2024.11.24 | Dreaming God's Dream
Nov 24, 2024 Bulletin
“Dreaming God’s Dream”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Twenty-seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Reign of Christ),
November 24, 2024
Revelation 1:4b-8
Sometime in the early 1830s, an enslaved young woman named Araminta Ross suffered a horrific brain injury. She was about 12 or 13 at the time, and her enslaver had hired her out to another farm as a field hand. She had gone into the village with the enslaved cook of the estate to help her purchase some dry goods at the village store. As she stood outside waiting for the cook, a young boy being chased by an overseer ran toward her and dashed into the dry goods store. The overseer picked up a two-pound iron weight that was used for measuring dry goods and threw it at the boy, but instead, the full force of this iron weight hit Araminta in the head so hard that it shattered her skull and drove the fabric of the shawl she was wearing on her head into the wound where it stuck. Apparently, Araminta had stepped in front of the young boy to protect him.
She was carried back to the farm, but she had no bed to be laid in, and so they laid her on the bench of the loom in the weaving room. No one tended to her. And the next morning, she was expected to get up and work in the fields. Which she did. But she was unable to sustain any work. As one of her biographers said of her, “the injury [caused] her often to fall into a state of somnolency, from which it is almost impossible to rouse her. Disabled and sick, her flesh all wasted away, she was returned to her owner. He tried to sell her, but no one would buy her.” Instead, her mother was able to nurse her back to health.
She recovered, but she was never the same. For the rest of her life she suffered headaches and seizures, and she saw visions. She had always had vivid dreams, but now those dreams worked their way into the seizures that she had, and sometimes she had vivid visions without a seizure during the day. Today, medical professionals would say that Araminta probably had temporal lobe epilepsy, an affliction that’s common for people who have a brain injury such as hers. They would have called her visions hallucinations. But that’s not the way Araminta thought of them; she believed these dreams and visions came from God, and she believed that they showed her a truth and a way forward.
In her dreams, Araminta would see what she described as a line, “and on the other side of that line are green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful [ladies in white] who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn’t reach them… I always fell before I got to the line.” (1)
Some 10 years later, Araminta Ross took a husband, a freed man who lived near the estate where Araminta lived. To mark this new phase of her life, Aramenta decided to change her name. As her first name, she took her mother’s name, the only person who had loved her unconditionally, and tended her with as much loving care as is possible for an enslaved mother. For her last name, she took on her husband‘s name, desiring to leave behind the name given to her by her and slavers. You may not recognize the name Araminta Ross, but you do know what she is known for, and who she became: Harriet Tubman.
The girl and the young woman who became Harriet Tubman was beaten cruelly and denied humanity and dignity, but “[w]hat was never beaten out of her was an innate sense of liberty—the knowledge, self-evident to her, that God intended for her to be liberated from bondage, spiritually as well as literally. ‘God set the North Star in the heavens,” she said later [in her life]. “He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.” (2)
And God also gave to her a calling, hinted at in those visions: that she should not only free herself, but others as well. In the years that followed her escape around 1849, she returned to her homeland of Maryland many times to lead over seventy enslaved people to freedom. Later, she worked for the US Army as a spy and scout, and assisted in the freeing of over 700 enslaved people during the Civil War.
When Harriet Tubman made her first escape from her enslavement in Maryland, she described what it felt like to realize she had crossed the Mason-Dixon line after two weeks of grueling travel to freedom in Pennsylvania: “I looked at my hands … to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.” (3)
“Such a glory over everything” is how I imagine that John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation, saw the coming of Christ in the clouds from our text this morning. We do not know if, like Harriet Tubman, John suffered a debilitating brain injury that gave him his fantastic visions, but I would suggest that there are some other similarities his life had Harriet Tubman’s.
If you were here last week, you might remember one thing I said about interpreting apocalyptic literature– like the Book of Revelation– is that context is the key. We can’t understand or interpret apocalyptic literature without understanding the context, the social location, and the history of the people from which it comes.
And the time of Jesus and John of Patmos was filled with chaos. In an extremely hierarchical colonial empire, the folks who were not Roman military or aristocracy—and that was 90 percent of the population—lived in great poverty, under the oppressive boot of the Imperial occupation. John himself had been exiled to the island of Patmos for his preaching the Christian way of life to the people in what is now western Turkey. The strange imagery of Revelation was a coded language that would be strange to outsiders, but would be understood by John’s followers as a message of power and strength for a downtrodden people.
