Monumental Dreams
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
June 26, 2022
Good morning, Friends, and welcome to Light Reflections. For those in-person this week, this is VBS Sunday. Our scripture for this morning is Genesis 37:1-11 from the New Revised Standard Version of Scripture.
37 Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. 2 These are the descendants of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was shepherding the flock with his brothers; he was a helper to the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, and Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. 3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children because he was the son of his old age, and he made him an ornamented robe.[a] 4 But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.
5 Once Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more. 6 He said to them, “Listen to this dream that I dreamed. 7 There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf.” 8 His brothers said to him, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?” So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words.
9 He had another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have had another dream: the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” 10 But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, “What kind of dream is this that you have had? Shall we indeed come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow to the ground before you?” 11 So his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
This morning, we are celebrating our VBS Kickoff. This year’s theme is “Monumental: Celebrating God’s Greatness.” The Bible character we are going to study throughout the week is Joseph from the Old Testament. Some call him “the Dreamer.” As I was considering what I was going to say this morning, another dreamer came to mind.
And speaking of monumental, his speech about his dream is considered by many as one of the most important speeches ever given. To give it some context for what I am going to talk about let me set things up a bit.
At the time, Martin Luther King Jr. was already widely recognized as the spiritual leader of the American civil rights movement. The podium set up in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 would be his bully-est pulpit ever.
Multitudes had traveled to our nation’s capital to join the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, co-organized by the National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The eyes of the nation were on the keynote speaker.
Dr. King had prepared his text carefully. He had asked for suggestions from his trusted advisors. He’d gone through several handwritten manuscript drafts which was unusual for him because he rarely used speechwriters and often spoke extemporaneously, from only a few jotted notes.
Originally, he had titled his speech, “Normalcy, Never Again”—but even after he had finished multiple edits, the papers he clutched in his hand were still not what he wanted them to be.
The most famous line from the speech, “I have a dream,” wasn’t even written anywhere on his notes. That ringing refrain had been a feature of several speeches he’d already delivered in other places—most notably at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, nearly a year earlier, and in Detroit two months previously.
The beloved gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was sitting behind Dr. King that day as he struggled to find words to connect to the audience. “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” she said to him. He heard her, and so he did. He told them about the dream.
Dr. King’s riff on the phrase, “I have a dream,” has truly gone down in history. Arguably the most famous and monumental of those improvised lines is this: “I have a dream that my four little 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.”
If you have any doubt that this was a monumental God-moment, as well as, a deeply religious address, a sermon, really, or that the civil rights movement was a deeply religious movement, then just listen to what Dr. King said just a few lines later:
“I have a dream that one day 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.”
He was, of course, quoting the prophet Isaiah. King continued,
“This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”
Well, in the waning days of the 20th century, a poll of more than 100 scholars of public addresses ranked Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as the most significant or monumental speech of that century.
In 2013, Jon Meacham wrote in Time magazine, “With a single phrase, Martin Luther King Jr. joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who’ve shaped modern America.”
But folks, that is not what everyone thought at the time.
An FBI agent named William Sullivan, head of the Bureau’s domestic spying operations, wrote in a memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover that,
“In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders above all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”
Yes, he was a dreamer, and, as a dreamer, things did not go well for him. Then, as now, dreamers make the powers that be—powers like William Sullivan at the FBI, the powers that fear change—deeply uncomfortable.
Visionary leaders do not hesitate to dream of a better tomorrow for all God’s children. As a result, those who fear change sometimes do desperate things to try to bury the dream.
This is where the Bible character, Jospeh. that we will be studying this week in VBS comes into play. Dr. King’s story is very similar to Joseph’s.
Yet, Joseph didn’t have just one dream, but several, extending over his lifetime. His early dreams foreshadow a time when his family will bow down to him and serve him. It is a dream he rather foolishly shared with his brothers. Their response was,
“Here comes the dreamer [again]! Let’s kill him and throw him into one of the pits; we’ll say that a wild animal devoured him, and we shall see what becomes of his dreams.”
Joseph’s brothers think better of those words. In the end, they don’t kill him, but they do throw him down a cistern, then sell him into slavery. To cover up their heinous deed, they stain his multi-colored coat with the blood of a slain animal, so Joseph’s heartbroken parents will believe a wild beast killed him.
