I would hate to live in a country without dreamers. Life would be dull, listless, low-energy,  and downright depressing. If there hadn’t been dreamers down through the long ages of history we might now be still living in caves.

America is a nation of dreamers, and one of the reasons I love New York City is that it is brim-full, overflowing with dreamers. They make New York as exciting and wonderful as it is. In the restaurants you may well be waited on by a dreamer who one day will be a star. Aspiring actors get free food and enough money to pay the rent while they study and audition and wait for their big break.

A couple of years ago, two women of this congregation who have become stars, the actress Marcia Gay Harden and the comedienne Caroline Rhea, were in conversation, obviously knowing each other very well. “Where did you meet?” I asked them, and they answered, “Waiting tables.”
 When you get into a taxi in this town your driver might be from Pakistan, India, Haiti, Egypt, or any one of a number of different countries. If you get into conversation with your driver, you discover that you are talking with a big dreamer. He will tell you the story of how as a kid he wanted to come to the United States so he could have a better life, a good place for his children to be educated, and his own house. Cabs are driven by dreamers.

Dreamers advance the world. I remember as if it were yesterday—many years ago, going to Grand Central Station to get a train, I saw Donald Trump standing by the curb on 42nd Street, looking up. We greeted one another and I said, “What are you doing, Donald?” He pointed to the Commodore Hotel, in its glory days one of the most elegant in New York, but now closed, boarded up and looking seedy, like many of the buildings along that part of 42nd Street.
But Donald saw something very different. “I just acquired that property,” he said. This building was Donald’s very first big acquisition. He was standing there visualizing what he would build. “It’s going to be shimmering glass, a spectacular hotel,” and he described a great restaurant and a lobby with a fountain. Two years later I was in that lobby of the Grand Hyatt for its dedication. The governor, the mayor, and many other dignitaries were there.  A great celebration took place because East 42nd Street, which had begun to decay, was coming back.

Standing to my right about ten feet away was an older man, and I watched as another man approached him to ask, “Harry, what do you think of this guy Trump?” and he tried to involve the older man in criticizing Donald. But he wouldn’t do it. He said, “No. I want him to succeed because I plan to build a hotel a couple of blocks up the street.” The older man was Harry Helmsley, at that time the biggest developer in New York. A young man’s dream had ignited a dream in an older man. Dreams make a difference. They are powerful.
When you walk out of this church and onto Fifth Avenue, if you enter the little shops and talk with the shop owners, you are going to hear about a dream coming true. You are going to hear about hardships, how expensive and difficult it is, how much they are doing to hold onto the dream. A dream has put them into business and is keeping them there.

My topic today is the challenge we face when one of our dreams fails or is taken away from us. I wonder if there is anyone here who has not experienced a broken dream, when something you wanted more than anything else, something you believed in and prayed for, was thwarted, postponed, crushed. Sometimes we can put our broken dreams back together. Sometimes they are not repairable and we have to give them up.

I think that dreams are the possibilities God puts in our minds and hearts. When a dream seems crushed, when it seems like it is not going to work, what do you do? You find another dream to replace that one. And there is one other thing you can do. When your dream has been challenged, you can go deeper, deeper to God. Go to your spiritual resources because that is ultimately where the answers will come from. God gave you the dream, and if a dream has to be taken away, God will deal with it.

When I need this kind of help I go to the Bible. My Bible is underlined, phrases are circled, there are notes along the sides of the pages. The underlines and notes have come out of my times of stress and sadness and struggle. So often now, when I have a spiritual need, I will open up my Bible and discover I am on the right page; the answer is right before me in the scripture. 
A number of years ago I discovered some­thing in the 43rd chapter of Isaiah, and I thought, “Wow! Why haven’t I read this before?” In the opening verses of that chapter God says, “Do not be afraid. Fear not, because I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.” Isaiah is writing about God speaking to Israel, but the tone is very personal, and I take it personally. “I have called you by name. You are mine. When you pass through the waters I will be with you, and through the rivers they will not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fires, you will not be burned. The flame will not consume you. For I am the Lord, your Savior.” 
This passage is saying that God intervenes. God participates. No matter what is going on, and how bad it might seem, know that God is there with you. When you go through the waters that are very, very deep, or in a rush of waters like a foaming river, and you think you are drowning, God is there with you. The waters will not overwhelm you. And when you feel like you are going to burn up, that flame will not consume you. This is going deeper to the reservoir of scriptural help; make as deep a reservoir as you can.

Sometimes a dream is broken because God has another plan in mind. The other day I had a con­versa­tion with a longtime member of this church, Dr. William Canfield. For many years Bill Canfield was a distinguished professor of speech at Hofstra University. He must have helped thousands of students in ways that really impacted their lives. But he didn’t start out teaching speech. Originally he had another dream. When he was discharged from the army after the Second World War, his dream was to become a famous actor. That dream brought him to New York. He was a very good actor and for some time he did quite well, appearing on a number of television programs. Things were going well, and he was able to earn a living fulfilling his dream.
I asked him how he had ended up as a professor instead of an actor. “Was that plan B?” 
“No,” he responded. “I joined Marble Church. Marble sent me on a spiritual journey where I discovered something I had never known before, that God had a plan for my life; and at the same time I sort of backed into teaching. I saw that God’s mysterious activity was at work in reshaping my life.” God had another idea, a better idea, for his life and career. He was happy and productive as a speech professor.

