Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Ezekiel 3:16-21 and Revelation 3:1-6

Do you remember Rip Van Winkle? He is the Washington Irving character who famously slept through the most important events of his generation. He fell asleep in the Catskill Mountains just as things were heating up between the American Colonies and Great Britain. He fell asleep before the Boston Massacre, and awoke after the United Sates of America had become a nation. When he fell asleep there was a picture in the tavern of King George. When he awoke he discovered it had been replaced by a picture of President George Washington. He missed the entire Revolutionary War and the founding of our nation.

Similar stories of sleeping through significant events show up in other societies and even ancient cultures. An ancient Jewish version of this story has a man asking his neighbor why he would waste time planting a carob tree. The man cynically reminds the neighbor that a carob tree takes about seventy years to produce its first harvest so he won’t see any benefit from planting the tree. According to the legend, he fell asleep that night and somehow mysteriously remained hidden and asleep for seventy years. He woke up under the now fully-grown carob tree and found his grandchildren’s generation enjoying its fruit.

Other versions of this sleeping story have been identified in Germany, China, and among the ancient Greeks. This idea of sleeping so long that we wake up disoriented in another time fascinates us regardless of culture. What is so intriguing about sleeping over several years and waking up in a different generation?

Maybe the answer is that it cuts close to home. The longer we live, the more we feel disoriented at the changes around us. When we were children one day felt like forever. We had time to play and eat and nap and play some more and eat some more and nap some more. Suddenly we were graduating from high school and then we barely blinked and we were finishing college. We woke up one morning and found that we were forty years old with the warranty on our body expiring. Then we are sixty years old with our minds writing checks our body can’t cash. In the blink of an eye we wake up at ninety years old. Life goes fast!

This has been called the “Rip Van Winkle” syndrome. The world changes so quickly around us that it feels like everything changed over night. Here is a quick test for where you fit on the Rip Van Winkle effect: How many of us remember when cell phones were for talking and we had never heard of text messaging? How many remember when restaurants used to ask “smoking or non-smoking?” Do you remember having to get up from the couch and manually change the television channel? Remember when Vietnam was a war instead of a country? Do you remember when attendants at gas stations used to routinely wash the windows and check the tires while filling up the gas tank? Remember when milk was delivered to your door? Remember gathering as a family around the radio to hear the President of the United States address the country? Remember where you were when you heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor? Remember when an uncle talked about “The War” he was referring to World War I?

The Rip Van Winkle effect can happen in churches. One day we are praying in good King James English, addressing God respectfully using “Thee’s” and “Thou’s.” Then suddenly there are amplified guitars and drums in the sanctuary. One moment the men are in suits and the women wear hats and scarves as head coverings. The next minute we have preachers in Hawaiian shirts and people in shorts and sandals. It can be disorienting.

Jesus addressed this Rip Van Winkle effect in his words to the congregation in Sardis. He tells them to “Wake up!” As we continue this fall series on the seven churches in the Book of Revelation, listen to what Jesus said to the church in Sardis.

Read Revelation 3:1-7.

Our girls adopted J.B. as their pet. Big brother Nate had the dog. Second son Justus had a hamster. So J.B. the fish was as close as we came to letting our young daughters have a pet. Actually, J.B. was the fish in a children’s Sunday school room at our church. When the girls stopped by my office, we would go gaze at J.B. in his fish tank. I never understood why they liked that fish. I thought it was the stupidest fish I’d ever seen. It never swam. It mostly just floated in place. It didn’t even float in the normal upright position. It floated listing to one side. In its entire life, I doubt I saw it swim more than a few inches, and that was only a couple of times. Our girls loved to tap on the tank to see if they could get J.B. to move a fin or swim or do anything. They thought J.B. was just too cute. One day I had to bring the sad news home. Sitting at the dinner table I explained to the family that the Sunday school teacher had found J.B. dead. Without missing a beat one of our sons asked, “How could they tell?”

Jesus had some pretty harsh things to say about the church in Sardis. “You appear to be alive, but you are dead.” Jesus seems to be tapping the fish tank as he calls, “Wake up!”

