THE POWER OF A DREAM

June 17, 1990
8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services -
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Romans 5:6-11
Matthew 9:35-10:8

“Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. You
received without pay, give without pay.” ~Matthew 10:8 (RSV)

Listen to some random reflections from American young people.
A twenty year-old from Knoxville, Tennessee:

“I worry when I don't have something to worry
about. I create problems for myself. For a few more
years, I would like toe just not care about anything."

Another twenty year-old from Oregon:

“When I think of the hand that nature has dealt
us, I can't help but see a whole crop of nightmares.
It is not necessary to revolt. We're not trying to
change things. We're trying to fix things. We are the
generation that is going to renovate America. We are
going to be its carpenters and janitors."

And from Ann Arbor:

“Our right to be cynical is very comfortable and
very safe. We're not going to invent anything, we're
not going to expand horizons, we're just going to fill
the existing spaces the ‘Baby Boomers' created.’

Those vignettes, and many others, were assembled by Time Magazine
correspondent, William McWhirter, who has written a fine feature article on
the “Twenty-Something Generation," the generation following the much
observed, analyzed and celebrated Baby-Boomers. The article will appear in
Time in the near future. The author is a member of Fourth Presbyterian
Church and a friend, and he occasionally sends me things to read that he
thinks I'll be interested in. He has given me permission to use his
material - pre-publication. What he had no way of knowing, of course, is
that I would read his article during the same week I was thinking about
that portion of the Gospel according to Matthew that I just read and also

on a day this church designates as Baccalaureate Sunday... A day to
congratulate and wish well to our graduates and to reflect a bit on what it
means to be graduating not only from various schools - but into the world
of the 1990s. As I began to think about it, I was amazed, again, at the
lively dialogue which always occurs between the word of God and the word of
the world, between the pages of the Bible and the pages of the newspaper,
or in this case, the pages of Time.

For instance, Matthew tells us this about the people around Jesus:

"He had compassion for them, because they were
harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd."

Time Magazine says, about "Twenty-Somethings”:

“Burned out or bummed out? Is this the sound of
(péople) with places to go and futures to conquer...
It may be the first generation of Americans in memory
more interested in treading backwards."

And then, in a particularly thoughtful paragraph about them - “The
Twenty—Something Generation," but really about al! of us, I thought -

“They are [we are] a generation that adamantly
refuses to think big. They, of course, have their
choice of seemingly uncontrollable issues like AIDS or
the urban homeless or violent crime, to be overwhelmed
by, but mainly they seem less stricken by awe and their
own sense of powerlessness than a smug conviction that
such activities {designed to address and resolve these
overwhelming problems] are mainly pointiess. The
favorite catchword of the era is "casual" — casual in
dress, action, speech, feeling: never let anything
show, never let anyone know.'

",.harassed and helpless, like Sheep without a shepherd."

The text is pivotal in the story of Jesus. There are several
important things going on. He has been teaching and preaching in the
village synagogues throughout Galilee. He has been telling people that
God's Kingdom is in their midst. He has been reminding them that they are
not only Jewish Palestinians, subjects of Rome, they are also citizens of
another Kingdom - the one based on justice and peace and compassion. So
they live in an environment of hope, because this Kingdom of God keeps
showing up in the middle of the Kingdoms of this world, the Kingdoms of
Roman Imperial Power and national and local political reality.

It is a message they need to hear. It is good news, truly. For
these are people who have plenty of reason to live in resignation, to give
up on hope for a better world, a better life. These are people who have
seen the awesome military power of Rome make a mockery of their dearest
dreams. The have seen and experienced what real power is as the legions
marched through their towns and villages. They have watched as their own
religious leaders, custodians of the drean, slowly but surely exchanged

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hope for expediency, collaborating with Roman officials in order to
survive. These are people who have watched their heroic prophetic faith,
which proclaimed, sang and danced and rejoiced about the coming day when
justice would roll down like waters and righteousness like ever-flowing
streams, a day when lion and lamb will lie down together, a blessed day of
peace when the fondest dreams of old men and old women would become
reality, and the idealism of young men and young women would be celebrated
for its bravery and truth; they had seen that faith of their fathers and
mothers slowly disintegrate, reduced to six hundred some petty rules
governing who can eat what with whom when. These are people who have
folded their tents, lowered their expectations, made compromises in order
to survive, become realistic about their possibilities, protected
themselves and their children from disappointment by not hoping for much
more than the status quo... “like sheep without a shepherd,“ he said...
meandering, without destination, purpose, or meaning.

