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Sermon for the First Sunday in Advent – December 2, 2007
A mother was issuing instructions to her children as she sent them off to Sunday school. “Why is it necessary to be quiet in church?” she asked. Without hesitation, her son replied, “Because people are sleeping.”
Despite its prevalence, nodding off in church – which never happens here - is not indicative of a sleep disorder, at least according to the Epworth Sleepiness Scale which presents eight situations and asks how likely it is that while doing them you will doze off during the day: sitting and reading; watching TV; sitting inactive in a public place (for example a theatre); as a passenger in a car for an hour without a break; lying down to rest in the afternoon; sitting and talking to someone (no, not your rector); sitting quietly after lunch without alcohol; in a car, while stopped for a few minutes in traffic. Each choice is assigned a number from zero to three, covering no chance to a high chance.
“If you score 10 or more,” says the University of Maryland Medical Center, “you should consider whether you are obtaining adequate sleep, need to improve your sleep hygiene and/or need to see a sleep specialist.” After taking the test, I plan on making an appointment first thing tomorrow, providing I get out of bed in time. Odds are there will be plenty of people ahead of me.
Adults today sleep about seven to seven and a half hours a night. Compare that to 1910, before the light bulb, when the average person slept nine hours each night. Since the advent of electric lights, then, people sleep 500 hours less each year than they used to, all with the result that today one in five adults report daytime sleepiness and, among those aged 18 to 34, half say that sleepiness interferes with their daily work.
The irony is, when it’s time to go to sleep, a lot of people can’t. Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder in this country. Last year, Americans filled about 42 million prescriptions for Ambien and Lunesta.
The electric light is only partly to blame for this; we seem to have little reason to go to bed. In the last generation or so we have increasingly become a 24/7 culture and our expectation of round the clock services is only expanding: restaurants, gas stations, pharmacies, gyms - the list goes on; all with the result that as we get less sleep we get sicker.
Sleep is just as important to our overall health as exercise and a healthy diet; it’s a biological need, like food and water. Yet millions of Americans report spending less and less time seeing to this need. Certainly life style changes have an impact on the number of hours we sleep each day; they also have an impact on when during a 24 hour period we actually shut our eyes.
Our bodies operate on what is called a circadian rhythm – “circadian” is Latin for “around a day.” Most circadian rhythms are controlled by what can be called the body’s biological clock, that part of your brain that tells you when it’s time to nod off and when it’s time to rise and shine. Without external cues or prompts, such as alarms or the rising of the sun, our body clocks behave in an entirely different way than they do in the course of a routine suburban Sunday.
Get away from the cues – what the Germans call “zeitgebers” for “time keepers” – and nature begins to take its course. In 1995, three researchers spent a summer above the Arctic Circle, where there is continuous light 24 hours a day. All watches, clocks and other timekeeping devices were removed and only the station’s computers tracked the times that the team went to sleep and awakened. Individual researchers did their work and, following their “body time,” chose when to sleep and when to wake up.
At the end of the experiment, the computer revealed that each member of the team showed an increase in sleep time, with the group averaging 10.3 hours a day; a figure that matches people who live in cultures where the afternoon siesta is still practiced; a long sleep at night and a briefer one in the early afternoon. This is the kind of pattern people tend to fall into on their vacations, a more natural rhythm it seems, difficult to follow and earn a living.
I’ve heard of some offices where napping is encouraged but those are an exception. Most companies frown on down time on company time; still, if you are caught nodding off at work and your superior wakes you up, here’s what to do: simply keep your head down and your eyes closed and say, “…and I especially want to thank you for my excellent boss. Amen.”
We know we need more sleep, yet most of us with day jobs tend to survive with the assistance of caffeine or a bit of “eye resting” on the train heading home. We get used to being tired. On weekends or days off, we do our catching up, paying off what is called our “sleep debt.” According to an article in the Psychiatric Times – a journal guaranteed to cure insomnia – “researchers have tended to treat the effects of sleep deprivation as nothing more significant than an inconvenience which makes people feel a bit tired now and then. This view,” the authors say, “is incorrect.”
Each day with insufficient sleep increases our sleep debt and when that debt matches the one on our credit cards, physical and psychological problems occur; problems which tend to be more evident in people who work nights. Because their schedules conflict with standard time keepers – such as sunlight - people often become uncontrollably drowsy at work, all of which effects their response time, their judgment and their effectiveness. “Night shift people tend to be day shift people who are trying to stay awake at night,” said one doctor.
