The greatest challenge any speaker has is to gain and to
hold the attention of his audience. Speech teachers tell us
that if we are going to practice anything, practice both the
opening and the ending of a speech. That may be all that
anyone remembers. So how does a speaker gain and hold
the attention of his audience? Talking VERY LOUD? That
works for a while, but soon it wears out the speaker and
assaults the audience. Regale the audience with bursts of
poetic oratory? Whoop, like the country preacher? Maybe
speak in a rap idiom? Nice if you can do it, but some of us
are ethnically challenged on those items.
One way to get an audience’s attention is to do something a
little outrageous, something a little offbeat. I told you last
week the story of the film, Dead Poets Society, where the
teacher climbed on a desk and revved up his students by
repeating, “Carpe diem” “Seize the day”. At the end of the
service Michael Stuckey told me I really had him scared into
thinking I was going to climb up on the Communion Table!
Well, that would have been a little too strong, even for my
tastes, but you would have remembered it! Just as you
remember those occasions when I have come out here in
bathrobes vaguely resembling some Biblical character.
(Although not even I have had the courage to do what I am
told Pastor Gillespie did years ago, come out dressed as
Santa Claus!).
Costumes and outrageous actions are one way to get
attention. Another is to use props, something visible. I am
told that my sermon, “Been There, Done That, Got the T-
Shirt”, in which I peeled off and revealed the slogans on five
or six different shirts, was all the rage in a federal
penitentiary! Hard to believe, because they couldn’t see the
shirts, but the idea seems to have grabbed hold. Maybe you
remember the time I preached on “The Strength of the
Triangle”, trying to illustrate how you and I can love each
other if we have God’s love with us, and I arranged three
two-by-fours to make my point. (There are, incidentally,
other ways to use two-by-fours to get people’s attention,
most of them involving something about ‘up side your head’).
Again maybe you remember the Easter when Camila Morris
made a huge papier-mache blob to represent the stone that
was rolled from the Lord’s tomb. I dramatically ended the
sermon with a push, and the thing rolled right off the platform
and down the steps, kaplunk! Well, if the point was to get
your attention, at least that it worked!
Well, what does God do to get our attention? God speaks to
us, all the time, but it’s easy to go to sleep. We ignore God.
Yet He keeps on working to get our attention. The Bible
says that He spoke to us in the law and through the
prophets, but in these latter days He has spoken to us by a
Son. That’s an attention-getter. Like the old hymn says,
“What more can He say than to you He has said, to you who
for refuge to Jesus have fled?” God has spoken, but we are
not always listening. God is working to get our attention.
The seer of Revelation introduces us to God’s use of alarm
bells to wake us up. He identified these alarm bells in the
letter to the church at Sardis.
I
First, there are times when God has to use something very
dramatic to get our attention. I call it a fire alarm.
Sometimes it takes a real disaster before we wake up and
realize that, like it or not, we have to act. When the fire
alarm sounds, nobody ignores it.
The Lord says to the church at Sardis,
I know your works; you have a name of being alive, but you are
dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is on the point of
death.
Wake up, strengthen what remains and is on the point of
death. Sometimes the Lord has to do something dramatic to
wake us up to the fact that we are near death.
There is a phone next to my bed, so that if it rings during the
night, I can grab it quickly. It was placed there when we had
young adult children. When it rang at some ungodly hour it
was something like, “Dad, I’ve got a flat tire; can you help
me?” Or, “Dad, I got sleepy while I was driving home, and I
think I scraped this jersey barrier on the Beltway”. That
jangling phone bell was like a fire alarm; when it rang, it was
not good news. And even today, though we are well past all
of that kind of stuff, now it is one of you: “Pastor, I’m in
trouble and I need help. Pastor, can you come; there’s been
a death.” Alarm bells are never good news. But I must
respond. I have no choice. It’s a matter of life and death.