But there is another part to the story. When I started preaching here at Marble I was a young Associate Minister and Dr. Norman Vincent Peale was the Senior Minister. Dr. Peale was the best public speaker I had ever heard and, I believe, the best preacher of the twentieth century. When he delivered what he might have considered a bad sermon, he was still so good that 98% of the people who heard him would say, “Wasn’t that amazing? What a tremendous communicator!”

One day he called me to his office and told me he wanted me to preach the early service. I refused. I knew I was too green, a manuscript preacher with very little experience in the pulpit, and I did not want to be compared to Dr. Peale. Six months later he called me into his office and asked me again. His doctor, he said, had told him that if he wanted to continue preaching at all, he would have to cut down his preaching load and have someone else do the first service. When I preached, I would stand behind the lectern, holding on for dear life, and read from a manuscript. I had decided I would learn to be the best manuscript preacher in the world; I would read my sermon so well you would not know I was reading it. The congregation at my early service was maybe 200 people. I felt people were coming because they were so faithful they came every time the church opened its doors, or they felt sorry for me and were trying to be kind, or they wanted to make sure they got a good seat for the second service with Dr. Peale.
On a blue Monday morning after one of these services I called Florence Pert, who has been my working partner and colleague for many years, and told her how depressed I was about my preaching. She suggested I call Bill Canfield. When I did his first words were “I’ve been waiting to get my hands on you for a long time.” For about a year and a half I went to his apartment faithfully and he helped me move from the manuscript to preaching without notes. Eventually, I was able to move away from the lectern, and I found that rather than preaching at people, I was in dialogue with them. Now I understood what Dr. Peale meant when he said, “I don’t want anything between me and my congregation. I want to be able to talk to them.”

Now it takes me twice as long to prepare a sermon and I have much higher levels of anxiety than I did before, but the way I can preach now is a gift and I owe it to Dr. Canfield. God changed Bill’s dream, and I and many others benefited. Bill’s new dream supported the dream of a young minister. One dream ignites another.

Jesus talked about how our faith in God’s dream for us can change our lives and the lives of others. There is a scripture that has empowered me many times in my life. It is one of the great challenges in scripture. Jesus said to His disciples, “If you have faith even the size of a mustard seed,”—and a mustard seed is miniscule—“you can say to that mountain over there ‘move!’ and it will move.”

Jesus had two bottom-line teachings. One bottom line was love: loving one another, being kind, fair and generous, forgiving each other. The second bottom line was faith. Jesus did not approach faith as an idea or a theology; He did not create a doctrine of faith. No, He talked simply and straightforwardly about faith. He said that if you believe in what you are doing you can connect the power that is in you with the almighty power of God. When these two powers are connected anything can happen! You can say to that mountain over there ‘move!’ and it will move. Many of you know that when you have had focused faith, even when that faith felt very small, mountains have been moved in your life.

Recently, we had an experience here at Marble Church that we will never forget. We had as a speaker a beautiful young woman—beautiful in appearance, and beautiful in soul and spirit. She radiated joy and optimism. We wondered how this could be, given what she had been through. Her name is Immaculée Ilibagiza. She is from Rwanda, and survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She and six other women spent 91 days hiding in a tiny bathroom, 3 feet by 4 feet. They had to be completely silent. The enemy was coming and going. They were in a minister’s house and people were constantly coming to visit. If they had been discovered they and the minister would all have been killed.

What did Immaculée do in those 91 days? She went deeply into prayer. Sometimes she prayed 12 to 14 hours a day. In one of her prayers she saw her faith as the size of a mustard seed, and she prayed with faith that God would move mountains.

During the time she was there, her mother, her father, two of her three brothers and every other family member were murdered. When it was finally safe to come out of hiding, because she had been immersed in prayer, she knew what she had to do. She went to the town office to find the man who had been responsible for the death of her family. It took every bit of her strength and courage, but she looked him in the eye and said, “I forgive you.”  When we asked her how she was able to do this, she explained, “I could not live with the burden of hatred for the rest of my life.”

Imaculée’s dream of a normal life with her family was gone forever, but through her prayers she had discovered God’s new dream for her. She is a living example of the power of faith. She is able to teach why we must forgive: the greater the offense, the deeper our hatred, the more necessary it is to release our souls from it. Imaculée could have been shattered and embittered when her dream was shattered, but she trusted that God had something wonderful in mind for her.
Remember that God is always with you. “I have called you by name,” God says. “When you go though the waters, you will not drown, and when you go through the fire you will not be consumed, for I am there with you.” Even a little bit of faith is enough to move a mountain of trouble. Let us pray.

For the blessings of life and for the gift of a big dream, we thank You. Help us, Lord, to know what Your plan might be for our dream today, and the next one, and the one after that. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.