Shattered Dreams

Carmel Presbyterian Church Podcast

“I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be sped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a little while.” (Romans 15:24)

Richard Lischer, who teaches homiletics at Duke Divinity School, recently published a book he entitled The Preacher King, in which he explored the preaching style of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and particularly Dr. King’s influence on the Civil Rights movement.

In his book, Lischer relates an evening early in the Civil Rights Movement, when King and others were in Albany, Georgia, where they were engaged in voter registration. That night the Mount Olive Baptist Church had been burned to the ground, one of seven black churches that had been torched in Albany that week. On that evening, the group of ministers, volunteers, and other workers gathered for a prayer service in the charred remains of that sanctuary.

During the prayer service, a young woman who was one of the volunteers working with King led the prayers of the community. In that prayer she began by saying, “I have a dream.”, and spoke about her dreams for freedom and justice.

King was very moved by this young woman’s prayer. He began to reflect on the power of the dream in Biblical faith and in the African American Religion. King remembered the words of the prophet Joel, who wrote:

Your old men shall dream dreams, And your young men shall have visions.

Out of that experience King developed a speech he entitled “I have a dream,” that he began giving in 1961. That speech became a part of American history when King delivered it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in that remarkable summer of 1963, a speech that had its origins in Scripture, in the African American Church, and in the plaintive prayer of a young college girl in Albany, Georgia.

But as Lischer points out, that was not the only speech or sermon that Dr. King preached based on the image of the dream. Shortly before his death, King preached a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that King entitled “Shattered Dreams”. In this sermon he speaks of shattered dreams not only as the disappointments that individuals face or even of the shattered dreams of the black people of this country. In that sermon he drew a parallel between Gandhi and himself and spoke of Gandhi as one who was assassinated and died of a broken heart. “Life,” said King “is a continual story of shattered dreams.”

I.

This morning we read a portion of Scripture that occurs at the end of Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome. In all of Paul’s letters there is a pattern that is typical in Paul’s thought. He begins his letter with a greeting. (Romans 1: 1-15) Then he follows that with a long section (Romans 1: 16- 8:39) in which he deals with some of the most important aspects of the Christian faith: the notion of salvation by grace through faith, the results of that grace, and finally he deals with the issue of the fate of the Jewish people (Romans 9-11). Having spelled out the message of faith, Paul then turns to a series of ethical concerns relating to the Christian life. (Romans 12:1-15: 13) He concludes his letter with a series of personal notes and a benediction. (Romans 15: 14-16: 27)

This last section is where I want to focus our attention this morning. Here we get a glimpse into Paul’s personal life and his hopes for the future. In this section there are three places or locales that describe the entire life and ministry of Paul: Jerusalem, Rome, and Spain. His goal was to visit the church at Rome on his way to Spain. That is what he intended to do. But before he could visit Rome and Spain, he had one task to perform. He had to return to Jerusalem to deliver an offering he had received from the churches in Europe and Asia, to relieve the suffering in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, Rome, and Spain, that was Paul’s dream. He wanted to visit Rome because it was the capital of one of the greatest empires in human history. Rome was the center of the Western World. Spain represented something else. In the Great Commission that Matthew relates in his gospel, Jesus says to his disciples,

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. (Matthew 28: 18-20)

That was Paul’s great dream, to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. Spain represented the most western part of the known world. That was Paul’s dream. He wanted to take the gospel to the

“ends of the earth”.

II.

Now, of course all of us have dreams and dreams are essential to the lives of all of us. The writer of Proverbs states: “Where there is no vision the people perish,” and dreams are essential to the human endeavor.

My youngest daughter Lucy taught English for several years to high school students at St. Stephens/St. Agnes in Alexandria, Virginia. She was only a second year teacher when she was asked to give the convocation address to the whole school: students, faculty, trustees, and parents. She was very nervous about this and called me several times in her struggle to find the right words.

In her address she spoke of her dream to try to help students understand some of the great classics of Western and Contemporary literature: Homer, Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad, J.D. Salinger, and a host of others. In her address she spoke to the joy and challenge of trying to help young people understand some of these great classics of literature, realizing that for many of these young people, it was like teaching a foreign language. She spoke of trying to help a class of young people to understand Homer’s great classic The Odyssey and helping them understand how Ulysses could leave a paradise filled with beautiful young women and return to his aging wife in Ithaca. “Dad,” she said to me, “you ought to try to explain that to a group of ninth grade boys!”

She also spoke of trying to help a group of seniors in high school understand that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is just a young person like themselves, trying to figure out the world of adults, hating his step-father, angry at his mother, and haunted by the ghost of his father.

To be sure, our dreams propel us in life, and without them our lives are greatly diminished.

III.

