Episodes
Sunday Mar 16, 2014
Life Essentials: Sleep
Sunday Mar 16, 2014
Sunday Mar 16, 2014
Rev. Dean Snyder
Psalm 121:1-8; 127:1-2
The United Methodist Church has two official sacraments. They are? Communion and Baptism.
The official definition of a sacrament is that it is “an outward sign of inward grace, and a means whereby we receive the same.”
So Communion is an outward act --eating and drinking—through which we appropriate (we get) some of the grace of God.
Baptism is an outward sign –water—through which we appropriate the grace of God when we are baptized and every time we remember our baptism.
Both of our official sacraments have a long history on which they are partially based in Judaism. Communion has a history in the Passover Seder meal.
Baptism has a history in the Jewish practice of Mikvah or ritual bathing. Next Sunday, as part of the sermon, Dawn is going to interview Naomi Malka. Naomi is a staff member of Congregation Adas Israel here in DC and her job title is Ritual Coordinator & Mikvah Director. She trained as a Mikvah guide at Mayyim Hayyim which is a Mikvah center and school in Newton, MA. She has developed a program for her synagogue called “Bodies of Water” for Jewish women and girls ages 10 and up to learn about Mikvah as a tool for positive body image and healthy decision making from a Jewish perspective.
So she is going to share about bathing rituals within the Jewish tradition as we think about baptism and washing as a Christian sacrament.
The other interesting thing is that Naomi has never been to a Christian worship service before. So next Sunday would be a good Sunday to pay attention to ideas in our service and hymns that might seem anti-Jewish. You know that Christianity began as a Jewish movement within Judaism. And eventually the traditional establishment Jewish people and the more fringe Jewish people who followed Rabbi Jewish had more and more tension. Some ideas got in the Bible which sound anti-Jewish unless you realize this was a family fight. Who knows that there are some things I can say about my family that you can’t say about them without being offensive? So when Gentiles started repeating what Jews had said about one another it became anti-Jewish and supported anti-Semitism.
So we need to be real careful today how we repeat the Scriptures. I know not everybody likes this but we are followers of someone who said to treat other people the way you’d want them to treat you.
So I know you will treat Naomi with respect next Sunday and be attentive and hospitable and warm because that it the kind of people most of you are.
I think it will be a great learning experience.
Now, Communion is not the same thing as a Seder. The ritual and its meaning has evolved, but understanding the Seder helps us understand some of the connotations of Communion.
Christian baptism is not the same thing as the Jewish Mikvah. For one thing we are only baptized once because Christian baptism never wears off. But I think understanding something about Mikvah may add to the richness of our understanding of baptism.
While we have two official sacramental, there are many activities in our lives that are sacrament-like or sacramental. They are ordinary life essentials --things we do every day-- that are signs and means of the grace of God.
We are talking about a few of these during Lent this year and the life essential I’d like us to think about today is sleeping. Sleep is a sign and means of the grace of God.
Until someone sent me an article on Facebook, I did not know that last week was National Sleep Awareness Week. I did not even know there was a National Sleep Awareness Week. At the beginning of the week the National Sleep Foundation issued its annual poll and study. This year the poll focused on sleep and the family and it discovered that children sleep better when parents establish rules, limit technology and set a good example.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science had a special session with professors from Harvard and elsewhere on the science of sleep and dreaming.
There have been lots of good articles around as to how important good sleep is to our health and vitality and articles about what we can do to sleep better: things like having a regular bedtime, not watching anything with a screen for 2 hours before our bedtime --we should not not sleeping with our ipads-- not drinking alcohol during the two hours before bedtime, doing something that makes us sweat at least ½ hour every day.
You can find out all those things easily enough. The problem isn’t a lack of access to information about what we ought to do to sleep better, is it? Not in my experience.
So I want to think with you not so much about the how-tos of sleeping better, and I know that some of us struggle with physical and psychological sleep disorders that require medical attention. If you suffer from a sleep disorder, please see a physician. What I say this morning is not going to address medical sleep disorders
But I do think that sleep can be sacramental. It can be a sign and means of God’s grace. God’s grace can cover us while we sleep.
I want to start with two statements just a few chapters apart in the Book of Psalms. Psalm 121 says “[The One] who keeps you will not slumber. [The One] who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” God does not sleep, the Psalmist says.
Just a few Psalms later Psalm 127 says that if God doesn’t sleep, we should. Psalm 127 says that sleep is a gift to us from God because God loves us.
Listen to Psalm 127:2 “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for God gives sleep to God’s beloved.”
Let me read it again: “It is in vain (useless, futile, a waste of time and energy) that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for God gives sleep to God’s beloved.”
Everybody who works in Washington, DC, should have this verse of Scripture Psalm 127:2 tattooed on the back of our hand so it is the first thing and the last thing we see day and night when we sit down at our computers:
“It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for God gives sleep to God’s beloved.”
Or try it the way Eugene Peterson translates it in The Message: “It's useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don't you know [God] enjoys giving rest to those [God] loves?
God enjoys it when you sleep well.
