January 2, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Redeeming by Redreaming

Matthew J. Helms
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:12–20
Jeremiah 31:7–14
Ephesians 1:3–14

For I dipped into the future,
far as human eye could see,
saw the vision of the world,
and all the wonder that would be.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

I don’t know about you, but I’m still having a hard time believing that it is 2011 already. Perhaps it’s because the weather is the same; we briefly escaped the cold on New Year’s Eve, only to have it return with a vengeance today. Perhaps it’s because after settling in from Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, life still looks a lot like it did in 2010. And yet despite it all looking the same both weather and otherwise, something feels different and new about this day and this time. When the clock struck midnight on December 31 and a year and a decade came to a close, we were reminded that our future is malleable; we are like clay, which can be reshaped and reformed. The new year is wide open in front of us, and we once again have a chance to reinvent ourselves and to reinvent our lives.

I’d imagine that many of us may have made new year’s resolutions in this very hope of reinvention. I am personally going to start eating better, get back into running, and spend more time with friends and family. That may sound like a cliché, but I’m embarrassed to admit that I am perfectly serious about trying to do all three. I’m also embarrassed to admit that this was my exact same list last year. Possibly you are like me, in that you start out really strong with your new year’s resolutions only to end up fading after a month. Your list this year may look exactly the same as last year. Or perhaps you may have grown so doubtful of your ability to follow through that you didn’t even make a list at all.

Why do we dream up new year’s resolutions, knowing that ultimately we will fall short? Why do we dream up new visions of ourselves when we all know that the dull sea of the status quo seems to trump the quick burning fire of change? Perhaps we are buoyed by stories of great successes, of people who have changed their lives through the power of their wills. I was recently reading an article by Malcolm Gladwell about a lawyer named Ben Fountain, who decided to quit his successful job at a law firm in order to become a fiction writer. The one problem was that Fountain had never written or published any fiction at any point in his life and he was thirty years old. Everyone in his life—his parents and friends—thought that he was foolish or insane. In his first year of being a full-time writer, he only was able to publish two stories, while receiving sixty rejections. He continued to write and write, but he wasn’t able to find any companies willing to publish his material. He went through a five\-year stretch when he wasn’t able to sell a thing. I can’t imagine what kind of self-doubt and depression he went through in that period, but the story ends happily. In 2006, a full eighteen years after he quit his job and began writing, Ben Fountain published Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, winning the 2007 Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for Best Novel of the Year and being named to the top Ten List of the Chicago Tribune, among others. Fountain’s dream for himself paid off, even if it took eighteen years to achieve.

And yet for all these success stories we hear, we know there are many other stories where big changes do not pay off. We know of people who have taken big risks in changing jobs and lives and these changes have not gone as planned. We may even know firsthand what it means to have a dream or a hope for ourselves and to not achieve it. Psychological studies have shown that human beings are risk averse—in part, I imagine, because of our fear of the unknown and the knowledge that our dreams for ourselves may not always go as planned. And yet despite all this, we arrive in the new year filled with hope and expectation, filled with a fervent belief, that this year, 2011, will be better than the last. Is this naïveté or foolishness? Perhaps. But I believe that God calls each of us to this foolishness; God calls us to hope and to dream, regardless of circumstance or present condition. In fact, this very act of dreaming and redreaming how our lives and how our world should look is a consistent biblical thread.

We see this redreaming in our biblical texts today from Jeremiah and from Ephesians. Jeremiah prophesied to Israel when it was in exile in Babylon, a bleak and bitter time in Israelite history. The Israelites spent sixty years in Babylon, and one would have forgiven them for giving up hope and becoming resigned to their situation. Instead, we see the exact opposite. The Babylonian exile began one of the most fertile periods of Israelite writing, as numerous prophets and poetic works were recorded telling of Israel’s impending rise. Jeremiah, Isaiah’s Servant Songs, Ezekiel’s Valley of the Dry Bones, Lamentations, and many psalms all came out of a period in Israelite history when the people had little reason to hope. And yet our Jeremiah passage today begins with the words “Sing aloud with gladness!” Jeremiah paints a picture in which the scattered people of Israel will return and gather together before the Lord and the Lord will redeem them. He is foolish enough to say to a battered and exhausted people, “God will turn your mourning into joy; God will comfort you, and give you gladness instead of sorrow.” He is foolish enough to dream a new future for himself and his world.

