TL;DR: In this sermon, preached September 6, 2026, at Creede Community Church in Creede, Colorado, Loren Richmond Jr. reflects on Romans 13:8–14 and the good news that God’s new day is approaching. Therefore, the darkness does not have to determine our orientation. We can wake up, put on Christ, and begin living now in the light of the day God is bringing.
Well, it’s wonderful to be with you all. My name, for those who didn’t hear, is Loren Richmond Jr. And I’m I’m glad to be visiting from Thornton, Colorado this morning.
And I must say, Charles already saw me. Charles and I are double dipping, and I’m sorry, I forgot your name. Hey, we’re double dipping. since I am, you’ll soon learn, and my daughter will tell you. I’m a self-described church nerd. So I actually worshiped at the Episcopal Church down at 9 a.m. So hopefully my sermon is at least as good as Dawn’s who I understand will be with you all, I think, in a couple of weeks.
But it’s a it’s a wonder it’s wonderful to be with you all this morning.
What Time Is It?
So I’m curious, have you ever woken up in the middle of the night completely disoriented, wondering what time it is?
It can be quite funny to observe when it happened to someone else. Last year, after a sleepover, my daughter fell asleep one afternoon and she woke up later that evening and she wanted to know what day it was. She wondered if she needed to get ready for school, where was breakfast. And it was quite funny to watch.
But when you’re the confused one, It’s not so funny.
I remember back when I was in college, I once woke up in the middle of the night, convinced it was morning. So I got out of bed, I put on pants and a dress shirt. This was Bible College, and I sat down and I did my morning Bible reading. Again, this was Bible college.
And I remember wondering why I was so tired, why I could barely focus on the words on the page.
And it never occurred to me that it was the middle of the night.
Now again, what made this especially confusing, this was not all the signs around me were normal. I regularly got up early for class, I had I had early classes. more so every other guy it seemed on my hall did not have morning class. So, you know, the halls being quiet, darkness outside, nothing seemed amiss, except of course my fatigue.
So it was just like my normal day, and I I wandered downstairs and left the front door. But of course, the moment I opened the front door, the alarm went off, and that’s when I finally realized it was not the morning, it was the middle of the night.
And now, of course, I had another problem. The door had locked behind me.
So I sit there in the middle of the night, fully dressed for class, waiting for security to come and let me back into the building. And when they came, I tried to explain what had happened, and they looked at me like I was, you know, yeah, like I was crazy, I’d lost my mind, and thankfully no one else was around to witness it.
When we don’t know what time it is, things can be confusing, disorienting, even quite upsetting. And darkness often makes the confusion quite worse.
It’s one thing to lay down for an afternoon nap, sleep longer than expected, and then wake up momentarily unsure of the time. It’s quite something else to wake up beneath the cover of darkness on an overcast night.
Where there is no sunlight coming through the windows, there is no obvious markers to tell us if it’s later in the day or later in the evening, there’s no way to know whether the morning is soon at hand or whether the night has only just begun.
And when we can’t tell what time it is, it can begin to feel like the darkness will go on forever.
When Darkness Becomes Our Orientation
Have you ever experienced something like that?
Not so simply just waking up confused like my daughter or myself.
But more so reaching a point in life where you feel lost and disoriented, unsure which direction to go, or frankly, sometimes which way is even up.
Sometimes it can look like sadness and despair. Sometimes it can become a recklessness like nothing matters. Sometimes it feels like aimlessness, a feeling that life has no real direction or purpose. I’ve certainly felt all three at different points in my life.
However it appears, this disorientation affects more than just our emotional and our physical health. Our relationships suffer, our families suffer, our communities suffer. We begin to assume that the darkness we see now is all that there will ever be.
And most relevant to Paul’s words this morning that was read by Charles.
Is that our spiritual lives also begin to suffer.
Our faith practices no longer seem to have a point. We wonder why gathering for worship even matters. Our acts of justice, mercy, and compassion feel completely pointless. After all, what difference will it really make?