There are wake-up calls in everybody’s life. There are fire
alarms when we discover that things have spun out of
control, and we need to correct ourselves right away. The
Lord said to the Sardis Christians, “you have a name of
being alive, but you are dead. Wake up and strengthen what
remains and is on the point of death.” Pay attention to what
is happening in your life. You must respond; some things
you just cannot ignore.
One day I had gone to visit the late Mr. Livingston at
Providence Hospital. When I was walking down the corridor,
there was an alarm bell sounding, and people rushing around
me. When I got to Mr. Livingston’s room, I found out that’s
where they were all heading. It was a Code Blue operation,
somebody in serious distress. They asked, “Who are you?”,
and I said I was Mr. Livingston’s pastor. “Pastor,” he said.
“Come on in. Mr. Livingston’s on the other side of the
curtain, but he needs you. He’s scared. His roommate here
is in cardiac arrest.” So I threaded my way across the room.
You can imagine where Mr. Livingston’s attention was.
Guess what, he didn’t want to talk about the weather. He
didn’t ask about the Redskins. He wanted to deal with
ultimate things; he wanted to talk about life and death.
Somebody is dying in the next bed; that speaks in no
uncertain terms. This is urgent! Respond now!
I wonder if there is a fire alarm ringing in your life. Is there
something you cannot ignore any longer? Maybe there is a
life issue that has plagued you, and you’ve never done
anything about it. Maybe there is a habit that you know is
destructive, there is some temptation that you give in to over
and over again. Every now and then you realize that this
thing, if you keep it up, will kill you emotionally or spiritually, if
not physically. But most of the time you are like Scarlett
O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, “I’ll think about that
tomorrow.” I tell you that a moment will come that will sound
an alarm bell, a fire alarm interrupting everything.
It may come as a cockcrow came for Peter. It may come as
the prophet Nathan came to David, announcing judgment. It
may even come in something as simple as a haircut came for
Samson. In one way or another God will ring an alarm bell, a
loud and crashing alarm, to get our attention, if we have
been drifting. “Wake up, strengthen what remains and is on
the point of death.”
II
But sometimes God uses something different. Sometimes
God uses not the fire alarm that rudely interrupts everything.
Sometimes God uses the alarm clock, the routine bedside
alarm clock, to move us into the day’s routine. You see,
some of us live our lives just one day after another, plodding
ceaselessly along, with very little direction, very little
excitement. And God has to wake us up to the meaning of
our ordinary, everyday, ongoing routine.
Every day of the week but Monday, I use two forms of alarm
clock to get me up and going. I use the bedside alarm,
setting it for 5:00 a.m., but being very careful not to have it
on too loud, because Margaret somehow does not want to
get up at that hour. In fact, she does not actually believe
there IS such a thing as 5:00 a.m! So the bedside clock is
set, but in the kitchen there is a coffee maker, carefully
prepared the night before, also set for 5:00 a.m. Now you
can see the strategy, can’t you? After the alarm clock goes
off, by the time I find my robe and slippers and stumble out
of the bathroom, I have nice fresh coffee waiting for me! And
if, as sometimes happens, my body just rebels against
getting up, before long the beckoning smell of the java bean
reaches out and lures me right out of my slumbers!
We have a hard time keeping on keeping on, don’t we? The
very everydayness of life gets boring. Like the fellow whose
job it was to tighten one set of nuts on each of an endless
row of new cars on the assembly line, and who said one day,
“If I have to tighten one more nut, I’ll be a nut!” We get tired
of doing what we have to do, day after day. But, you know,
God has a way of ringing that daily alarm to help us
remember what we are assigned to do! God sets off little
reminders, and we “wake up and smell the coffee”. We
discover that what we are doing is not meaningless; that
there is a reason for keeping on keeping on.
The Lord says to the Sardis church,
“I have not found your works perfect in the sight of my God.
Remember then what you received and heard; obey it, and repent.”
I have not found your works perfect .. the word “perfect”
really means “complete”. God says that He has not found
our works complete. So remember, obey, and repent.
