Dreaming Big

In your dreams. That’s what today’s readings feel like to me. In Acts, the apostles are in Jerusalem—all together in one place, awaiting the Spirit. Physically close to each other. Probably singing and praying, breathing in each other’s energy. We’re kind of together in one place, but it’s a place of grief, uncertainty, confusion. As one writer puts it, “we’re together facing a common threat that knows no borders.”

And in John, the risen Christ breathes the Spirit on the disciples. Can you imagine that today: breathing on someone? And finally, in Numbers, the Lord comes down in a cloud and takes some of the Spirit that is on Moses and puts it on the seventy elders. Yikes—would that kind of spiritual transmission even be safe today?

In your dreams. So much of life seems that way today. Hard to imagine. Far off. Unpredictable. But for many, their situation is more concrete: dreams deferred. Young athletes preparing for the Olympics. Seniors anticipating prom, graduation, college. Couples excited about their upcoming summer wedding. Plans for overseas travel. Dancers, actors, musicians preparing for audiences. A single mother who was just getting on her feet on then loses a job. Dream deferred. Dream on.

Consider words by Langston Hughes:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun? . . .
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

For the families of the roughly 100,000 dead—many unable to be physically present at the end—these are days of broken dreams, broken hearts.

And for the families of George Floyd from Minneapolis and New Yorker Eric Garner before him, another “I can’t breathe” moment. White brutality toward African Americans. We’ve come so far yet keep getting news like this. Are our hopes and dreams, our passionate work for racial justice and reconciliation all for naught?

Some just want to get back to normal, hitching our future to our past. Yet, as novelist Arundhati Roy writes, “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Video: The Great Realization

Dear church, Pentecost is a time for dreams and visions. For imagination. For creativity.

And to get us dreaming, consider the first Pentecost. There could not be a more inclusive community. Folks from every nation under the sun. Jesus’ death behind them, they gather to inaugurate a new age. The Holy Spirit shows up in wind and fire. But more than that is this miracle: they can all understand each other in their own language. In a society that seems so divided even amid our collective grief and anxiety, oh that the Spirit could stir up in us a sense of unity and reconciliation!

But there’s more! Peter gives the sermon and he does an amazing reworking of a text from Joel. Joel tells of us terrible tragedy. A plague. A forecast of death and destruction. A call for the people to repent and lament. Yet Peter interprets it in light of new life in Christ, the wonder of a new age, God’s dream of a redeemed humanity.

Could this be the Pentecost that the Spirit is pouring out on us and all flesh? Our sons and daughters prophesying? Our young seeing visions? Our old dreaming dreams? Imagining a new world? Could it be? God’s dream for shalom, for peace, for unity, for reconciliation?

Oh, people of God, it will take you and me. It will take poets and artists, scientists and politicians, the medical and technological communities, scholars and theologians.

It will take people of other faiths. Communities of color. Differing ways of seeing the world. Differing gifts and abilities. It will take getting out the boxes and getting out of ruts. It will take dreaming big.

It will take openness. Not to mention a dose of humility. In the headline of one recent article, “No one knows what’s going to happen: why we should stop asking pundits to predict the future after the coronavirus.”

It is stressful to not know the future. I get it. Yet this is our great opportunity. To get our egos out of the way and let the Spirit blow among us. Let the fire of the Spirit burn away the wreckage of what was as we await what will be.

Will join me in this dream? Will you join the community of Holy Trinity to envision a new church, a new country, a new world? Use your imagination. Even as another black man cries out, “I can’t breathe,” even as we hold our breath in fear and anger, Jesus breathes the Holy Spirit on us today.

Even in quarantine, we are gathered together, in one digital space, in the Spirit of Christ. And as in the Moses story, that Spirit is being put on you. So that you may witness to the mighty power of God. Not only in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. But in Lakeview, Hyde Park, Evanston. Connecticut, Florida, Missouri!

I sense it deep in my bones. The Spirit is among us. The Spirit is already creating something new in our world. It is a time for dreams and visions. And a new Pentecost!