To Christians and other interested readers

In the days immediately following the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the city of Washington D.C. was in chaos. People poured into the streets with their anger, frustration and deep grief. For white people living in the suburbs, as I was, it could have been an opportunity for deep compassion and lament for our African American neighbors. Instead, for many, there was resentment.  After all, the anger and the frustration of African Americans we saw on TV seemed to be directly pointing at us. As a child, I heard confounded responses from adults around me. “I never oppressed anybody. I never owned slaves. Why are they mad at me?”  Of course, these claims were born of fear and defensiveness. We simply were not willing to enter the deep suffering of our neighbors, especially when we needed to guard our own innocence.
I think of that time because of its similarity with our response to the rise of “Wokeness” in our culture. Wokeness evokes the same discomfort, the same hostility the same defensiveness we felt long ago.  What I want to suggest is that in an era of Wokeness and our discomfort with it, the Church is being given yet another chance to let go of our defensiveness and to come home to a pattern of Christian life that, of late, we seem to have forsaken.
In his very first public pronouncement, Jesus says “Repent! For the kingdom of God has come near.” What is the call to repentance except a wakeup call for us to realize that we are missing the blessing of the kingdom by going in the wrong direction, with the wrong assumptions, with the wrong idea of what the world is really like. “Wake up! Turn around.” This is the first thing we hear from our Lord, Jesus. Somehow, we have come to think that Jesus’ words no longer apply to us. But repentance has always been at the center of the Christian life.  And with it, contrition, that feeling we get when we realize our participation in something wrong and want to repent of it at once.
Take Peter. After saving his own skin by denying Jesus, Peter is ‘woke’ in a most traditional way, by the crowing of the rooster. Hearing it, he wakes up to his own complicity with those who tormented Jesus.  This is a painful awakening, driving Peter to go out and weep bitterly.  As anyone who has ever had to face their own failings can testify, we would much rather live in denial than to have our failings revealed. But folks, confronting our failings, waking up to our sin is exactly the event God continues to want for us, not for judgement and condemnation, but for mercy, forgiveness and new life, all delicious fruits of the Gospel.
Or take Paul. He was on his way to Damascus to arrest and bring to trial the followers of Jesus. He was going there knowing that he was doing the will of God. But he was awakened from his dreams of threats and murder by the appearance of the risen Jesus and suddenly realized that what he knew to be God’s desire was nothing of the sort. Those he persecuted suddenly became the very neighbors he was called to love. He would say “For the commandments…are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Besides this you know that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed”.  Wake up! Love your neighbor! See the salvation that is so near to them and to you, for your salvation and that of your neighbor are inextricably bound together. Thus, Paul becomes the very spokesman of wokeness.  Indeed, the rest of his life and ministry is a continual retelling of his wokeness, in all its pain and glory, as a wakeup call to the Church.
We think that our neighbors who are calling us to wake up just want us to feel bad about our history, our culture, our commitments. But no, these are the voices of people who have seen what we have not been willing to see, have suffered what we have not been willing to suffer, have wept when we have not been willing to weep. Such voices echo the scriptural witness that calls us to clarity about the reality of our situation when we are oblivious to complicity in the suffering of others and of ourselves. If we have ears to hear, they are the rooster crowing, the flashing vision of Jesus, the prophet announcing the kingdom. They beseech us to go through the painful process of repentance and contrition to arrive at the joy of mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation. Do not be angry at the voices that call to us “Wake up!” They are calling us to the very heart of the promise of God. They are calling us home.

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