the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 11:6-9
They will not hurt or destroy... What a wonderful vision. What a wonderful dream. But is that all it is, a vision, a dream?
A world without violence certainly seems like a dream. Most of us don't dare imagine such a thing. We'd be happy with less violence, with only occasional hurting or destroying on a small scale. Not hurting or destroying at all, even in just one city? That seems impossible.
I wonder if only prophets can see such things. I don't restrict prophets to the Bible. I'm certain Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet. He dreamed things that many could never imagine happening. It hasn't happened all the way to what he dreamed, but even non prophets like most of us can see it partially now. I suppose that's a bit like the first Christians beginning to glimpse what Isaiah had dreamed. In Jesus they saw enough to join with Isaiah saying, "Yeah, I see it now, too."
Jesus was certainly a dreamer and a prophet. He read a passage from Isaiah, "(The Lord) has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." And when he'd finished reading he said, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
All the oppressed weren't freed, and the year of God's jubilee didn't really take hold in full, but Jesus could apparently see it, the way that only prophets can. And those who drew near him began to glimpse it, too.
But somewhere along the line, Christianity lost sight of its dreams. Maybe it was when it became "Christianity," and institutional religion rather than simply followers of the dreamer, Jesus. Regardless, we traded in Jesus' dream of a new day, what he called the kingdom of God, for a ticket to heaven if we believed the right things. We relocated Jesus' dream to another place even though Jesus clearly was able to dream it and see it right here on earth.
The Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians that no one can say Jesus is Lord without the Holy Spirit. (I assume he talking about actually meaning it and not just saying the words.) And he insists that all members of the body of Christ are given gifts of the Spirit, including some who are given the gift of prophecy. I think we would do well to discover who they are in our churches, and see if they can't help us begin dreaming again.
Even within church congregations, we often seem unable to imagine anything but the possible, the things we can manage on our own, the things that seem reasonably doable. No visions and dreams, just doable action plans, the same sort of things devised in company offices and corporate boardrooms.
We say "It's only a dream" to dismiss something, to write off an idea as impossible. But prophets, including the prophet Jesus, dream dreams. And they call us to catch their dreams, their visions.
God, we need some dreams. Help us to dream again.
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