"Dreams"
Using our God-given gifts for God's purposes
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Text: Genesis 40
It was February 4, 1913, when the eldest child of Leona and James McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. Now, the parents were rather well educated. Even though they were farmers, the father was a carpenter and the mother was the local school teacher. This eldest child of the McCauleys attended Miss White's School for Girls. Upon graduating from that school, she went to a secondary school, the Atlanta Teachers' College School in Montgomery. Unfortunately, this shy, modest and soft-spoken girl did not graduate immediately from high school, because her grandmother was ill, and she spent her days caring for her prior to her death.
Not to be deterred, however, this child of the McCauleys decided to go back to school, and at the age of 21 graduated, received her diploma and embarked on her life. Many years later, on December 1, 1955, this shy, soft-spoken daughter of the McCauleys from Tuskegee was be sitting on a bus in Montgomery, when she was asked to move by a white man because all the white seats were filled, and she was on the edge, the delineating line between where whites and where blacks could sit, at the back of the bus.
The bus driver asked her to move, which was her obligation, and the daughter of the McCauleys refused. She refused. In one act, in one moment of defiance, this gentle woman was to overthrow all the Jim Crow laws that had been established as the foundation of racial segregation in the southern United States. By one act of defiance, by remaining seated when being told to stand, this one singular individual changed the course of history. This woman was, of course, Rosa Parks. As Jesse Jackson, in an interview with The New York Times this week, said paradoxically, “By one woman's defiance and arrest, the long road to freedom began.”
Now, I want you to tuck that away for a moment, for I will revisit the story of Rosa Parks a little later on. For now, I want us to go back not 50 years, but 4,000 years, to the story from this morning's passage. The story of Joseph is the story of someone else arrested and sent to prison and that experience actually ended up causing a complete and total change in world and religious history.
The story is very simple. The Hebrew Joseph became the slave of the Egyptian Potiphar, because his jealous brothers found a dream he had distasteful. So he found himself in an Egyptian prison with two men who clearly had insulted the Pharaoh, although we know not why or how. One of them was the Pharaoh's cook, which really makes you wonder what kind of food he served to get thrown in prison (and causes me to think back on my grandmother who I mentioned in last week's sermon, and whether she should have been arrested - but that is another story!) The other was the cup bearer, the butler. These two men were not of lowly estate; they were both famous, well known in the court; they were the heads of their respective departments. However, both of them had dreams, and not knowing who to turn to, and having no professional interpreter of dreams to help them in their dismay, they turned to this Hebrew called Joseph, and asked him to interpret their dreams.
Joseph said something very powerful to them: “Do you not know that it is God alone who is the interpreter?” In other words, he didn't have a specific skill, save that which he was given by God to use. Still, they wanted to hear what he had to say. He prophesied, and the prophecy came true: One would be beheaded and die; the other one would live, and return to serve in the court of Pharaoh. However, there is a telling moment, when Joseph said to the one to be saved, the cup bearer, “Will you tell Pharaoh about this dream? I want you to make sure that you tell him about me in order that I might be saved and taken out of this mess that I find myself in.”
And so we have an interpretation of a dream. And dreams, throughout the Bible, weave their way through almost like a string that ties the Scriptures together. In Joseph's story alone, where his very first dream leads him into trouble, he interprets two more dreams in prison and, later interprets yet another, that makes his fortune. They all have meaning and they all have power.
The great apocalyptic writer, Daniel, also experienced dreams and also gave an interpretation of liberation that changed the history of the people of Israel. So, too, in our text from the Gospel of Matthew, Mary and Joseph have a dream. It is that very dream that saves them from lingering within reach of King Herod and seeing their child destroyed; they were able to go to Egypt and find freedom instead. Such was the power of dreams. Even St. Augustine in his magnificent work, Genesis ad Literum, where he interprets the Book of Genesis, says there is a place for dreams. There is a place for the unconscious and the conscious as sources of revelation.
