Skip to main content

I have a dream

Matthew 2.1-12
Does anyone remember any of the dreams that they’ve had - dreams that you can share with other people, I mean? Long before I was married, before we were even going out, when I was 14 in fact, I had a very vivid dream about my wife, Helen. Usually we forget dreams, don’t we, but I remembered this one! I’m not going to tell you about it, except to say that the dream started with us sitting on the school bus together and I was very disappointed to wake up just as it was about to get interesting.

I can tell you that when I was six I had a dream about a wolf. It was chasing me across some fields near my grandparents’ farm and eventually it chased me up one of the drain pipes outside their farmhouse. I’m not usually very good at shinning up drain pipes, but I got up this one very quickly. And this time I didn’t mind waking up.

The civil rights leader Martin Luther King famously said, in a speech in Washington to hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, ‘I have a dream.’ He was quoting from the Bible. The Bible is full of dreams, and these are dreams which the people who had them remembered.

Have you ever had a dream which seemed to have a real meaning, a dream where you suddenly woke up knowing something you didn’t know before? I’ve had dreams where I thought I was going to do that, but then I realised the dream didn’t make that much sense after all. But in the Bible dreams do make sense, and Joseph had way more dreams than anyone else.

In the song, the storyteller has just woken up. He draws back the curtain and immediately knows that he’s definitely awake. He wishes he could still see Joseph’s famous amazing coat, bright colours shining, wonderful and new. But the dawn is breaking and the colours are fading. He wants to return to the beginning of the dream, like me when I dreamt I was on the school bus, but he can’t. ‘The world and I, we are still waiting,’ he sings, ‘Any dream will do!’

But any dream won’t do! We’re called to share God’s dream - a dream of a world filled with peace and love. But the dream won’t come true just because we want it to. Like the people in the Bible, we have to commit ourselves to helping God realise the dream.

The wise people are good examples. God had a plan that someone would come to live among us and show us exactly what he’s like, and how much he loves us. That someone was Jesus and God made the plan come true, as he’s got a habit of doing, but it could still have gone wrong without the help of the wise men who shared God’s dream and remembered it. They went home another way and thwarted the king who tried to stop the plan from working. It’s as easy as that to do the right thing. We just have to dare to dream.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I don't believe in an interventionist God

Matthew 28.1-10, 1 Corinthians 15.1-11 I like Nick Cave’s song because of its audacious first line: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that’s what the song says. Actually Cave has always been very interested in religion. Sometimes he calls himself a Christian, sometimes he doesn’t, depending on how the mood takes him. He once said, ‘I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it.’ But his lyrics often include religious themes and he has also said that any true love song is a song for God. So maybe it’s no coincidence that he began this song in such an unlikely way, although he says the inspiration came to him during the sermon. The vicar was droning on about something when the first line of the song just popped into his ...
14 comments
Read more

Giotto’s Nativity and Adoration of the Shepherds

John 1.10-18 In the week before Christmas the BBC broadcast a modern version of The Nativity which attempted to retell the story with as much psychological realism as possible. So, for instance, viewers saw how Mary, and Joseph especially, struggled with their feelings. But telling the story of Jesus with psychological realism is not a new idea. It has a long tradition going back seven hundred years to the time of the Italian artist Giotto di Bondone. This nativity scene was painted in a church in Padua in about 1305. Much imitated it is one of the first attempts at psychological realism in Christian art. And what a wonderful first attempt it is - a work of genius, in fact! Whereas previously Mary and the Baby Jesus had been depicted facing outwards, or looking at their visitors, with beatific expressions fixed on their faces, Giotto dares to show them staring intently into one another’s eyes, bonding like any mother and newborn baby. Joseph, in contrast, is not looking on with quiet a...
1 comment
Read more

Luther and Loyola

James 1:17-27 Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23 Within Christianity there has always been a tension between two poles. At one end of the spectrum stands Martin Luther, who said that Christian faith is about trusting in God to put us right - or make us righteous - through the saving death of Jesus. Luther came to this conclusion when he was a professor of New Testament studies in a little town in Germany called Wittenberg. One year he decided to teach his students about Paul’s letter to the Romans and that’s when it suddenly dawned upon him that Christian faith is all about trust. At the other end of the spectrum , stands someone like Ignatius Loyola the founder of the Society of Jesus. He spent a lot of his later life in crisis, first struggling to overcome severe wounds that he had suffered when he was a soldier and then during two short periods locked up in a cell by the Spanish Inquisition. He came to believe that the Christian life is a similar sort of struggle, a lifelon...
Post a Comment
Read more