Try waking it by pressing the power button (instead of a key or the mouse). That works on my iMac (OS X 10.7.3 Lion). Several people on these discussion boards have had success with this approach, when the problem has been with a wifi connection. This thread seems to include both wifi issues and ethernet issues.
Of course, something is still very wrong and this seems to be a relatively new problem for at least some of us. When the iMac fails to connect to the wifi router after sleep, the problem (for me) is not the ISP, or the router, which are all working fine. The iMac simply fails to connect to the router and obtain a DHCP address.
Not being an engineer, I have no idea what the difference is between waking up by pressing the power button vs. a key or the mouse, but there's got to be a clue there somewhere.