Keep awake

LOUISVILLE — With readings that included Zephaniah 1:7 and 12-18 and 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11, Presbyterian Life & Witness’ Interpretation and Communications staff offered their colleagues a Chapel Service Wednesday on the theme “Keep Awake.”

The Rev. Lee Catoe, who edits Unbound and co-hosts the weekly “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast,” preached during the half-hour online service.

“Sleep has always been a frenemy of mine,” Catoe told those in worship. He was 5 when his grandmother died in her sleep, “and it caused me to be fearful of naps.”

He recalls running around the daycare van trying to escape his parents and the daycare staff because he knew naptime awaited him there. “I didn’t want what happened to my grandmother to happen to me,” Catoe said.

The problems around sleep waned as Catoe got older, but they returned in college. “This time, sleep turned into the most realistic dreams that continue today,” he said. “I often wake up feeling the emotions in my dreams,” and he sometimes has to ask himself, “did those events in my mind actually happen?”

The Bible is replete with either God or God’s messenger coming to people in their dreams. Zephaniah, whom Catoe called “a fiery prophet,” urged the people to stay awake “when it’s so easy to fall asleep,” Catoe said.

“I guess I can take comfort knowing that followers of Jesus often had issues with being awake or wokeness,” which Catoe called “a term that classifies people as being aware of systems of injustice and possibly doing something about it. It depends on the person, I guess.”

While Catoe declined to be “hell-firing or brim-stoning today,” as with any other organization, “when policy and process disorient us, when systems are made complicated, what does it mean for us to stay awake and be sober? When our members see us as silent more often than vocal in the midst of the most turbulent time of my generation … when young folk are asking us to awaken as they are hounded” by afflictions including the housing crisis, low pay and addiction, “what do these words from the prophet and from Paul mean to us?”

“When immigrants are terrified to leave their homes, where care for the Earth is disregarded, when trans folks are demonized, when the unhoused are beaten, when social safety nets are eroded, when veterans are denied care and some are found in the street … what do we do with these words, ‘keep awake. Stay awake.’”

We are asleep, and we must awaken, Catoe said. “We must be honest. We must nudge and we must shake. We must blow the trumpet to get the church to get up and stretch and show up.”

“The alarm clock has been going off, and tapping the snooze button of complicity and comfort has done more damage than we will ever imagine.”

We can build something new, Catoe said, by “de-centering the talk and entering the actual doing, the walk,” by “building something new no matter the cost, because silver or gold will not be able to save us.”

“Y’all, we can do this,” he said. “We can awaken as Christ awoke” by awakening to “what we actually believe, and that is resurrection, new life and boldness. We have the capacity. We have the talent, the expertise, the gumption, the call and the ability to be awake and stay that way.”

Our country and our world “long to hear the good news, to see a church that does not sway in its message of justice, all the while keeping hope and living in joy,” he said. “We so need a church that shows up and stands in what it believes, but we have to cultivate that in this place” because “hope, justice and joy do not radiate our of nothing. It has to be here.”

When we’re weary, “find that rest, knowing we have to get back up again and knowing that progress doesn’t come easy,” Catoe said. Being awake includes “seeing each other and listening to each other and trusting each other” while “dreaming together — not behind closed doors, but together, dreaming of a kingdom here on this Earth and in this reality, and in this current moment.”

“I so pray this all may be so,” he said. “Amen.”