And so“when he told them about God's Kingdom, it was a powerful word
of hope. Revolutionary... because people who live in hope are not always
patient with the status guo. People who take their dreams seriously are
inclined to want things to change in the world. They become a nuisance,
and then a threat to the status quo. St. Paul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nelson Mandela... dreamers of a
better day... men of persistent hopes... dangerous men.

That's the first important thing in this pivotal text: the lostness
and confusion, the cynicism and hopelessness of Jesus' generation. Time
Suggests worry about what's going to happen and a degree of cynicism . about
the future is what it means to be “Twenty Something" in 1990. I am
suggesting that there are dimensions of that metaphor which describe all of
us, regardless of our age.

You can, as Time suggests, choose the issue to be overwhelmed by.
You don't even have to leave this neighborhood. Public education, health
care and housing for the poor, homelessness, drugs... not simple matters,
but major human problems with history and complexity, getting more serious
exponentially. Poor education and poor health care in one generation
multiply by quantum leaps... in the next. There is an AIDS epidemic raging
out there and an unprecedented wave of urban crime — six murders on one
night last week at a time when Congress has again refused to control the
ownership of semi-automatic weapons.

On it goes and there is a sense in which the only viable way to cope
with these and other overwhelming dilemmas of modern urban life is to
forget about them, fold up tents, lower our expectations, retreat, hope for
little. The temptation is very simply to insulate yourself, to stop
thinking about it, to look the other direction... under the guise of
realism... to become fatalistic.

It's a reality for all of us, not just the "“Twenty-Somethings."
One component of the uncertainty of the "Twenty Somethings," Time
said, is the virtual disappearance of the old dynamic of company loyaity and

job security as one of the reasons for contemporary anxiety and
uncertainty. "Twenty Somethings" have to develop a new philosophy of

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vocation and in the process are delaying making a commitment, getting jobs,
and are staying at home in freater numbers than at any time since the
depression. “Loyalty, protection and security of a life-time career within
a large corporation - is a thing of the past. Today it's a world of
entrepreneurial, self-employed job-hoppers. Career is a fast-changing
series of lucrative assignments and contracts." That's new. It's new but
it's devastating when it happens at the age of forty-five or fifty, at the
very time when a person used to be able to assume a degree of success,
security and comfort. Part of the new economic and competitive reality is
that it is precisely then that many are seen to be liabilities, and find
themselves suddenly, unexpectedly out of work, which often means out of
security and almost always means out of meaning and purpose. Jeanie Duck,
' a distinguished management consultant, speaking at the Counseling Center
Benefit last week, said that when it happens it is often accompanied by an
understandable spiritual crisis of self-worth, self-esteem, self-value.

Maybe ‘it's better not to expect much or hope for much for our city,
nation, civilization - or for ourselves personally. Maybe the smartest
thing we can do is follow the lead of the “Twenty-Somethings" and adamantly
refuse to think big.

Which brings me to the second important thing going on in this
pivotal text in Matthew. Having surveyed the residual cynicism,
hopelessness and lostness of the people of Galilee, Jesus gathers his
closest friends, the twelve who have been traveling with him, listening
carefully and watching closely; gathers them and then does something brave
and unlikely and maybe naive and foolish: sends them out to do what he's
been doing ~ to change the world — to challenge the hopelessness ~ to raise
sights and expand horizens. Given the grimness of the political and social
realities of first century Palestine, a sensible course of action would be
to take them on a mountain retreat, to a workshop on spirituality, to learn
how to pray and to cope internally with all the pressures of the world, to
learn how to construct a personal, private enclave of the soul, a religion
which will provide support and enrichment and self-actualization and
fulfillment.

Instead, he sends them out into that world with a specific, very
ambitious assignment:

“Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons."

How's that for thinking big? When we think about personal career
paths, we learn to set goals and key objectives. We learn te be modest,
realistic, to make objectives always reachable and measurable so that we
are not disappointed when we fail to reach them. Don't you imagine that
the disciples had a lot of misgivings about so ambitious an adventure? Can
you imagine setting out to “heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out
demons"?

One of the tragic dynamics which accompanies lostness, uncertainty
and fear is a general demeaning and spurning of idealism. Time concludes
that the “Twenty-Somethings" look at the great optimism of the 60s, note
how many of the dreams are unfulfilled - and conclude that it's better not
to have the dreams. That's not confined to them. That's a description of

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our culture, our heart and soul... We didn't establish world peace,
eliminate poverty and hunger, or build a racially inclusive society - so,
therefore, the dreams themselves must be wrong. Prudent, sensible people
will be realistic about humankind's propensity to war, injustice and racial
prejudice.

