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Tuesday, January 17, 2006
What Is Your Dream?
Psalm 8; Revelation 19:1-10
On Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, Pastor Jack preached on human dignity here and now, and our glorious destiny for all eternity. Your fundamental vision of life's purposes drives every decision you make -- for good or for ill. Dream big!
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Ms. Rosa Parks sat down one day and lifted from our eyes a heavy veil.
When she refused to give up her seat to a white man on that bus, he and every American were compelled to confess that all people everywhere are essentially the same. Underneath her dark skin, those tired bones and muscles looked an awful lot like his.
"Who are we," asks the writer of Psalm 8, "that God would even notice us? What in the world are we that God would care for us?" The answer: We're God's image and likeness in the created world, men and women whom God trusts to take good care of it all. And of each other in the bargain.
A few years later, Dr. Martin Luther King stood up and opened our eyes again with his soul-stirring rhetoric. With hundreds of thousands of pilgrims he stood before the Lincoln Memorial, calling on our nation to cash its overdue check of equal opportunity under the law. He also called on African-Americans to resist all temptations to violence and hatred in pursuit of civil rights.
And then he shared with all of us his great dream for America:
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.... 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....
"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...."
In the cadences and imagery of a prophet, Dr. King called on all of us to gaze with new eyes upon the fundamental truth that all people everywhere are brothers and sisters in the human family. And to affirm once again that we all share the same ultimate purpose and destiny.
C. S. Lewis once said that every person on this earth is becoming either more like God or more like the Devil, choice by choice. If the veil were lifted, he said, we'd be tempted to fall down in front of one person and worship her for all her dazzling glory, and to run away in panic from another because of his hideous evil nature. Choice by choice, step by step, we're spiritually investing in heaven or hell.
Revelation 19 shows a most inviting vision of heaven -- a wedding banquet for the Lamb of God (Jesus) and his Bride (all of us). An eternal love-fest!
Written during one of Rome's worst periods of persecuting nonconformists (like Christians who refused to bow down to the emperor), Revelation is a coded call to stand firm at all costs to what you believe about God and the world.
The wedding feast comes only after the "great whore" of government gone mad with power has been appropriately punished. Thank God, I guess, that Dr. King skipped that prophetic image when he challenged America to do the right thing.
On the inter-personal level and on the grand scale of nations, then, entire destinies are being formed one decision at a time. Those decisions are driven by our fundamental vision of what life in this world is all about, our dream for a final purpose that's worth pursuing.
Another prophetic voice, an unlikely one by popular standards, tells us in simple terms how to do it one day at a time:
"I believe that appreciation is a holy thing -- that when we look for what's best in a person we happen to be with at the moment, we're doing what God does all the time. So in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we're participating in something sacred." (Mr. Rogers)
posted by Jack Buckley at
4:43 PM
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