May 6, 2018 “Sleeping in Church” – Acts 20:7-12

Acts 20:7-12
“Sleeping In Church”
May 6, 2018 – Sixth Sunday of Easter

“I would like to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather did… not screaming and yelling like his passengers.” That’s an old joke, but Eutychus did die peacefully in his sleep, though not quite how you would want. Verse 9 says he was a “young man,” which might put him in his twenties, but verse 12 calls him merely a “boy.” Falling asleep, he fell from a third story window. He died instantly. From his point of view, it was peaceful, but imagine the horror and sorrow of the congregation gathered there.

There is a happy outcome, of course, so it’s easy to see humor now in this story about the consequences of sleeping in church. One commentator even suggests Luke was deliberately poking a little fun at Paul for how long he preached that night.

Yet to those gathered there that Sunday evening it was anything but funny. It was late, “many lamps” were burning, making the room smoky. Eutychus slumped, slumbered, then slipped from sight out that window. Someone noticed, the preaching stopped, and the devastated assembly ran down to pick up the boy’s body. The service was over.

You could make this a lesson on spiritual alertness. You could link it to Jesus’ warning about His return in Mark 13:33, “Be on guard! Be alert! You don’t know when that time will come.” Further on Jesus adds, “If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: ‘Watch!’”

Paul takes up this same theme of spiritual alertness for Jesus’ second coming in I Thessalonians 5:6. He wrote, “So then, let us not be like others who are asleep, but let us be alert…” It’s echoed by another apostle in I Peter 5:8, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

Wake up, then! Don’t let yourself nod off like poor Eutychus or you may fall prey to the same sort of disaster. Spiritually, we must stay constantly awake, always watchful, ever attentive to the dangers around us.

Last Saturday afternoon I drove the five hours home from the conference annual meeting in Bellevue. I had gotten up before 6 a.m. to make a meeting leaders breakfast at 7. The meeting ran late and I grabbed some lunch and ate in the car. I listened to an audio book, but it was raining and dreary. Somewhere around Olympia I felt my eyes closing.

You know how it is. You grip the steering wheel hard. You bite your tongue, literally. You shift in your seat. You roll down the window to let some cold air in. You slap yourself. You tune the radio to music you absolutely detest and turn it up loud. A church member who has moved away once told me that he handles behind the wheel drowsiness by driving with a full bladder. Whatever it takes to stay alert and awake, you do it, because the consequences are too awful to consider.

I could argue this morning that our spiritual situation is like that. We’re traveling toward God’s kingdom high speed on a road where danger lurks around every curve. The devil is there, waiting for us to fade out a just a little so he can pounce and ruin our lives, destroy our souls. Waver in devotion, move off course into sin, slack off in giving, even for just a moment, and we will crash and burn, terrible wreckage on the spiritual highway.

Yet a moment ago, as I described desperate efforts to stay awake behind the wheel, maybe a few of you with a good dose of common sense were thinking, “Why not just stop? Take an exit. Pull over. Close your eyes for a few minutes. Get the rest you need. Don’t put yourself and everyone else in danger. Just stop and go ahead and sleep!” You are right. That’s exactly what I did last Saturday. I pulled into a rest stop, reclined my seat and took a twenty-minute nap. I woke refreshed and ready to drive the rest of the way. In the same way, you and I need spiritual rest and refreshment too.

Eutychus is here to teach us the spiritual value of sleep and rest. This youth proves that even the worst consequences you can imagine for spiritual slumber are not beyond the grace of God. Yes, he drifted off while the Word was being preached and he fell on the hard ground, broken, bleeding and dead. But the point of the story is not that, not the horrible penalty for his drowsiness, but the miracle that Eutychus was raised from the dead.

Verse 7 begins with the simple statement that believers in Troas had come together “On the first day of the week…” This is one of a few statements in the New Testament which make clear that early Christians met on Sundays, rather than on the Jewish Sabbath which is Saturday. Why? Because Jesus rose from the dead on Sunday.

Back up into verse 6 and you will discover that all this occurred shortly after the “Feast of Unleavened Bread,” just after Passover. It was Easter season in the church! They would have been remembering how twenty years before Jesus had died on the Cross, then was raised up early on a Sunday morning at just that time of year. His Resurrection might even be what Paul “talked still longer” about that night, as it says in verse 9.

It was Paul’s last night with them before he set sail for Jerusalem. As we will learn in the next couple weeks, he had a premonition of his arrest. He wanted to see all his churches, all the new Christians one more time. At the beginning of the chapter we learn that he took a final tour of Greece and Macedonia, his last stop Philippi, where he evidently picked up Luke again to join him. That’s why verse 7 says, “we met to break bread.” Luke is once again speaking first person. He saw this with his own eyes.

Paul had lots to say in Troas. As he says later in the chapter to some Ephesians, they would never see him again. God was about to take him on a new journey. He wanted to leave them with reassurance. He may have spoken about the Resurrection to remind them that believers in Jesus Christ have nothing to fear from death. Jesus rose and so will we.

In our Gospel lesson from John 15, Jesus urged His disciples to love each other as He loved them. But His emphasis was not so much on great deeds of loving service. There in verse 15 Jesus said, “I do not call you servants any longer… but I have called you friends.” Jesus too was getting ready to go away, but He wanted to reassure them and to reassure you and me that we are His friends and that His Father, “will give you whatever you ask.”

