Pentecost 11
17 August 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
LEARNING TO DREAM LIKE JESUS
Joel 2.26-29. Ephesians 3:14-21
When the great preacher Fred Craddock was a little boy growing up in Appalachia, his father
took him out in their backyard one night, had him lie down on the grass, and look up at the sky.
Then he said to Fred, “Son, how far can you think?”
Fred said, “What?”
His father said, “Just look up toward the stars and think as far as you can think.”
So Fred said, “I focused my imagination up toward the stars, and I said, ‘I’m thinking . . . I’m thinking . . . I’m thinking.’”
His dad said, “Are you thinking as far as you can think?”
“I’m thinking as far as I can think,” Fred said.
“Okay, now, in your mind drive down a stake right there. Have you driven down your stake?”
“Yes sir.”
“That’s how far you can think?”
“Yes sir.”
Then his father asked, “Now, what’s on the other side of your stake?”
“Mmm, there’s more sky.”
His father said, “Well, move your stake.”
And they spent the evening moving his stake further and further, higher and higher.1
At the heart of biblical faith is a God who calls us to stretch ourselves beyond what we know, beyond what we have, beyond what we can see, beyond what we think we can do.
Paul’s prayer in Ephesians for God’s people is large. He prays that Christ will dwell in our hearts through faith, and that rooted and grounded in love, we will be filled with all the fullness of God. He prays that we would have the eyes to see and the power to comprehend and the faith to move our stakes into the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s great love. I don’t know about you, but that’s one of the tallest prayers I’ve ever heard. Paul says we serve a God who is able to accomplish far more than we could ever imagine.
All through scripture, God calls people to take risks and through the risk-takers God accomplishes amazing things. God called Noah to build a boat for the flood that was to come – and to do it while the sun was shining. God chose an elderly couple named Abram and Sarah to pack their bags and go where God would lead him to start a new nation through whom God would bless the world. God raised up a woman named Deborah to lead and serve as judge among God’s people. God selected a shepherd boy named David to be Israel’s greatest king. God invited an impoverished teenage girl named Mary to give birth to the Son of God. God called uneducated fisherman and crooked tax-collectors to drop everything and follow him, to be witnesses to the most important moments in human history. God sent his Spirit on the church, a community of Christ followers who would be always on the move, driven not by what they could see and know, but led by the Spirit of the living God, pouring the love of Christ into others, widening the tent of God’s welcome to all people, changing the lives of those around them.
It sometimes takes a great deal of faith and courage to be the people of God. In the days of the prophet Joel, centuries before the birth of Jesus, an inspiring word was given to a people who had endured hard times. When the time of blessing comes, the prophet Joel says, the Spirit of the living God will be poured out like nourishing rain upon the sons and daughters of God and they will proclaim what God is doing among them: The old will dream dreams and the young will see visions.
The words of the prophet Joel came to fruition at Pentecost. A few days before the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost, a small band of disciples had gathered to pray and wait for the wind of the Spirit to blow among them. They prayed and they waited, and the Spirit blew in a mighty way. The old indeed began to dream again. And the young had visions of what God could do among them.
God’s people have always needed dreams and visions. Paul prayed for the Ephesians to be filled with the love of God, and to glorify God in the church for generations – the God who can do abundantly far more than we could ever ask or imagine.
Here Paul links prayer with imagination, that often neglected gift of God. To follow Christ faithfully and boldly we need imaginations inspired by God and bathed in prayer.
Do you have dreams and visions of what God could do through us in this place? Not nostalgic visions of the past returning, but visionary dreams of what new thing God could do among us.
We tend to dismiss dreamers and visionaries. It often takes years, usually after their death, for others to see the wisdom of their words. Not only do we tend to dismiss dreamers and visionaries, but with our blind and cynical hearts we are also good at tearing down their dreams.
