Discovering God’s Dream

2 Corinthians 5: 11-21

11 Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we try to persuade others; but we ourselves are well known to God, and I hope that we are also well known to your consciences.¹²We are not commending ourselves to you again, but giving you an opportunity to boast about us, so that you may be able to answer those who boast in outward appearance and not in the heart.¹³For if we are beside ourselves, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.¹⁴For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.¹⁵And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.
16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view;^* even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view,^* we know him no longer in that way.¹⁷So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!¹⁸All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;¹⁹that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself,^* not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.²⁰So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.²¹For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

            When I was four years old, I created a “Book About Me,” at my Preschool, Junior Village. In it, I drew a picture of myself, my family, my school, and included some of the songs we had learned that year, and also declared my favorite color to be red-which was to change several times throughout the years.  In this book, I also declared what I was going to be when I grew up: A Tennis Player, just like Chris Everett Lloyd.  Now, I have really dated myself as growing up in the 1970s and 80s!

            Often, we do ask the children around us, “what are you going to be when you grow up?”  Since those days in Junior Village, I was known to aspire to be an actress, a professional singer, writer, teacher, and therapist…and some days when I come to work, I wonder whether all of these have truly been attained in the profession of ministry!

            The question we don’t ask of children…and perhaps the questions we don’t ask ourselves, either, is this: what does God dream for your future?  Our daughter Hannah’s professional aspirations vacillate from day-to-day: sometimes she says she will be a very good clown, and other days she declares she will be a ballerina.  On the days she says she wants to preach like mommy, those are usually days when I’m struggling with writers’ block for a sermon, trying to go to two committee meetings at once, rushing back to the office from the hospital, and being aware that my office looks like a tornado hit it…and I answer the same way each time, “Be very sure that God is calling you to the ministry before you pursue it.”

            As I have reflected upon this response, I have challenged myself to rephrase the way that I speak about her call.  God could be calling her to be a clown, a ballerina, or a minister.  As I wrote in the newsletter this past month, those who are called are not just the ones in ministry or prophesy or in religious education, but all are called in the waters of baptism to respond to God’s grace through faithful discipleship.  Herbert Alonso has written, “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life teling me who I am.  I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live…but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.” 

            I’ve preached about this subject before here in our congregation.   Each minister has some “pet subjects,” and one of mine is call.  When I preached about this before, many of you shared with me on the way out of the sanctuary that you weren’t quite sure yet what God had called you to do, and some of you tried to convince me that indeed there was no called from God for you.

            The scripture from 2 Corinthians was written by Paul in a time of pain. The context of this letter is weighty: not only had there had been conflict between him and many members of the Christian community in Corinth, but the members of the community were in conflict, as well. Not only is Paul in emotional pain from the weight of the human relationships crumbling around him, but he is in physical pain from the toll that the traveling has taken on his body. 

The messages from the world might have told him several things.  He might have gotten a message to simply GIVE UP!  Retire from this evangelism gig, get as far away from those bickering church folk of Corinth, Rome, and Ephesus, and everywhere else he was serving and writing to and traveling to and find a lonely island and relax for once!  Or he might have heard a message from the world that had to do with power and manipulation… “they won’t listen to you…well, make them listen to you, use fear, intimidation, that’ll set ‘em straight.”

Who knows what messages or temptations from the world Paul might have struggled with at this point of his journey.  What we do know is that this portion of his second letter to the infant church in Corinth describes the ways in which he hears God’s voice, God’s message, God’s dream.  And in those moments of being exposed to God’s will and call, he experiences and shares hope in the midst of the turmoil; his eyes are set upon God, through Jesus Christ.  “Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, the old life is gone, a new life has begun.”  With God, writes Paul, a new hopeful future always awaits us, hope always reigns over despair, reconciliation always wins over enmity, and love has more power than might.