With all the trouble in our lives, in our communities, in our world, it’s easy for this disorientation to creep into our faith.
And over time, rather than simply feeling disoriented by the darkness, the darkness becomes our new orientation.
We stop praying because we no longer see the point. We begin to wonder if church attendance is just a waste of time. We stop doing good in our communities because we are convinced that none of it really matters.
The disorientation of the darkness, has become our new orientation.
The Night Is Nearly Over
The Apostle Paul wrote to a group of Christians in Rome who were perhaps themselves feeling something similar.
I would encourage you to go back and read chapters 12 and 13 of the passage that Charles wrote, read before that. And and Paul’s words suggest, I or Paul’s words I might suggest that there may have been some feelings of disorientation among those early Christians in Rome. Some sense of what’s the point.
In chapter 12, Paul reminds him of some fairly obvious things. Let love be genuine. Hold fast to what is good, hate what is evil. As much as possible, live at peace with everyone.
And finally, right before the reading today, again, Paul goes back to the basics: love one another, keep the commandments, love your neighbor as yourself.
I mean it seems all rather straightforward and obvious.
But I wonder, I wonder if the reason Paul said these things is because he was writing to a group of Christians who were themselves struggling with a sense of disorientation and despair.
Maybe the Christians in Rome were also wondering themselves, why are we still struggling under Roman rule? How much longer are we supposed to wait? And if Jesus is not coming back to put these things right, then does it really matter how we live?
Perhaps the darkness had become their orientation.
And this is why Paul thinks it’s so important for them to understand what time it is.
Paul reorients them by telling them that the night is nearly over and God’s new day is approaching.
For those who feel disoriented and adrift, Paul offers a marker, a point of orientation. He says in fact he says in fact that it may feel that we are awash in darkness and disorientation, but this is actually the right time. This is the moment, he says.
And more than that, he promises them that God’s new day is almost here, that the night will soon be over.
To say it perhaps more simply, Paul says the sun will come up tomorrow.
God’s New Day Is Coming
Paul is here speaking about an eschatological promise. Now that’s a that’s a big theological word that simply means what God has promised, God will do. Thank you. No, no, don’t worry.
That God is moving the entire creation, all of the cosmos, towards the future that God has promised.
And I especially appreciate the way that Paul speaks about time here. Paul is not saying, it’s five o’clock and the sun will rise at 6:23. No. Paul is saying that the sunrise is near, but the time before the sunrise is not empty.
This moment matters.
Paul’s not just simply saying, hang in there, we’re almost there, much as we said to our son yesterday on the road trip.
In other words, this is not a long, laborious, tedious wait that we’re just supposed to kill our time and fill empty time with pointless distractions and games and entertainment, much as we might do on a long road trip.
Quite the opposite, actually.
Paul is saying that this is essential time. This is important time. This is God’s time.
And when we understand those two things, that God will bring the new day, and that this present time matters, it changes our entire orientation of how we live and how we act.
The darkness no longer determines our orientation, God’s approaching new day does.
So this morning I have good news for you: God’s new day is coming.
Throughout the sweep throughout the sweep of scriptures, biblical writer after biblical writer has expressed a yearning and an eagerness for the time will when God will come and make all things right in our world.
The promised future has been described differently by biblical writers and theologians. Perhaps you’ve heard of the day of the Lord, the kingdom of God, The second coming, the return of Christ.
This is part of what we celebrate in the season of Advent. Not only that Jesus came once as a baby, but that Jesus will come again.
And for Paul, this is not a question waiting to be resolved. For Paul, we can be as certain as we are that this is right here in front of us. It’s concrete, or I suppose wood in this instance.
And let me affirm that I don’t offer this as some sort of dreamy escape, but rather as something quite real.
And I think it makes a real difference in how we live when we recognize that the future does not depend entirely upon our own efforts and actions.
When we assume that the future depends on us, every human action faces the headwinds of human failure. If we can’t do it ourselves,
Eventually we wonder why even tried.
Again, the darkness becomes our orientation.
