Dream Dreams

Easter Sunday; Yr. A, April 20, 2014

Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18

Sermon preached at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

            In May 1999 I got a call late at night.  It was my father telling us to come home.  My mother was dying of pneumonia.  We made plane reservations and left early the next morning.  When I got there, she was alert and comfortable.  My family gathered in her room.  We told jokes and stories, and she laughed with us all afternoon.  Those who had been up all night with her went home to sleep.  Nancy, my younger sister and her husband and I stayed the next night with her.  She declined over the next 24 hours, and died early the following evening.  She was the first person I ever saw die. 

            I don’t know what I expected to see, but I expected something.  I was a faithful Christian. I believed in life after death.  I believed in the resurrection.  I believed that God was there in that moment when we pass from this world to the next.  I expected to see something.  What I saw was the life draining out of someone I dearly loved.  I saw her chest stop moving up and down in its rhythmic path.  I saw her skin pale, and the light go out of her eyes.  I saw time stop.  I stood there transfixed … waiting … wanting … yearning for something that I didn’t have words to express.  I wanted to see some sign of God’s presence, some hint of God’s existence in the end.  But there was nothing but absence.

            About three years after my mother died, I had a dream.  I found my mother living in a little room in the back of a small cafe in Ohio.  She had a limp, but she could walk, something she couldn’t do when she was alive.  She spoke to me and told me that she was fine, that the women at the café had helped her heal.  Indeed, when I spoke to them, they agreed that my mother had been a mess when she had arrived, but she was better now.  Having found her, I was anxious to bring her home with me, but she wouldn’t come.  I asked my father to talk to her, to make her understand how much we missed her, but he declined.  He gave her a kiss and said that she belonged in the café, with the women, and she would be just fine now.  So we left my mother in that little café in Ohio.

            When I woke from that dream I felt such peace and assurance.  I woke Nancy up, and told her that now I knew where my mother had gone.  She was living in a small café in Ohio with two women who took very good care of her, and she was fine.  Actually better than fine.  She was whole, as whole as she could be given the wounds of her life. 

            Dreams are funny things.  They are sometimes openings into the thin spaces between the secular and the divine.  In the passage we heard from Acts today, we hear the result of other visions and dreams.  Cornelius had a dream.  In it, angels told him to send messengers to Joppa to bring back a man named Peter.  About the same time, Peter had a vision that revealed to him that all animals, even those that were considered unclean, were fit to eat.   An angel told him that three men were coming to look for him, and he should go with them to the house of a Gentile, something before the dream he would never have done.  That vision revealed to Peter that all people are acceptable to God; whether Jew or Gentile, anyone who fears God and does what is right is made “clean” through faith.  Everyone.

            I used to think that dreams and visions were made up, just works of our own imagination, things that went on inside our heads … human creations that had more to do with us than with God.  But when you think about it, how else is God to communicate with us except through us?  All God has to use are the tools we have been given to receive him.  As Professor Dumbledore told Harry Potter when Harry was near death, “Of course this is in your head, Harry, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”  So when I hear this story of Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ tomb, and I hear the longing and the anguish in her words, I remember my mother’s death and that dream about her.  I remember Peter and Cornelius and their dreams and the truths they discovered. 

            Mary saw that the tomb was no longer sealed and she ran in fear to tell the men that Jesus’ body had been stolen from its resting place.  Jesus was gone, to where she did not know.  The men ran and saw that indeed, the tomb was empty.  But Mary remained, weeping … longing, yearning for the one she had loved and lost.  Looking in the tomb, she saw two angels and they spoke to her.  “Woman, why are you weeping?”  “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”  Turning around, she saw the gardener.  He also asks,  “Woman, why are you weeping?”  You can imagine her almost pleading with the him as she says, “if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.”  She is seeking Jesus, but can’t see him even though he stands right in front of her eyes.  Only when he calls her name does she recognize him as the one she is seeking.  Only then does she see the truth.  A familiar voice, one of friend and teacher, that calls out to her in unmistakable love.  God is doing something new and wonderful in this encounter.  Jesus is telling Mary, and each of us, that we have the capacity to enter into a relationship with the risen Christ, a relationship that has the potential to change us for the good and call us into action.

            Even if we feel frustrated and doubtful and faithless when God feels distant, we can take comfort in the knowledge that if we are yearning for God … we will find God.  God is standing right there with us, calling our names … waiting patiently for us to turn around and see.  As fervently as we are seeking, God is wanting to be revealed, hoping to be recognized in the ordinary people and events of our day … making Easter a miracle that can happen in any moment simply by turning and seeing who is standing next to us, recognizing who is calling our name.  

            C.S. Lewis said that once he became a Christian there were no more coincidences.  Instead he found grace at every turn.  He started to see miracles happening all around him.  The miracle of wounds healed, of pain comforted, of loneliness finding companionship, of loss endured, of anxiety calmed.  Easter miracles, every one of them, in a world filled with way too much pain and suffering.  We are being called by the risen Christ into relationships that foster healing and forgiveness.  These are Easter moments, resurrection possibilities, evidence of God’s love in the world. 

            On this happy morning, we are each called by name, and invited into God’s construction company, to become builders of God’s kingdom on earth and to know the risen Lord alive in us.  We are asked to dream dreams, and see visions, of a world that can be made new, just as Jesus is made new for us.  So grab your tambourines and join the merrymaking.  Welcome this happy morning.  Ring your bells, for Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

Amen.