Before I go any further, I want to offer you a little permission. If your mind wanders during this sermon, that's okay. If you find yourself daydreaming, following a thought somewhere unexpected, or imagining a world that doesn't exist yet, you don't have to pull yourself back to what I'm saying. Maybe that's exactly the dreaming you need to do today. You don't have to come away from this sermon with a lesson or a plan. You can just let yourself wander a little.
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t up here preaching, I might take a little nap. I’ve spent a lot of my life being sleepy. People ask whether I’m an early bird or a night owl… The answer is, I’m neither. And it’s not just the ordinary kind of sleepy, where you stayed up too late or had a long day. It’s the kind where you can sleep for hours and still wake up tired. The kind where sleep sometimes arrives at inconvenient moments, and where waking up can feel like being dropped into the middle of a conversation you don't remember starting.
When I was training to become a minister, I spent a summer at New York Presbyterian training as a hospital chaplain. And in between my visits with patients, most afternoons, I would sneak up to the top floor of the chaplaincy department, curl up on the couch, and take a nap.
I remember feeling really guilty about taking a nap while I was “on the clock.” Shouldn’t I spend every second of my day visiting people who were sick, in pain, in need of spiritual care? But I couldn’t help it. I was just too tired. So I’d drift off to sleep, wake up feeling slightly better than I did before, and return to my rounds.
At the end of that summer, the head of the department revealed that he’d tabulated all of our visits into some quantitative statistics. They didn’t tell the full story of whose hearts we’d tended to or the prayers we offered, but they gave a sense of the number of hours and people we’d visited.
My heart sank. I was sure that my numbers would be much lower than everyone else’s. I’d spent so much time that summer sleeping instead of visiting patients. I felt incredibly guilty.
But when I asked to see my statistics, he showed me that my numbers were almost exactly the same as the average of the entire group. Not more, not less.
I hadn’t logged anywhere close to the highest number of visits, but I also hadn’t done less than the rest of the group as a whole. Sure, I could’ve made more visits if I had just powered through. But that summer, I learned something about balance and care, especially when caring for others. I could rest without failing at my work. I could take care of myself and still show up for other people.
I wonder how many of us need that permission in more areas of our lives.
Permission to stop striving for a moment. Permission to be a person rather than a collection of responsibilities. Permission to do something that doesn't produce a measurable result.
And permission to dream.
The quote in our program today is from Tricia Hersey, sometimes better known as “The Nap Bishop,” founder of The Nap Ministry. Tricia created the Nap Ministry when she was in seminary. She says, “I was inspired by the personal experience of being exhausted as a Black woman in America. I napped all the time while completing a stressful graduate program. It helped me survive.” (Link)
I’m not the first person to talk about rest as resistance. It's a phrase the Nap Bishop recites often, and it's something we've talked about on our clergy team, too. Our August theme each year is
“rest.” A few years ago, Brother Zachary preached on rest as a space to dream. He told us, “The only prerequisite to dreaming is rest.” This last August, Rev. Peggy reminded us that “Alone, rest is just sleep. Together, rest is a curriculum. And the lesson is teaching us how to be free.” (Link)
Tricia Hersey puts it this way: “You were not just born to center your entire existence on work and labor. You were born to heal, to grow, to be of service to yourself and community, to practice, to experiment, to create, to have space, to dream, and to connect.”
To dream.
I love that she includes dreaming alongside healing, growing, serving, creating, and connecting. Dreaming is not the thing we do after all the important work is finished. It's part of being alive. It's part of how we learn what matters to us, and what we might want to make possible for one another.
The Nap Ministry describes a DreamSpace that becomes available to us when we nap, a space where we can heal, invent, and imagine.
And I wonder what it would mean to take that idea beyond sleep. What would it mean to make DreamSpace for ourselves and for each other? To create a little room in our lives where we can ask what if, without immediately having to defend the answer?
Because I think one of the hardest things about living in the world right now is that we are constantly being asked to be realistic.
We're asked to be realistic about politics. About the climate. About housing costs. About what our institutions can accomplish. About how much change we can expect, and how quickly. We're asked to understand the limits of the world as it exists, and to make our plans accordingly.
And, to be clear, there are times when we need to be realistic. We need budgets and logistics and people who can turn a good idea into something that actually works. We need to know what resources we have, what the obstacles are, and what we can do next.
But if we begin and end with what is already possible, how will we ever discover what else might be?
Every meaningful change in the world begins, somewhere, with somebody imagining that things could be different.
Someone asks, What if we didn't organize our lives around the assumption that some people will always be poor? What if healthcare were something everyone could count on? What if we treated immigrants as neighbors rather than threats? What if our children could grow up in a world that was more generous, more peaceful, and more just than the one we inherited?
These questions can sound naive. They can sound impractical, or hypocritical. Sometimes they can sound downright ridiculous.
But the fact that something sounds impossible to us today does not mean it always has been, or always will be.
Last week, Conor invoked all of the artists who “never had the time to create because of the demands of the work week, of everything we have to hold as we strain for our own survival.” They invited us into a chance to become the creator, to honor the artist we all have inside of us. The artist who is not separate from ourselves as humans, as political beings, as people who have something to offer the world.
