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A Dream and a Hope
A sermon preached by the Reverend Dr. Stephanie J. Nagley at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Bethesda, Maryland – January 16, 2005
I have a dream, he said. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream, a hope. He saw a world not determined by its divisions but made strong and good and whole by its diversity. That world hadn’t happened but he could see it as clearly as if it were true.
The world suffers from the lack of dreams and dreamers. The world suffers from the lack of hope and possibility.
Somewhere along the line we put away too many of our great dreams. We put away too many of our grand hopes and we settle for too little.
There was a large heating oil tank in our back yard when I was a kid. But when I was little that oil tank was anything but just an oil tank. For me it became my horse. I would take a robe and tie the rope around the neck of the tank and sit astride imagining that I was a cowboy, fighting the good fight, running from the posse, heading for the hills.
That play lasted a good long time, until one day I saw our neighbor peaking out the window laughing at my play. Then the bubble burst. The horse became an oil tank and my time of dreaming was gone.
Maybe all of us have a memory like this, a moment in time when the bubble burst and the dream time was lost. When the dream is lost, the world goes flat and one-dimensional. It’s sad really, because our ability to dream is also connected to our ability to hope, to imagine a world that is more than what we have at hand. When we lose our ability to dream we also lose our ability to hope and then we lose our willingness to stick our necks out and reach for the stars.
I guess that’s called growing up. We are encouraged to put away the wild possibilities of our imaginations. We do have to be realistic. We do have to keep at least one foot in the world, for we do have mortgages to meet and children to raise and other responsibilities. But where would we be if not for our ability to dream and think beyond the constraints of time?
The lack of dreams delivered 15th century Europe into a collective depression. The Nuremberg Chronicles of 1493 describe a society with little vision or hope. Yes, there were glorious cathedrals, emerging artists and a network of universities. But there were also plagues and the toppling of a feudal system and the unrepentant hypocrisy of the Church. There had not been a major scientific discovery for 1,000 years.
What brought them out of that monochrome existence, that depression? What brought them out was someone with a dream, a hope, a vision. Christopher Columbus dared to stick his neck out and discovers that the world is not flat. (This is not to ignore the violence done against the people Columbus discovered in that New World, only to acknowledge that his discovery changed Europe.) With that the malaise lifted and the Renaissance took off.
It could be argued that Columbus didn’t dream but sailed for the New World with sufficient information to reassure him that he wouldn’t fall off the edge. But if he hadn’t had the ability to dream, all the information in the world wouldn’t have convinced him to try. He had a dream, a vision of a reality beyond the conventional understanding of what was out there. His dream was more a state of the heart than the head, his willingness to risk was greater than his fear of failure.
There are people following Jesus. He turns and says to them, “What are you looking for?”
Maybe they were looking for a reason to dream. Maybe they were looking for a reason to hope.
Maybe they were looking for a New World.
Jesus gives us our biggest dream. He calls it the kingdom.
The problem with the kingdom is that it does seem otherworldly. It’s hard to get our hands and heads around. The kingdom is that vision, that dream of a New World that refuses to be pinned down or lend itself to a Madison Avenue jingle. But it’s there. In the deepest parts of us we know that place.
Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that place of the kingdom. He talked about, wrote about it, marched for it and died for it.
We don’t need to parse King’s speech to understand what he was telling us. We know what he means. We know he is describing the kingdom of God, or at least the edges of that kingdom. He is dreaming about finding that New World for which Jesus also fought and died for.
We have come a long way since the summer of 1963 but we still have far to go. Race still divides us. Economic inequality still plagues us. Tribal loyalties still lead us to war. People still perish from too little hope, too little vision. People suffer because too many people have put away their dreams.
Columbus brought our geographical borders closer. Dr. King challenged us saying, “This new world of geographical togetherness . . . made the world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius, we must make it a brotherhood.”
Someone once said that the central task of the church is an imaginative one. The church gives us a place to dream. The church gives us a place to explore our moral and spiritual genius. The church gives us a place to live into the reality of that kingdom dream.
The church’s central task is to give us room for our dreams and in that give us a reason to hope and with that hope give us the energy to reach for the stars, give us the courage to set sail for a new world.
The church’s central task is to continue to tell a story about other dreams from long ago. The central act of our worship is the story we tell every time we gather for the bread and the wine. The story is about our lives. The story is about a God that won’t abandon us, even though we push that God away a thousand times. Our story is about getting lost and being found. Our story is about a love that refuses to let us go and about the dream of a world where everyone finds a home.
Our central task as the people of St. Luke’s is to let the neighborhood know that we are here. We are here for those who want a church that is open. We are here for those who want to talk openly about life and faith, to be open in sharing what they believe or don’t believe. We are here for those who don’t need to be imprisoned with dogma but embraced with conversation. We are here for those who want to explore the depths of what it means to be human, who want to explore their spiritual and moral compass. We are here so that everyone who dares may get to dreaming and dare to make those dreams come true.
When those following Jesus asked him where he was staying he said to them, “come and see.” In those hours they were with him I suspect that they did a bit of dreaming. Gathering together, eating and telling their stories, I imagine they discovered their dreams about a world that they longed for. For them, for us, dreaming again and daring to make those dreams come true is what we are to be about. Maybe we’ll fall off the edge, but then there’s always the possibility that we’ll finally find that longed for New World.
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