A Word Worth Rescuing

A few weeks ago, people online were losing their minds over a movie about Homer's Odyssey. Not over whether it was any good. Over the casting. A Black actress playing Helen of Troy. A transgender actor playing a Greek soldier. The word people kept reaching for was woke. The movie was too woke. The casting was too woke.

I think it's gotten away from us. I think it's worth going and getting back.

Where it came from

Stay woke didn't start as a punchline. It started, decades ago, as something closer to a warning passed between Black Americans: stay awake, stay alert, don't let the world talk you into not seeing what's actually happening to you. It meant consciousness. It meant refusing a kind of sleep that feels safe precisely because it lets you stop paying attention.

That's not a small thing to mean. That's most of the Sermon on the Mount.

Where it went

Somewhere along the way, the word got picked up by people who meant it as praise — a badge for being sufficiently aware, sufficiently correct, sufficiently on the right side of things. And then it got picked up by people who meant it as an insult — a catch-all for anything that looks like inclusion, or diversity, or taking someone's marginalization seriously, used less to describe a position than to end a conversation about it.

Both of those uses have something in common. Neither one is really asking whether the thing being called "woke" is true. They're asking whether it's stylish, or whether it's suspicious. The word stopped being a description and became a weapon, and weapons don't ask questions. They just decide who's on which side.

I think that's a loss. The political fight over the word is real, and I'm not here to referee it. But somewhere underneath it is an actual, old, serious question both sides have stopped asking: what does it mean to be awake, and what does it cost?

What the church already knew

Jesus asks his disciples to stay awake more than once, and it's never a casual request. In Gethsemane, the night before he dies, he asks Peter, James, and John to keep watch with him — and they fall asleep. Not because they didn't care. Because staying awake to what was actually happening was more than they could bear.

Paul tells the church in Rome almost the same thing: wake from sleep... the night is far gone, the day is near. Not "be informed." Not "read the right things." Wake up, because there is a kind of sleep that feels like rest and is actually a way of not having to look at something.

Ezekiel gets handed the job of sentinel — the one who stays awake on the wall so everyone else doesn't have to — and God tells him plainly that his silence would have blood on it. Watching, for Ezekiel, was never neutral. It was never just a posture. It was a moral act with real weight attached.

None of these texts are asking anyone to be stylish. They're asking people to be honest about what they'd rather not see.

What I'd like back



I don't think the church needs to defend the word "woke." It's not our word, and it's carrying too much freight from too many directions to be useful as a badge or a slur.

But I'd like to reclaim what it was pointing at before it became a weapon: the old, hard, biblical demand to stay awake to what's actually happening — to the sleep we've mistaken for peace, and the people that sleep lets us stop seeing. That demand doesn't belong to one political side. It belongs to anyone who's ever read Ezekiel on the wall, or watched Peter, James, and John fall asleep in the garden while Jesus asked them to stay.

Call that whatever you want. I'd just hate to see us lose it because we got embarrassed by the word.