February 2003

Luke 2:41-52

I am convinced that the world is advanced by the dreams of its people, and that an individual is advanced by the dreams in the heart and in the mind. When dreams stop, life becomes stagnant. Entire societies can stagnate when the people don't dream.

The other day I had a conversation with a friend who told me he had spent a couple of years working in the city government of Budapest, Hungary. Having an interest in Hungary and having been there a number of times, I asked, "What did you think of the mood of the people?"

"You know, Arthur," he responded, "they've had a hard century - World War II, Nazism and then forty years of communism. Many people there say there is a whole generation which is lost." And then he said something that really brought me up short: "I met a lot of people who have stopped dreaming. Every time they would dare to dream, the dream would be crushed. So they stopped trying."

There is a sad poignancy to hear that anybody has stopped dreaming. I'm sure a number of you have also stopped dreaming, because of troubles and complexities and frustrations and delays. It was just too hard, and you gave it up.

It's my prayer for you today that you be motivated and inspired to take that dream out of the box. Take it off the shelf and dust it off. Give it some breathing space. Re-ignite the flame that was there when you originally had the dream, and allow it become a huge torch, the fulfillment of what you need to come true in your life.

Sometimes I hear, "Oh Arthur, I'm too old to dream."

You're never, never too old to dream.

The other night two friends of mine relayed a story about a dinner party they attended a couple of years before, in Italy. In the midst of the dinner one of the guests took out a tape measure and stretched it across the table, from one to eighty. "I'm sixty years old," he said. "Most of you are in your late fifties. Mark out sixty inches on this tape measure. We have progressed most of the way along the tape measure. We have already lived most of our years." He looked around the table. "What are we going to do with the rest of our lives?" He was not too old to dream. They tell me he died a year later, which is all the more reason to get that dream out, work it, and let it happen.

I am convinced that the world, the individual, is advanced by the dreams. Think of America, its ingenuity, its genius, its creativity, its growth and the inventions of this country. Every invention is somebody's dream. We've got to keep dreaming.

There are four things I want to warn you about with dreams. The first one I've already mentioned. Do not ever think you are too old to dream. The second one: As much as you can, stay away from people who are dream-busters.

I get so annoyed at those sophisticated, prophetic people who tell other people that their dreams aren't worth anything. If you have ever discouraged anyone's dream, please don't do it any more. It's not helpful. That's not your dream, that's the other person's dream. They have to deal with the dream they have inside of them. So never, never be a dream-buster.

Mark Twain said something like this: "Avoid people who belittle your ambitions. It's the small people who do that. But the people who are truly great help make you feel that you too can be great."

The third thing about dreams: Watch out for and avoid what I call "sitting-around dreams," back-porch dreams.

You sit there and fantasize about the day when you're going to win the lottery and what it's going to be like. It's pure fantasy, not going anywhere.

I remember a number of years ago I knew a young man who said he was going to be a professional baseball player, even though he was not on a team, and didn't play much ball.

"How are you going to make it if you're not practicing and you're not on a team?"

He said, "Well, I'm a good thrower, I'm a good catcher, and I'm a good hitter." And he went on and on and on, and it was all pure fantasy. The last thing I knew, this kid still didn't have a job.

The fourth thing about dreams: Dream on, dream big, but expect difficulty.

There will be delays and hard times. I think they are in the divine plan; God is testing the dream, its validity and strength. It's also a way of testing us, to make sure that we have the stamina to stay with it until the dream comes true.

Do you know what happens with a lot of us? We have a dream and, because we know it's a terrific idea, we assume that because it's good, it will happen. Well, it has to be proven to the world that it's a wonderful idea. If the dream is going to be worth anything at all, it's going to come about through strain and struggle and hardship.

Jesus, I believe, was a big dreamer. I'm sure that as he was growing up people looked at him and some said, "That's a young man with promise." But many said, "He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just a dreamer." And they sloughed Him off.

When He was twelve years old His parents took Him to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. After the festival, they were walking back to Nazareth, when His parents realized Jesus was not in the crowd. They went back into Jerusalem and took three days to find Him. They found Him with the elders in the temple. He was learning, He was listening, He was asking questions, He was responding to their questions.

"What are you doing here?" they asked Him.

