Dreams
St Bene’t’s Church, Sunday 26th July 2026
The Rev’d Dr James Crockford
1 Kings 3.5-12
Romans 8.26-end
Psalm 119.129-136
Matthew 13.31-33, 44-52
Do you ever remember your dreams? I wonder, as I ask that question, what vivid dream springs back to your memory. But don’t worry, I’m not going to ask what you’d been dreaming about.
We all probably dream far more than we can remember. Perhaps you recall times when, having awoken, you have just the haziest memory that you had had a dream, or that something a bit like this or that happened, but the detail, the sequence, is all gone. Dreams tend to happen in the thin layers of sleep, as our brains are firing up, but our bodies, and our memories, are still on reduced functions. But still, sometimes what we get up to in the washy and wacky world of our dreams, lodges enough for us to recall it when we awake, for good or ill. We remember some intoxicating love affair we conducted in a dream somehow without all the self-consciousness and risk that are there in the real-life version; or we remember falling off a building or all our teeth falling out. When I was growing up, I had a recurrent dream in which I was a podgy cherub, with a giant silver hula-hoop that encircled me, levitating around my waist like Saturn’s ring; and if I made breaststroke movements with my arms and legs, I started to fly. Make of that what you will.
It strikes me as a bit of a gamble, then, in our first reading, for God to appear to Solomon in a dream, and ask him what he wants. It is here, on the cusp of consciousness, that we test out and toy with experiences that might seem impossible, unattainable, in the light of day; here where the worst of ourselves might be freely imagined without consequence, or where the things we conjure up might make absolutely no sense at all. Ask me in a dream what I want, you might get some very strange answers.
But in another sense, the world of our dreams sometimes – sometimes – is where we find our desires most unfiltered, where we might see and feel and touch what we most deeply need and want, in a way that gets easily crowded out and suppressed in all the noise and fear and jostling contentions of waking life. It’s not the case for every dream, but I’ve known, and perhaps you have too, the feeling of waking with some sense of revelation, of unveiling, that a dream carried me on, whether in unlocking grief, or anger, or love, or longing, that needed to find a way to the surface, and I find that I’m grateful it did.
God promises to give us our hearts’ desires, but it takes a lot of soul-searching to find what those desires really are. Solomon’s dreamed response does not mention the obvious Christmas-list stuff for an ancient near-Eastern King – for long life, riches, victory and security, for wives and concubines and horses and armoury – but he asks instead for understanding, for wisdom, to know justice, and all the true fulfilment that those things bring with them. (Though, spoiler alert, Solomon does get all the riches and victory, the wives and concubines and horses, and it ruins him.)
But back to his dream and ours: how to speak of those things that we truly desire and long for? Jesus, in our Gospel reading, layers image upon image, metaphor upon metaphor, to try to get our minds and hearts toward what he calls the kingdom of heaven – what things will be in that promised and envisioned day when the desires and hopes of all creation are aligned, harmonised, consummated, within the fire of divine love and enfolded in the steadfast peace of God’s heavenly reign. A new creation, a new earth, a new society, a new way of being – the new life that breaks upon the scene in Christ’s death and resurrection, the old order of sin and death giving way to the new life of glory, but this we still await in its fullness, to transform all that God has made. To bring about the kingdom of heaven. How do you articulate that reality?
Jesus can only stir our hearts and minds for this new day, for what it will be like, by summoning the power of our imaginations. Tiny seeds that look like nothing, becoming big bursting trees of splendour, a canopy for all creatures. A little yeast pounded and pounded with patience and resilience, punched through the flour, to transform the dough into the miracle of bread. Hidden treasure you would give everything for. A pearl worth sailing the world to find. A net cast into the sea that catches every kind of fish. (Every kind of fish in one net? Surely that’s mind-bending.) These feel like the hinted glimmers of dreams, imaginings that tug at some feeling, some hope deep within us, and that finds its fulfilment in the new life that Jesus is ushering in.
But we’re not there yet, are we? All very well trying to reconnect with those deep stirrings, trying to imagine ourselves into the world Jesus promises, but which of us cannot think of a hundred things to point out that can make all this seem like a pipe-dream?
But St Paul tells us not to despair. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, not depth…no no no, not anything else, nothing in all creation, can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We might know hardship, or distress, or persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, or sword…but God in Christ has given his everything, even his very self, for us all, and so not only is all not lost, but nothing can or will be lost. It is God who justifies, so who can condemn? It is God who calls us, and what can negate his promise? It is God who will glorify, and what in all creation could ever dampen his glory?
So, what then are we to do? Paul seems to send us right back to that dreamworld, if you will, the dreamworld of our prayers. In all our weakness, in the midst of the pregnant birth pangs, the violent pain of the new breaking into the old; in the desperation of our deepest yearning for justice, for redemption, for peace, we have the Spirit of God within us. The Spirit that helps us in our weakness. That in our despair, in the silence of not knowing how to face all this world throws at us, all the ways it may try to wreck our hope in God, in all this the Spirit moves us deeply, with prayers that are cries and groans, guttural sounds from the abyss, that summon our pain and longing into prayers that are the heartbeat of God within us. It’s a raw image. (It’s not very Anglican, really is it?) But Paul tells us to get in touch with that deep stirring, with that raw expression, the labour pang within us of a new creation breaking forth – to let the Spirit of God stir within us the passion for a world reborn, and bring to birth in us the mighty new things of God. Things that are like the pearl and the treasure, you’d give everything to have; like the tree that explodes to voracious life from the tiny ball of code dead in the ground; like throwing a net into the sea and finding you’ve caught everything.
Let us find in our own day, and in our own way, the images, the art, the music, the dance, the architecture, the friendships, the worship, the prayers, the acts of self-sacrifice, the labour and the love, that will enliven our imaginations to dream of the kingdom of heaven, and that will unleash our heart’s desire for a world set free into the freedom of God’s spirit, the glorious liberty of the children of God; and in those dreams and desires, find the energy and the fervour to pray and work and long for God’s coming kingdom to transform all that God has made, changing us into his likeness, from glory to glory.