In Morton Kelsey's recent God, Dreams and Revelation, he says there is an equal place for dreams and conscious experience. All this is borrowed from the writings of Jung and Freud, who both believed that dreams should be interpreted, because more often than not, these dreams represent repressed ideas and thoughts, rather than divine inspiration or instruction.
The point I want to make is that dreams are important: They are not to be dismissed, and they are not to be rejected. God can use them, but (and there is a big but), there is a profound word of caution here. The word of caution is given by Jeremiah: Sometimes dreams can be used by God for good and sometimes they can be used for evil. Sometimes, the hidden unconscious level of our minds can lead us to do things and go in directions that have no godly purpose at all. We must be careful then not to make dreams more important than they really are.
This was particularly important in biblical times. The Egyptians had a tradition of professional dream interpreters that reached its peak during the powerful 19th Dynasty. They told people what they should think, and how they should interpret their dreams, and who thus manipulated the people. Now, Joseph's point in all of this was that it was not he who interpreted the dream, it was God. He was not to be elevated, because he was given a gift. More importantly, undergirding our whole understanding of dreams and of special manifestations of the Spirit's power is faith. It is the conscious knowledge of God and how God has revealed himself through the Scriptures, in Christ, in time, and in history. For Joseph, the dream, and the interpretation of the dream was not the important thing, it was the faith that God could use him for his divine purpose.
So, on this Reformation Sunday, I want us to look at dreams and the providence of God. I do so because Joseph was very, very clear: His dreams and his gifts were for a singular purpose and reason. In the history of Israel, the moment at which Joseph entered Egypt became a turning point, a singular moment. It was the foundation of what was to be God's covenant with the tribes of Israel. It was the bringing of the tribes together in order that they might eventually leave Egypt and find the Promised Land and fulfill God's ultimate destiny for them. Joseph, then, and his interpretation of dreams were used for a divine and a godly purpose and plan, not for the aggrandizement of Joseph, not for his profit, but that God's ultimate plan and victory might be achieved.
This, my friends, tells me a great deal about the nature and the purpose of gifts we are given. Whatever spiritual gift we are given, whether it is, as in Joseph's case, the ability to interpret dreams, or whether it is to prophesy, whether it is to have special knowledge, whether it is to have the faith that moves mountains, whether it is the ability to interpret tongues, whether it is the gift of healing, whether it is the power of great speech, whether they are quiet gifts that happen without anyone knowing, or public gifts for the whole of the community of God see, all these gifts are for a greater purpose.
Even the dreams that we have, even the visions we have of godliness or goodness or of the coming of the kingdom, even these dreams are secondary to God's ultimate plan of salvation. That it why the great reformer, John Calvin, in writing on this text from the Book of Genesis, said the following:
This must be noted, in order that no one may undesignedly usurp more to himself than he knows that God has granted him. For, on this account, Paul so diligently teaches that the gifts of the Spirit are variously distributed, and that God has assigned to each a certain post, in order that no one may act ambitiously, or intrude himself into another's office; but rather that each should keep himself within the bounds of his own calling.
Here is the recognition by Calvin that we are all given gifts of the Spirit. We are all baptized, we have all experienced the laying-on of hands, every one of us has a spiritual gift, but those spiritual gifts must be used ultimately for the greater good. This was explained to me in a wonderful illustration dating back to 1937, when Walt Disney created the first full-length animated motion picture. The story goes that he put together a million pictures, each frame lasting 1/24 of a second. When he put them all together, the story of Snow White was created. However, it was only when these frames were run together at full speed, that the movie was seen for what it was.
Well, my friends, you and I are like those 1/24-of-a-second pictures. In and of themselves, individually, they don't tell the story, but by virtue of God's provision and power, they come together in God's mind, and only then does the story unfold. So it is with Joseph: When he was interpreting the dreams of the cup bearer and the baker he did not know what was going to happen, but he did know that the gift he was given was for God's purpose, and only God could give it, and only God could use it. That is why I love the Apostle Paul's argument in the Book of Romans: “All things work for good for those who love the Lord.” The kingdom works out its business. God unfolds in history and in time and in place his purpose. We have but a glimpse of it. We see only a fragment of it, but God unfolds the whole picture.