I once heard an old preacher say that when he got to heaven he only had one question for God. And it did not concern some heavy theological issue. He said his question would simply be: “God, why are there so many ‘but-folks’ in the church?” Why is it, he wanted to know, that when you try to dream God’s dream for the church, there’s always someone who will say, “That’s a great idea, BUT . . .” or “That sure would be nice, BUT . . .” They’re “but-folks.”
You know who he’s talking about, don’t you? We have likely all of us been “but-folks” at one time or another in the church or at work or with our children. Many of us have experienced the dreaming of new ministries, new possibilities, dreams that call for bold faith, and you can’t get the words out of your mouth before someone starts shaking their head. Instead of looking for ways it CAN be done, there are those who will give you several reasonable cynical explanations as to why it CANNOT be done. They’re “but-folks.”
U.S. General James Mattis said, “Cynicism is the perspective of the coward.” 56 years ago last month the first human beings walked on the moon! Do you know how many “but-folks” there were who said it could not be done?! But the bold dreamers and brilliant visionaries of NASA refused to listen to the “but-folks.”
Now when I say dreams, I’m not talking about daydreams based on wishful fantasy. That’s not what the Bible means when it talks about dreams. German pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned us about wish-dreams for the church. He said there’s the danger of loving our dreams for the church instead of the reality of the church, and judging the faith community instead of embracing the faith community. I’m not talking about wish-dreams.
I’m talking about dreaming like Jesus. Pastor and author Rebekah Simon-Peter (yes, that’s her real name) grew up Jewish but became attracted to the way of Jesus, and eventually was ordained a Christian minister. She says there are five marks of a Jesus-like dream:
First, she says a Jesus-like dream will expand your assumptions about what is possible. It will stretch your mind and your imagination. It will push you to think bigger. It doesn’t say “I can’t.” It says, “With God, we can.”
Second, a Jesus-like dream is bigger than you are. It is not something you can do by yourself. It will take a whole community of dreamers to make it come true. It will require the power and guidance of God’s Holy Spirit. If the dream isn’t bigger than you are, then you don’t need God’s help.
Third, she says a Jesus-like dream will scare you. It will seem like it’s too big for you to accomplish. A dream that scares you calls for a spirit of faith and adventure. We may very well be called to go where we have not gone before.
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly – something Rob Nash alluded to this past Tuesday night – Rebekah says a Jesus-like dream is about the transformation of our community, not the survival of our church. A Jesus like-dream is bigger than our congregation. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting our church to grow: The growth of the church is not the focus of the vision. The focus of a Jesus-like vision is God’s world in which we live. The church is here to serve the needs of the community to feed the hungry, to tend to the sick, to visit those in need, to speak up for the weak and the poor, to address systemic injustice, to take care of strangers to love those who feel unloved and to reach out to the outcast and make them feel welcomed and valued. If we’re not doing those things, it doesn’t matter if we’re growing or not, because we’re not being the church Jesus calls us to be.
Fifth and lastly, a Jesus-like dream inspires and unifies people. It will not inspire and unify all people. Some will prefer the comfortable smallness of the way things have always been. But a Jesus-like dream will bring people together who are serious about following Jesus and rally them around a common mission. Genuine Jesus-people get excited about making a difference in the lives of people and transforming their community for the better. When people see the church at work doing good outside the walls of the building, living out what they say they believe, then they want to be a part of what’s happening.2
The dreams Rebekah is talking about are more akin to what the Bible calls visions – visions that enable us to see with spiritual eyes and discern where God is calling us and what God is wanting to do in our midst.
But we’re often afraid to dream or to share our visions because others might scoff at us. What if we fail?
Monty Roberts was speaking to a group of people and he told the story of a young boy who during his senior year in high school was asked to write a paper about what he wanted to be and do when he grew up. That night he wrote a seven-page paper describing in detail his dream of someday owning a horse ranch. He even drew a diagram of a 200 acre ranch, showing the location of all the buildings, stables, and horse tracks. He drew a detailed floor plan of a 4000 square foot house that would sit on that 200 acre dream ranch. He put his heart into the paper and the project.
