9 - 25 - 17 Dream-Granters (4 minutes)

“When the Lord brought back the captives from Zion, we were like men dreaming.”

I think we set our sights too low. The reading from Ezra truly is a miracle! Not only is King Cyrus not a Jew, he is someone who has conquered Judea. Yet even in him who has done violence against God’s people there is this shift of heart. I see two things here in the old testament and psalm, and another in the Gospel acclamation.

We can’t only look to righteous people to do righteous things. If we don’t believe we can see holy things out of unholy people, we won’t see these things. And if we are viewing people correctly, that is that the great majority of people (believers and unbelievers alike) are thoroughly unholy, we won’t see much good being done in the world.

There is a bit in some of Lewis’s writing when he talks about wanting black to be a little bit blacker. That we are almost disappointed when our enemies, those we despise, are revealed to be human, or even - in some aspects - venerable. Cyrus is merely another oppressor, another conqueror, another dictator bent on extracting tribute and service from his subjugates. At least this may have been the view among many of his subjects. But there is more there! Even if he is a wicked, ambitious, ambitious enough to claim God has given him dominion over the entire earth, man - he is still a man! There is still that dignity, that divinity within him that is inside every human person. And it is that ubiquitous divinity that allows this change of heart, this divine act.

Believe the best of people and you may be wrong more often, but at least you’ll be joyful when you are correct.

I say joyful because one might be glad to be correct in condemning a person, but this is mere happiness, pleasure in one’s own perceived intelligence. Joyfulness is something completely different.

We were like men dreaming. God has granted something so extraordinary that it is a surreal experience in its actualization. How many times have we experienced something we never thought could happen? If we are lucky we have a few memories we hang on to, pure moments of gratitude. And if not, we wait in hope that our dreams may be fulfilled.

Something I think we lose in our era of rationality and low expectations is that God is a dream-granter. If our desires align with the Kingdom He will make our reward very great, such that we cannot believe our eyes. If what we seek is the Kingdom, we’ll get everything we desire.

“Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”

What I hear in this is a channeling of this dream-granting. We surely have the power to change other people’s lives for the better, every day. Even if we are not particularly powerful we can be exceptionally polite, unusually caring, strangely graceful. Oftentimes the events that make us feel as though a day were “good” or “bad” weren’t the important things in a practical sense, they were the ones that affected us emotionally and spiritually. So even if you cannot afford to help pay off your neighbor’s mortgage, your assistance with yard work when they injure themselves may mean even more to them in a less visible and obvious way.

You can restore their faith in humanity. And I feel that there is no need to explain how a greater faith in the fundamental goodness of people is a stepping stone to a belief in a benevolent God. This is how conversion happens! It is not the picketers with hateful signs, it is occasionally the rational appeal, but I think the method Christ advocates most (and unsurprisingly is most effective) is showing not telling. It is witnessing with our lives. Advertising the positive effect God is having on our lives and could have on another person’s life.

That they may see your good deeds and glorify not you, but your heavenly Father. For where, after all, does the divinity in you that would allow such good deeds flow from? It makes little sense to praise the water jug for the purity of the water it holds, surely we must always be pointing back to the source.

If the purpose of my writing is to aggrandize myself, I work in vain. If my purpose is for my own growth towards God, I am a little better. If I truthfully believe I have the ability to draw other people closer to Christ through my writing, I am sinning by my retention of it. If I really believe myself to have said anything whatsoever important in these past 75,000 words, anything I believe could bring one person from damnation to salvation, even if it were because they were already so near the edge it just nudged them over, and I did not share it out of fear of humiliation, I am truly a selfish wretch.