A Dream Deferred

This is a sermon I wrote and delivered almost two years ago to a class of other aspiring preachers.  Even though the application is specific to that group, I beleive the work can stand on its own.  I was blessed to come across this once again and I hope you too enjoy it. -Michael

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

            This poem, “Dream Deferred,” by Langston Hughes, is perhaps the accomplished poet’s most cherished work.  It can be found in nearly every American poetry anthology, it is taught on all levels of school, and it has continued to inspire people eighty years after it was born.  All of this accolade and endurance raises the simple question of “why?”  I believe that Hughes has captured the essence of what poetry is all about.  It pleads the hearer to simply enjoy its subtle beauty, to hear its cadence and meter, its rhythm and rhyme, to hear the words dance together, to see deep truths of one’s soul expressed in new colors and images, in heart wrenchingly new ways.  That first time you hear it, you may not even have the slightest clue what it means and yet it still teaches you, it still inspires you.  However, this poem is not enduring just because of mere surface-deep beauty, but rather it is layered like an onion, it holds a great depth underneath its initial attraction.  This is a poem that one is not easily bored with, not a puzzle that is easily solved.  It begs us to look a little closer, to hear it again and again. 

As we begin to mine it we begin to discover just how choice some of the poet’s word selections are, “sags,” “fester,” “raisin in the sun.”  These are just so imaginative; you can almost begin to taste the poem, to smell it, to hold it.  You also begin to notice subtle shifts in meter and rhyme.  The final line disrupts the rhyming pattern by pairing load with explode without an added line between them.  As you chew on this oddity, you see that it is intentional, that the ending is meant for abruptness, that it emphasizes the dramatic shift from dream to dynamite, “or does it explode?”  And at this discovery you cannot help but feel this poem, you know what its like to set ones dreams aside and to find them dead one day.  You step back and read the poem anew, and the beauty you once saw pails to the freshness that is now present. So you dig some more.  Perhaps you study Hughes’ life and the context that this poem was created in.  You find out he was an African-American during the Harlem Renaissance, you learn that he was a product of racism and segregation.  You start to see that Martin Luther King Jr. was not the first to dream of radical equality.  You understand that many of Hughes’ contemporaries abandoned their quest to accept their second-class citizenship and you can only imagine how this heart Hughes’ heart.  What does happen to a dream deferred?  And all of the sudden the poem is far heavier than you could have imagined.  The closer you look at the details, the clearer the whole picture becomes.  And the process continues because this is a poem with not only great breadth, but also great depth.  So, in turn, is the poetry of God.

 Line after line is filled with both awe and intrigue.  In many ways, each genre of the Bible holds a poetic quality, a beautifully simple message of love, of sin and redemption, yet it is dripping with a depth of richness unsearchable yet pleading to be searched.  This book is, perhaps over-simplisticly, an epic poem of a relationship between a God whose name is synonymous with love and His creation whose name is synonymous with dirt.  Yet beneath the surface there is a mine of immense wealth that many of us have sold all to explore.

  

In the midst of this epic poem we find the third chapter of Ephesians; A passage that speaks of the wealth of this story of relationship between Love and dirt.  Writing under the pen-name, Paul of Tarsus, God encourages and challenges His followers to search the unsearchable riches of His love.  Obedience to this paradoxal command is rewarded with being filled with the fullness of God.  If you are like me, at first you may not even now what that is, but it still teaches, it still inspires.  Our author who sees his mission as to bring news to the nations of the boundless riches of Christ prays this prayer in verse 14 through 21:

¹⁴For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, ¹⁶that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ¹⁷so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, ¹⁹and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. ²⁰Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, ²¹to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

This prayer found in the midst of a Greco-roman letter is without a doubt poetry.  The initial hearing produces a sense of wonder and an invite to explore.  While there is much to explore with this passage, I want us to narrow our focus on two verses, 18 and 19 and even more narrowly two words, breadth and depth. 

Here Paul is asking us to do the impossible- to comprehend the incomprehendable, to search the unsearchable, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge.  And in this we will be filled with fullness of God!  While many would look at such a plea as futile, some of us possess a flare for the unknown, a trace of an adventurer’s spirit left over from second grade that has a heart for the hopeless cause.  Paul appeals to that spirit and is compelled that his brothers and sisters throw logic to the wind and attempt the impossible.  Yet we must know that it is not impossible.  This is a prayer as it only could be.  Paul is not asking us to do the impossible but asking God to empower us to do the impossible, a word not found in his dictionary.  So in God’s hands, with the Spirit’s empowerment, how are we to start, where are we to begin this quest of lunacy?  Remember those two words, breadth and depth. 

