Dream On

“Dream On”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
March 8, 2009

It’s hard to find a more dysfunctional family than that of the twin brothers, Jacob and Esau, and their parents, Rebekah and Isaac. As recounted in the Old Testament Book of Genesis, Rebekah learned early in her pregnancy that the twins she was carrying would contend with one another as “two nations” and “two peoples [that] shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Esau was the first to be born; then came Jacob. While twins, their temperaments were different, very different; their physiques were different. It was difficult to imagine them as brothers, let alone twins. Their father Jacob could not hide his greater affection for Esau, the doer, the outdoorsman, and the son with the direct approach. Their mother Rebekah could not hide her greater affinity for Jacob, the contemplative, the homebody, and the son of willful scheming.

How does the dysfunction play out? Recall the story of Esau as a young man coming in from the field famished, catching the aroma of a stew prepared by his brother, Jacob. “Pottage” it’s called. So hungry is Esau and so attuned to his brother’s hunger pangs as leverage for advantage is Jacob that Esau is seduced by Jacob into selling his birthright as first-born in exchange for “bread and pottage of lentils.”

Years passed and the family prospered through good times and hard times, even as the deception and favoritism continued. Isaac grew old and, realizing that his time was limited, called to him his favorite son, Esau. He asked him to go hunting and bring back the wild game that he so loved that he might eat and then bless his eldest before he bid farewell to all. Rebekah, eavesdropping on their conversation, confided to Jacob what was afoot and ordered her favorite son to go and bring her two goats so that she might prepare them for Jacob to take to his father with the intent of securing his blessing first. Knowing that her husband in his blindness might touch Jacob’s arm and recognize him as the younger twin, Rebekah counseled Jacob to cover his arms with goatskins to deceive her husband’s touch. Jacob complied, and just as years earlier he had leveraged his brother’s hunger to his own advantage, so now he leveraged his father’s blindness to his own advantage. He successfully secured his father’s blessing.

Isaac and Esau quickly discovered the deceit, but the blessing could not be revoked. Such were the ways of family in this culture of a few millennia past. Twice tricked, Esau was livid and sought to avenge the injustice by plotting to murder his brother. Once again, Rebekah came to the fore and sent her darling Jacob off to the safety of her brother Laban’s household in Haran. It is at this point that our morning reading begins:

“Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place, and stayed there that night, because the sun had set.” (Genesis 28:10-11a)

Jacob falls asleep and dreams of “a ladder set upon the earth,” with angels going up and down the ladder and the Lord God standing above all and proclaiming divine authority and divine promise, that God would multiply Jacob’s descendants and bring him back to this land. Jacob awoke and affirmed the ground as holy ground, calling the place Bethel, which in Hebrew means “house of God.” At this point, Jacob vowed that if God would be with him and sustain him, he would give a tenth of all his belongings back to God. In other words, Jacob promised to tithe! It seems to me a small price to pay for God’s promise of sustainability, especially given Jacob’s bad behavior in the eyes of God and family.

Let’s take a closer look at this dream, one of many biblically recounted dreams that shifted the tectonic plates of ancient history. A man in flight from an avenging brother, Jacob beheld in the vulnerability of sleep angels of God going to and fro on a ladder that joined heaven and earth, with God at the top proclaiming divine authority. Jacob awoke shaken by a transformed consciousness of where he stood—in a holy place. He was humbled. Yes, it was about time; but he was through a dream humbled. And from such a stance, he entered into a covenant with God.

According to Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, Jacob’s dream is an example of “the Holy Other address[ing] people in the vulnerability of the night.” Writes Brueggemann:

“The dream requires a total redescription of Jacob’s life defined by God’s promise. …Jacob pledges to be allied with [this promise], a pledge that entails accepting himself as a carrier of the promise. Quite concretely, Jacob promises to tithe. When he awakes, the world is different because of this holy voice in the night.”

In the dream, unlike in Jacob’s daytime behavior, there is no guile. Ultimate gratification sealed in the covenant between God and Jacob trumped the immediate gratification through which Jacob had lived his life thus far. God promises sustainability; Jacob promises generosity through the specifics of tithing. A covenant is made, not a deal, but a covenant.

Dreams lace the biblical narrative. We read in the Gospel According to Matthew the account of the Magi, summoned by Herod the king who had heard the story of what they had seen, a star rising above the birthplace of a new king. Learning that Bethlehem was the place, Herod sent them to find the child and come back with a report. Off they went to Bethlehem, found the child, and left their gifts at his feet. In a dream came the warning not to return to Herod, but to travel home by a different route. Joseph, the father of the newborn babe, was similarly warned in a dream to take Mary and their child and flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath.

Dreams are dreamt, plans shift, and history turns a corner. The devious Jacob becomes accountable to the holy in a new covenant. A king is prevented from venting murderous envy on the babe who would transform our understanding of how we might live. Dreams introduce radically different options at a time of natural vulnerability. Our consciousness takes a rest, and something else steps in.

“Dreams,” writes Brueggemann, “are recognized as disclosures of otherness, an otherness that may indeed open us to authentic reality and to a truth that lies beyond reason.”

