Sunday Sermon: Wake Up!
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Text: Psalm 118:24
Series: Seven "Ups" for the New Year
In all of my years on Planet Earth, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a year where more people were more excited to welcome in a New Year than this one. That’s because 2020 was nothing of the year we hoped it would be. As with every New Year, what began with such high hopes in January 2020 turned out to be a major disappointment. But now, we’ve turned the page on the calendar and we’re back to where we were last year at this time – full of excitement and anticipation, if for no other reason than nothing could be worse than what we’ve just gone through. Or could it?
You may have heard the expression, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” That’s an expression from the early part of the last century in which people living in a downstairs apartment would hear an upstairs neighbor take off one shoe, drop it, and then of course repeat the action with the other shoe. Consequently, the expression became shorthand for waiting for something you knew was coming, something not altogether worth anticipating.
That’s how a good number of people are feeling today. It’s hard for them to be excited about the coming months when all they have to go on is recent history and they’re not really sure about what’s around the bend. So, how do we gear up for the New Year and rediscover our excitement about the possibilities that are before us? Perhaps the best place to begin is by reminding ourselves that the God whom we worship and serve is not only a God who knows the future, more importantly He is a God who controls it, and who from that future breaks into our present to guide us along paths that will insure us of being in a position to know every measure of His favor.
Such was the promise voiced by the Psalmist in our text for the day, the 118th Psalm. The 118th Psalm is a thanksgiving psalm, penned by the Psalmist to celebrate a recent act of deliverance, one that gave the psalmist every reason to be hopeful about the future. In the face of some great threat that had created no small amount of anguish for the psalmist, God had drawn near to be his helper and to do something the Psalmist could never have done in his own power by setting him free (vv.5-7). And so, in response to God’s past act of deliverance, the Psalmist makes the choice to expect God to be present to act in the same way in the days to come, beginning with the present moment! “This is the day the LORD has made!” declares the Psalmist. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it!”
At a time like this, where we straddle the years so to speak, it’s usually the case that we give our attention either to the past or to the future. We look back or we look ahead. Indeed, the first month of the year, January, is named for the Roman god Janus, who is usually depicted as having two faces, a face to look back and a face to look ahead. I have nothing against either perspective, except for when our obsession with either one robs us of the possibilities of the present.
I hear that Psalmist in this text warning us against that very mistake. “This is the day the LORD has made.” In other words, today is the time for us to experience every measure of God’s favor. We don’t have to wait for a time to come. Neither do we have to be paralyzed by regrets over missing opportunities in the past. Today holds all manner possibilities because God is at work. God is always at work. Our responsibility is to look for how He is and to order our lives around it, lest we miss out on God’s unmitigated joy.
Isn’t this what Jesus called people to do? I’m thinking in particular of that story recorded in John’s Gospel, where at the pool of Bethesda Jesus healed a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years (John 5:1-15). You remember the story. Jesus is in Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews, which one we are not told because that’s not what’s important about the story. What’s important is Jesus’ question to the man, upon hearing how long he had been in that condition: “Do you want to be healed?” On the surface, it sounds like a strange question. Certainly, it sounded that way to the man, who answers Jesus ambiguously, neither yes nor no. “Sir, I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. And while I am trying to get in, someone goes down ahead of me!” In other words, “I always seem to miss my opportunity.” So, what did Jesus do? Jesus healed him. On a day when a healing was the last thing the paralytic probably expected to happen, Jesus told him, “Get up! Pick up hour mat and walk!” And at once the man was cured, picked up his mat, and walked away.
John goes on to tell us that this healing occurred on a Sabbath day, when no one expected anybody to do anything, not even God, who in Genesis rested on the sabbath day. And when the religious leaders got wind of what Jesus did, they went to him and chastised him. But how did Jesus answer them? He told them, “My Father is always at work to this very day, and I, too am working” (Jn 5:17). In other words, what Jesus was telling them was, “This is the day the LORD has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
You may be here this morning still paralyzed by the disappointments of the past, in some cases disappointments that go back much farther than 2020. And because of those very disappointments you’re also paralyzed by fears of what the coming months will hold. Someone has said that those kinds of anxieties about tomorrow, which are based on what happened yesterday, are like interest payments on debts that we may not every incur. But they take their toll nonetheless and they rob us of God’s joy.
How, then, do we find deliverance from such anxiety? Let me offer you a suggestion. Every morning when your feet hit the floor, before you say or do anything else, make this your first thought. Say to God and say to yourself, “This is the day the LORD has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it.” Say to God and say to yourself that you will not be bound by your past and you will not get ahead of God in terms of your future. Say to God and say to yourself that you will be looking for how God will be at work in your midst and that you pledge to join God in that work. And then, while other people will be going through their day totally oblivious to the many miracles God is doing every moment of every day, you will see and you will celebrate how in every situation, even the most seemingly hopeless of them, God is always about a work that brings to those awake to it the most immeasurable joy.
In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, down around Beaufort, St. Helena, and Fripp Island, is the heartland of the Gullah culture, which is still very much a part of life in that area. In fact, I understand that even today you will hear old Gullah references, one of which is the term “dayclean.” The point of that expression is that every new day is a “clean” one, a blank slate as it were upon which the story of new mercies yet to be discovered might be written. It’s a reminder of how if we are not preoccupied with the past or troubled by the future, we will be able to see the new day for the miracle that it is, encompassing work and play and family and, most of all, faith in God, who is Himself the author of every good and perfect gift, the greatest of which is His Son, our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
So, if we are in fact awake to the work God is doing in our world, there is only one rule for us, and it is the duty of this present moment. The past is past; the future is yet to be. There is nothing we can do about either, but there is everything we can do about the present, living moment by moment as if there were nothing to expect beyond it and everything to expect within it, living each moment as if “dayclean” has come.
“Wake up, child, dayclean has come.” “This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”