Similarly, Harriet Tubman and her people lived under the oppressive boot of the slave economy. Tubman had been beaten and undernourished all of her young life. She was taken from her mother at the age of six and hired out to various landowners throughout her childhood to work as a weaver, a nanny, a trapper, and a field hand at. She watched three of her sisters be sold to the far South. Her visions, and the messages sewn into quilts and embedded in spiritual songs were a coded language carrying a message of power and strength to a downtrodden people.
For both Harriet Tubman and John of Patmos, “the vision of Jesus coming in the clouds to claim his kingdom and the citizens of his reign is subversive to the empire and oppressing power. Jesus is the beginning and the end. Jesus is the one who is, was, and is to come. At no time does God relinquish God’s claim over God’s people, despite what despots say or do.” (4)
Today—this last Sunday before the beginning of Advent—is known as Christ the King or Reign of Christ Sunday. This isn’t an ancient feast day of the church; it’s a day that was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925, as a reaction to the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism in European politics of the time.
It sounds like a good idea: to assert the primacy of Jesus as Lord, rather than any human political regime. After all, isn’t that what the early Christians did? Isn’t that what John of Patmos was trying to reveal in his Book of Revelations? But it didn’t really work out very well for Europe, did it? Doing so didn’t stop the horror that was about to unfold across Europe in the thirties and forties.
As the church historian Diana Butler Bass puts it:
Whatever the Pope’s intentions behind the new feast, it neither elevated a Catholic political order nor protected the church from fascist authoritarianism. Less than a decade after the establishment of Christ the King, that same Pope came to an agreement with the Nazis, the Reichskonkordat — essentially opening the political door to Hitler.
Questions about God’s kingdom and its relationship to human governments are among the most contentious and difficult questions in the history of Christianity. Reasserting Christ as King over the politics of this world seems an appealing solution to some in our own times.
This is the path now pursued by Christian nationalists, those who seek to “reconstruct” Jesus’ lordship and extend God’s dominion through political movements in the United States and across Europe.
But Christians who reject Christian nationalism… — which is a heresy — can’t respond with the opposite solution — to further remove and isolate the compassionate and just Jesus from public life. We can’t ignore what is going on or give into the temptation of a merely “spiritual” kingdom. Boxing in the prophetic life of the church has never served the poor and the outcast well. (5)
So what are we to do?
One of the things that people often forget about the Book of Revelation is that it ends not with the imagery of battles and cataclysm, but with a renewed and restored earth:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. (6)
With this imagery, Revelation echoes the vision at the beginning of the Bible, with the Garden of Eden in Genesis:
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden. (7)
Just as John of Patmos and Harriet Tubman had a dream of a place of peace and justice and freedom, so too does God. And these visions from Genesis and Revelation hint at God’s dream for us and for creation: Earth restored. Humanity and creation living in peace and community. Nations healed and at peace. A place of abundance where everyone has enough and no one has too much. A garden watered and cared for and loved.
We too can dream God’s dream, and then work to make it come alive—just as Harriet Tubman did, and as Jesus did—by being grounded in the love of God. That’s the realm of Jesus. And that’s the realm of his followers. This realm, this kingdom—or as I like to say, this “kin-dom,” doesn’t come from authoritarianism, greed, violence, slavery, or oppression. It comes from God, the One who befriends the world, the One who creates and restores, the One who sustains with bread and wine, and the One who turns death to new life. Amen.
Tiya Miles, Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (New York: Penguin Press, 2024), 106
Casey Cep, “The Radical Faith of Harriet Tubman,” New Yorker, June 24, 2024 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/01/combee-edda-l-fields-black-night-flyer-tiya-miles-book-review> Accessed November 19, 2024.
Miles, 143.
T. Denise Anderson, “Audacious Visions: (Revelation 1:4b-8),” The Christian Century, November 22, 2024, <https://www.christiancentury.org/sunday-s-coming/roc-b-anderson> Accessed November 22, 2024.
Diana Butler Bass, “Sunday Musings: Kingdom Face-off?” The Cottage, November 23, 2024 <https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-eb6> Accessed November 23, 2024.
Revelation 22:1-3a (NRSVue).
Genesis 2:8-10a (NRSVue).