But when the teacher returned it, on the front page was a large red “F” with a note that said, “See me after class.” After class the teacher told him he received an “F” because it was an unrealistic dream for someone like him. “You come from an itinerant family,” the teacher told him. “You have no money or resources, and owning a horse ranch requires a lot of money. There’s no way you could ever do it.” The teacher told him that if he went home and rewrote the paper with a more realistic goal he would reconsider his grade.
The boy went home, thought about it long and hard, and a week later turned in the exact same paper, with a note on top that said: “You can keep your ‘F’ and I’ll keep my dream.”
Monty Roberts then turned to the assembled group to which he was speaking and said, “I tell you that story because you’re sitting in my 4000 square foot house in the middle of my 200 acre horse ranch, and my school paper is framed above the fireplace.” And then he said, “The best part of the story is that two summers ago that same school teacher brought 30 kids to camp out on my ranch for a week.”
As the teacher was leaving, he said, “Monty, when I was a young teacher I was something of a dream stealer. During those years I stole a lot of kids’ dreams. Fortunately you had enough gumption not to give up on yours.”
We can be rough on dreamers, can’t we? We refuse to trust anything we are unsure of, anything that doesn’t make sense to our small minds.
If you’ve spent your life in the business world you knew you were beholden to trustee boards and shareholders. Not so in the church. We are beholden to the mission of God in the world, the God of the Bible who calls people to leave home, to build arks, to buy land in a destroyed city, to marry a girl who’s pregnant with, she says, a child of the Holy Spirit. And perhaps most foolish of all – God calls us to believe in resurrection, in God’s ability to bring life to that which seems lifeless. God extends to people the call to risk and through them accomplishes amazing things. To risk something big for something good is to live by faith, trusting that God can do far more than we could ever imagine, far more than we’ve ever done before.
We must not ask ourselves: “What do we want to do?” That gets congregations in a whole lot of trouble because it centers on us and our plans and our desires. The crucial question for us is: “What is God calling us to do?”
As we imagine our future together as a congregation I want to challenge you not to be dream stealers. Don’t be “but-folks.” Don’t throw godly wisdom out the door. But don’t forget the apostle Paul said that God’s wisdom looks like foolishness to the world, and don’t forget that prayerful risk and courageous faith are the life-blood of the church.
There is a healthy critique that asks, “Is this the best way to do this? Is this really what God wants us to do?” And there is the cynical critique that always says, “It can’t be done.”
Shel Silverstein wrote poetry for children that can be quite instructive for adults, especially these lines:
The man who misses all the fun
is he who says, “It can’t be done.”
In solemn pride he stands aloof and
greets each venture with reproof.
Had he the power he’d erase
the history of the human race.
We’d have no radio or motor cars,
no street lit by electric stars.
No telegraph, no telephone,
we’d linger in the age of stone.
The world would sleep if things were done
by men who say, “It can’t be done.”
It is also true that the church would sleep (or even die) if things were run by those who say, “It can’t be done.”
The church is a living body active in a movement Jesus called the kingdom of God, a kingdom of dreams and visions that make a difference in people’s lives. Our calling is to make ourselves available for God to use to change lives and help heal our broken world, to reach out to the people in our community with the good news of God’s love. So don’t be afraid to envision and reimagine, to see with spiritual eyes what God is calling us to do and who God is calling us to be.
Are we willing to open our hearts and minds to what God might have in store for us? Are we willing to let God lead us in ways beyond what we have previously imagined? I don’t know what that might be, but isn’t it thrilling to imagine what the living God might have in store? Could it be that the God who is always doing something new is calling us to move our stake beyond what we think we can do?
So how about we prayerfully lie down under God’s great sky and with eyes wide open see how far we can imagine God’s glorious future. And then how about we rise and seek to glorify the God whose power at work within us is be able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.
May it be so.
______________________
- Fred Craddock, Craddock Stories, Mike Graves and Richard Ward, ed., Chalice Press, 2001, 123-124
- Rebekah Simon-Peter, Dream Like Jesus, Market Square Books, 2019