Lectionary Readings
Disturb us, O Lord, and by your Spirit, help us to dream holy dreams. Amen.
There’s was a practice common in Wales until not too long ago known as “hunting magic eels.” It’s something like a Welsh Valentine’s Day – there was an well that was said to be inhabited by enchanted eels that could predict your romantic future. If you threw a token into the well and the eels touched the token, it meant that your lover would be faithful to you for life. This well was a pilgrimage site for centuries. Today, the well and nearby church are both in ruins.
This story illustrates well what many describe as the “disenchanted” world that we live in. How many of us, when seeking romantic advice, would consult with eels? Or a bit more close to home – during the search process for this call, I attended a conference in New York in April and was really excited and hopeful that I would be called as your Rector, but also quite anxious about it as well. So I went to Evensong at St. Thomas Fifth Avenue and got there quite early to just sit and pray. When I was there, as clear as I’m speaking to you now, I heard Jesus say to me “You will be the next Rector of Grace and St. Stephen’s, and I need you to trust the process.” And if some of you are thinking “Oh boy, this guy heard Jesus talk to him, how did he get through the screening process?” you can be forgiven for such thoughts because we live in a secular age, a disenchanted world in which stories like that just don’t fit with our worldview.
How we got here has been a long process that’s been going on since the Reformation. Through centuries, faith has morphed from being a pervasive reality to personal devotions. I’ve been quite influenced by the work of a scholar named Andrew Root over the past several years. He’s written a lot about what it means to believe in an age when belief is privatized and relegated to the realm of opinion.
At the most basic level, what has changed is that we have gone from seeing ourselves as porous – open to things like magic, prayers, and even one another to seeing ourselves as buffered – meaning that we are closed off to outside influences. You can see this in a lot of popular psychology and self-help literature, but it’s also how we end up with people saying things like “We need more than thoughts and prayers.” To say that is to assume that prayer isn’t doing anything. To be very clear, yes, I’m all for action, but we don’t need to think of prayers as empty words.
Our concern as people of faith is that if we are buffered selves that are in control of what, if any, outside forces impact us, we will be closed off to the surprising enchantments of the Holy Spirit. We might dismiss the voice of Jesus as a delusion. We might overlook a sign from God as mere coincidence. We have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are the masters of our lives instead of stewards of the gift of life that our gracious and loving Creator has gifted to us.
And this misunderstanding can have disastrous consequences. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has surmised, “Our present ecological crisis is due to our failure to think of the world as existing in the relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.” Having a closed mind impacts not only us, but everything we touch. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” – but when we close ourselves off to mystery, to things bigger than us, well, we end up with the mess that surrounds us. Instead of life being about beauty, joy, and love, life ends up being “one damned thing after another.”
Some have referred to this disenchantment and listlessness as “the ache.” We know something is missing, but we’re not sure how we lost it or what exactly it was. One person has described this feeling as the photographic negative of enchantment. Whereas our world and minds used to be open to wonderment and enchantment, there is a now a hole at the center of where we find meaning and purpose. St. Augustine famously wrote, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” If there’s a diagnosis for our psychological and cultural malaise, we could easily call it “restless heart syndrome.” It’s why our society is so full of frustration, depression, burnout, and alienation. It’s so easy to feel like we’re just going through the motions, like we’re just cogs in the machine, like life is going faster than we can keep up. One scholar has named this phenomena “acceleration” – it’s like living on a roller coaster. Sure, those can be fun for a few minutes, but that’s no way to live. And because things move so fast, not only do we not have the time to “Be still and know that God is God,” such activity is often seen as inefficient, selfish, and wasteful.
But these feelings of emptiness is why so many people are on an endless search for meaning. The theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas has said that we live in a society in which we are told that we have no story except the story that we chose for ourselves when we had no story. In other words, we are told that we are blank slates and that we have to discover and create our own identity, direction, and purpose. And while that might sound liberating at first, it’s a weight that has crushed so many people. To be told that we have to figure out the purpose of our lives and put a plan into place to actualize that purpose, and we get to do it both independently and under the watchful and judgmental gaze of everyone around us, oh, and we only get about 80 years to figure that out – it’s a crushing burden.
It’s no wonder that so many turn to things that numb us from these restless hearts. We binge on scrolling, substances, and shows. Yahoo Finance reports that the spiritual and devotional products industry was worth $3.6 billion in 2022 and expects that to grow to $8.3 billion by 2031. We’re searching for something, for anything, that can give us a hit of the transcendence that we yearn for – so whether it’s crystals, rosaries, or hot yoga, we’ll try anything to fill that hole and be enchanted.
So what do we do about this? We can’t just make ourselves believe in magic eels or their Christian equivalent. We can’t reenchant the world by simple willpower or willful ignorance. The philosopher Simone Weil said that “Attention is the only faculty of the soul that can give access to God.” It’s about our attentions – about how we train our senses.