Paul in a desperate plea, asks God for the power to enable each of us to explore the unknowable mystery of God.  Yet he asks us it to do it in a rather specific way.  While yes, you may argue that Paul is merely using poetic language to insinuate how we might know God’s love fully, the Spirit does not flippantly inspire.  We were given Breadth and Depth for a reason.  I believe that in each of these words we see aspects of how we can approach our understanding of God; we see our pilgrimage to knowing the unknowable.  Much like the enduring qualities of Hughes’ poem, the love God initially speaks to our hearts, effects us in ways we lack the vocabulary to express.  I believe that each and every one of us at some point has heard what they believe was the voice of God saying something along the lines of “I love you.”  And that message changed everything.  It became our dream.  Judging by your attendance here today, you like me have felt a call to explore the profoundness of that simple “I love you.”  We like Paul seek to tell the nations of the boundless riches of Christ’s love.  And through diligent (and sometimes not-so-diligent) study we have begun to learn how to express that initial moment of grace, that initial dream, words like atonement, election, propitiation, resurrection, and crucifixion.  Yet somewhere along the way, we have fallen so in love with the dig that you have forgotten why we ever began in the first place and then the infatuation with depth slowly fades, till the impossible again seems, well, impossible.  What does happen to a dream deferred?

We must remember that our quest involves not just the digestion of the depth but must be balanced with an appreciation of the breadth.  That reality is intrinsic in Paul’s prayer, the two go hand-in-hand.  (read the text again)  This is not an either-or statement, you cannot have one without the other.  Yet what does that really mean- the breadth of God’s love? I believe that in a way it is the largeness of His mercy, it is an observation that leaves us speechless, that can only be described as awe and wonder.  Our God is an awesome God indeed, and in those moments of revelation where we stop learning merely about God but actually experience Him, those are the moments where we explore the breadth of His love.  I believe that these moments of God’s presence provide the fuel that keeps us digging in the libraries and the classrooms, that keeps us laboring in the pulpit and conversely the depth acquired there gives a greater sense of God’s grandeur.  In a sense the dream drives the mission and vice versa.

Travel with me, if you will, perhaps close your eyes and imagine or remember the most brilliant night sky you can picture.  It is filled with glory, countless stars more than your eyes can hope to take in.  Your breath is stifled, you neck is hurting as you crane it back in hopes to take in perhaps just a little more.  You are simply stunned at its sheer vastness.  Yet as you continue to stare you begin to notice something, your eyes are adjusting to the light and detail that was previously hidden begins to appear and it becomes all the more grand.  As you continue to gaze, you focus in on perhaps one particular star and you imagination takes over.  This star is a hundred times bigger than the sun surrounded by other stars each with there own planet system each with their own story, there own history, own wars, own rulers, their own dreams, and their own missions or maybe even a system of life unlike anything our imaginations could possibly construct; each one a syllable in the epic poem of the universe, each one a thread in the tapestry of the heavens.  After being lost in you fantasies you remember reading somewhere that there are approximately 70 sextillion stars.  You do not even know what that means, but it still teaches, it still inspires.  You know it is a lot and that this twinkling little star up above the world tonight which you have wondered what it is, is just one of those 70 sextillion stars each with their own name, their own epic story and you are swept back again to you initial reaction; this is indeed a vast universe.  The closer you look the more you see.  The deeper you search the wider the mine. As I stated early, we too have looked on the night sky of God’s love and feel in love, prompting our current mission.  We must remember our dream, that intial moment of Grace and realize that is still there more pungent than when we first began. C.S. Lewis’ sums up eternity in the Last Battle, as a constant journey further up and further in.  Oh how boundless are the riches of God in Christ!  May we know the unknowable love of Christ!

Paul points out in verse 19 that the result of a balanced approach is to be filled with the fullness of God.  This is the goal of our endeavors. I cannot escape the haunting reality that when we deny either the searching of breadth or of depth we deny the fullness of who we are in Christ. We deny our dream.  Yet that is precisely what so many of us have done in the effort to acquire knowledge.  Yet, knowledge without awe and without wonder and without mystery is really no knowledge at all. We have all the answers to all the questions except the most important one.  The depth that we experience often causes us to forget why we ever began.  What does happen to a dream deferred? We forget the cosmic tapestry that we are a part of because we focus so much on the individual thread that we can never know where it is going, where we are going, till we stop diving so deep for a moment and just look around and realize that God is the Grand Weaver, that this is all His, all of this is His masterpiece, His epic poem, His tapestry, His love.  Then and only then can we face the difficulties of following Christ.  How can we stand without the power of the Spirit reminding us of the broad statement of God’s character, which can be summed up in three words, “I love you.”  How are we to continue a mission that has no purpose? 

Perhaps you know what it is like to have all the answers and get completely stumped by something so simple, I know I have.  I have seen an eight year-old boy lose his dad to suicide and as I prepared to preach to funeral, I felt like giving up.  But I heard God say, “I love him, do not give up.”  I have seen my own father abuse alcohol and his very life, and yet I hear my God say, “I love him, do not give up.”  I have bared my heart and soul before congregations, proclaiming the very words of life, the great truths of all creation only to find them yawn, and snore, and ignore, and walk out and I wonder why I ever answered that call to preach and I hear my God say, “I love them, do not give up.”  And then I wonder why I ever doubted my call.  I have looked in the mirror and saw nothing but filth, fed up with myself, unable to believe that I had indeed done the very thing that I swore never to do again and you know what I hear, I hear my God say, “I love you, do not give up.”  And so I look to you and I wonder, what do you hear?