The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
May 13, 2007

6 Easter – C
Acts 14:8-18
Revelation 21:22--22:5
John 14:23-29

“I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King, Jr, on August 28, 1963. I know the date well. It was the day our son Aaron was born.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.... I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” a day when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” a day when “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers,” a day when “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.... I have a dream today.”

Martin Luther King’s dream of forty-four years ago is as old as that of St. John. “I have a dream,” John wrote to Christians who were struggling against the chains and dogs and water cannons of the caesars of their day as much as were blacks of the United States in theirs in the 1960s. “I have a dream of a heavenly city, a dream of a new Jerusalem where there will be no temple, for the Lord himself will be the temple. The city will not need the sun or the moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God himself will give it light. The gates of the city will never be shut. There will never be any night there, nor will anything foul or unclean be there, and the river of life will flow through the city from the throne of God. By the splendor of the light of God the nations will walk. The leaves of the trees will heal the nations, the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and the nations will live by his light.”

This earlier version of the dream comes from the Book of Revelation. It was recorded by John some nineteen hundred years ago from his jail cell on the island of Patmos. It is a dream held up before a world as troubled then as King’s was in 1963.
Revelation is not a book we hear many sermons about. Maybe we don’t know what to do with it, because we don’t know what to do with such dreams, because we don’t know what to do with visions of a new heaven and a new earth, with dreams of a world delivered of racists and criminals, muggers and psychopaths and pushers, and also delivered of preachers and sermons, because we’ll all be so close to God, and God so close to us, that we won’t need Bibles or preachers or choirs to try to make God seem close, because God himself will be among us.

To us, dreams like John’s seem like so much “pie-in-the-sky.” We, after all, are an enlightened, sophisticated people, we like to think – an educated, resourceful, modern people who solve the problems of life when they present themselves. If New York or Denver or Colorado Springs is broken, we’ll fix it. So many a preacher’s sermons, my sermons and those of others, are exhortations to action now rather than invitations to wild dreaming about tomorrow.

How are we to love as Jesus loved us? By going to where the problem is, we say – by taking food and medicine and other needed things, by fixing roads and passing laws and raising taxes. Most of us in contemporary America have been taught to rely on ourselves, taught to believe that we human beings are bundles of untapped possibilities who have the potential to devise a new heaven and a new earth with our own hands. All we have to do is live up to our potential!

But deep down we know, don’t we, that such confidence in human potential is the real “pie-in-the-sky.” As Karl Barth insisted, the reason we come to church is to leave that illusion behind, if only for a while. To leave behind all the things we do all week because we know them to be “possibilities somehow exhausted.” Because the human possibilities for transformation of the world, we realize, are simply inadequate to the world’s need for transformation. All we have to do is look around us to see that we have exhausted our possibilities for human potential. And that’s depressing news to a people who have been taught that we can fix every problem, even the problems of evil and sin.

But how else are we to assess the possibilities for the human transformation of life in a post-September 11 world, except as “possibilities somehow exhausted”? War in the Episcopal Church itself, and in the Anglican Communion, not to mention war in Iraq, mocks all our pretensions about loving each other as Jesus loved us. Even if a political solution in Iraq is reached, we know that the solution will be temporary, that the basic distrust will not have been erased, and that the human possibilities for a new earth today make a shaky platform on which to stand.

The world as it is, no matter how much better we try to make it, never seems to be the city of the dream. We still have a need for lights in downtown Colorado Springs. Downtown Denver, even with its modern police force, is still downtown Denver, the same old world. Our nation itself, in raising walls on our borders against the rest of the world, would solve problems of international relations by making a gated community of the land of the free, just as we continue to buy better locks and hire more effective guards for our gated communities at home.

Millions on every continent still go to bed every night without enough calories to sustain life, and many within our own borders go to bed every night without the assurance that someone loves them. No matter how many Habitat houses we build today, there is still a need for more tomorrow. No matter how many sick people we treat in Haiti each year, the lines to see the doctor are just as long the next year. No matter how many people we serve at Westside Cares this week, the need is just as great next week, and we human beings remain a people who are not above trampling our own kind and crushing those in the way of a better view of a soccer match or rock concert...

...and my preacherly exhortations to you – exhortations to duty, to reform, to generosity and mercy and justice – crumble to dust in my mouth...

...or would, except. Except for the vision, except for the dream. Except for the dream which is based not upon what we are doing, but upon what God is doing.

If, despite our best human efforts, the world is still the same old world, what is to keep us from falling victim to exhaustion and cynicism and despair? Only the promise of God! This is the dream and the faith of the Church – that the new Jerusalem, a new heaven and a new earth, will be raised up, not by us, but by God. This is the hope of Easter that sustains us and saves us from exhaustion and cynicism and despair.

“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” the Scriptures remind us. (Proverbs 29:18) “Where there is hope, there is life,” is the way John Claypool echoed that ancient truth. The dream is a requirement for life itself.