            Like Paul, we receive many messages and hear many voices that want to influence us.  The messages of the world that we receive daily are loud and are sometimes overwhelming for us all. As is written in our Bible study we’ll be using for the next six weeks, “every day in a wide variety of ways the world tells us who we are and how we are to live.  Depending upon the message we listen to, we are: physical beings who are to make ourselves sexually attractive, intellectual beings who are to accumulate knowledge, consumers who are to acquire possessions, workers who are to produce products, or pleasure seekers who are to gratify desires.  The list could go on and on.”  Every day, we are encountered with those who would want to influence us…who would want to define for us who are.

            As we declare in our statement of faith, though, first and foremost, the answer to question of who we are is: we are children of God.

            And as children of God, our task, our call, our vocation, and our joy is to own that identity and to discover the dream that God has for us.  Not to discover the dream that the advertisers have for us, not the dream that our boss has for us, not the dream that academic institutions have for us, not even, and this is a hard one…not even the dream that our children or parents have for us…and certainly not the dream our pastor has for us, but the dream that God has for us.  God may use parents, teachers, pastors, maybe even bosses, or even advertisers to get our attention, to steer us the right way, to open our eyes, or our ears, our hearts and souls, but our first and foremost focus of attention must be upon God and God’s dream for us, but our eyes and focus must be upon God in order to see all that God has to reveal to us.

            When I began ministry here, almost a year and a half ago, many people asked me, “what is your dream or vision for the congregation,” some even asked me, “what is your agenda for our congregation?”  I worried that my answer would seem weak, or that it might be heard as an easy cop out, some would wonder what I was even doing up here in the pulpit and behind the minister’s desk, and in the office of teacher and moderator if my answer was, “well, my vision is that together as Pastor and congregation, we will intentionally, and with prayer and Bible study, discern the dream and vision that God has for us together.”

            As is also written in our Bible study, “rather than a flight of fancy or wishful thinking, God’s dream is a vision of what is ‘really real.’  It is a vision of th wholeness of life, the healing of a broken world…the Christian community is not limited by the facts and trends of the current situation, but instead can imagine a new state of affairs not yet fully existing…learning how to truly see-to discover God’s dream for this time and place-is at the very heart of what it means to be the church. God has granted the Christian community a special sight, a spirit of wisdom and revelation that enlightens the eyes of our hearts to see the world as it really is.”

            We don’t have to be history majors to know that all too often, in the past, the larger church has given in to the temptations of the world and followed the calls of greed over frugality, power over equality, and manipulation over spiritual renewal.

            I guess we could live in that bleak understanding of the church and decide to live in despair that things will always be that way.

            Or we could open our eyes to ways in which the historical church has also had eyes to recognize and to follow God’s dream.  The church, made of both white and black Christians was the back bone, the voice, and the strength of the civil rights movement, so that our church ushers were no longer asked to keep people out, but to bring people in.  The church in South Africa was the inspiration for the architects of Apartheid and those writings and confessions still speak to the wider Christian community, calling into a dream of equality and reconciliation.

            Searching for and discerning God’s dream for us individually and as a community of believers is not easy.  God’s message is not splashed on a screen every ten minutes in 15 second sound bites while we are watching our favorite show at night, and besides the posters declaring John 3:16, it’s probably not found while watching our favorite team play ball.  It certainly does not live in our anxious or worried hearts, and is not found in our feelings of shame, resentment, or regret.

            Listening for and discerning God’s dream for us as individuals and as a community of believers requires us to intentionally begin our day in prayer, asking that our eyes might be opened to the vision God has for us, and ending our day in meditation, as we reflect upon the ways in which God spoke to us in our reading of scripture, in the quieting of our souls, and in the listening to the wise, of all ages, around us.

            Discovering God’s dream begins with really and truly believing that if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation, the old life has gone, and a new life has begun.”  The message of the gospel is in the power of the resurrection, that even in the despair of death, there is a new beginning and a hope for a future.  Discovering God’s dream means beginning the day in hope that God will tell you something new, will call you into something new, introduce you to a new insight or person of faith today.  Whether we are nine or ninety, God has a word for us today.

            Let us embark upon this journey with hope, discovering together God’s Dream.