In his book of essays, Harvard Diary, psychiatrist Robert Coles
remembers how he and others are often retained by government and also non-
profit organizations to analyze the motives of young volunteers who sign-up
for the peace corps or who take a year off to work in a ghetto... who seem
to think they are actually going to change the world; to observe and
analyze them as if idealism is dangerous - maybe even a kind of unreality,
a mental illness, an aberration. He writes:

"I appeal for a skepticism that ought to be directed at some of our
kind. I shudder as I think of someone like me sitting and watching and
questioning a young Dorothy Day or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr.,
{Harvard Diary, “Idealism,” p. 107]... and he could have said that about
the young Galilean who sent his eager, idealistic young friends out to heal
the sick and raise the dead.

So let there be more idealism, not less, idealism grounded not in
utopian political ideology, but on spiritual foundations; specifically on
the foundation of the Gospel of the one who never compromised with the
status quo, who lived and died believing that love and hope are better by
far than resignation and despair.

In a time of general resignation and retreat from the enormous and
threatening problems of modern urban life, the church of Jesus Christ ought
to be the one place where dreams are celebrated, where hope is alive and
well, where people talk about healing the sick and raising the dead and
cleansing the lepers and casting out ali the contemporary equivaients of
first-century demons.

Church is the one Place where the dream of racial inclusiveness must
never die..

-the one place where people are loved and accepted and affirmed in
their diversity; racial and economic and sexual..

-the one place whose specific responsibility it is to celebrate peace
and justice and idealism and hope. In Eastern Europe, the church, it turns
out, is the one institution which remained with its integrity intact...
because it was the custedian of the hope. The church has been doing it for
2,000 years...

Part of the reason we are not willing to risk great ventures is the
possibility of failure. Neil Simon, in a commencement address warned the.
seniors at Williams College against “caution and timidity because of an
acute fear of failure." Fear of failure, he said - on the basis of his own
experience writing plays and then living in terror, anticipating the
reviews the next morning - that fear is far worse than failure itself.

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It's true, not only for artists, but for all of us. Fear of failure
can prevent us from thinking big... about the possibilities of our nation,
but also about ourselves: it can prevent us from reaching high
professionally and personally... can become the dead weight of boredom in
our personal relationships; and it's true spiritually, I believe. It's
what prevents us from fully embracing this religion of ours. It's what
keeps us from bold prayers and great hopes and high expectations.

What about the reality of failure? What about the inevitable
disappointment when your dreams are bold? Hans Kung is often asked, he
says, what keeps him going, how he persists in his role as loyal but
censured silenced opposition in his own church. Kung, a very
distinguished theologian, regularly challenges the hierarchy on questions
of clergy celibacy, birth control, abortion. In his book, Why I'm Still a
Christian, he writes that it helps to be healthy physically and mentally,
have good friends and a good sense of humor and to know, finally, that your
hope is based on Jesus, not your own strength, vigor, certainly not on the
strength and vigor of church or nation or political ideology, but on Jesus
and that Kingdom he promised.

How to Keep hope alive in a time of resignation and cynicism?
Remember Jesus, he says, who showed how strength and power are expressed in
weakness... remember “the power of the Gospel which proves in the long run
to be stronger than all human incompetence, fear and insecurity, and more
forceful than all our foolishness and cynicism." [p. 82]

Jesus called his disciples. to dream boldly, to hope for much, to live
as if God's Kingdom was in their midst. That is the bold summons of
Christian faith to "Twenty Somethings," to new graduates, new students, to
each of us, young, midlife or older - regardless of where we are in our
journey.

Hope for much - never be afraid to dream... The promise is not that
we will know the answer to every question, the solutions to every problen,
the resolution for every political, social, economic dilemma. The promise
is not even that the way will be always clear or that we will never fail...

The promise of faith is that there is a strong shepherd to follow,
that the journey will be arduous, demanding, challenging, but never
boring... The promise is that there is one whose dreams continue to have
power to change the world: power - in the process - to save our souls.

OK RF K

Eternal God, our hope is in you. Sustain us, young and old, as we
live in hope. Give us courage to dream dreams, to follow where our Lord
leads us, to live in confidence and expectation; in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

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