I want to suggest three ways sleep is sacramental – a sign and means of grace.
First: sleep is an expression of faith and trust in God. When we go to sleep we give up control and trust God to run the universe without our help for a few hours. It is an expression of faith that God can manage without us telling God what to do.
The Book of Psalms is the best book of the Bible on sleep. Psalm 4:8 says: “I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”
Psalm 3 “O Lord, how many are my foes! … But you, O Lord, are a shield around me … I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me. I am not afraid …” (Psalm 3: 3-6)
The Book of Proverbs is good too. Proverbs 3 “Do not be afraid of sudden panic, or of the storm that strikes the wicked; for the Lord will be your confidence … If you sit down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet.”
Whether or not someone is explicitly religious or not, lying down in bed and letting go of our striving and work and control is an act of faith.
So sleep is sacramental because it is an act of faith and trust in God.
And it may help for us to make this explicit, to have a going-to-sleep ritual. Maybe a Psalm we repeat when we turn off the light: “I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you O Lord, make me lie down in safety.”
Or maybe we think back through our day and offer the day hour by hour and trust God with it.
Or maybe we thank God for the day behind us and for the opportunities of the day ahead.
Some ritual that helps us remember that all of life is a gift from God and that sleeping is an act of faith.
Sleep is sacramental because it is a sign and a means of trust.
Number 2, sleep is sacramental because it is an act of allowing grace to permeate beneath our conscious selves into the wild and insecure places within us.
All day long we spend our energy suppressing and repressing the parts of our deep unconscious selves that we don’t like and don’t want others or God to know about.
As the poet Karl Sandberg said: There is a zoo in me. There is a wolf in me. There is a fox in me. There is a hog in me. There is a baboon in me. There is a mocking bird in me. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart …
There is a zoo in me and all day I work at being a zoo-keeper.
I’ve got all this stuff in me –, anger, jealousy, lust, fear, insecurity, anxiety – and I spend all day trying to repress and suppress and hide it and overcompensate for it, but at night when I enter REM sleep, I give up control of even my unconscious and the animals come of of their cages
Here’s the grace I can experience in REM sleep-- I may discover that God doesn’t just love the kindly, friendly, caring, selfless, competent, self-assured person I pretend and try to be all day long. God also loves the messy, selfish, needy, angry, rude, scared-to-death little boy inside me that I only let out in Stage Three sleep in my dreams.
A couple of days ago I had a dream in which I was assigned to teach a crowd of r for a day and they would not stop talking and listen to me. A man, maybe another teacher, came up to me and told me that he was a friend of Chuck Hilty. Chuck’s friend said to me “Chuck tells me everybody listens to you when you are in the pulpit.” But in my dream I can’t get anybody to listen to me and Chuck’s friend just stands there with a smug look on his face.
Inside of me is an insecure Dean who thinks nobody would want to listen to me if I weren’t hiding inside a pulpit.
And if I listen to my dreams and incorporate them into my conscious awareness I can experience the grace and love of God for not only the me Chuck Hilty thinks I am –or that my unconscious thinks Chuck Hilty thinks I am—for the Dean who can’t get a group of teenagers to stop talking to each other to pay attention to anything.
REM sleep – when our unconscious self is most likely to emerge in our dreams—can be a time of g healing and deep grace when we can reincorporate repressed parts of ourselves into our conscious lives that make us more whole. On and off over the years I’ve kept a dream journal. It is an experience of grace and healing to sit with those journals and let God love the zoo in me.
The third way that sleep can be sacramental is that it embodies and models the rhythm of well lived life.
Proverbs 6 says we can sleep too much. Proverbs 6:
“ Go to the ant, you lazybones; consider its ways, and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest. How long will you lie there, O lazybones? When will you rise from your sleep?”
Ecclesiastes 5:12 says: “Sweet is the sleep of laborers, whether they eat little or much; but the surfeit [the excess] of the rich will not let them sleep.”
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, preached a sermon on sleep. Sermon 93 of the Standard sermons entitled “On Redeeming the Time” for you Wesley scholars in the congregation.
The first part of Wesley’s sermon is about how he understands we are all different but he is skeptical of people who say they need only a few hours of sleep a night. He says he has never known a person who can do well for more than a short time with less than at least six hours of sleep. Don’t try to sleep too little, he warns.
The second half of the sermon he warns people about not sleeping too much.
Because we need a rhythm of life that includes both receiving and giving, resting and working, being and doing.
There is a way both sleep and work are sacramental. We receive grace when we let go and rest. We receive grace when we serve God and others and the world in our work.
So perhaps it might also be good to have a morning ritual. Just as we trust ourselves at night to God’s care and grace, to begin a new day by committing our work to God and God’s kingdom.
My fear often is that we contemporary people of faith try to
squeeze all of our spirituality into one hour in church a week. So I want to
suggest that if we turn your sleep into an explicit act of faith, an act of
trust, and act of opening ourselves to grace and acceptance of our deepest
selves, and if we offering our working days to God’s service, perhaps then we
can actually do what the Apostle Paul tells us to do – to pray without ceasing.
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