Sermon Illustrations on dreams
Background
The American Dream Today
The term “American Dream” was first used by James Truslow Adams in 1931 in his book The Epic of America. There he described it as “a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable.” But I’ve discovered that like many things in life, definitions change. A more current description of the American Dream is “an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity.”
I asked my blog readers for their own perspective on the term and got dozens of responses, such as this one from Kim Frey: Our grandparents probably viewed it as the ability to get out of poverty, to provide for loved ones, and to have a comfortable home, getting a strong basic education, having a good work ethic, and being content with what you have. . . . I think the idea of the American Dream has become much more materialistic in the past few decades . . . “Bigger, better, faster, and more” has defined it recently.
The Construction of Utopias
One of the seductions that continues to bedevil Christian obedience is the construction of utopias, whether in fact or fantasy, ideal places where we can live the good and blessed and righteous life without inhibition or interference. The imagining and attempted construction of utopias is an old habit of our kind. Sometimes we attempt it politically in communities, sometimes socially in communes, sometimes religiously in churches. It never comes to anything but grief. Meanwhile that place we actually are is dismissed or demeaned as inadequate for serious living to the glory of God. But utopia is literally “no-place.” We can only live our lives in actual place, not imagined or fantasized or artificially fashioned places.
A favorite story of mine, one that has held me fast to my place several times, is of Gregory of Nyssa who lived in Cappadocia (a region in modern Turkey) in the fourth century. His older brother, a bishop, arranged for him to be appointed bishop of the small and obscure and unimportant town of Nyssa (a.d. 371) Gregory objected; he didn’t want to be stuck in such an out-of-the-way place. But his brother told him that he didn’t want Gregory to obtain distinction from his church but rather to confer distinction upon it. Gregory went to where he was placed and stayed there. His lifetime of work in that place, a backwater community, continues to be a major invigorating influence in the Christian church worldwide.
Stories
The Death of Veggie Tales
You may not have heard of Phil Vischer, but you have heard his voice. He is the creator of the wildly successful Veggie Tales and provided the voice of Bob the Tomato. Veggie Tales was massively successful, selling more than fifty million videos and grossing hundreds of millions of dollars. It all ended with one lawsuit, which bankrupted the company. As Mark Batterson tells the story, a single sermon changed Vischer’s outlook:
If God gives you a dream, and the dream comes to life and God shows up in it, and then the dream dies, it may be that God wants to see what is more important to you—the dream or him.
A dream, even a God-given one, can become the end rather than God. Batterson concludes, “God-ordained dreams aren’t just born. They are reborn. If they become more important to you than God, you have to sacrifice them for the sake of your soul.”
Introduction by William Rowley, Mark Batterson, All In: You are one decision away from a totally different life, Zondervan, 2013.
A Dream of Immanuel
When he was a young boy, twelfth-century church leader Bernard of Clairvaux fell asleep outside a church while waiting to go in for a Christmas Eve service. In his sleep he had a dream, a kind of vision, in which he saw very clearly and distinctly how the Son of God, having espoused human nature, became a little child in his mother’s womb. In that act he came to see how God’s heavenly majesty was mingled with sweet humility.
This vision so filled young Bernard’s heart with comfort and jubilation that throughout his life he kept a vivid memory of it. What was it that filled his heart with joy? It was nothing other than the fact that God chose to be with us: Immanuel. Out of love Jesus was conceived, and out of love he chose to die. There is something in us that God finds lovable. It is certainly not our sanctity, nor is it our fidelity. When I look at my own baseness, my incredible ability to sin at a moment’s notice, I wonder what God sees in me.
Dreaming of a Better Future
Honoré de Balzac would eventually become a celebrated writer in post-Napoleonic France. He was renowned for his complex characters and realistic writing style. Like most young artists, de Balzac lived the stereotypical “starving artist” lifestyle in Paris in the 19th century. As a different illustration demonstrated, his extremely dire living conditions in an unfinished attic led him to lose a significant amount for his first commissioned novel.
Nevertheless, de Balzac had aspirations of better living. To help him conjure up this preferred future, he decided to write on the wall what his future residence would look like. On one wall he wrote “Rosewood paneling with commode”; another said “Gobelin tapestry with Venetian mirror”; and above the hearth, the pièce de résistance, “Picture by Raphael.”
Stuart Strachan, Source Material from Clifton Fadiman, Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes.