Jesus was worried that the congregation in Sardis was reflecting their city’s history. We know that Sardis was a town positioned on a hillside so that it was easy to protect from attack. Yet twice in their history they had been conquered and destroyed. In the mid-sixth century B.C. the city was destroyed because the watchmen on the walls fell asleep and failed to warn the city of the coming attack. For the next hundred years they repeated this story as a warning for future generations. Eventually they rebuilt the city to its former glory. They again became prosperous. They surrounded themselves with extravagant beauty. Then, amazingly, a few generations later the same thing happened. In 214 B. C. it was destroyed as again, the watchmen on the city walls fell asleep and failed to sound the alarm. The enemy sneaked up on the sleeping city and plundered it. This idea of the watchmen falling asleep became the image Jesus used to warn the church.

We have seen the pattern that Jesus uses to address the congregations in Revelation. The typical pattern is for Jesus to greet the congregation with affirmation and compliments, followed by a statement of concern and correction. Only after he has addressed his concern and their need to repent does he conclude with a promise of reward.

Did you notice how this letter breaks that pattern? Jesus starts with the complaint and ends with the compliment. Why would he do that? The answer is that he wants them to be shocked awake. We sleep through what is comfortable and familiar. We are startled awake when something doesn’t fit what we expected.

Jesus is exhausted. The disciples have shared the last supper together. They are now out at the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus invites Peter and two more of the closest friends to spend an hour praying for him. But they doze off.

How can they doze at a time like this? The guard is gathering to come arrest Jesus. Soon he will be falsely accused and found guilty. His hours until death are numbered. Judas has betrayed Jesus’ location thus starting the clock ticking to Jesus’ crucifixion. How could they sleep?

Answer: They didn’t know what was about to happen. They assumed that tomorrow would be just another ordinary day. They could doze because they did not know that world history would change in the next few hours.

Do we remember what we did on the evening of September 10, 2001? How were we able to fall asleep that Monday night? The answer is that we slept because we thought we would wake up to another normal day. Then the towers fell and we woke up to a new world of terrorism threatening our Western lifestyle. We woke like Rip Van Winkle to a new world.

Here is the point: as individuals, we can fall into a stupor because everything feels predictable and comfortable. As a nation, we can be caught off guard when we assume that tomorrow will be just another typical day. In this same way, a whole generation of Christians can fall asleep as well.

Ready for some startling statistics that I hope wakes us up this weekend? Here are the facts, nothing but the facts. While 23% of the seniors in America (12 million) intentionally reject Christianity, that number soars to 40% (24 million) for Americans under thirty years old. (I know where some of us are going in our thoughts. “Well, they will come back to the church when they marry and have children.” Sorry. The numbers remain close to 40%, dropping slightly to 37%, for rejecting Christianity as this generation moves into their forties.)

Are we awake yet? How about this? Ten years ago survey results showed that non-Christian Americans held a generally positive view of Christianity as a religion. Eighty-five percent of non-Christian Americans felt favorable toward Christianity’s role in society. Ten years later, the same surveys show that non-Christians under the age of thirty hold a much more negative view of our faith. Thirty-eight percent have a bad impression of Christianity, with 17% expressing “very bad” perceptions of our religion. This shift has happened in one generation in one decade!

If we want to remain asleep, we can blame it on Hollywood or television. (Only 22% of this age group of non-Christians report that their views were primarily influenced by the media.) Most of these non-Christians (59%) base their perception on their own bad church experience while 50% have friends or relatives who are Christians.

It is time to sound the alarm. Something is shifting quickly in our country. We are quickly becoming a post-Christian society. Wake up!

A while ago I was stressing out about something. I was losing sleep. I tried to figure it out by talking with my wife. I prayed about it but felt no clarity or sense of peace. I kept losing sleep. A few days into the stress, I mentioned to Pastor Neal that I wasn’t doing well with the stress of the situation. “Man, I am stressing about this situation. I thought I knew what was right, but the more I think and pray the more I realize that the situation is really complicated. I’m not sure what is right or wrong in this case.” I finished by saying to Neal, “I’ve been losing sleep over this.”

Neal paused and said, “Some things are worth losing sleep.”