Dreaming Along the Margins
a sermon based on Acts 2:1-21
by Rev. Cindy Weber
“Hope is hearing the melody of the
future.
Faith is to dance to it.”
--Rubem Alves
When our church gave a baby shower for
Terri and Greg and their first child, Will, who now live in North
Carolina, we had these little cards that said, “Wishes for Will,” and
on the cards we wrote down our hopes and dreams for Will, and then
read them aloud. Some of the wishes were serious, some of them were
funny, one of them was especially poignant. One of the children who
used to come here sometimes, Brandon, from the low-income government
housing development across the street, about ten years old, wrote: “I
wish that Will lives to be as old as I am.” I wish that Will lives to
be as old as I am.
You know, when I was Brandon’s age, it never occurred to me that a
baby might not grow up to be as old as I was. But then, when I was
Brandon’s age, I had never heard gunshots, as Brandon so often did.
When I was Brandon’s age, I had never lost neighbors, or uncles, to
violence, as had Brandon. When I was Brandon’s age, it never occurred
to me that a baby might not grow up to be as old as I was.
There was a sense of sadness around the circle that day as Brandon
shared his most heartfelt dream for baby Will, a sobering moment in
which we were all reminded that even as we celebrated the bright and
seemingly limitless future of one child, that there is a whole world
full of other children, children whose dreams have been stifled and
stunted by the harsh realities of their everyday lives.
And there’s a sense of sadness in me on this Pentecost Sunday, the
Birthday of the Church, as we call it, as we see that the Church that
was let loose on Pentecost has somehow through the years become so
very much like Brandon, so very much like Brandon, with his stifled,
stunted dreams.
Now, I’m not saying that the Church doesn’t dream. We do dream. But
too often our dreams and visions are shaped, not by the promises of
God, but by the promises of culture. Too often our dreams and visions
are shaped, not by the deep underlying realities and promises of God,
but by the shallow demands and desires of our everyday lives. Too
often our dreams and visions are shaped, not by the windy freedoms of
the Spirit, but by the false security of what we think we know to be
true. Too often the content of our dreams and visions is more like the
grass that withers and the flower that fades than the Word of God that
endures forever.
While the Spirit calls us to dream with the prophet Isaiah of a
world of simple abundance, one where everybody has enough, a plot of
land and a home to live in, the Church dreams of bigger buildings and
more staff and more stuff.
While the Spirit calls us to dream with the prophet Micah of a
reality where weapons have been melted down into farm implements and
the children don’t even study war anymore because it hasn’t happened
in so long, the Church dreams of safety and security, and, by and
large, lets our government tell us what that means, consistently fails
to meet its “special obligation,” in the words of William Sloane
Coffin, “to point out that ‘God ‘n country’ is not one word.”
While the Spirit calls us to dream with the prophet Amos of
justice, not just trickling down justice, but flowing down like a
mighty river justice, the Church arms itself with proof texts and dams
up the waters of justice in order to keep people who are gay and
lesbian out there.
While the Spirit calls us to dream with Mary the mother of Jesus
about radical social change, about a world where the poor have been
lifted up, exalted, and the rich brought down from their thrones, the
Church today says, “Well, she didn’t mean that,” and colludes with the
powers.
Rubem Alves, who is a liberation theologian from Brazil, says that,
“Hope is hearing the melody of the future. Faith is to dance to it.”
Hope,” he says, “is the presentiment that the imagination is more
real, and reality less real, than we had thought. It is the sensation
that the last word does not belong to the brutality of facts with
their oppression and repression. It is the suspicion that reality is
far more complex than realism would have us believe, that the
frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the
present, and that miraculously and surprisingly, life is readying the
creative event that will open the way to freedom and resurrection.”
The Spirit calls us to imagine this world as it should be, to hear
the melody of God’s future. And to dance to it.
But that’s a bit intimidating, isn’t it, when we don’t even know
the steps. And just think, what if we begin to dance to the melody of
the future and someone tells us that we’re doing it all wrong? What if
we begin to dance to the melody of the future and someone laughs at
us, calls us naive, or drunk, or worse? What if we begin to dance to
the melody of the future and then we realize that we’re out there all
alone? What if we begin to dance to the melody of the future and it
sweeps us away, overcomes us, changes our lives and our outlook
altogether?
That’s what happened to Jesus’ disciples, you know. One minute they
were praying, waiting, looking for the Spirit to come, a few days
later, they’d sold their possessions, pooled their resources, changed
their lives altogether.
Henri Nouwen has said, “The world is waiting for new saints,
ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God
that they are free to imagine a new international order...Most people
despair that (it) is possible. They cling to old ways and prefer the
security of their misery to the insecurity of their joy. But the few
who dare to sing a new song of peace are the new St. Francises of our
time, offering a glimpse of a new order that is being born out of the
ruin of the old.”
And I would mirror Nouwens’s statement, and say that the church
is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women…
The prophet Joel, as quoted by Simon Peter on that Pentecost
Sunday, talks about young men and old men, sons and daughters, slaves
seeing visions and dreaming dreams. Notice, Joel is listing those who
live on the margins of life, not those to whom we would normally look
for leadership, the middle-aged CEOs, but the young, the old, the
sons, the daughters, the poor…
“It isn’t to the palace that the Christ Child comes,” sings Bruce
Cockburn, “but to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums.”
Of course, we know that because we’ve been dreaming along the
margins for quite awhile now. But as we’ve turned our face more and
more toward the world, with all of it’s desperate need, as we’ve
sought to live in solidarity and in simplicity, we’ve managed in some
ways to turn our face away from the rest of the Church. No wonder:
we’ve been disappointed, disillusioned, repeatedly sickened by the
Church’s inability to separate “God ‘n country,” by the Church’s
preoccupation with minutia.
But as Carol, who came to us in the fall, has told me over and over
again, you need to take this out there. The church needs
ecstatic men and women, the church needs to hear this voice from the
margins. I don’t what that means, exactly, but maybe we can be
dreaming and visioning together, not just for a new world, but for a
new Church, a set-free, let-loose, truly Pentecostal Church.
“We are called,” says William Sloane Coffin, “not to mirror but to
challenge culture, not to sustain but to upend the status quo, and if
that to some sounds overly bold, isn’t it true that God is always
beckoning us toward the horizons we aren’t sure we want to reach?” (Credo,
pg. 146)
In the book, Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, Codi, who
has gone back to her hometown to face her past, corresponds with her
sister Hallie, who has gone to teach agriculture to the peasants of
Nicaragua during the time that the United States is sending millions
of dollars to the contras. Codi is proud of Hallie, but is scared for
her, too, and in one of her letters she writes:
“I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the
need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to be brave, to walk
into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have
it be home. How can you just charge ahead, always doing the right
thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring? I would
have so many doubts--what if you lose that war? What then? If I had an
ounce of your bravery, I’d be set for life. You get up and look the
world in the eye, shoo the livestock away from the windowsill, and
decide what portion of the world needs to be saved today...”
Hallie, in her return letter to Codi, writes this:
“Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your
life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is
live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in
it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it:
elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The
possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the
destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in
that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both
sides.”
The Spirit calls us to figure out what it is that we hope for, and
then to live inside that hope, under its roof, to run up and down its
halls touching its walls on both sides. The Spirit calls us to
envision the future as it should be, and then to live as if that
future is already here.
Come, Lord Jesus, send us your Spirit. Renew the face of the earth.
Amen.