Fathers and Faith
In his book The Case for Grace, pastor and author Lee Strobel describes a dream he had as a child after having a significant argument with his father. Strobel does what most of us would do at that age: resolve to work harder, perform better, and get into his father’s good “graces.” The dream that followed demonstrates, even at an early age, that grace would inevitably seep into Strobel’s life, and that the performance treadmill he had learned as a child would never get him where we wanted to be:
One evening when I was about twelve, my father and I clashed over something. I walked away feeling shame and guilt, and I went to bed vowing to try to behave better, to be more obedient, to somehow make myself more acceptable to my dad. I can’t recall the details of what caused our conflict that evening, but what happened next is still vivid in my mind fifty years later.
I dreamed I was making myself a sandwich in the kitchen when a luminous angel suddenly appeared and started telling me about how wonderful and glorious heaven is. I listened for a while, then said matter-of-factly, “I’m going there” — meaning, of course, at the end of my life. The angel’s reply stunned me. “How do you know?” How do I know?
What kind of question is that? “Well, uh, I’ve tried to be a good kid,” I stammered. “I’ve tried to do what my parents say. I’ve tried to behave. I’ve been to church.” Said the angel, “That doesn’t matter.” Now I was staggered. How could it not matter — all my efforts to be compliant, to be dutiful, to live up to the demands of my parents and teachers. Panic rose in me.
Words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. The angel let me stew for a few moments. Then he said, “Someday you’ll understand.” Instantly, he was gone — and I woke up in a sweat. It’s the only dream I remember from my childhood. Periodically through the years it would come to mind, and yet I would always shake it off. It was just a dream.
Lee Strobel, The Case for Grace: A Journalist Explores the Evidence of Transformed Lives, Zondervan.
For Dummies
Mark Batterson met John Kilcullen at a writers conference where they shared their stories. Kilcullen’s massively popular “For Dummies” series of books began with a single comment: “Do you have any simple books on Microsoft DOS—something like DOS for dummies?” [1] Today there are more than sixteen hundred “Dummies” books in 31 languages. A single idea, especially one from the Holy Spirit, can transform your life and those of countless others.
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Mark Batterson, All In: You are one decision away from a totally different life, Zondervan, 2013.
William Rowley
“I Don’t Remember”
In A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World, Ron Lee Davis shares a powerful story of forgiveness about a priest from the Philippines. The clergyman had carried the weight of one particular sin that plagued his conscience for years. Though he had repented multiple times, he couldn’t shake the feeling he was still to be punished by God. At one point in his ministry, there was a deeply religious woman in his parish that loved God and claimed to have visions in which she spoke face-to-face with Jesus. The priest was initially skeptical. So he decided to test her by saying,
The next time you speak with Christ, I want you to ask him what sin your priest committed while he was in seminary.” The woman agreed.
A few days later the priest asked., “Well, did Christ visit you in your dreams?”
“Yes, he did,” she replied.
“And did you ask him what sin I committed in seminary?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said, ‘I don’t remember'”
What God forgives, He forget.
Ron Lee Davis, A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World.
Martin’s Cloak Dream
Martin of Tours became a great leader of the monastic movement in the West. In his early life, Martin was conscripted as a soldier in the Roman army. During this time, he became a catechumen (that is, someone undergoing instruction to become a Christian) and wrestled greatly with his life as a soldier.
During this time, according to legend, he met a homeless person in need of clothing. Martin decided to cut his cloak in half to share with the beggar. That same night he had a dream that Jesus was clothed with that same torn cloak. When he woke up, to his astonishment, his cloak had been restored. Martin was understandably inspired by the miracle and chose to finish his Christian instruction immediately, getting baptized at age 18 and his discharge from the army. Martin would then become a prolific monk and a bishop, spreading the gospel throughout the region from which his name is derived in modern-day France.
Stuart Strachan Jr.
Someone With Skin
Ronald Rohlheiser begins his excellent book, Our One Great Act of Fidelity, with a story of a young girl. She had awoken from a nightmare, convinced that monsters had invaded her room and were coming to devour her. She escaped the darkness at just the right moment, running into her parent’s bedroom for safety.
Her mother slowly carried her back to her own room, turned on the light, and showed her that there was nothing there to spook her. After a few more reassuring words, the mother said, “You don’t need to be afraid. You’re not alone. God is here in the room with you.” The child responded, ‘I know that God is here with me, but I need someone here who has some skin!”
