I Have a Dream

Seventeen minutes. That's all the longer it was—17 minutes. Shorter than a normal sermon. Much shorter than most speeches calling for significant change. And yet those seventeen minutes continue to impact our nation and the world 49 years later. Seventeen minutes, and a speech delivered like a sermon with one recurring theme: "I have a dream!"

Martin Luther King's dream was of reconciliation, of a day when people are no longer known by their labels or their skin color. It was a big dream (a dream he sensed somehow he would not live to see). Forty-nine years later, despite significant progress, we still haven't seen the full culmination of that dream. We're still waiting, Dr. King. We're still working and waiting and hoping...and dreaming.

King's dream, of course, was inspired by a dream given in a prayer centuries before by one whom King knew as Lord and Savior. On the last night of Jesus' earthly life, Jesus had a dream and a prayer. "I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me" (John 17:20-21). Jesus didn't pray that we'd only get along with those we like, or those who are like us, or those who are part of our church. He prayed that we'd get along with all those who claim his name, that we'd be one, unified in mission and in hope. Two thousand years later, we're still waiting. We're still working and waiting and hoping...and praying.

Perhaps our slowness to live into both Jesus' and Dr. King's dream is our failure to dream ourselves. We become content with what is. We become familiar with brokenness. We forget to dream of a better day, a brighter hope and the sort of future that only dreamers like Dr. King can see. On this day when we remember King's legacy, what is your dream? Do you dream of a day when, as King said, freedom can truly ring? Let his words soak into our soul today: "And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

I have a dream. Lord, haste the day.