Sunday, June 21, 2015

Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church
Job 38:1-11

I have a dream.

I have a dream today.

I don’t know if I could ever have uttered those words from a pulpit until today.  Until today, I would have thought those words coming from a white, privileged preacher in a mostly white, privileged church to be at least disrespectful, if not outright arrogant, words certainly that didn’t belong to the likes of me.  But then I caught a glimpse of this thing and I now have to tell you that I have a dream.  Here it is……

I have this imagining that somewhere, out in the future, a distant future maybe, an old man, a white man, walks into an auditorium filled with people of all colors and all ages and people come to their feet to welcome him to the stage.  He very humbly acknowledges their applause with a gentle bow of his head and brushes his hand across his eye as this now-familiar connection between audience and speaker opens up his insides yet again.  Over the course of the next hour, the audience listens spell bound to his story, a story that has somehow, miraculously captured the hearts of so many across the country, a story that has fallen on parched souls like rain from an at last friendly sky.  It is a story parents have brought their children to hear.  

He speaks in a gentle tone of what it is like to be transformed by forgiveness.  His message is that simple, but it takes the whole hour to tell the story. He speaks of redemption and being unmade and then reassembled inside by nothing short of love.  He speaks of an intractable hatred that seemed to be his whole life and he speaks of that hatred eroding over time under the unrelenting pressure of what he came to recognize as love.  It came at first in the stinging voice of forgiveness speaking from the center of unimaginable pain, pain he had inflicted.  His story goes on to tell of those who not only spoke their forgiveness, but of those who wrote to him and a few who eventually visited him over a lifetime in prison.  In this dream, the speaker tells his hushed audience the story of how the people of Emanuel AME church took him on as a project, about how they came to understand very early in their grief that the best way to pull themselves out of the hell of anger and bitterness was to take up the work of leading—of inviting—him out of his hell.  That’s how it started, and fifty years after that terrible day the letters were still coming, these days, mostly written by those who were not even born when he did what he did.  

His story fills halls with people captured by the hope of a world transformed.  Yes, at times someone in the audience still stands up and hurls old pain in bitter words, and when that happens he simply puts his head down and gets quiet and apologizes yet again for the pain he has caused the speaker.  In those moments the rest of the audience recognizes that he responds not out of what he has learned about handling hecklers, but out of who he has become as a person.  His salvation has been deep and thorough, his is a story only he can tell, it is a story that fills a deep hunger in those who flock to hear it.  

I have a dream.  

And I know that dreamers are easily dismissed.  

But here’s the thing.  We would be lost without our dreamers.

And here’s another thing.  Following Jesus means casting your lot with dreamers and taking up the dream. Even when the dream seems too impossible for the kind of right thinking, pragmatic realists we think we are supposed to be.  Dreaming is for dreamers we say.  We live in the real world.  Dreamers live in their heads, in pleasant visions of heaven where a little love and a few angels make everything ok.  Let the dreamers dream, and while they dream, the rest of us will have to get the real work done.  That kind of thinking is familiar, but it is not what we have been seeing in the news this past week.  What we have been watching, what has become apparent in the middle of the tragedy in South Carolina, is the promising fruit of dreams taken up long ago, dreams preserved and advanced through what is sometimes, like in the declarations of forgiveness we heard from the victims families, gut wrenchingly hard work. I marvel at the voices that were able to speak forgiveness in that courtroom.  I am humbled and convicted by their faith and their ability to hold tight in such times to the dream of God.  And yes, I can imagine that kind of faith and commitment, and love, working its way over time even into the tangled heart of someone as twisted as Dylann Roof.  We’ve been given signs of transformative dreaming all week.  

Forty seven years ago when Martin Luther King was killed, Memphis, my home town was split apart.   Last week when nine people were killed in Charleston, the city came together in ways that have inspired the world.  One of the bright lights in this past week has been the story of Joseph Riley, the white mayor of Charleston.  The story of his commitment to the dream of racial harmony and equality in Charleston over the last four decades, often in the face of ridicule and resistance from some white citizens, is a story of triumph.  Part of the reason the killings were so painful for all of us is that they remind us of a time we thought we had outgrown, moved beyond, and they make us wonder if the progress we thought we had made is real.  Well I’m here to tell you the progress is real. It is progress.  


The work isn’t finished, not by a long shot, but we have come a long way, thanks to the hard work of dreamers, dreamers who have slogged through the hard times protecting and nurturing a vision of what might yet be.  They have been laughed at, hated, even killed, but we see this week that their work has changed the world, not by ending evil, I don’t know when that will happen, but by changing our response to evil.  What stands out this week in words of forgiveness, in a mayor’s tears, in the black and white arms entwined in prayer and support of each other is the living promise that under the storms of this life, beneath the trials that threaten us, the dream of God, a dream of living, transforming, creating love runs strong.  Our call….our work..like the work of all these good people we have heard of this week, is to share in that dream, to embrace it, to hold it and live it in the world in such a way that others come to believe in its power.  The hard work to be done in our time is the work of dreamers.  We all have a voice in what is going on here.  Every one of us can say,  must be able to say, 
I have a dream.    

JB