Now, I sometimes hear cynics say, “Oh, but this religious stuff about the gifts of the Spirit and the dreams, isn't it all basically designed to make people feel good? Aren't preachers only good when they make everyone feel happy and warm and cuddly inside, and go away feeling wonderful? Isn't religion a false balm poured on the soul of a troubled humanity to make it feel better?” The answer, my friends, is categorically “No!” Why? Because Joseph, even after he had interpreted these dreams, was not successful in getting the man who could help him to remember his name. Joseph, then, was not successful in his interpretations. God had given him a gift, but on a superficial level he had failed. Nevertheless, he persisted.
That, it seems to me, is the very power of faith: Whatever gift we have been given, whatever thing we have been assigned by the Almighty, it is our duty to be persistent. Look farther along on the story of Joseph; it is fascinating to read the next chapter. In Chapter 41, you will see that Joseph was still willing, even after he had been forgotten, to prophesy and interpret the dream of Pharaoh, knowing that if he got the interpretation of Pharaoh's dream wrong, he would end up like the baker, beheaded. But he trusted in God. He trusted that God would give him a gift, and that gift, if it was used for God's purpose, would be there to protect him. What incredible courage, what incredible use of a gift that he'd been given, because he said that God alone interprets dreams.
On this Reformation Sunday, we sit in the hallowed tradition of men and women throughout the centuries who have trusted in God's word and God's word alone, who have committed their lives, their bodies, minds and souls to the truth of that word, many of whom were rejected by their home denominations, many of whom were belittled because they would not compromise their faith and their beliefs. Some were driven out of cities like Geneva, others were dismissed by their faith communities because they were willing to stand for the truth, or because they preached at the pitheads of mines and worked with the people on the street, bringing the word of God to outcasts. Those people believed and trusted, just like Joseph, that God was the source of their dreams; that God was the source of their spiritual gifts; and that God's word was their foundation.
The Rev. Peter Cartwright, a travelling Methodist in the United States in the 19th century was known for being rather outspoken. Once, at one church, he was told that President Andrew Jackson was going to be visiting that Sunday. The Board of Management was petrified, because they never knew what Cartwright was going to say, so they took him to one side and they said, “Now look, Reverend, we want you to be very gentle and careful in what you say, because the President is coming and we don't want you to offend him. Do you understand?”
The Rev. Cartwright said “Fine, but I will do as the Lord leads me.” They rolled their eyes! Andrew Jackson came to the service, and in the middle of his sermon Cartwright said, “I understand that President Andrew Jackson is here in the church this morning. President Jackson, you will go to Hell if you don't repent first.” Everyone wanted to leave or to hide under the pews right there. At the end of the service, President Jackson walked down the aisle, just as you do here, to greet the minister at the door, and he went up to him and said these immortal words, “Sir, if I had a regiment of men like you, I could whip the world.” Courage! Courage!
Joseph, interpreting that dream, had courage. He had the strength of his convictions. He knew the source, and the source would not let him down. This brings me back to Rosa Parks. Singularly missing in all the newspaper articles about Rosa this week has been one, salient fact, that she was first and foremost a Christian believer. In her magnificent book, Quiet Strength, she wrote the following:
Every day before supper, and before we went to services on Sundays, my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick the cotton in the fields. Prayer and the Bible, they became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put trust in God and seek him as my strength.
Then she goes on to say:
Since I have always been a strong believer in God, I knew that he was with me, and that only he could get me through the next step once I decided to stay seated on the bus. I have learned over the years that knowing what must be done does away with fear. When I sat down on the bus that day, I had no idea history was being made. I was only thinking of getting home. But I had made up my mind, and after so many years of being the victim of the mistreatment my people suffered, not giving up my seat, and whatever I had to face afterwards, was not important. I did not feel any fear sitting there. I felt the Lord would give me the strength to endure whatever I had to face. It was time for someone to stand up, or in my case, sit down, and so, with God's help, I refused to move.
Hearing what Rosa Parks had done, the 26-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would later stand before his nation and say, “I have a dream.” That is the power of faith! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.