The Need for Sleep

A sermon on Luke 9:28-36 and Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
Preached Sunday, March 16, 2025 at Saratoga Springs UMC.
Video available here, using the All We Need worship series from Barn Geese Worship.

A close-up of an altar detail from Saratoga Spring UMC’s “All You Need” altar.

Would you pray with me?

God of our sleeping and God of our wakefulness, thank you for bringing us, tired as we are, together in this time and this place. By your Spirit, make your presence known here among us today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I’ve been watching a lot of Law and Order: SVU lately. I know, I know, it’s probably not good for me. Let’s spend hours thinking about some of the worst things people can do to each other! That’ll make me feel better! But I like true crime, always have, and when I want a break from Criminal and Forensic Files, SVU is there for me, giving me a story while meeting my need for the macabre.

And when you watch a lot of Law and Order: SVU, you notice a line that characters repeat over and over again. It’s a signal that something’s wrong, like when a character in Star Wars says, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” When someone’s about to break, or when someone wants the moral high ground, inevitably, a character says, “How do you sleep at night?”

“How do you sleep at night?” It’s used against perpetrators and detectives alike. “How do you sleep at night?!” Detective Stabler shouts at an unrepentant villain after naming off his crimes one by one. “How do you sleep at night?” a date asks Detective Benson when she talks about the kind of work she does. “How do you sleep at night?” an impressed prosecutor asks Assistant District Attorney Casey Novak after listing off the tough cases she faces in her job. And Casey gives one of the most honest answers in the show. “How do you sleep at night?” “I don’t,” she says. “I don’t.”

Now, it’s clear at that moment that Casey does need sleep. She goes on to make a series of spectacularly bad choices that get her license to practice law suspended. (Gosh, it’s good TV. The moral conundrums! The anguish! The drama!) And it’s clear throughout the show that everyone needs more sleep than they’re getting. The captain is always telling one detective or another to go home and get some rest (but of course, that’s right when a phone call comes in that cracks the case wide open, and no one actually ever sleeps). I can’t count the number of episodes that close on a shot of one detective or other at their desk in the dark after telling their partner that they’re just about to head home. There’s an epidemic of insomnia at the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, and somehow, even when poor choices ensue, it seems noble.

And maybe that’s what’s at play with Peter and James and John, headed up to the mountain for the Transfiguration. I know, I know, you heard about this story from me just a couple of weeks ago, but it’s an alternative reading in the Revised Common Lectionary for this week, and it’s such a great picture of what happens when you’re chronically sleep-deprived. The disciples go with Jesus up the mountain to pray, but they can’t stay awake. They sleep, and because they do, we miss out on Jesus’s conversation with Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets together with the Word Made Flesh. Peter, maybe still half-asleep, suggests putting up some tents, so that maybe we can catch up on the action, but it’s too late. The moment has passed.

But you can’t fault them. James and John and Peter have been leaving it all on the court, ever since they started following Jesus. They are following the Savior. They are literally doing the Lord’s work. They have clarity, and purpose: they are healing people. They are feeding people. They are saving lives and one day, they’re going to turn the world upside down. They are going to throw off the yoke of empire. They will run Rome right out of Jerusalem and free themselves and their people from the burdensome, self-centered policies of Herod Antipas and anyone else who exploits the poor and the workers. If anyone in all of Christendom was doing the right thing, surely it was these three. Surely, if anyone in all of history should be sacrificing sleep, it was Jesus of Nazareth’s inner circle.

But here they are, worn out and tired, asleep through the Transfiguration. Here they are, missing a miracle, because their eyes were too heavy to hold open.

And the Transfiguration isn’t all they missed. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you all the consequences of not getting enough sleep. I started to do some research on sleep deprivation as I was preparing to write this sermon, and I stopped partway through because it’s all stuff I’ve heard before. Pull an all-nighter and it’s the equivalent impairment of having a blood alcohol content of 0.08%, the legal limit in most states. Chronic sleep deprivation can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a weakened immune system, higher pain sensitivity, and an increased risk of developing diabetes, even heart attack and stroke, not to mention all the fun effects it has on your mental health.

And I think we all know the health benefits of sleep: they’re the dangers of lack of sleep, reversed. We know that sleep is when our brain tidies up from the day, stores memories, and reinforces connections. We know our bodies literally heal during sleep. We even know there are benefits from snuggling into a cozy bed, whether there’s someone for you to snuggle with or not. Sleep is good for us. 

Which is bizzare, because without these benefits, sleep makes no sense whatsoever. I mean, talk about embracing vulnerability: we as individuals are never more vulnerable than when we sleep. And we do it so much! In theory, anyway. In theory, we’re sleeping a third of every day as adults, more if we’re kids. At least a third of each of our lives is spent unconscious and paralyzed, for our own benefit. Bizarre. And don’t even get me started on nightmares and sleep paralysis. That’s a whole other can of worms. 

But think about it! I mean, imagine Abraham from our Genesis reading, alone, in the dark. And I mean dark dark. Dark like you and I can’t even imagine. No lights. No hum of appliances or HVAC. No one else. Just dark and quiet and outside and alone. 

I wouldn’t sleep a wink. 

But Abraham does. 

He sleeps beneath the stars. The innumerable stars. 

And there, he dreams. 

See, we like the Transfiguration. We like shiny, sparkly Jesus, and the voice on high to guide us. We like clarity and purpose. Or at least I do. Whether or not the disciples sleep through this story, the lectionary likes it enough to offer it to us twice! There is something solid about the light in the darkness that we see in the Transfiguration. 

But we find God in the darkness, too. There is such a thing as holy darkness. There are many moments where God insists on being found in darkness: the cloud Moses enters on the mountain top, the starlit night sky, the tomb, the womb. God is there in the darkness before creation, before God calls the light into being. And when the last photon is absorbed and the last atom stilled, there God will be too. 

Friends, we need sleep. We need rest. But just like all our vulnerabilities, all our needs, we were never meant to bear it alone. It turns out the sleep pattern variance of humans—our individual differences in when we naturally fall asleep— have an advantage. Some people truly are natural night owls, the ones who face the unknown in the darkness while most others sleep. Some people truly are early risers, the ones taking over the watch as the dawn breaks. Truly, God knows why our minds and bodies need the rest that they do, but we are shaped to rest and take care of each other. We were never meant to do it all ourselves. 

John and James and Peter up on that mountain had probably been overdoing it, overfunctioning in the face of the worries of the world. I’m sympathetic to that impulse. I’m sure some of you are as well. But I think the detectives in SVU don’t sleep because they are carrying the weight of the world’s sorrows alone. “How do you sleep at night?” They don’t. They can’t. Too much depends on them. Too much. We were never meant to carry this much all on our own. 

Even Jesus took naps. 

So friends, I leave you with this question. How do you sleep at night? (Or into the midmorning, as the case may be?) Are you honoring your need for sleep? Are you allowing the holy dark to envelop you and heal you? Or are you trying to carry a load you were never meant to bear, sacrificing sleep on the altar of guilt, or worry, or productivity, or fear? 

Lay it down. Lay down. Get some rest. 

God knows you need it. 

Amen.