Walter Wink warns, however, that John’s vision is “a dream of the possible, not a blueprint of the inevitable.” It is not inevitable because it is always possible that powers and principalities who do not share the vision might block the dream from becoming reality, just as the powers-that-be often block grain that is sent for famine relief and siphon off money that is sent to build a hospital or a school. And wherever the dream is blocked, where hope fails, death is sure to follow.

“More staggering yet,” Wink adds, is the thought that it might be Christians themselves who block the dream and ensure the death. “Or, if not Christians, then [fellow citizens like those of] the American South who thought to preserve slavery. It is true,” Wink concedes, ”that a handful of Christian leaders have always been in the vanguard of social change, but the vast majority of Christians have lagged behind, still espousing racism, still denying women equal rights, still persecuting gays and lesbians, still baptizing war as just.”

Wink says that sometimes he wonders “if God hasn’t supplied us with not just one vision, but two. One vision is of doom, the other of salvation.” Will we follow the kings of Gog and Magog and the principalities and powers of Revelation 19 toward the destruction of the nations, he asks, or will we, by our faith and by our actions, join those nations of chapters 21 and 22 who inherit the New Jerusalem? (“Without a Vision the People Perish,” All Saints Church, Pasadena, California, April 14, 2002)
It is, however, not we ourselves upon whom we rely, John reminds us. “Nothing can save us that is possible,” he insists, anticipating W. H. Auden. Salvation requires nothing short of a miracle, and only the visionary can see it. That is why King’s dream and John’s dream, the dream of God himself, is so important. For in the dream there is hope, and where there is hope there is life, and the promise is that it is God who is building the city, not us.

Well, then, what good are all our good works? If, despite our best human efforts, the world is still the same old world, and if it is God, not we ourselves, who is building the new Jerusalem, then why do anything at all? Because. Because, as children of God, sharers in the dream is who we are; because it is part of God’s dream that we share in God’s dream for us, share in King’s dream and John’s dream, and live. And because without the dream we perish.

So St. James insists that doing love as Jesus does love is the only religion worth practicing: “What good is it, my friends,” James asks, “for someone to say he has faith when his actions do nothing to show it? Can that faith save him? Suppose someone is in rags with not enough food for the day, and one of you says, ‘Goodbye, keep warm, and have a good meal,’ but does nothing to supply their bodily needs, what good is that? So it is with faith. Faith that does not lead to action,” James insists, “is dead.”

“But someone may say: ‘One chooses faith, another action.’ To which I reply: ‘Show me this faith you speak of with no actions to prove it, while I, by my actions, will show you my faith. It is my actions that show you my faith.’” But even for James it is faith in God’s vision, faith in God’s dream, faith in God’s promise that empowers the doing.

This, then, is the faith of the Scriptures, the faith that drives our action and produces the hope that sustains our lives. It is faith, not in ourselves, but in God’s promise, together with the faith that our lives and how we live them are part of God’s dream. That is the dream of John and of King – that history is in God’s hands, not ours; that the moral arc of history is long, but that it bends toward justice; that the One who makes all things new is building the city, and that we are his workmen; and that God himself will be our light, and all flesh will see it together.

Talk about building for the 21st century and all that is fine, but to talk about building for the 21st century is to talk about short-term goals, and history worth investing in, history worth living, the long moral arc of history, is in the hands of God, not in the hands of presidents and CEOs and generals and emperors...

”...and it has been revealed that in God’s time all God’s children will have shoes, and all God’s children will live in a new Jerusalem where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. It will be a day when the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood, a day when little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers, a day when every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight in that New Jerusalem where the gate is always open and where there will be no padlocks are on the doors and no need for either sun or moon, for God himself will be our light, and there will be no night, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

Well then, what about the short term? What about today at Westside Cares, and next week at Habitat for Humanity, and next year in Iraq, and tomorrow at City Hall and the State House and the Justice Department and the food pantry? If, despite our own efforts, the lines at all these places will be just as long tomorrow as they are today, what are we to do in the short term?

In her little book A Simple Path, Mother Teresa included a quotation from Gandhi which sums the short term up. “Act,” says Gandhi, “but do not seek the fruit of your action.”

Life and peace come, Mother Teresa is saying, when we let go of “results.” Life and peace come when we act, but let go of the results of our own short-term acts and rest in the long-term assurance of God’s promise.

How shall we live in the short term? Well, each of us, of course, has got to answer that question for himself, according to his faith. What we are assured of is that how we answer it will reveal either the dream that sustains us or the nightmare we choose to die with.

There is a sign on the wall of the children’s home of the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta that is entitled, “Anyway.” It’s a word about faith and action, and about the peace and hope that comes from resting in the long-term promise of God. This is what it says:

People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend your years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you help them. Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Do good anyway, because, as Thoreau reminds us, “dreams are the touchstones of our character.” Our dreams reveal who we are. This is the first and great reason to “do good anyway.”

And the second is like unto it: When you enter the unlocked gates of the New Jerusalem and, together with all flesh, see the glory of God yourself, you’ll be pleased you were part of the building, pleased you were part of the solution and not part of the problem.

And so will God.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.