The crowd was getting tired and restless after listening to speech after speech. King was the last speaker on this extraordinary day. He had worked hard on this speech and he was getting some good responses, but he could sense the crowd drifting as he realized that he was about to head into what he considered the lamest section of the speech.
He began to go off script. Behind him, singer Mahalia Jackson shouted out, “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.”
He had preached about the dream at the end of June in Detroit, then again in Chicago. He reached back into his repertoire and began. Here are a few of those lines that are so familiar to us now:
“Even though we still face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
“I have a dream that one day that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream.”
In this first month of 2021, I think we all have dreams of what could be - a world of justice, of fairness, of healing for humanity and for the earth on which we live. We hold those dreams even after the traumas of the last year, of the last week. Those dreams matter. They help us keep moving forward. As poet Langston Hughes wrote:
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken -winged bird
That cannot fly
So indeed the dream that Dr. King sketched out on that day in DC many years ago is a dream that still lives, that we still hold fast to, because we surely are not there yet.
The Jewish people in exile in Babylon 25 centuries ago had dreams of returning to Jerusalem, that beautiful city that had anchored their ancestors. They had wept at the waters of the rivers in Babylon, but they still clung to the hope of restoring what had been lost.
Then along came the Persian king, Cyrus, who told them they could go back home. When they got there, they discovered home was no longer the beautiful city of their memories.
Their dreams clashed with the reality of a destroyed temple, crumbled city walls and burned city gates. They faced opposition from their fellow Jews who had remained in the city.
Ezra, as we heard today, went to work rebuilding the temple - a temple that would last through the time of Jesus until the Romans destroyed it in the year 70. But they had to rebuild the temple in the face of political opposition trying to frustrate the effort. Does any of this sound familiar today?
Then Nehemiah arrived to rebuild the city gates and walls, to restore both pride and security to the city. But, as the text said, the city officials were worried about losing their own power and were “displeased greatly that someone had come to seek the welfare of the people of Israel.” Hmmm... But the people stood with Nehemiah and said, “Let us start building.”
They were turning the dream into a reality. They did not stay at rest letting the dreams float through their minds. Nor did they let those prevail who would resist change, who would stand in the way of the welfare of the people.
We are seeing that resistance to change on steroids at the moment in our country. So the lessons of Ezra and Nehemiah, the words of Martin Luther King resonate in our lives right now.
While he shared King’s dream, he also sought to wake up America to the action that was needed. Listen for the echo of Ezra and Nehemiah in these last words of his speech that day:
“If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South; through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham.
“But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today. By the force of our demands, our determination, and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy.
“We must say: “Wake up America! Wake up!” For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”
We need dreams to inspire our actions.
We need to wake up to begin turning those dreams into reality.
And then we need to get about the work of rebuilding.
That is hard work.
Nehemiah did not cuss out the leaders, Moss noted. He did not post responses on Facebook or Instagram. First he prayed, seeking the spiritual strength to move forward.
As Moss put it: “Nehemiah recognizes the courage it takes to just to start rebuilding the wall even though people are discouraged. Sometimes the greatest challenge is to begin. You have to have the courage to begin.”
Last week Sage Walker struck a similar theme during our worship service when she talked about a sign in her third-grade classroom that still inspires her work for a better world: “It’s not about winning the race. It’s about having the courage to start.”
Sage reminded us, “If you are brave enough to actually get in there and do something hard, you might find out you can do hard things.”
Remember those lines from poet John O’Donohue that Susan Watson read at the beginning of our service today?
May I have the courage today
To live the life I would love
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
In the midst of the violence of recent days and the threats over the next few days, fear is a reality. Courage has become unusually important in our lives. We may not be on the front lines, but we all have roles to play in shaping our society as a place that might reflect God’s dreams.
So as we hold our dreams, come awake and look to rebuild our lives, our community, our nation after the pandemics of COVID and racism, what might we do?
Let’s start with that sense of spiritual depth that matters for a community like ours. We have a richness of spiritual resources available to us - the sacred stories of scripture, the inspiration of music, the silence in a time of meditation, the encouragement we give to one another. From those places, we can find the courage we need.
Then we need to focus on the tasks that match our skills and our resources. No one of us alone nor this church community alone can rebuild every part of the world. We can be part of the larger effort and make differences in the places close to us.
Otis Moss noted that Nehemiah did not have expectation that the rebuilding of Jerusalem would be finished in his lifetime. But he organized the people so the work could go on. He knew his opposition was organized so he knew he had to organize even better.
As Bryan Stevenson told radio interviewer Krista Tippett last month, “Hopelessness is the enemy of justice. If we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem…There’s no neutral place. Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists.”
The folks gathered at the Lincoln Memorial that day in 1963 to knew something about not giving up hope. They knew about organizing to make the world a place bending toward justice. They knew their ancestors had not seen the changes they had hoped for but had passed on the commitment from generation to generation.
The people there in 1963 were there with full knowledge of what the dark past had taught them - a past of injustice, of oppression and terror and lynchings.
They also knew the hope of the present on that day, facing a rising sun as they marched just as John Lewis had called them to do - with a spirit of love and a spirit of dignity that would change the nation.
They knew that they - and we - would have to march on stony roads.
They knew that they - and we - could sometimes feel that hope unborn had died.
But they also knew from the stories of the past and the promises of God’s presence with them on the way that they would march on ‘til victory was won.
If those words sound familiar, they are among the lyrics of the great poem written by James Weldon Johnson along with music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson to celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln in 1900.
Now, 120 years later, that song still gives hope and inspiration to Black folks in our nation - and to us - as we join them in holding on to the dream, waking up to the injustices around us and rebuilding our lives and our nation until “now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.”
Listen with me to this somewhat shorter version of the song, released last July 4 by Gospel singer Kirk Franklin.
Watch for both the joy and the determination as we carry ourselves forward into the challenges of our time.
