Dream On

Text: Psalm 126 March 25, 2007

Dream on. In your dreams. You live in a dream world.

It is a cynical and scary time right now, and in times like this, dreams and dreamers are mocked. Yet we have to dream.

The season of Lent is like a long freight train taking a slow curve on the plains of the Midwest. We carry a lot of baggage as we go into Lent. We start from one place—we have a history, an origin. We have in Lent a destination—we have a future, a new way of being. The theme of Lent is repentance, which you have often heard me say is a turning, a change in direction. Not a sudden change, not a stop-and-take-a-right onto Prospect Street type of thing. But a long and gradual change, so slow that sometimes we don’t even know we are changing. Until we realize that what was once on our left hand is behind us now, and the landscape ahead is different. The promise of Lent is that there is a new way of being that calls us and greets us.

As the Sundays in Lent move toward Holy Week—Palm Sunday is next week, then the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection on Easter—as we move toward those days, the focus of the readings assigned for the day changes. They become less introspective, less critical, less somber. Instead, they talk about joy, and restoration, about salvation, about God’s rescue of those in trouble and sorrow. A God who restores fortunes and frees the captives and returns the exiles back to their land and homes. Stories of dreams.

The psalm today, Psalm 126, sits on the curve of Lent. It looks back and it looks forward. Some think the psalm is confused. The verb tenses seem not to fit with one another. “When you restored [our] fortunes,” the psalm begins. Yet four verses later, it pleads “restore our fortunes, O Lord.” Some translators want to clean this up, making the verbs all agree. Either the psalm is about the past or it is about the future, they say. They say that either the psalm is a psalm of thanksgiving—thanks for restoring us—or it is a psalm of petition—please restore us.

But though the grammar might be confusing, the situation should not be. For most people, the line between thank you and please is a connecting line, not a boundary line. We can be grateful and hopeful at the same time. We usually are. Like with the Lenten freight train, the shift between what has happened to us and what might happen is not a sudden one. Our dreams are grown from the seeds of our experiences.

Yet we live in times when dreams—visions, we might say—are hard to come by. There are always such times. Times when, as it says in the book of Samuel, when dreams were not widespread. Paul, in the book of Acts, noted that with Jesus a new era was starting, when young people and old people would once again dream dreams.

Perhaps you find it hard to dream dreams of your own future. The world seems polluted by greed, violence, stupidity, selfishness. What kind of dreams will those seeds produce? Is it absurd to dream of the future when the future looks dark at worst and dim at best? Are dreams only fantasies, wishful hopes, escapes from a tough spot?

Yet we have to dream to live. Individuals deprived of the chance to dream go crazy. They cannot function, their judgment is bad, they feel dislocated. And so do peoples and nations deprived of the chance to dream go crazy. The wickedness of constant and unceasing oppression of a people—Palestine, slavery, apartheid, anti-Semitism, racism; you can add your own examples—the wickedness is that it stifles dreams in those people. There is nothing to dream when every day is the same or worse than the last, and where the future seems to be the same thing as today, only repeated endlessly. It is a sign of depression when the days ahead seem to be destined to be only today, over and over again.

So it not surprising that the psalm rejoices that the people of Israel can dream again. The psalm was probably written at time when the people of Israel were going home from their exile in Babylon. God has redeemed them from exile, just as God had freed Israel when they were slaves in Egypt. They rejoice because they see that their future will be different than today. Not that it has changed yet, but that it looks like it might, like it will.

Such dreams do not arise from despair. They are not visions of escape or escapism. They arise from hope. A little hope. Dreams—visions of our future—do not cause hope, they are built on hope. They are not the source of hope, but the result. “When the Lord restored our fortunes, then we were like those who dream,” says the psalm. The dreams of Israel come from feeling God’s touch on them once again. It is the hope that God has brought to them that lets them dream.

The psalm does look two ways, back and forward. It is seeing what God has done in their past that gives them the hope to dream of God in their future.

Dreams—the kind of dreams we are talking about—are dreams of Yes rather than dreams of No. Not a dream of the oppressors leaving but dreams of a time of freedom. Not a dream of the destruction of the new Babylon but the building of the new Jerusalem. Not the ending of one difficult part of our lives but the beginning of a time of understanding and contentment. Not release from discouragement and disillusionment but a time of passion and sense of adventure. It is not destruction but construction that brings us joy. Not death but new life.

To dream requires an inkling. That’s a good and strange word. It comes from a word that means whisper. An inkling of hope is the seed of dreams. A glimmer, a glimpse. Not something made up out of our fantasy, but just a speck of reality from which the dreams grow. The amount of hope that feeds dreams is like the tiny glimpse—maybe in passing, maybe in accident—like that glimpse we get of someone that leads us—amazingly—to think, to dream, “I could fall in love with that person.”

The Gospel reading today sits exactly in the middle of the Gospel of John. Beyond today’s verses lies Jesus’ trial, execution, and resurrection. This part of John has been called the Book of Glory, meaning the passion story. Before today’s verses lie Jesus’ early ministry, and especially the miracles. This part of John has been called the Book of Signs. The signs are the inklings of hope that let us dream of new life.

Lent is foremost a way of seeing. The disciplines of Lent are tricks to help us keep our eyes open for God’s presence in the world and in our lives. The meditations of Lent are moments of mindfulness that help us register those glimpses we get of God. And give us hope that we might end up going in a new direction. We pray, in keeping with the psalm, we might give thanks to God, and that we might dream on.