He Dreamed a Dream

A few weeks ago I watched Les Miserables in Sun Pictures. There is that extraordinary scene where Fantine, the destitute and despairing mother played by Anne Hathaway, meets Jean Valjean. He sings “I Dreamed a Dream’, lamenting how she dreamed and trusted, but now the terrible end of death is in sight. Valjean enters and pledges to continue her dream that “love would never die, that God would be forgiving.”

Fantine dies peacefully, but the world is changed because of her dream.

We need to dream!

 In 2009 Susan Boyle, a middle aged, poor, rural, Catholic Scottish woman who embodied everything that was not a pop star, dreamed that that her voice could lift others. She sang Fantine’s song on Britain’s Got Talent. Her instant success lifted the spirits of millions who felt pushed down because they didn’t fit in to the perfect mould of the ‘beautiful’ people.

In our liturgy today there are two dreams. Two men, six hundred years apart, stand in a public place, unroll scrolls and dream out aloud.

Nehemiah tells the story of the Babylonian Captivity. In 586BC the Persians conquered Jerusalem and deported most of the population to modern day Iran. Eighty years later, with their spirit, culture and faith largely in tatters, they came home. Standing in front of them, Ezra dreamed of renewal, a rebirth of faith, culture and hope. He galvanised the battered nation and urged them forward. They responded.  After seventy more years of hard work this was symbolised in the dedicating of the new temple in Jerusalem in 516BC.

Centuries later, Luke began his Gospel recording how Jesus spoke to a nation in chains. Colonised by Rome and oppressed by a religious system that had lost its way, Israel was in captivity of spirit and body. When Jesus stood in the synagogue in Nazareth, his home town, he spoke to a dejected and cowering people. He was an educated man, and knew that he could lead a people by taking a risk and dreaming out aloud.

After all, the worst they could do was kill him.

Jesus dreamed and two thousand years later we are being invited to share the dream. The difference between his dream and Ezra’s is that Jesus has a dream that is timeless. For the reign of God to be alive in our midst, it needs to be lived in each and every generation. The text Jesus read started to be fulfilled in the first century AD, and is being fulfilled today, even as we speak.

Dreamers are not considered highly in our culture, and the word itself is often used as a put down, but Jesus was not talking of idle dreamers who would see no action and no commitment. Christian dreamers are filled with passion, energy and hope. They know that they can’t do everything themselves, but can be part of a greater reality. St Paul reminds us that we are all part of the one reality, even though we do different things with our different abilities. “Now you together are Christ’s body; but each of you is a different part of it.”

You and I need to dream. We dream seeking for a brighter future, a more perfect reality, a world more like the kingdom of God. We look around us and have the choice to bury our heads or to stand up and listen to the dream out loud, to accept the hope that is offered to us and put it into practice in our lives and parish today. We can’t do it alone, but working together we can achieve wonderful things. 

The dream is alive and active in Broome today, even as we speak: you are invited to live the dream in Christ.

Homily, 3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time Year C, OLQP Broome,  27^th January 2013.