Of course, we know how the story turns out. Through a series of amazing adventures, Joseph ends up in Egypt, in prison. His dreams while he is in jail foretell a future of both plenty and famine in the land.
Eventually, Joseph is released from prison and is elevated to an administrative position high in the government and is soon running the entire country as Pharaoh’s chief of staff.
In a time of terrible famine, the sons of Jacob come and grovel before this Egyptian bureaucrat, begging for food so they will not starve, thus fulfilling the very dream they’d found so offensive all those years earlier.
Only then does this mighty Egyptian official reveal his true identity. He is their brother Joseph, who has every right to exact a terrible revenge upon them, but whose heart has only forgiveness for these brothers who have so grievously wronged him.
Please note: Joseph was not a complainer; he was a dreamer.
Reflecting on Dr. King’s speech, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, makes this same point about complaining. Looking at the speech, he has observed that something is missing from it. It’s the phrase, “I have a complaint.”
Wallis points out that, “there was much to complain about for black Americans, and there is much to complain about today for many in this nation. But King taught us that our complaints or critiques, or even our dissent, will never be the foundation of social movements that change the world—but dreams always will.
Just saying what is wrong will never be enough to change the world. You must lift up a vision of what is right.”
That is a word that is as ripe and right for us today as it was back in 1963.
In our homes, in our Meeting, in our lives we need to dream, and to dream big. We need to have monumental dreams!
And we need to teach our children to dream, monumental dreams of justice for all people. We need to remind each other that the dream that is needed is not so much the American Dream of individual achievement, but to dream God’s dream for the human race, a dream of a world made new through God’s grace and mercy. This has been the Quaker Way from the beginning.
It’s a dream expressed by the apostle Paul who writes to the Corinthians: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new.” (1 Corinthians 5:17)
I don’t know about you, but I think we need more dreamers like that today. We don’t need complainers. There are plenty of those already because of a culture of complaint in our country which is a quick and rather ugly way to build community.
It’s easy to point out everything that’s wrong and needs to be fixed, but the problem is that the kind of unity that is built on the negative, on complaint and hostility, has no staying power.
For that, we need dreamers, visionaries who focus not on how bad things are, but on how good they can be. We need dreamers who can outline concrete ways, the small, incremental steps that can be taken, to achieve worthy goals.
This week in VBS, I believe we are going to work hard to instill this in our children. They are going to be looking at these monumental points:
That God loves you no matter what.
That God is with you everywhere.
That God is in charge.
That God is stronger than anything, and
That Good is always surprising.
These are some of the same points that Martin Luther King Jr. and Joseph were trying to instill in the lives of their followers. Because both were rooted in the fact that their dreams were monumental because they were bigger than just their dreams. Because their dreams were actually God’s dreams for us and they were faithful in sharing those messages even through the tough times.
When we are determined, persistent and share the dreams God puts on our hearts, we can help create a positive vision of what can be with God’s help. We can sow seeds of joyous enthusiasm that has the power to transform and change our lives for the better.
I hope you would agree that we need more godly dreamers in this world.
We’ve been given the vision of God’s intent for our world, a purpose that God started at Creation and that Jesus continued by inaugurating his kingdom. Then God sent the Holy Spirit to launch the Church that we might continue to dream and work for this vision of a new world of justice and peace for all peoples. This is the call to each of us who consider ourselves followers of Christ.
It is our monumental task as the church. And sadly, if we don’t do our job, someone will fill in the void with a vision that is unworthy, that will not treat all people with dignity and respect as God does, that will point people not to the kingdom of God but instead, towards their own small, self-centered kingdoms.
God calls us to a bigger, more monumental dream than that. As the early Quakers acknowledged, God calls us to dream and work for the kingdom of God to come on earth—now, in our lives, in our work, in our families, in this Meeting, today. And that means change and struggle will be part of it, and sometimes it means that we will be uncomfortable. But, I believe that is a dream, a vision, a call that is worthy of our lives. It’s truly Monumental!
Now, as we enter waiting worship, please take a moment to ponder the following queries:
Am I more of a complainer than a dreamer?
What Monumental Dreams has God put on my heart for the world?