Those who dream (Sermon)
When the Lord restoredthe fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth wasfilled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then it was said amongthe nations,
“The Lord has donegreat things for them.” The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.
Restore our fortunes,O Lord, like the watercourses in the Negeb.
May those who sow intears reap with shouts of joy.
Those who go outweeping, bearing the seed for sowing,
shall come home withshouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.
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The people who wrote this psalmwere a people in pain. The Israelites had endured captivity in Babylon fordecades after being forcibly removed from Israel, the land that God hadpromised them, the promise that was supposed to endure forever. The Davidicline, the line of kings had run out, the kingdoms had divided, and noweverything, every wish, every dream, every conception of their identity wastaken away.
The people of God had reachedthe end of their rope. There were no more options left. Where was God, in thismess? Was there going to be death and judgement forever? Was there any way tocome back after disobeying God so completely that the result was exile inBabylon?
This sentiment is captured inanother Psalm, Ps. 137: “By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and therewe wept, when we remembered Zion.” They told us “‘sing us one of the songs ofZion’… how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”
These are people with no hope,no idea of a future, no sense that things could ever be right again.
Then, as these things happen,a new political regime took over. The Babylonians were defeated by the Persians,and suddenly things changed. In a moment of political goodwill, the people ofIsrael were now allowed to go home, to return to Zion.
And we don’t know exactlywhen today’s psalm was written, but we know that it was probably during theexile or the time of return, when suddenly the people of Israel could begin tothink about the possibility that the Lord might restore their fortunes like thewaters of the Negev, that maybe one day, they could be like those who dream.
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we werelike those who dream.
I love this psalm. And what Ilove about it is the vivid way that it captures this tension between what wehope things will be like, and what they’re actually like. It’s a prayer thatsays God, this is what we dream about, this is the future we see in our mindseye—please, make it happen.
But more than a simple hope,what matters about this psalm is how it engages with our ability to imaginesomething else. What matters here is that the people writing and singing thissong are able to say to God—this, this is what we imagine our future to be. Weimagine our mouths filled with laughter. We imagine being able to shout in joy.We imagine what it will be like when we have once again found your favor, andall the other nations can see it.
I don’t want to suggest thatthis is a situation where the key is to imagine it, then God will make ithappen. God isn’t a genie-in-the-bottle. And as the people of Israel found outwhen they returned home, even the good things that happen to us aren’t alwayshow we’d imagined they would be.
AND YET dreaming matters. Theimagination matters.
What we see going on in thePsalm is a people who are finally able to dream of going home. A people who areable to imagine a future, and ask God for it.
Restore our fortunes O Lord, like the waters of theNegev.
In a lecture this week on Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Judy Fentress-Williams said to a crowd of seminarians and visitors at VTS that “the only grace you can have is the grace that you can imagine”.
The only grace you can haveis the grace that you can imagine.
Perhaps this imagining ofgrace is clearest in today’s gospel lesson, where Mary pulls out all the stopsto welcome Jesus. She anoints his feet with perfume, and wipes them with her hair.Not only, as Judas points out, is this wasting money, but it’s also anincredibly intimate gesture. To wipe someone’s feet with your hair, as a woman,means that your hair has to be showing, in a culture where that is a taboo,where women must cover their heads. If you do that kind of thing to the wrongperson, you’ll never hear the end of it and your reputation will go down thedrain. To do this, Mary had to have imagined a world where she imagined Jesussaying yes. Saying, thank you, saying “leave her alone” saying “let her do this”.Without the imagination, without the hope that this gesture would be takenwell, Mary would not have been able to do this.
The only grace you can haveis the grace that you can imagine.
In a world where we want somuch better for our children, for our friends and family, for our country, forour planet… or wherever you know that someday, things might be different… weneed to be able to imagine what that could even be like.
We were like those who dream
Imagination is not passivity.When we imagine, we imagine a world that is better so that we can begin to reallypray, to really see other people as Christ saw them. To see our imaginationcontinuing what God began in creation, and what Christ saved on the cross.
So what would it be like if wetook a leap and began to imagine more?
We imagine a world that isbetter, and get to work. Perhaps we imagine a world where there is nohomelessness, and we must then confront the fact that we pass the homelessevery day on our way to work. Perhaps we imagine a world where there is nohunger, and the answer to that prayer is that extra time to volunteer in a foodpantry or to help a hungry neighbor.
Where are you dreaming?
What are you imagining thatcould change the world to bring about God’s kingdom?
When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we werelike those who dream.
We are those who dream.
(Sermon recording, with some substantial variation from this text, will soon be found at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, under Lent V, 2018, or may be found below.)