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Message from Pastor Peter Marty

Wired to dream

By Pastor Peter Marty

These are the weeks when wild-eyed graduates around the country sit in stuffy gymnasiums, or under the great big sun, waiting for the announcement to switch the tassel on their skullcap from one side to the other. Some are surprised. Some are honored. A few are bored. All are hopelessly hot. The nifty, polyester rent-a-gowns were never meant to breathe. The odd-looking mortarboard hats were never meant to be practical (though more than a few jobless graduates this year might reuse theirs as that bricklayer’s tool from which to slop mortar).

As graduates angle to make sense of what the commencement speaker really means behind his many admonitions, her oft-repeated platitudes, and those sometimes shallow jokes, there is one word they will not miss. It is the encouragement to DREAM! Some wisp of Robert Kennedy’s idea still manages to creep into nearly every commencement address. “You must have a dream and dare to follow it… Some look at the world and ask ‘Why?’ I dream of a world that isn’t yet and ask, ‘Why not?’”

I actually think graduates sit up when they hear this sort of idea. Today’s generation went straight from breast milk to computer keyboard. Along the way, they never heard their computer do justice, love kindness, or walk humbly with God. They certainly never witnessed their hard drive being able to dream. So yes, they are all ears when it comes to someone prompting them to imagine a world that hasn’t yet come entirely to be. The last person they want to become is that guy in the New Yorker cartoon, standing street-side as a vendor beneath his umbrella on his hotdog cart — no customers — with the sign on the front of the cart reading: All of my hopes and dreams, crushed, served on a bun… with mustard.

Graduates today are wired to dream, and well they should be. We all are. Ever since federally-funded brain research in the early 1990s catapulted dream studies to the foreground, neurologists have been reminding us that all warm-blooded mammals (including those in chic black robes with mortarboards and tassels) dream each and every night, in different measure.

We should not be afraid of dreams. They are often the access point for God to make an inroad on our all-too-settled worlds. The Bible is full of dream encounters, perhaps the best-known involve events close to the birth of Jesus. First, the magi head home by an alternate route, having been warned in a dream to avoid King Herod’s wrath. Then, an angel of the Lord pops into a dream of Joseph and demands that he haul the Christ child and mother Mary off to Egypt for safety. Finally, when Herod is dead and the threat of murder has passed, the angel reappears to Joseph in another dream and says, “Go home.” This all happens within a matter of seven verses.

Great dreams fund the imagination. They underwrite hope. They insist on a world that is often at odds with the one we see. What else made Martin Luther King Jr.‘s. 1963 speech on the National Mall so timeless, but its expectant quality. With nothing less than a holy intensity, King proposed that we be restless enough as a nation to imagine even a better way than the one we had previously crafted.

Whether or not you are on track to graduate this month, or have already been down that track, or have no interest in that track, do not forget to dream. You have been wired to dream. Dream of what it is that you really hope for in life — not the cheap wish or the crass want — but the full-throated hope that will make for a new world under your roof. Chances are better than good that God will keep getting involved to make it happen.

Pastor Peter Marty,

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