Paul’s other topic that night in Troas may have been grace. According to verse 7, Paul wasn’t just preaching, there was discussion. Perhaps they were wrapping their minds around the good news that through Christ, you don’t have to work hard to make God love you. He just does. By the grace we receive in Jesus, all our sins are forgiven. We cannot make ourselves better people, but grace beyond our own strength makes us new people.

Either way, the event of Eutychus became a graphic and glorious illustration of Paul’s message. Through the power of Jesus Christ, the dead are raised. And through the grace of Jesus, our failures, our sloth, our inattention, our spiritual sleepiness is forgiven and healed. When we fall, His grace raises us back up again.

All those passages I mentioned earlier about alertness and more are in the Bible. It is not good to let yourself grow spiritually lazy and careless, to doze off along life’s way. You don’t want to be lulled into spiritual sleep by all the gaudy lights of the world, forgetting that ultimately you will meet Jesus Christ and be accountable to Him. Far too many stories of fallen Christians have been in the news. You don’t want to be one.

Yet Eutychus reminds us that even the worst fall is not total disaster. The grace of Jesus Christ is greater than our most awful failures. He can raise a man fallen from the third story and he can raise us even when we fall to the depths of sin and negligence concerning spiritual things.

Paul told us this when he wrote later on to another young man named Timothy. In II Timothy 2, verses 11-13, Paul penned a little poem:

Here is a trustworthy saying:

If we have died with him,
we will also live with him;
if we endure,
we will also reign with him.
If we deny him,
he will also deny us;
if we are faithless,
he remains faithful,
for he cannot deny himself.

Verse 12 in the middle there sounds like a Eutychus type warning. “If we deny him, he will also deny us.” We need to stay alert and faithful, avoid falling away, avoid denying our Lord. But the rest of it is all good news. Like Eutychus, if we die with Jesus, we will also live with Jesus. Verse 13 at the end is the gracious promise, “if we are faithless, he will remain faithful.” If we fail, Jesus won’t. If we slip off into sleep or sin and fall to our doom, Jesus is still there, faithful, loving, gracious. He will raise us up, even out of death.

As important as it is to be diligent, to work hard, to be alert, to guard against drowsiness that leads to disaster, in the end it does not depend on us. That’s the promise, that’s the miracle. When we are tired we can sleep, and Christ our Lord will watch over us.

It is easy to imagine life is like a never-ending drive down I-5, demanding constant alertness. We have jobs to go to and assignments to complete. There are bills to pay and not enough money to pay them. There are aches and pains we need to see the doctor about before they get worse. There are friends who need a text or a phone call. There’s a house that needs painting, a car that needs repair, a stack of laundry that needs washing. Your boss, your employees, your customers, your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends, all beg for your attention. On top of all that, your pastor would like you to show up at church and stay awake for an hour or so.

That white-knuckle-drive mode of life keeps us awake. When I get in it, I come home at the end of long day and drop into bed. I fall asleep immediately. But sometime around 3 or 4 a.m., my eyes spring open. I am absolutely wide awake. All the worries flood into my brain, the bills, the people, the broken dishwasher, the wrong things I said the day before, the sermon yet to write, all of it crashes down on me and there I am, sleepless for an hour or so. I toss and turn and try to turn my brain off.

At those times, I sometimes recite to myself over and over the Eastern Orthodox “Jesus Prayer,” “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” remembering that none of what keeps me awake ultimately depends on me. Yes, in the short run, it’s best if I rise in the morning and do what needs to be done. But nothing that truly matters will fall to the ground while I sleep. Not even my own life depends on staying awake. Jesus has mercy for me. If I fall, He will raise me. I know that because He raised Eutychus.

“Do not be alarmed!” Paul said in verse 10, “for his life is in him.” That is God’s word to you and me today. No matter how troubled you are; no matter how dangerous the road before you is; no matter how dire the consequences are for falling asleep, Jesus is master of it all. “Do not be alarmed.” When you are in Christ, His life is in you.

Eutychus is the great demonstration of the fact that you and I don’t have to trust in ourselves, that we ought not trust in ourselves. We trust in Jesus, trust in Him so completely that even when we feel perched on the edge of disaster, we can rest, we can sleep in Him. He said, “I have called you friends,” and we can rest in His friendship.

Psalm 4 starts out with a cry to God, “Answer me, when I call to you.” David is in great distress. He’s surrounded by people who torment him, who don’t believe in God, who think there is no way out of the troubles that surround them. But by the end of the psalm, David is able to sing, “I will lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.”

In Psalm 127:2 we find these wonderful, wonderful words for this morning,

In vain you rise early
and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat—
for he grants sleep to those he loves.

God grants sleep to those He loves. Blessed, peaceful, trusting sleep. Even in the middle of stress and toil, even on the edge of disaster. Sleep is good, because God is good. We may sleep because His grace to us in Jesus never sleeps.

This morning I invite you to sleep, to sleep in Jesus Christ. Sleep in church if you need to. There’s no better place to rest and be confident that God is watching over you. The last verse of our text says that after they broke bread and listened to Paul even longer, until daybreak, they “had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted.”

The story starts and ends with the fact that they were there to “break bread.” That’s the language Luke uses to talk about Holy Communion, about receiving the grace of Jesus in His broken body and shed blood. We are here for that this morning too. As we eat and drink and receive our Lord’s gifts, we can rest in His grace. The Lord watched over Eutychus even in death. We will read this summer how He watched over Paul in danger and shipwreck. He will watch over you and me with the same love. That’s not a little comfort. It’s a lot of comfort.

Amen.