But sometimes dreams get shattered. Sometimes the things we want the most elude us. Paul’s great dream was to go to Spain, to fulfill the Great Commission of Christ, and to take the gospel to the ends of the earth. But that dream was never realized.

As a minister, I have spent a great deal of my time with people who are living with shattered dreams. Sometimes it is a young couple who want to have children, only to see that dream slip away. At other times I see husbands and wives, once deeply in love, but now facing the terrible bitterness of divorce. I see people facing serious illnesses. I see people in jobs and vocations, who see the great promises of success and fulfillment slipping away like the morning fog.

Now, we do not know how Paul dealt with the disappointment of not going to Spain. It must have been a bitter disappointment. He had been through so much: shipwrecked, beaten, imprisoned, stoned by an angry mob. Yet Paul, like Moses, was not allowed to enter the Promised Land. The gospel reached Spain, but Paul was not the messenger. That dream of his, about which he speaks in the letter to the church at Rome, lay shattered.

So, what do we say this morning to one with a shattered dream?

For one thing, we often find God amidst our shattered dreams. In the Heidelberg Catechism, there is a remarkable section in which the question is asked, “What advantage comes from acknowledging God’s creation and providence?” to which this answer is given: We learn that we are to be patient in adversity, grateful in the midst of blessing, and to trust our faithful God and father for the future, assured that no creature can separate us from his love, since all creatures are completely in his hand and that without his will they cannot even move.” (Question 28 – The Heidelberg Catechism)

One of my favorite hymns is the hymn “Now Thank We All Our God”, written by Martin Rinkart. The first verse of the hymn is this:

“Now thank we all our God, with heart and hand and voices. Who wondrous things has done, in whom his world rejoices; Who from our mothers’ arms, hath blessed us on our way; With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.”

Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran pastor who served in his hometown of Ellensburg, Saxony, in the southern part of Germany during the time of his ordination in 1617 until his death in 1649. His pastorate spanned the Thirty Years War in Europe. That war was the context of his entire ministry, of all his preaching, teaching, and caring for people. The effects of that war were devastating. For instance, during the Thirty Years War the population of Germany fell from sixteen million people to six million people.

The City of Eilenburg was not spared from destruction. It was a walled city and in the year 1637 alone, as many as 8,000 died in that city. The other two ministers serving with Rinkart died and he alone was left to serve the city.

One year he conducted 4480 funerals, sometimes 50 a day.n This included the funeral of his wife. Martin Rinkart was a man who loved and cared for others, living his faith in the midst of great suffering. Here was a man who could thank God even in the midst of great agony and loss. Moreover, while it is true that we often find God in the midst of shattered dreams, it is also true that God finds us as well in those shattered dreams.

Several years ago I heard Dr. Thomas Currie, formerly the Dean of Union Seminary in Charlotte; speak to a group of ministers and laypersons about ministry today. Dr. Currie noted that for many young ministers (and older ones too), ministry can be an embarrassment. Sometimes when a young person tells a group of friends that he or she wants to be a minister, that person is sometimes met with a look of “Why would anyone in their right mind want to do that?” After all, the job is a bit vague, sometimes the pay is not so great, and no one really knows what ministers do.

But as Dr. Currie pointed out, if there is any embarrassment to ministry, it is an embarrassment of riches. It is not as if ministry is at times not frustrating. It is. But the great open secret is that all who minister enter into the ministry of Christ. And he is rich. And he gives lavishly. He is also at work long before any of us arrives on the scene. He gives to us also the most extraordinary gifts. People believe and trust the gospel. They come to church to worship and to work. That too is a miracle, that others walk with us, befriend us, support us, encourage us, and listen to us. More than that, Jesus give us work to do that matters. Even in the deepest, darkest, and most tender parts of their hearts, people invite us to enter to share unspeakable sorrows and celebrate unaccountable joys.

Ministers also follow Christ there, because he goes before us. For in those places, banking and business, law and politics, medicine and philosophy are of little use. There in the boat in the storm, there on the hillside where there is nothing to eat and thousands of hungry people looking to be fed, there where even our walk of faith finds us sinking into the sea; there he is with words that rebuke the wind and still the angry seas, that break the bread and feed the thousands, there he is with his own arms to hold on to us, there he even gets in the boat with us and brings us home.

Ministers sometimes complain that the work of ministry can be difficult, unfair and painful. But they also know, in truth, that it is a gift and we have received far more than we could have ever given. We know that Jesus is the good shepherd, who does not abandon his sheep or his poor shepherds. The life of ministry is, in truth, an embarrassment of riches.

And so, even in those moments when our dreams are shattered, there is one who does not abandon us, but calls us to life and eternal salvation.

Amen!

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