But a Dream

Propers: All Saints Sunday (Hallowmas), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here / While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream.

What if it is all a dream? What if this troubled reality that you and I shape and share together is but the shadow of a fuller, greater life—which we can now just barely glimpse, as through a glass darkly—but to which one day we shall all awake, refreshed, renewed, reborn, resurrected?

There are many accounts in the Bible of how God creates and sustains our world. In some He simply speaks the cosmos into being: “Let there be light!” And there is light. In others He cultivates Creation as a gardener, shapes humankind like a potter. In still others He is the grand architect of the universe, digging out foundations, measuring by the plumb, declaring boundaries and borderlands. And of course, in the final assessment, God is the sacrificial Lamb, standing as though slain, whose blood pours forever forth to nourish everyone and everything in all of Creation for all of eternity.

Different metaphors, mind you, different images, yet all with the same basic premise: that God is the Creator and the Father of us all, not just at the beginning of time but in every moment, every heartbeat, every breath, from here to eternity. He calls us forth from nothing—which is to say, He calls us forth from nothing but Himself. We are born of God, sustained in God, and return to God. For indeed, says St Paul, “in Him we live and move and have our being.”

One Creation story you might not have heard before comes to us from India—where indeed there have been Christians since the time of the Apostles. In this story, God is known as Vishnu, which means the All-Pervading One. And God dreams all the universes, every possible world, into being. We are born of the mind of God and we live in the mind of God. It’s all rather Platonic, really. And what I like about this story, this metaphor, is that it fits things together so nicely.

Classically, we believe that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent: that is, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and everywhere. And if God is a dreamer, then all these understandings of Him dovetail into a whole. He is all-powerful, for instance, not simply in that He can do anything, but that He makes everything possible: His is the power that imparts all powers, the Dreamer from whom all the dreams derive their every possibility and potency.

God is all-knowing, because He is the one dreaming the dream. If He doesn’t know it, it doesn’t exist; it’s not part of the dream. He is everywhere present because the entirety of the dreaming, the entirety of all realities, is going on inside of Him. And He is all-loving, all-good, because He is in every moment dreaming us, in every moment giving to us His very Being, and that’s what love is: giving of yourself for the good of another. And God gives us all good, because He gives us all life: He gives us Himself. We are all known and loved and empowered in God.

But there’s more to this metaphor, because sometimes we dream ourselves into our own dreams, don’t we? We don’t just observe what’s going on, but we participate; we become characters in the worlds in our heads. Thus, sometimes, we are both the dreamer and the dream, both the creator and the creature. And that should sound familiar because that’s who Jesus is for us. He is the Creator as part of Creation, the Author entering the story, the Dreamer dreaming up Himself. And so God is both the transcendent Creator beyond us and the loving Savior beside us—as well as the life within us, the Spirit and Breath who sustains us.

Thus we have Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit, One God—dreaming His saints into being.

Now, like I said, that’s a story; it’s a metaphor. But I think it a helpful one. And it’s helpful also to think of what happens after the dream ends, once we all wake up. When you do wake up, the characters in your dreams don’t merely vanish. They become a part of you. You can, in fact, see them more clearly, see them for what they truly are, when you wake up and remember and reflect upon your dreams. There’s a reason, after all, why psychoanalysts look for truth in our dreams.

When you wake up, you come out from your dreams to find a fuller and a deeper reality. What if death is like that? What if we wake from this life unto a greater truth?

Christian tradition speaks of the four final things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. And what are any of those if not truth? What are any of those but the light of mercy and justice shown upon the fullness of a life then taken to final perfection? St Paul again: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His likeness from glory unto glory.”

See, our culture doesn’t really know just what to do with death. We spend our whole lives either in fear of it or denying it. We tuck our elderly away in homes, out of sight, out of mind. We outsource the preparation of our loved ones for burial. We worship youth and hope to keep mortality at bay with exercise and low-carb diets and hair dyes and virility pills. Surely, surely, we think, there must be something we can buy with which to bribe the Reaper. Yet death remains implacable.

Christians, however, do not believe that death is really real. Death is not a thing; it has no substance of its own. As darkness is the lack of light and cold the lack of heat, so death is simply emptiness, the lack of love and life. And that was never part of the plan. God didn’t make death. Indeed, He swallows it up! Christ has come to conquer death, not with fire or sword, not by wrestling the Reaper as Heracles tried, but by filling hell to bursting with the life and light and love of God, the Spirit and the Blood of God. And so death and hell are overthrown!

In Jesus, the very thing which appears to the world to be the end of all is now in fact our gateway, our doorway, to everlasting life. And it doesn’t mean we’re overeager here to reach the end. We want to dream this dream all through, with the people whom we love. But we go to a greater Kingdom, a greater Truth, a greater Love. When this troubled dream is over, we shall wake in Jesus Christ, to rise anew in Him.

And all the things we think so real—our possessions and positions, our houses and our health—all of that will pass away, evaporating like shadows before the dawn. And all that shall remain will be the love we shared, the hope we lived, and the One who dreamt us all. We are made of the stuff of God, the Imago Dei; made one in His Body, one in His Blood, one in the Spirit of Jesus the Christ.

Thus, my friends, we cannot die, for death for us has passed away. There was never really any “there” there to begin with. To be clear, I’m not saying that we’re immortal simply in and of ourselves, because clearly we aren’t—not any more than a dream can exist independent from its dreamer. But we are made immortal by the promise of our Lord, by the love of Jesus Christ. For if we all are one in Him, then we are one in God. And we shall awake as His saints.

You know, throughout the folklore of this world, one encounters the notion of the divine double, the doppelganger. It’s this idea that we all have a heavenly twin who accompanies us throughout this life, be it a faerie or an angel or what-have-you. But what if this twin is you, the real you, the saint whom you were meant to be? Think about it: If Heaven is eternity in God—and eternity isn’t just a long time but a state truly beyond time, beyond before and after—then mustn’t you be there already?

If indeed Jesus has saved you, as He promises that He has, then you, O sainted sinner, must in some sense always already have been there with Him in Heaven. “For you have died,” writes St Paul, “and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” Maybe that’s the real you, up there with Jesus in Heaven, already saved, already perfect, already happy, surrounded by everyone you’ve ever loved or ever will, every dog you’ve ever lost, every parent you had to bury. All of them alive, all of them awake.

Maybe that’s where we really are, and all this—this is but a dream. And we will wake up, arisen, resurrected, reunited, all eternal in the Heavens. And we will laugh and we will cry and we will embrace and live forever in His joy, forever as His saints.

Won’t that be something? Someday. When all of us awake.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.