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.