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And We Shall See What Will Become of His Dreams

by the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer, Canon Pastor and Subdean

As one who is privileged to celebrate saints days and holy days regularly, I’m always intrigued by the passages of Scripture chosen by those who created the Lectionary for a particular saint’s day. When it is someone of the stature of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the potential for appropriate Scripture passages is enormous. So how intriguing that they selected this passage from Genesis. Joseph, we recall, was specially beloved by his father, and a dreamer. The passage we just heard is meant to chill us to the bone in its depiction of cold-blooded fraternal hatred. And as we struggle to catch our breath against that icy blast, we are hit with the stunning of irony of the words, “and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”

Because if we’re familiar with the Joseph cycle, we know what becomes of his dreams. He is rescued from the pit, taken to Egypt, and ultimately put in the service of the Egyptian ruler. Joseph’s dreams become a source of blessing for an entire nation and they ultimately enable to Joseph to reconnect with his brothers, the brothers who conspired to take his life. Such is the power of dreams. Such is the power of prophetic vision.

On March 31, 1968, four days before he was martyred, King preached what would be his last sermon in the National Cathedral in Washington: Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. Early on in the sermon, King draws on the image of Rip Van Winkle. He said,

…it is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history – and rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution. And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution……and there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, “Behold, I make all things new; former things are passed away.”

King sermon that day in Washington called a people to awaken to action. The dream of racial and economic justice which fueled King’s work certainly bore no relationship to the sleepwalking unconsciousness of much of America in the 1960’s. On that day, in that enormous cathedral, he called out the privileged scions of power in our nation’s capital. Called them out on the gulf between promise and fulfillment, called them out on how a great nation is a compassionate nation and how America, as he put it, “has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.”

Called them out in 1968. And calls us out today in 2012.

And we shall see what will become of his dreams.

This passage in Genesis reminds us that the seeds of hatred are germinated in the soil of possessiveness and envy. Philosopher and anthropologist Rene Girard called this phenomenon “mimetic violence,” and it begins when we assume that things of value must necessarily by limited in quantity. Joseph’s brothers believed that Joseph was not entitled to more of their father’s love. “Everyone knew” that the firstborn son was supposed to be the father’s favorite, and then in descending order from there. Joseph, to their way of thinking, deprived them of their natural position of privilege and status. Their solution was violence. And yet as we make our way through the Joseph cycle in the book of Genesis, we see that the lens through which God looks at creation is very different from the cramped, cold, zero-sum perspective that privileged humankind tends to use.

King saw God’s gracious intention for all humankind, and gave his life to articulate that dream, that vision, come whence it may, cost what it will. He ended his sermon at the National Cathedral with his now famous words, “we shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice…..If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the (children) of God will shout for joy.

God grant that it may be so. God grant that we shall live to see what will become of his dreams.