If your life is anything like mine, you are surrounded by
unfinished business. I can go into every room in my house
and see projects I started but have not finished. The shelves
I bought lumber for, but have not constructed; the library I am
allegedly cataloging; the attic whose clutter assaults me
every Christmas when I go there. Good intentions, all over
the place. But you know what is at the end of the road
paved with good intentions.
Well, God finds our spiritual work incomplete too. Our
spiritual work. We were going to pray with more purpose,
but after a few tough days we fell back into neglect. We
were going to study the Bible more diligently, but, I don’t
know about you, but I lost my way somewhere in the thickets
of Leviticus. We were going to attend prayer meeting, we
were going to take a discipleship course, we were about to
share Christ with a neighbor. But we didn’t finish. We didn’t
stay with our everyday tasks.
What happened? We forgot. We forgot. We forgot who we
are. We forgot our identity. We forgot our values. We
forgot what it really is to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus
Christ, day in and day out, in season and out of season,
when it’s popular and when it’s tough. We forgot who we
are; we forgot what matters to us. And so just like the
person who goes to work every day, tapping at the same
computer, pushing the same papers, every day the same old
same old, we forget why we are doing spiritual work. Yet
God helps us to remember by putting little alarm clocks in our
lives. God helps us to remember when we wake up and
smell the coffee just who we are and what we are about.
Aging people, when they retire, sometimes feel there is
nothing more. If I am defined by my job, when my job is
gone, then who am I? Why get up and get going? Well, that
retirement date is one of God’s alarm clocks to help us
remember who we are and what we are about. One of the
gifts that the late Robert C. White gave us in his short few
months among us was that thirst for lifelong learning, new
things to be and to do.
Young adults, who you would think would be the most
forward-looking people of all, are often caught in this same
trap. You go to college, because people have told you that
your degree is the ticket to success. Then you get out and
find out that nobody wants your psychology degree, nobody
will pay you because you are an English major. So what is
there for to do? You get depressed and scared. You forget
who you are as a child of God, you forget that God has
something with your name on it. It might actually be a good
thing if you get turned down for a few jobs, because that will
wake you up to figure out who you really are. Wake up and
smell the coffee, God’s alarm clock.
There is a word for us as a church, too. Our church is
replete with unfinished tasks, things we have started but
have not taken to the next level. Three and a half years ago
we began to encourage you to start new ministries, and quite
a few have done that. Well and good. But the everydayness
of some of these ministries has become burdensome. We
have not moved ahead from grand plan to where the rubber
hits the road. I believe that God is ringing our alarm clocks
about the way we do church and is calling us to faithful
diligence. God is calling us to pay attention to who we really
are.
Several years ago we were the venue for an episode of the
TV show, “A Man Called Hawk”. The show’s producers had
scouted around for a church building, because the episode
was to center on a choir member and her problems. They
liked the look of our place, so we let them shoot here. One
of the producers said to me, “I see your church is multiracial;
but the church in our episode is a historically black church.
We do need some extras, but it wouldn’t work for them to be
white folks. Would you invite just your black members to
participate as extras?” I thought nothing of that, and the next
Sunday, trying to bring a light touch, announced the
opportunity and said, “Now those of us of the Caucasian
persuasion can just stay home.” Well, you talk about getting
people’s attention! You did not hear one word I said in the
sermon. All you could say after worship was, “You have
made a terrible mistake. We stand for being multiracial; we
are not here just for one group.” I said, “But this is play-
acting. This is not really about us. This is just fiction, TV.”
And you said, “We don’t care. We don’t even want to
pretend to be something other than what we are.” Did you
ever ring my alarm clock! That day I remembered what we
are about, I remembered what our values are, I remembered,
I obeyed, and I surely did repent!”
We need to remember who we are and what we are about.