Our Ephesians passage comes from a letter written by Paul or one of his followers to a small church in Ephesus during the second half of the first century. While this was not the worst period for the persecution of Christianity, life was certainly not comfortable for the early Christians by any means. Despite this context, the author is foolish enough to claim that Christ’s dying and rising give us “spiritual blessings” and “forgiveness before God.” “All things will be gathered in him” and “we will have redemption in his blood.” What this author is doing is dreaming, or truly redreaming, how we are to relate with God and this world. The foolishness of this vision is that we should be foolish—foolish enough to believe that we have been given spiritual gifts and have been redeemed by God.

But what does it mean to be redeemed? This idea of redemption is at the heart of both the Jeremiah and Ephesians passages, and I believe that redemption is at the heart of our new year’s resolutions. Redemption can be defined as a compensation for the faults or bad aspects of something. This definition can be seen rather clearly in our new year’s resolutions. We want to improve ourselves and our lives because we all feel as though we have somehow fallen short of all of our potential. We want to redeem ourselves and become the idealized visions that we hold of who we could be. But are we truly capable of redeeming ourselves? According to the Jeremiah and Ephesians passages today, the work of redeeming begins with God and with God’s vision. This vision is not one that is blind to circumstance; rather it calls us to recognize our circumstance and proclaim that God has something far greater in mind. For Jeremiah’s community, a community living in exile without hope, God’s vision and dream was a rebuilt society. For the community in Ephesus, a community connected with other Jesus followers through letters, God’s vision and dream was a unity and gathering together of God’s people. These visions and dreams seemed like foolishness in the time they were uttered, much like we may cynically dismiss bold dreams of peace or eradicating world hunger, but they contain God’s awesome potential to transform any circumstance or person for the better.

It is instructive, perhaps, to look at the life of Paul, the purported author of our Ephesians passage. Many of you may remember that Paul was once called Saul and was actively involved in persecuting the early Christian church. The book of Acts records stories of Saul overseeing the stoning of Stephen and arresting Jesus followers around Jerusalem. However, while he was on the road to Damascus to arrest other Jesus followers there, he was overtaken by a bright light and a voice asking him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Intriguingly, Saul was blinded by this experience, and it was not until he spoke with Ananias, a Christian in Damascus, that he regained his sight. In this encounter, Saul’s vision of the world changed: his passionate persecution of early Christians became a passionate conviction that God through Christ was ready to gather and forgive all. Once a perpetrator of violence, Paul was transformed by Christ’s vision of a united world under a love for God and neighbor. This re-visioning, this foolish redreaming, changed Paul’s life and the world.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes that the message about the cross—that we have new life in Christ—is foolishness to the world. This idea that we can become different people from who we were, that we can have a new life in Christ, seems like utter foolishness to those of us who have grown used to broken new year’s resolutions and a broken world. Ben Fountain’s decision to leave his law firm and begin a new life as a writer seemed foolish to everyone around him, including himself. Saul’s conversion from a Christian persecutor to a Christian preacher, marked by his name change to Paul, sounded foolish to those who heard it. And yet as we saw in our passages this morning, God calls us to believe that which is foolish—that we are a redeemed people through Christ and that we are called to redream who we can be and what the world around us can be according to God’s vision.

In many ways, this is core to our beliefs as Presbyterian Christians. One of the earliest mottos of the early Reformers was the phrase “The Reformed church, and always to be reforming according to the Word of God.” What I believe this phrase to mean at its core is that God is constantly calling us as the church to re-vision, to redream, who we are and how we intersect with the world. This should not be construed as necessitating change; rather this motto instructs us that God never stops inspiring us to do new things and to believe things can be different.

This instinct that we have at the beginning of this new year to do just that, to do new things and to believe things can be different, is core to who we are as Christians. It takes a certain amount of naïveté and a certain degree of foolishness, but we believe that we have been redeemed by Christ and we are each called to redream our world according to Christ’s vision. We have experienced many of these dreams falling short: peace has not reigned on earth, the high have not been set low and the low lifted up, there is still mourning in the place of joy, and we have not treated our neighbor as ourselves. Despite seeing these dreams fall short, we are continually called to redream them—to call them into being through our continued hope and optimism.

This is put in a beautiful way by a prayer that comes out of the Franciscan community, a Catholic monastic order dedicated to serving the poor and homeless according to Christ’s vision for the church. This prayer lifts up the need for foolishness in our world, the boldness of hope, and a belief that things will be better. The prayer reads, “May God bless you with enough foolishness in order to believe that you can make a difference in the world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done”. As we redream who we are at the start of this wide-open year, I hope that we are foolish enough to think that we can make a difference in this world. I hope that we are foolish enough to believe in Christ’s vision for this earth. Finally, I hope that we are malleable enough to be shaped by Christ’s vision—to act on it, to achieve it. In 2011, let us believe that we can make a difference in this world, and let us do what others claim cannot be done, guided by Christ’s vision. Amen.