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and scholar of matters mythical, psychological, and religious, observed that:

“…in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.”
(Civilization in Transition, Collected Works 10, pars. 304 f.
in a footnote to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 394)

A richer dimension arises in our dreams that gives us the chance—depending upon our interpretation, and this is pivotal—to turn enter new venues of consciousness and behavior, to become more whole than we had ever imagined possible! Enlightenment does not stop with reason. Wrote Jung:

“The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.”
(Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 302)

Dreams and their interpretation are the very stuff of transformation. The biblical dreams that I’ve recounted speak to the realities of our own day.

Not unlike Jacob and his mother, Rebekah, not unlike the power-hungry Herod, we have escalated our assumptions into a state that is unsustainable. Once again, theologian Walter Brueggeman lends his interpretive gifts to the matter. The triumvirate of autonomy, anxiety, and greed describes a dysfunctional human family. Surely in our own nation and yes, as Unitarian Universalists, we have been giddy with individualism. Even the iconic Ralph Waldo Emerson lifted up “self reliance” to the status of an idol. The quest for autonomy, or hyper-individualism, perpetuates a myth that any of us might be non-dependent and unaccountable; we become anything but our brother’s or sister’s keeper, and we will surely not be kept! Who needs an ultimate Other? Who needs the notion of God—not an old man in the sky, but the transcendent power of love and life? I think of that game from kindergarten, The Farmer in the Dell. It concluded with one lone person in the middle of the circle, and we all sang out: “The cheese stands alone.” Such is surely the case with “big cheeses.”

The inevitable sequel to the myth of autonomy is anxiety. Runaway independence is neither achievable nor sustainable.

“The outcome of such autonomy without allies or support,” claims Brueggemann, “is an endless process of anxiety, for one never has enough or has done enough to be safe and satisfied. As a result the autonomous person, championed in current economic theory, is caught in an endless rat race of achievement that produces bottomless anxiety—about the market, about performance, about self-worth.”

Sound familiar? Anxious autonomy spills into desperate acquisitiveness—that is, greed. Anxious autonomy whispers in our ears, “You don’t have enough; you must do better; you must get farther ahead.” The mania overtakes not just those who stand at the top of a very different ladder, but those who stand in the middle and those who stand at the bottom—not quite like the angels who fluidly connected heaven and earth. Brueggemann speculates “that this triad of autonomy/anxiety/greedy acquisitiveness is the story of our recent economic collapse.”

How do we find our way out of this mess? How do we transcend our desperation to recover with a wholly other way of being?

Return to Jacob on the run. Return to the wise men, tempted to be not so wise. Return to a young father whose newborn babe is threatened by an autonomous/anxious/power-greedy head of state. Directions arrived in dreams. Wholly other options for being arrived through layers that lay deeper than reason, deeper than habits so ingrained that consciousness freezes.

In Brueggeman’s wisdom, the alternative to the autonomy/anxiety/greed triad is the biblically based covenantal existence melded with affirmation of God’s—or divine—abundance melded with generosity. Autonomy is traded in for the covenant of community. Jacob is the prime example of this, freed into the realm of covenant through his dream in flight to Haran. Anxiety is traded in for affirmation of the abundance of God. Once again, Jacob’s flight is taken in anxiety over his brother’s threatened revenge. As a consequence of his dream, he enters into a covenant with God in which God promises him abundance through sustainability and Jacob promises God generosity through tithing. Greed and acquisitiveness are traded in for generosity—that is, Jacob’s prior behavior contrasted with his newfound generosity. So too the dreams of the Magi and of Joseph hold the promise of relationships that are covenantal, directions that are life saving and life sustaining, and lives that are generous to the core.

“As far as we can discern,” wrote Jung, “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” It is time for illumination.

We are tempted—all of us—to succumb to a desperate hope that we’ll return to a Dow Industrial Average well above 10,000, fluid lending practices, and a job market with employment that is familiar if not sustainable. If we affirm a community of covenant grounded in love of neighbor, if we give thanks for an earth for which we still have a chance to be stewards, and if we respond with a level of generosity that embodies our gratitude—including generosity to this very community grounded in a covenant of love, we will know a future beyond our wildest dreams. We will know a future in which the angels of our most promising nature walk freely between what we imagine as heaven and what we inhabit as earth. It is possible, it really is. Amen



Sources:

Walter Brueggemann, “The Power of Dreams in the Bible,” The Christian Century, June 28, 2005, pp. 28-31, http://www.religon-online.org/showarticle.asp?title3218

Walter Brueggemann, “From Anxiety and Greed to Milk and Honey: What the Bible has to say about ‘bailout,’ and other comments on the crisis we now face,” Sojourners: Faith, Politics, and Culture, February 2009, 20-24.

The First Book of Moses Commonly Called Genesis and The Gospel According to Matthew in The Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Collected Works 10, pars 304 f, in a footnote to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1965, p. 394

Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Recorded and Edited by Aniela Jaffé, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston, Revised Edition, Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, 1965.