We need to be diligent about doing church, day by day and
week after week. God says to Takoma, “I have not found
your works complete ... Remember, obey, and repent.” We
have said that we are evangelical, but we have not finished
our outreach efforts to this community. We have said that
we are missionary, but we have not called out from among
us resources and people to go out and do missions in a
sweeping way. We have said that we are compassionate,
but we have not wrapped our arms around the last, the least,
the lost, and the lonely in anything but small ways. Oh, now,
occasionally we do reach and include a homeless person.
But he soon disappears. He does not stay. Isn’t that an
alarm clock ringing to remind us to finish what we have
started? Takoma Park Church, wake up and smell the
coffee! Do church! Do it well! Do it completely! God has
seen our works, and they are not complete. “Remember,
obey, and repent.”
III
But I must confess to you that the alarm bell that interests
me most is not the fire alarm, with its rude interruption of
everything; nor the alarm clock, calling me to do my duty
every day. The alarm bell that intrigues me is neither the fire
alarm nor the alarm clock; it is one you cannot hear. You
can only feel it and see it. And that is the body clock. The
natural, inbred, body clock. Something that comes from
within and is not imposed from without.
Let me illustrate. On those blessed Mondays, when I a, not
expected to do church work, I don’t set the alarm clock or the
coffee clock. But I still wake up between 6:15 and 6:30. I
don’t try to do it. I would like to sleep a little later. But
something inside, some natural rhythm, just prompts me to
get out and get going. Nothing rings, you understand. No
bells. Just an inner voice.
But it gets even more interesting than that. There are times
when I go to bed on Saturday night, not really satisfied with
the sermon. But I’m tired, so I go to bed and hope that I can
fix it all at five in the morning. Now what do you think
happens? Do I sleep? Do I really get my rest? No, if I go to
bed without everything ready for Sunday, invariably I will
wake up around three or four o’clock, with my mind
processing unfinished business. When there is something
more to be done, my mind will not leave me alone until I have
dealt with it. In fact, maybe it’s not my mind at all; maybe it’s
the Holy Spirit “bugging” me until I respond. All I know is
that the most effective alarm bell, the most persistent wake-
up call is the one from within. The one which is a voice that
says, “There is more for you to do.” The one which pulls at
the heartstrings and says, “Let’s get busy on Kingdom
things.”
So it comes as no surprise, really, when the Lord of the
church at Sardis says to the believers there:
“If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not
know at what hour I will come to you.”
You back off from Kingdom work now, and the Lord will not
allow you to rest. The Lord will come and will move us to
respond. This is the sort of alarm bell we need: that inner
desire to want to do Kingdom work. Lord, give us in this
church men and women who are restless for the Kingdom,
believers who have an inner drive to do whatever they can to
further the Kingdom. My prayer is not for populating the
pews or for placements in the platters. My prayer is for men
and women who do not have to be talked into Christian
service, for people who do not have to be begged to take
leadership. My prayer is for folks who want to serve, who
generate ideas, who think ahead, who just do what needs to
be done. My prayer is that we would be able to hear the
Lord coming like a thief in the night, silently, quietly, pushing
us from within to do what we have been called to do. My
prayer is for more occasions like the one I experienced last
week, when I went to work to raise funds for a family in
distress, and more than thirty of you responded with love
gifts, one of you wrote a letter thanking me for honoring you
as a potential giver, and one of you even said, “Pastor, if you
don’t get enough, my husband and I will make up the
difference.” Oh, praise God for those who hear that inner
alarm, that body clock that says, “Get going!”
I tell you today that my heart wants to be faithful. My soul
desires a closer walk with Christ. My mind searches for a
way to say what Paul said to King Agrippa, “I was not
disobedient to the heavenly vision.” But even more, my
heart wants this church to be faithful and diligent and
obedient. My heart wants us to know the mind of Jesus
Christ, so that without fanfare, before the fire alarm jolts us
and without the daily alarm clock jangle, we shall say, like Dr.
King, on the last night of his life, “I just want to do God’s will”.
Be faithful unto death, and I will give you a crown of life.