"Don't you know that I must be in my Father's house, that I must be about my Father's business?" was his reply.

I'm going to use some poetic license now, and use my imagination. Maybe some day in the far future, in some cave in the Middle East, they're going to find some paper with some writing on it, and it will be the diary, the honest diary, of an adolescent Jesus. It's going to go like this:

I dream of being somebody very effective one day. I dream of being a great teacher. I'll be able to command an audience of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people and I'll talk to them in ways that will affect them and change their lives.

I dream that one day I'm going to confront all of the nonsense, all of the evil, all of the craziness, all of the selfishness, all of the evil power structures that are out there. I'm going to challenge them, and I'm going to make a difference.

I dream that one day I'm going to be able to love the people, and be with them, and listen to them and touch their lives and heal them.

I believe that Jesus as a young man had these kinds of dreams, and did everything He could to make them come true. What a difference His life made to lives then, through the centuries, and to our lives today - the work of a great dreamer.

One of my favorite verses of the Bible is in the book of Joel, where God says,

I will pour my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters, they will prophesy. Your old people, they will dream dreams. Your young people, they will see visions.

This is the way I believe God participates in the human process. He puts within our minds, hearts, and souls dreams to do significant things. I believe God has put into every single one of us a particular dream that we are to pursue for the greatness of who God made us to be. As God is great, as God loves us, God has made us into human beings who are potentially great through the dreams God has given us.

About eighteen or twenty years ago, I met with a woman, in her late twenties at the time - very bright, already successful in business. She was vice-president of a major New York company, and had done very well. But, as she talked, I could see she was miserable. Everything inside her was in chaos.

She talked about her family with great love, and about how wonderfully close she was to her father, but then in the next breath she would talk about her father as controlling and manipulative and hard and mean. In reality she didn't have a good relationship with anybody.

But she was dreaming. She dreamed of having her own successful business. She dreamed of having a happy marriage. But she was in trouble. She couldn't even get to the point of having a relationship with any human being.

That was the first time I had spoken with her, but I took a chance. I knew what I needed to say to her. I had to suggest she enter therapy, but she had been brought up in a conservative area, and in her part of the country seeing a therapist would have been anathema. You weren't supposed to do that kind of thing. You were supposed to work everything out with Jesus. You pray about it, and it will be okay.

But this woman had severe emotional wounds, so I said a little prayer and I said, "If I suggest to you the name of a therapist, will you go and see him?" And she said yes, and she went.

Sometime later in a conversation with that therapist he told me, "I have never seen anybody move so quickly in therapy as this woman." She knew that if she wanted her dreams to come true she had to work hard to understand herself and begin to heal and grow. Every dream has its own built-in discipline; there are things you must do to achieve your dream, and she knew that. So she moved through therapy. She did her work.

Today she's written four books that have sold well. She has her own company, with more business coming at her than she can handle. And she is in a genuinely happy marriage.

One last story - not long ago in this sanctuary we conducted a memorial service for a cousin of mine, an architect, whom I had not known well. We had seen each other maybe eight or ten times in our lifetimes. As I and other members of the family learned that day at his memorial service, as many of his colleagues came together to talk about him, he had been a great and successful dreamer about the possibilities of cities. He had designed the esplanade at Battery Park City with that very attractive fence. This was all his work. He had done a lot of work in the World Trade Center area.

Several years ago he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Before the service I was talking to a young architect who had followed him to Minneapolis to work with him. I asked him, "How did Victor make the adjustment to Minneapolis?", meaning how did he make the transition from a big city to that of much smaller city.

The young man responded, "He didn't adjust to them. They adjusted to him."

"Minneapolis," he said, "has its back to the Mississippi River. They'd never really embraced it, but he got the attention of the city leaders to turn the city around to face the river, to embrace it, and to make it a part of who they were."

Dream on. Dream big. Your life, the world, is advanced by your dreams. Don't be afraid of the discipline, the hard work and the obstacles - that's all part of it, if you want to really grow up and have something extraordinary happen.

And remember -- it's never to late, never too late, to dream. Dream on.
For the blessings of life, Lord, for the gift of the dream, we give You thanks. Help us each one to get in touch with, to dust off, to re-ignite an important dream. And, Lord, help us make it happen. In Jesus' name we ask, AMEN.