MAYBE WE ALL NEED TO BE WOKE

During the last political campaign the word woke was bandied around to define anyone who was deemed a liberal – whatever that word means or meant to those who used the term in a disparaging manner. No one ever seemed to define the term but only to use it in a demeaning manner and to point out that woke policies were bad for the country and should be avoided at all costs.

Maybe they were and are wrong. Maybe we should all be woke. Maybe we have been woke all along and never knew it. Maybe to be woke means waking up to new realities, new understanding of the world and what is going on in the world around us, waking up to understanding what our responsibilities are to one anther in this world, waking up to what it means to be a Christian.

Maybe those who disparage those they consider woke do so because it lets them off the hook when it comes to dealing with societal issues they would rather ignore because they are too difficult to address – and, of course, too expensive, as if cost suddenly becomes a factor when it is someone else on whom the money – and one’s tax dollars – are being spent. When the issue is our own personal problem, we have little or no qualms about the expense, especially if the government is paying the bill.

The truth is that we all, deep inside ourselves, would rather not have to wake up to what is demanded of us by our faith. It costs too much in the way of giving our time or our money or our God-given abilities to address the issue or issues at hand. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. If the issues and our responsibilities to address those issues are not front and center, it is all to easy to ignore them and, perhaps, write them off as woke and therefore somehow too political.

That, of course, is to ignore the body politic with the realization that we are all in this world together, that we are responsible one to another, whether we like it or not. It is not an issue of we-and-they but of us-and-us. Jesus was constantly being confronted by those who used the law to keep them from their responsibilities to help those who needed help. He never let them get away with it, much to their chagrin.

Our faith won’t let is either, much to our chagrin. Again, we can all find reasons, perhaps sound and logical reasons, why an issue is not our issue. And when we do, we give it a name and walk away. It is only when we woke (that word again) up to what is really behind both our excuses and the issue itself that we begin to take it seriously. Giving an issue a name – like woke – only keeps us divided and prevents us from doing what we can, as little as that sometimes is, to help solve the problem.

Jesus’s message was all about getting our attention to the needs of the last, the least and the lowly of this world, that we will be judged on how we responded to those needs, on how we should judge ourselves. Maybe Jesus’s message was and is that we should all be woke: be awake to what our faith, and maybe even our politics, is calling us to do, even demanding that we do, no matter how difficult and whether we like it or not.