But trusting the promise of God’s new day does not mean that we do nothing and leave it all to God. This is not an attitude of God is coming back, so we can just so we can just let it all burn.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
Trusting the promise means that allowing God’s new day to orient us right now.
Said differently, because God’s new day is coming, our time and our actions right now matter all the more in this present moment because we have a part to play.
We do this and we live this way because God’s new day is already approaching.
Wake Up. Put On Christ. Live in the Light.
So, how do we live that way?
Well, first we wake up, we recognize what time it is.
Paul tells us to to wake up and pay attention to the opportunities God has given us to participate in God’s good work.
We do not wake up to cause the sunrise, we wake up because the sunrise is already coming.
Second, we put on Christ. We dress for the new day.
Paul describes this as clothing ourselves in the armor of light. He’s not saying that everything is gonna be daisies and roses. He recognizes that there will still be struggle and challenge.
But he reminds us that we cannot face the darkness through our own strength alone. We need God.
We receive Christ, the identity of
From Christ, the identity, the character, the strength that we need for this time.
And third, we begin living in light of this new day, allowing God’s future to shape our actions right now.
If we trust that the sun will rise tomorrow, we set out clothes for the next day. We make plans for what will come to be. In the same way, trusting God’s approaching new day changes how we live today.
It means trusting that what we do in this man in this moment matters. This is the essential time.
And it means practicing now the love, justice, and peace of God’s coming new day.
This does not mean that we ignore the justice we excuse me, this does not mean that we ignore the pain and injustice around us. We still grieve and mourn pain and tragedy and death and loss.
But we do not allow the darkness to become our orientation.
Instead, we yearn all the more for God’s new day, and we we affirm with the early Christians who would have said, Maranatha, our Lord comes.
And we do what God has given us to do, not to try to fix everything ourselves, but to testify and to bear witness through our actions that our Lord comes.
In short, when we trust that this is God’s time and that God’s day is coming, it changes how we live and how we move and how we act in this world today.
The darkness no longer determines our orientation. God’s approaching new day does.
Even There, This Was God’s Time
I had planned to to end this sermon differently, but I recently came across the story of a a man named Raul Hernandez, who is an undocumented immigrant from Honduras.
Roel’s story begins in a way that many of us perhaps have heard and become all too familiar.
Last November he reported for a routine appointment with immigration and customs enforcement.
His wife, pastor, children, several church members waited outside for him.
And Raul never came back out.
He was detained and eventually transferred to a county jail.
Early in his detention, Raul struggled with fear and uncertainty. But each morning as sunlight streamed through a small window high above his cell, Raul watched the birds fly by, and he remembered that God was still with him.
Before his attention, Raul was actively involved in his church, but it was still discerning what God had for him.
Inside that jail, Raul says that God awakened something within him.
He prayed with men who were frightened and uncertain about their future. He reminded them that they mattered to God and that God forgave them. He read scripture with them, he even preached to them.
Raul was recognizing and responding to God’s time.
It’s why even there he said, believe it or not, that he could wake up smiling.
Raoul later struggled to explain how the last place on earth he wanted to go had become a place he found difficult to leave.
God made that place holy for me, he later said,
Remember, the jail was still a jail. He was still separated from his family. The darkness was still very real, but it no longer determined his orientation.
All the while outside the jail, Raul’s church cared for his family, found lawyers, raised money, wrote letters, and fought for his release.
After Raul came home, they continued supporting and advocating for other detainees.
This is what God has awakened, Raul said.
To be clear, none of this makes Raul’s treatment acceptable. It does not mean that God intended for Raul to suffer, nor does it mean that suffering is inherently good.
But those who determined, excuse me, those who detained Raul, they could lock the door and determine where he slept, but they could not, they could not determine what time it was.
Even there, this was God’s time.
God awakened to something in Raoul, God awakened something in his church.
The darkness did not determine their orientation. God’s approaching new day did.
We do not live this way to make the sun rise. God’s already got that covered.
We live this way because the sun is going to rise.
The darkness does not become our orientation. God’s approaching new day does.
Thanks be to God.