November 28, 2010 reading:
Advent 1: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14;
Matthew 24:36-44
What happens to
a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
This may be African-American poet Langston Hughes’s most famous piece. I hear it every year as I look at the readings for the Sundays of Advent. The dream Jesus cast, the hope we inherited from the first generations of disciples, has been deferred for another year. What happened to it? What has happened to us?
The poem’s title is Harlem. Hughes wrote it in the 1950s. He wrote of a community still longing for liberation after generations of preaching and promises. A community still dreaming of rebirth. A community ready to explode? Perhaps. Did Langston Hughes believe there would ever be a Barack Obama? Hughes looked forward and sighed, “Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?” By the time of his death in 1967, Hughes had seen Dr. King, Black Power, and the civil rights movement revive the dream of a world made new. Forty-one years later, just a hair longer than a biblical generation and not so long in dream-time, many of Hughes’s spiritual heirs thought the dream had come true.
In Advent 2010, do we really believe Jesus will come again? This Sunday we’ll hear Isaiah sing, “In the days to come … He shall judge between the nations …” Have we waited so long to hear his hammer beat swords into ploughs that we’ve stopped listening? This Sunday we’ll hear Paul say, “Salvation is nearer to us now …” He’ll call us to wake up. Will we yawn, stretch, and reach for a hymnbook? This Sunday Jesus will tell us again, “Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.” Will we check the sky on the way out of church? Or will we just think about Sunday lunch and the start of yet another busy Christmas season?
What happens to a dream deferred? What has happened to our Advent hope? I’m afraid Advent observances are tougher than ever to sell in the church today. We don’t like to postpone Christmas celebrations for four whole weeks, let alone remember a dream deferred for almost 2,000 years! Is Advent hope today a heavy load?
But a Christian life without Advent hope is no Christian life at all. A church no longer crazy enough to believe the dream will come true is no church at all. A Christian community whose shared agenda no longer includes posting watch for Jesus at the door isn’t really up to much. Christianity without eschatology is no good news for the world.
Langston Hughes is remembered as one of the apostles of the Harlem Renaissance, a few who dared to proclaim good news to a community that others said was beyond hope.
I believe it’s time for an explosion. Time for us to live the words we’ll hear again this Advent season, share again in our candle lighting litanies, sing again in our Advent hymns. (Christmas carols too!) Dream the dream again and dare to live it toward fulfillment.
If we don’t proclaim and live our hope the world will only know the destructive explosions of others whose advent hopes don’t ring with healing, justice, unity in diversity. The Christian and Muslim extremists who make the news every day are sure they know what God wants for the world. This Sunday we’ll actually make the same claim! We’ll say and sing a dream of a world renewed in peace. Maybe God has deferred the dream and still waits for us to become so restless we’ll begin to live it now!