There may be additional consequences as well. The British Medical journal “Lancet Oncology” reports that night shift workers are more susceptible to certain cancers due to a decrease in the body’s production of melatonin, a tumor fighting hormone. But, they say, even worse than working an overnight shift is flipping between daytime and overnight work, known as shift work. Resetting your body clock causes all kinds of difficulties.
There’s even a name for this condition - Shift Work Sleep Disorder, or SWSD, and it is defined as “a constant or recurrent pattern of sleep interruption that results in insomnia or excessive sleepiness, leading to increased accidents, increased work related errors and increased sick leave. This disorder is common in people who work between 10:00pm and 6:00am.
So, what all this means, it seems to me, is that precisely that time when we are to be at our best - most awake and most alert – that is, the time of the advent of the Son of Man - we are actually in danger of being at our worst, most likely to miss his appearance because we are either napping or pushing ourselves
desperately to stay awake. Also, this research suggests that what we need is more sleep, not less, if we are to be in a position to pay attention to signs of the kingdom; if we are to find a way to recognize the presence of God in our lives.
“Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming,” Jesus says. Is he extolling the virtues of insomnia or SWSD? I hardly think so. Just as, earlier in Matthew, when he says, “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away,” he is not advocating self mutilation.
Jesus is fond of making points through the use of hyperbole – “an exaggeration or extravagant statement used as a figure of speech” – says my dictionary, or through the use of paradox, “A seemingly contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true,” says the same source. Both of which seem to be the case today. We cannot possibly stay awake all the time; and if we are to be alert, we must be able to sleep. So, what’s he talking about?
First, keeping awake is not the same as not sleeping; insomnia is a form of numbness, a pursuit of a purely personal goal, and that hardly puts us in a position to perceive signs of the kingdom, and it seems to me that perception is the point here. Keeping awake, it seems to me, requires us to get enough rest so that we can attend to other matters as we wend our way through our circadian day; other matters besides falling asleep or staying awake; other matters besides ourselves.
The call is to focus on priorities, on those times, as Jung said, when the “imperishable world erupts into this transitory one.” To be asleep is to spend days and nights in hiding from the world and ourselves, seeking to smother our questions and longings in the rhythms of routine. As W. H. Auden wrote as he sat one night, alone in the midst of a crowd: “Faces along the bar/ cling to their average day/The lights must never go out/The music must always play…Lest we should see where we are/ lost in a haunted wood/children afraid of the night…” Waking up requires more than caffeine; it requires courage.
Second, if we are to know what time it is, as Paul demands, we need to devote less attention to the time keepers, and more to the signs of the times as we go about our days, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, too busy to notice that the clouds are gathering.
How much less likely are we to notice the darkening skies now that, thanks to that electric light bulb, we so seldom see them? Perceiving signs of God may be more difficult since we are more readily distracted; that does not make the task any less important. Indeed, it only adds to the urgency of the summons “Sleepers, wake! The time has come.”
How much less likely are we to be alert to advent time, now that, thanks to a 24/7 society and ailments such as Shift Work Sleep Disorder, we max out on a sleepiness scale yet can’t seem to fall asleep? Something needs to shake us out of this vicious cycle. This time of year has the potential to do just that. “Advent is the time for rousing,” said Father Alfred Delp, a German priest. “We are shaken to the very depths,” he said, “so that we may wake up to the truth of ourselves.”
Accused of conspiring against the Nazis, Fr. Delp was arrested in 1944, tortured,and executed in 1945. While in prison he wrote a series of meditations on the meaning and lessons of this holy season. He called it an “Advent of the Heart,” and said that everything that has happened to us over the rhythm of our lives - even our suffering - everything offers us an entry into the true Advent, our journey towards a meeting and a dialogue with God. Something will shake us, he said, right down to the heart, right down to the bones. Something will force us to wake up and come to our senses and notice what has always been there.
Now’s the time; the time to look for God, the time to find focus in our lives; even, in this increasingly chaotic season of the year, the time to rest. In the rhythm of your day, take a minute to find what T.S. Eliot called “The still point in a turning world.” Find it; hold it as long as you can – even put it on, as Paul told us to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. And then, when it’s time to let go; when it’s time to sleep, then you can safely shut your eyes, knowing that, untroubled by insomnia or SWSD, God stays up all night.
Amen