Visions of more than sugarplums…
“There is a divine dream which the prophets and rabbis have cherished and which fills our prayers, and permeates the acts of true piety. It is the dream of a world, rid of evil, by the grace of God as well as by our efforts…to the task of establishing the kingship of God in the world. God is waiting for us to redeem the world. We should not spend our life hunting for trivial satisfactions while God is waiting constantly and keenly for our effort and devotion.
The Almighty has not created the universe that we may have opportunities to satisfy our greed, envy and ambitions. We have not survived that we may waste our years in vulgar vanities. The martyrdom of millions demands that we consecrate ourselves to the fulfillment of God’s dream of salvation…”
– Abraham Heschel
As we celebrate this Fourth week of Advent, we are invited to step inside the divine dream of God for our world. I suspect most of us do a better job of saying what the dream is not. Abraham Heschel does a wonderful job of speaking to what that dream is not –trivial satisfactions; greed, envy, ambitions and vulgar vanities. Even a world ‘rid of evil’ is still a description of what the dream is not.
Perhaps it is the nature of fallen man, that we know what something is not before we know what it is. Perhaps that is why the work in the aftermath of Ferguson is so difficult. We know what is NOT present, what is unjust, what is not happening long before we can see what might and could be there. In addition, there are a thousand different ‘takes’ on what is not there. But to name what needs to be there, and what that looks like, that takes a lot longer.
Perhaps that is why Jesus needed ‘to come down among us’ – because he knew we would have to see what the kingdom IS before we would ever understand it. We would have to see what love does before we would ever trust it. We would have to see how another lived the dream before we could ever learn how to live it our-selves.
Jesus was not born among us to satisfy that which is small within us. Rather, He was born among us to enkindle in us that divine dream of love. He came down, as the old song says: “that we might have life… have love… have joy… have peace.” And He came down to teach us not to stop in our efforts until every person on this planet knows the same truth.
Instead of letting sugarplums dance in our head this Christmas, what if we dared to let the dream of God dance there instead….