Stuart Strachan, Source Material from Ronald Rolheiser, Our One Great Act of Fidelity: Waiting for Christ in the Eucharist
Tell Them About the Dream Martin!
Most of us in the United States know the famous “I have a Dream” speech Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the Lincoln Memorial as part of the 1963 March on Washington. On a sweltering, humid day in the nation’s capital, some 250,000 people came to hear King speak on the cause of civil rights and the fight for equality and justice for African Americans. What most of us don’t know is that that the “dream” part of the speech almost never happened, in fact, should not have happened. It was not a part of the prepared remarks for that day, but inspiration came in the form of a gospel singer named Mahalia Jackson.
As King inched towards the climax of his speech, he seemed to hesitate, perhaps unsure of whether his prepared remarks were as inspiring as he had hoped. At that moment, the great civil rights leader heard a voice behind him. “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!” Mahalia Jackson shouted. At that point, Clarence Jones, one of Dr. King’s advisors leaned over to the person next to him and said, “These people out there, they don’t know it, but they’re about ready to go to church.”
The rest, as we now know, is history. Dr. King had been testing out this “dream” section of his speech at previous events, and when he took Mahalia Jackson’s advice, he put into words the longings of a generation to experience equality and justice for all. He described the power of the gospel to create reconciliation where there had previously been hostility and tension.
I love this little insight into one of the most important moments in American history, not because it lessens King’s impact and genius, but rather, enlarges it. It also speaks to the genius and boldness of Mahalia Jackson, willing, in one of the biggest moments of her life and Dr. King’s, to speak up with a great idea. How wonderful for King not to scoff or ignore her, but to listen, pause and realize that she was right, that now it was time to tell them about the dream.
Stuart Strachan Jr. source material https://www.vox.com/2016/1/18/10785882/martin-luther-king-dream-mahalia-jackson and other articles
Analogies
Mystery and Revelation
Karl Barth wrote that, “God is always a mystery. Revelation is always revelation in the full sense of the word or it is not revelation” (CD I.8.2). God’s revelation, to Barth, always exists in a dialectic of being simultaneously veiled and unveiled—thus, we are always dependent upon God for God’s revelation, and it never becomes our possession.
The image of a dream might be helpful here. While some people are able to recall their dreams in vivid detail, for most people there is a perfect clarity while dreaming that vanishes in a moment upon leaving that unconscious realm. In this analogy, the dreaming would correspond to our utter dependence upon God for understanding divine revelation, so that this revelation maintains the character of mystery. The image might work more obviously with other scriptural mysteries (“Would someone simply forget,” one might wonder, “that gentiles are included in God’s promises”?), but even with this mystery our proper understanding of the nature and purpose of this inclusion requires a constant reliance on God’s illumination.
Darren Pollock
Studies
Daydreaming Through Life
How long do daydreams last? Eric Klinger ran a study in which he trained a group of participants to estimate the duration of their thoughts, daydreams or otherwise. What he found was that the average thought length was fourteen seconds, but there were more thoughts that were about five seconds long than there were of any other length.
That the mean is so much higher than the median suggests that we have some very long daydreams that bring the average up so high. Every single day, a typical person entertains about four thousand thoughts during their waking hours. If we use, as a working definition of daydreaming, that it consists of thoughts that are either spontaneous or fanciful, then fully half of these thoughts are daydreams—two thousand per day!
Jim Davies, Imagination: The Science of Your Mind’s Greatest Power, Pegasus Books, 2019.
Humor
Dreaming of a Better Future
Honoré de Balzac would eventually become a celebrated writer in post-Napoleonic France. He was renowned for his complex characters and realistic writing style. Like most young artists, de Balzac lived the stereotypical “starving artist” lifestyle in Paris in the 19th century. As a different illustration demonstrated, his extremely dire living conditions in an unfinished attic led him to lose a significant amount for his first commissioned novel.
Nevertheless, de Balzac had aspirations of better living. To help him conjure up this preferred future, he decided to write on the wall what his future residence would look like. On one wall he wrote “Rosewood paneling with commode”; another said “Gobelin tapestry with Venetian mirror”; and above the hearth, the pièce de résistance, “Picture by Raphael.”
Stuart Strachan, Source Material from Clifton Fadiman, Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes.
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