Luke 1:67-79 (Isaiah 2:1-4)
Wishes, Hopes, and Dreams
James Sledge November
30, 2014 – Advent 1
When
I was a boy, way back in the 1960s, one of the things my brother and I most looked
forward to was the arrival of the Sears Christmas catalog. I’m not talking
about the regular catalog, a massive thing several inches thick. This was a
specialty catalog, though still quite large, geared toward children and
Christmas.
Now
I realize some of you have never laid eyes on a Sears catalog of any sort, but
bear with me for a moment. Way back when, before the internet, the Sears
catalog was the place you could find most anything you wanted, the Amazon.com
of its day. And the Christmas catalog was filled with toys and games and bikes
and most anything a child might want for Christmas. My brother and I would
spend hours going through it, marveling at all the wondrous things in it. Some
of this was research, looking for potential presents from Santa, or gift
suggestions for relatives. But a great deal of it was mere, wishful thinking, a
child’s version of “What I would buy if I won the lottery.”
I
assume most of you have engaged in such wishful thinking. Who hasn’t
occasionally imagined winning the lottery or wished for an impossible haul of
Christmas presents.
Speaking
of wishing, in Brian McLaren’s We Make
the Road by Walking, the chapter for the first week of Advent makes a
distinction between wishes, on the one hand, and hopes and dreams, on the
other. He writes, “Desires, hopes, and dreams inspire action, and that’s what
makes them so different from a wish. Wishing is a substitute for action.”[1]
One needn’t agree with McLaren’s exact semantics to get his point. There are different
sorts of longing. When someone dreams of running the Marine Corps Marathon she
may well start a training routine that will hopefully allow her to finish the
race. It is a dream that motivates, very different from, “Oh, I wish I could
win the lottery.”
When
Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed, “I have a dream…” what he was doing had
little in common with my looking at spectacular presents I would never get and
saying, “Wouldn’t that be grand.” He was speaking of something he dedicated his
life to, that he worked diligently to achieve, a real possibility. It was a
prophet’s dream.
Prophets, Dr. King, the biblical sort, are
connected to God’s dream, the future that God is working to bring. Prophets seek
to align people with that dream. When biblical prophets predicted gloom and
doom, it was never a precise “This will happen on such and such a date.” It was
a call to change, to turn from ways that will lead to destruction. And in the same
way, when prophets spoke of a day when nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, it was never a magic formula or timetable. It was an intimacy with
the hopes and dreams of God, an assurance that God would bring history into line
with those hopes and dreams. The biblical prophets knew, as the prophet Martin
Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice.”
Today
we enter the season of Advent, a season that draws heavily on prophets from
both Old and New Testaments. It is a season that calls us to align our hearts
and our lives with God’s dream of weapons transformed into farming tools, of
the poor lifted up, of endless peace, of hope for the hopeless. But can we
really dream such a dream and dedicate ourselves to it?
The
events of recent days seem more nightmare than dream. The stark divisions over
the Michal Brown’s shooting and the grand jury decision in Ferguson, along with
the violence that has followed, could convince some that Dr. King’s prophetic
vision was more wishful thinking than a dream.
This
past Tuesday, as the media streamed images of flames in Ferguson, a friend and
colleague posted a quote from Dr. King on Facebook. His words addressed events
long ago, but they seem eerily appropriate for today.
It is not enough
for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally
irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the
contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions
are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other
alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must
say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America
has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has
worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the
promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear
that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and
the status quo than about justice and humanity.
The prophet, that dreamer Martin Luther
King, was no Pollyanna who merely wished for a new day like another might wish
to win the lottery. Like the biblical prophets, he was firmly grounded in the
reality of a world profoundly resistant to God and God’s ways. He had no
illusions that the world would quietly accept God’s new day. He followed Jesus,
after all. But out of his deep faith, he could see what many could not, and so
he could do much more than wish. He could dream and give himself, even risk
himself, for that dream.
____________________________________________________________________________
I
hope you noticed the stones forming a path on the floor this morning. Thanks to
the Arts and Soul Ministry, many of you made stones for the path that helps us
begin our Advent journey. I really like this idea of a path that leads
somewhere. American Christianity has had an unfortunate tendency to become a
static thing, a set of beliefs one accepts or doesn’t. But faith, at least the
sort Jesus and the prophets invite us to, is a journey toward God’s dream, a
day when tanks become farming tools, when they shall beat their swords into
plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; when Dr. King’s dream
becomes reality.
Advent
is about preparing for that journey. It is so much more than a run-up to
Christmas. It is a call to lay claim to the prophetic vision, to God’s dream.
We celebrate Christmas because it is such a dramatic statement of God’s
faithfulness to that dream. We celebrate because God enters into the world as the
one who invites us to become partners in the dream. And so I hope you will join
me this Advent in doing more than wishing it were a better world. Join me in
claiming the dream and answering the call to do our part, as a congregation and
as individuals, to journey toward that dream. Each of us has a stone, or two or
three, to add to the path, to help build the road to that dream, to the day
that is coming, a day that is glimpsed by faith, and that is revealed to the
world by the faithful.
[1] McLaren, Brian D., We
Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation,
Reorientation, and Activation (New York: Jericho Books, 2014), p. 63.
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