When it comes to faith, I can’t help but turning to mystics and poets. They are in touch with these sacred rhythms that our modern world simply doesn’t have a category for. Mary Oliver has a poem called “The World I Live In,” where she says, “I have refused to live in the locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world is live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what’s wrong with maybe? You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen. I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.” Are we open to seeing angels? Or are we moving so fast that we can’t be bothered to turn aside and see the burning bushes all around us?
I shared with you all a line from one of my favorite poems a few Sundays ago, and you’ll hear me say it enough in the years to come that you’ll have it committed to memory as well, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only they who see take off their shoes, the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” Or if you’re into mystery novels, it’s Sherlock Holmes saying, “The game is afoot.” Or maybe you’re a good Anglican and always appreciate a CS Lewis reference – well, this is like the saying in the Narnia series when the Christ-figure, the lion Alsan, is about to do something dramatic and miraculous: “Aslan is on the move.”
And this is actually some of the best evidence, if we can call it that, for believing in God. Again, CS Lewis said that “I believe in God like I believe in this Sun, not because I can see it, but because by its light I see everything else.” Well, the fact that we’re stumbling around so much in the darkness, the ache that we feel from having restless hearts, that sense that something is missing points us in the direction of the love of God that created us and is meant to enchant our lives with joy and wonder. We are enchanted beings living in a disenchanted world, which is why so many of us feel like resident aliens.
As I’ve said, it’s about our attention. And we are blessed to be a part of a community like Grace and St. Stephen’s that helps us to train our senses on the living God. We encounter the God who ministers to us through prayer. We encounter the God that lives in others as we serve them. We encounter the unnecessarily abundant beauty of this world in this sacred space, in hearing soul-stirring music, and in walking outside and seeing the grandeur of Creation. And in Sacrament we are told that we belong to a story not of our own making. We are loved, forgiven, blessed not because that’s the story we’ve chosen for ourselves and not because we’ve earned our place in that story, but because God loves us so much as to come among us to be a part of our story that we might be joined to the eternal story of love. And that’s what we receive in the Eucharist – tokens that don’t need to be disturbed by magic eels, but tokens that tell us that, no matter what, our Good Shepherd is with us which means that “all shall be well.” The Church stirs our senses towards the God who is on the move among us.
And where all of this connects with today’s Scripture is the promise that we heard from the prophet Joel: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophecy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.” Beloved, our enchanting God is afoot, giving us holy dreams to dream.
Martin Luther King is, of course, remembered for sharing his dream with our nation, and in another one of his addresses, he spoke of the need for our society to reboot its imagination. That’s tech support 101 – if it isn’t working, turn it off and then back on. We have been given stories that, to put it clearly, are lies. We have been told that our divisions are too great to overcome, and the only way forward is to conquer those who disagree with us. We have been told that we lived in a closed world in which miracles and visions are figments of our imaginations. We have been told that wealth and status are the markers of our value. We have been told that we are alone in figuring out the meaning of life. We have been told that the Church is dissolving into irrelevance and will be defunct within the next century. Beloved, these are nightmares that come from an impoverished imagination.
But there are dreams yet to be dreamed. It is true that in giving we receive. Love really is the greatest of all things. Today is the formal conclusion to our annual giving campaign for the 2026 budget and that’s got me thinking about what our dreams are for this parish. I am confident that God has some audacious and awesome dreams for Grace and St. Stephen’s, and I believe that God has planted the seeds of that dream within each of us. God is pouring out the Spirit upon us all, giving us dreams to dream as the kingdom is coming on earth as it is in heaven.
My dream for this parish is that we will be place where we receive and reflect the relief of Jesus. We will grow to trust that deepest and truest thing about us is our belovedness. We will share this love that makes all things well with our community that is suffering from restless hearts. We will be enchanted by a world that is charged with the grandeur, generosity, and graciousness of God. In this place, we will know the peace of God that passes all understanding. God is doing amazing things for us, with us, and through us – we have some amazing dreams to dream. And that’s why you’ve been invited to invest in these dreams through annual giving. Money isn’t just a practical tool that makes an economy work, it’s a way we experience the liberating truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
One more prayerful poem that I hope will become a prayer that we will carry with us as God gives us dreams to dream as a congregation. This is from the 16th century explorer Frances Drake:
“Disturb us, Lord, whenwe are too well pleased with ourselves,when our dreams have come truebecause we have dreamed too little…Disturb us, Lord, whenwith the abundance of things we possesswe have lost our thirst for the waters of life…We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes;and to push into the futurein strength, courage, hope, and love.”
Indeed. Disturb us, O Lord, and enchant us that we might dream your holy dreams. Amen.
