Have you ever taken a red-eye flight somewhere? 

I love a red-eye.  

I don’t get much sleep, and the legroom and the elbow-room of Business Class is always more than I can afford, but I still love it. 

The old movies always make it seem like travel used to be a lot more romantic than it is now.  

When Hercule Poirot was getting on the Orient Express, he was eager to sample what the dining car had to offer.  

That’s not what it’s like, anymore, is it?   

But there’s still romance to the red-eye.  

You gather around the gate sometime after dinner, and once you’re on the plane, there’s the settling in—some people are picking their movies or getting their iPads fired up; you have students getting out their reading for some class; parents traveling with kids putting Uno into the seat back pocket in front of them, right next to the barf bag; executives already unpacked and glued to their laptops before those of us in Zone 4 have gotten that lecture about sharing the overhead bin space.  

At some point after a couple of hours in the air, they turn out the cabin lights for sleeping, and it’s then that you can spot the other night owls, reading light by reading light, all the way up to the very front, as the world of the airplane goes quiet and there’s not much movement along the aisle.   

Of course, at some point, it all starts to feel long.   You’ve had enough of your book.  The person whose movie you were secretly sort of watching has switched to a t.v. show you don’t care about. You look at the little GPS thing and you’re only just approaching Greenland. Your tailbone hurts. There are a lot of miles yet to fly. 

But then the best thing happens.  

Dawn arrives.  

The sky goes from black to blue, and there’s a thin orange line that curves ever so slightly as it hugs the outline of the dark earth below.  

You can hear them in the aft kitchen, getting the coffee cart ready, and people begin to wake up, and it feels like, well, it won’t be long now.  

We’ve almost made it.  Almost there. 

I love the romance of a red-eye flight.  Don’t you? 

II.

The Apostle Paul might have, too, if he’d gotten the chance.  

He was certainly adventurous – though certainly also, he was more of a dutiful business traveler, a professional fixer, of sorts, who would have been hunched over his laptop, working late into the night, being sent by the home office into some new fiasco he had to untangle, rather than someone who was chasing diversion for its own sake.  

But certainly, he understood the power of the dawn. 

He says in his letter to the Romans this morning, “…You know what time it is, how it is now the moment…” which the King James Version translates as “high time,” so: “You know…how it is now high time for you to wake from sleep.  For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers…” 

“The night is far gone, they day is near.  Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” (13:11-12)

For Paul, this journey that had started to feel so very long seems to be finding a different energy. 

That thin orange line tracing the earth has told him that it won’t be long now.   We’ve almost made it.  We’re almost there. 

III.

As it happens, that’s also not unique to Paul. 

All throughout Scripture, there are stories that set apart the dawn as a particular moment when God is at work in the world. 

If you were here earlier this summer, that story of Jesus walking on the water we heard occurs just before dawn.  

When Jesus dies, the women go to the tomb just before dawn, only to discover it open, and the body gone.  

In the Old Testament, it is just before dawn that Moses parts the sea and the Hebrew people escape from bondage into freedom. 

The new day is constantly affirmed as a time for renewed possibilities—as God shows across the generations that the works of darkness…all the works of fear and greed and the fruit of all our worst inclinations…will not stop God.

Because even in the midst of darkness, for those with eyes to see, God is constantly bringing new life and new hope into the world. 

Things are getting untangled.  Liberation is near.  Rescue is near.  

IV.

It may seem like a bit of an odd message for Homecoming Weekend, when so much of the point is to invite you back into the tangled routines of three-season life, and most especially to the rhythm of church-going.

I mean, let’s be honest: for a lot of us, liberation may not seem quite so near now as seemed was a week or two ago.  

I remember walking our daughter Grace to her first day of Kindergarten some years back. 

I was watching her happily skipping along, ready for this new adventure.  

Meanwhile, I was a puddle – like, unable to see because of the tears (and thank heavens I wasn’t driving) – because there I am with this wonderful little kid holding my hand, and now for the rest of her life, starting that day, she was going to be working for The Man. 

Isn’t that the reality of this season? 

Isn’t so that, while some of us may be the joyful Kindergartener, eagerly starting a new adventure, plenty of us are not that, and are getting back to commutes and commitments we didn’t necessarily miss all that much while we were away. 

And actually, that brings us back to Paul.  

The first audience for his letter in Rome probably wasn’t a group who had much experience by way of vacation.  

Leisure time really hadn’t been invented for anyone but Emperors.  

But that first audience knew what it was to be tangled. 

They shared one of the great challenges we often have as a people of faith, which is to be sitting in the middle of demanding, back-breaking, sometimes even heartbreaking days, yet also trying to live for the greater good, trying to remember to be patient and forgiving, generous and kind, and everything else that comes with being the people that Jesus invites us to be. 

That didn’t fit easily into the world of the Christians of Rome, any more than it seems to fit into ours.  

V.

But as Mahatma Gandhi once counseled, “We must be the change we want to see.” 

And Paul’s message this morning is along those lines: he names the mysterious paradox that, in hoping, we bring hope into the world. 

Because, of course, what dawns in us is ultimately what dawns in the world.  

It’s the armor of light that finally cuts through any tangle if we’re willing to follow the ruthless logic of love and care and of living for something greater than ourselves. 

Now, I will date myself and remind a handful of us about a sitcom from the early 80’s, called “The Greatest American Hero.” 

It wasn’t my favorite, to be honest.  If you don’t know it, that’s probably just as well. 

Just about the only thing memorable about it was the theme song.  

But its premise is instructive, in its way. 

A regular Joe sort of guy randomly encounters aliens one day, and they give him a special suit – a superhero sort of costume – that is full of capabilities beyond the bounds human science.  The ability to fly, for example. 

Unfortunately, they give him the suit, but at the moment when they are about to hand over the instructions for the suit, they are interrupted, and the aliens fly off, leaving the guy standing there with the suit…and whatever it might do. 

The point of the sitcom is, of course, how does he learn to use the suit?  How will he awkwardly learn to discover, much less master, what it can do? 

How does he come to terms with its powers, which are, by extension, his powers? 

In some sense, the armor of light can be like that.  

How will we come to terms with its powers, which are, by extension, our powers?

How can we move, with so few instructions, in the direction of the dawn, as it breaks as a thin orange line hugging the dark surface of the earth? 

Most of all, we move by moving.  

We move by untangling ourselves—by investing less energy, by awarding less time, by directing fewer resources, fewer excuses, and fewer of our aspirations to those necessary evils that cannot possibly bring out our best.  

Actually, maybe that’s just it:  maybe the most important lessons faith has to teach us are just how few of the evils we face are actually “necessary,” for us or for anyone else. 

Maybe what’s necessary for us is to become more serious in loving.  More serious in caring.  More serious in listening.  More serious in letting ourselves be claimed by our neighbors, and so, more serious in helping. 

Paul’s hope is that, with the help of God, and following the example of Jesus, we will be bold enough to live as those who have been rescued, and bold enough to stand up for our deepest selves – our best selves. 

And in that, to bring those best selves into the world.  

That’s what he means by “putting on the armor of light.” 

VI.

I love the romance of a red-eye flight.  Don’t you? 

Don’t you love the settling in, the slow quiet, the companionship of the vigilant, and then, wonderfully, the arrival of the dawn? 

Dawn tells us that we are almost there. 

And as we settle in to a new church year together, and dawn seems so far away, may we learn to live as those who are ready, even now. 

With God’s help, may we put on the armor light, and go forth untangled.

Amen.