And I think that's connected to this work of dreaming, too. We need room to create. We need room to imagine. We need room to play around with an idea before we know whether it will work, or what it might become.
Because the things we create, the stories we tell, and the communities we build all begin somewhere in our imagination.
There is a phrase that we use sometimes at Community Church: we call this place a 200-year-old startup. We are part of a movement with deep roots, a long history, and a whole lot of unfinished business. We have inherited generations of people who experimented with different ways of gathering, believing, worshiping, organizing, and living together. People who tried things that hadn’t been tried before, and who sometimes got things very wrong, and who left us something to build on.
For the first hundred years of its existence, Community Church wasn’t even Community Church. It was the Second Congregational Church, the Church of the Messiah, one of dozens of churches of its kind in the city. But we chose to be something different, and we are still making that choice every single day.
And that means we get to ask what comes next.
In preparation for this congregational year, some of us got together and talked about our dreams for the future of Community Church. “A hub for community organizing across the city.” “A place for activists to rest and be spiritually nourished.” “A center for the arts.” “Values-based summer camp.” “A place where no one goes hungry.”
The dreams were big. I bet you have dreams of your own.
And what I appreciated about that conversation was that we didn't begin by asking how we would make all of these things happen. We didn't start with a budget or a staffing plan or a list of reasons we couldn't do them. Later, we talked about how to get there. But before we did that, we gave ourselves permission to dream.
We have practice dreaming here. We do it every week when we recite our Unison Affirmation. Look at it for a moment – it’s in your programs. Sit with it.
A church that recognizes wisdom across traditions. That seeks truth in freedom and justice in love. That abjures all that separates and divides. That shall make of all persons one Beloved Community.
What a thing to say together.
Our Unison Affirmation is a vision that reaches far beyond any one congregation, far beyond the people in this room, and far beyond the particular moment in history in which we find ourselves. It describes a community that we have not yet fully become. It describes a world that we have not yet fully built.
And we say it anyway.
We say it because it gives us a direction. It reminds us what we're trying to create, what we're trying to practice, and what we're trying to become. It offers us a vision that we can return to when the work is difficult, when we disagree about how to move forward, or when we need to remember why any of this matters.
And that brings me to another way of thinking about how we make change.
Deepa Iyer, who writes about social change ecosystems, offers a helpful way of understanding how movements work. She describes the many different roles people play in making change: visionaries who imagine what is possible, builders who create the structures that make it real, storytellers who help us understand why it matters, caregivers who sustain people through the work, disruptors who challenge the status quo, and so many others.
No single person does all of it. No single organization does all of it.
We need people who can imagine the future, even when the present gives them very little evidence that it will arrive. We need people who can hold a vision of justice and love and keep pointing us toward it, especially when the road gets long.
And we need the people who take those visions and turn them into something tangible. We need the people who organize, who cook, who show up, who make phone calls, who care for one another, who keep the lights on. We need people who can hold a dream in one hand and a spreadsheet in the other.
We need all of these things. But I wonder if we sometimes rush to the spreadsheet too quickly. (And if you know me, you know that’s a big thing for me to say, because I love a spreadsheet).
But what if, before we asked how to build Beloved Community, we spent some time imagining what it might feel like to live in one?
What if we let ourselves envision a congregation where people are genuinely known and cared for? Where differences don't have to be erased for us to belong together? Where people can rest without feeling guilty, disagree without being discarded, and bring their whole selves without having to prove they deserve a place?
What if we imagined a world in which our institutions were organized around the flourishing of people, rather than asking people to sacrifice their flourishing to sustain our institutions?
What if we let ourselves dream a little beyond the edges of what we know how to do?
And what if we didn’t have to do it alone?
Because dreaming together is different from dreaming by ourselves. Other people bring possibilities we would never have thought of. They challenge the assumptions we didn't know we were making. They help us see that what feels like a personal longing might actually be something we share, something we could work toward collectively.
Sometimes another person gives us permission to want something we had stopped letting ourselves want.
Sometimes we hear somebody else's vision and realize that the future can be bigger than we thought.
And sometimes dreaming together means sitting with the discomfort of wanting different things, of not having one clear picture of what comes next, and of trusting that we can keep talking and listening while we figure it out.
We don't need to agree on every detail of the future to begin moving toward a world with more love, more freedom, more justice, and more room for people to be fully human.
We need a direction. We need one another. And we need to keep making room for possibility.
You don't have to be a visionary every day. You don't have to be the person who knows what comes next. Sometimes it is enough to rest while someone else holds the vision for a little while. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is make a place where another person can dream.
And sometimes, when we're ready, we can return to the question that has animated so many movements for change, so many experiments in community, and so many people who have tried to make a different kind of world.
What if?
We don't know exactly what the future will look like. We can't guarantee that our dreams will come true, or that the people who come after us will finish what we begin.
But we can decide what we want to point toward. We can tell stories about the world we want to live in. We can make room for people to imagine it with us. And we can take whatever steps are ours to take, knowing that other people are walking alongside us, and that others will come after us.
That is part of what it means to belong to a tradition that is still being made.
That is part of what it means to build Beloved Community.
Amen.
