Dream Bigger [Advent 1A - Isaiah 2:1-5]

 The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Isaiah 2:1-5

 

Dream Bigger

St. Paul’s, Greenwich

 

Once again we welcome the advent of a new year.  This sanctified new year comes with considerably less fanfare than the one that will begin on January first.  We celebrate this new year around an altar instead of a television, at a respectable hour, not in the middle of the night.  This morning, we lit a single candle instead of dropping a gaudy, luminous ball.  Moments from now, we will drink consecrated wine rather than bubbly champagne.  And I am the only person who dared to wear a festive, pointy hat at this New Year’s celebration. 

 

A short month from now, when the ball does drop, we will muster up our courage and make our resolutions: new dreams to wrap around our old lives.  But today, at this dawning, we do something a little different.  Recognizing that our resolve is always and forever a bit too thin, we dare to dream old dreams of a new world, a new reality that in some mysterious way is already and not yet.

 

Advent, this first season of the new Church year, is a reminder that God intends to burst the old wineskins of a world prone to pragmatic progress, of a world that no longer dreams in color.  This world has resolved to think too small; it has tuned out the vast imagination of our creative and hopeful God.  And so this is our season to demand a hope beyond what is possible.  We are the ones who are called to dream the dreams that this world needs.

 

And those dreams are old dreams.  They are the dreams of the prophet Isaiah.  The ancient prophet lived in a world besieged.  His eyes were plagued by violence and despair, blinded by the awful glint of cold steel.  His people lived with a persistent pit in their collective stomach; they harbored an existential dread, had little hope for the future, lived in fear of impending annihilation.  Imperial armies rattled the gates; death haunted their fitful sleep.  And, despite the plans of politicians and the bribes of the corrupt, the nation was powerless to stop the flood of destruction.

 

It was a traumatic existence, a harsh reality.  But even the harshness of reality could not dim the dreams of the prophet.  Isaiah imagined a different flood – not a flood of destruction, but an endless stream of people, from the nations, even the enemy nations, coming to fall on their knees before God, to learn love instead of war, peace rather than violence. 

 

It was a dream as offensive as it was bold.  The prophet hoped for the salvation of their enemies, of his enemies.  He hoped for deliverance, the deliverance of even the perpetrators, from this horrific history of violence.  The nation fantasized, understandably, of revenge.  Isaiah sang redemption songs.  Because in the strange economy of God, it was necessary that they all be saved together.  True peace required total salvation; it included the salvation of the very people they wanted to see destroyed.

 

It was a big and audacious dream.  But this prophet, Isaiah, was called to dream the dreams that the world needs.  Peace was not winning a war; peace was the end of war.  And so the prophet hoped for the impossible: a future in which swords are beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, in which life is fostered and war is nothing more than a fading nightmare, a world in which the energy and resources that we invest in destruction and defense are invested, instead, in feeding the hungry and lifting up the lowly.

 

This is the dream: no more fear, no more violence, no more pain, no more tears.  This is the dream: a wide world cradled in the peaceful comfort of the arms of God, ancient divisions healed by the love that birthed the universe.  The assurance at the heart of the salvation story is that something better is coming – God still has a dream for us.  Our desperate longing for a better world is that persistent, old dream – one passed down by the prophets, embodied by Jesus, promised in the final chapters of the final book of the Bible.  Our old dream is the coming Kingdom of God.  This dream is our inheritance.  It is the stubborn hope we plant in this parched and weary world. 

 

Political policy, financial prosperity, proliferation of weaponry will never make this old dream come true.  The dream of God is so much bigger.  And so we must dare to dream bigger than human schemes.  The hope of the world is that God’s dreams will come true.

 

Our calling is to dream with God, to dream the dreams that our world needs.  And to sing those dreams out over the dehumanizing din of our days.  We do not have to accept the despair and division that fuels this age.  Jesus gives us hope.  And that hope allows us to resist the manufactured distractions that seek to sedate our souls and dull our dreams.  We are people of the Good News.  And the Good News has the power to bring dreams to life.     

 

Once again, we stand at the dawning of a new year.  Amidst the turmoil and uncertainty of our times, we light our candle and drink our wine and dream our dreams.  Old dreams of a new world.  A new world that often seems impossible and yet already exists, in the fathomless heart of a hopeful God, in the future of the Kingdom come.  It is Advent.  The new year begins with an old reminder: to dream bigger.  To dream with God.  To dream the dreams our world needs.