Easter ... Dreams Lost and Found

Reflections on Luke 24:5

Carrie and John had talked about having children from their first date.  It seemed presumptuous then, but quickly it was clear theirs was a lifetime romance.  They were married within a year and started trying to create the family they had dreamed of right away.  Within six months, Carrie was pregnant and shopping for baby paraphernalia on her lunch hour and John was busy making ready a nursery.  The miscarriage came as a shock.  It just never occurred to Carrie that things would not go as planned.  But her doctor told her it was not uncommon to miscarry a first pregnancy in the first trimester.  So they tried again right away.  Four more pregnancies and four more miscarriages.  The door to the nursery was kept closed and Carrie no longer shopped on her lunch hour.  It was clear that something was wrong.  Still, it felt like a death when her obstetrician sat them down together and told them they would never be able to carry a baby to term.  A dream, their dream, their vision for their future was laid to rest in a doctor’s file. 

Mike dreamed of a career in business, one that would start as soon as he received his college degree, but in the fall of his junior year, his father was severely injured in a tractor accident and he was needed at home to work the family farm.  His dream died and was buried in a cornfield. 

Terri loved to dance.  She often said she lived to dance.  Her childhood was a blur of classes and recitals.  Her parents insisted she attend college, so she picked one with an excellent, extra-curricular dance program and majored in dance and minored in her studies.  Her dream was to dance at Lincoln Center.  Upon graduation she went straight to New York City.  It turned out that her dreams were bigger than her ability.  Audition after audition ended in bitter disappointment.  After two years, she buried her dreams in a city dumpster along with her lucky ballet slippers and headed for home.          

Paula simply dreamed of growing old with Jack, her husband of 19 years.  She loved him more than she thought possible, but it wasn’t enough for him.  Her dream died in family court, the Honorable Judge Raymond Walters presiding over a divorce decree that freed Jack to marry Emily, his co-worker and mistress of nearly three years.  Paula’s dream was laid to rest in the home she was forced to sell in an effort to split their assets.

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Jesus wasn’t the only thing sealed behind a large stone, laid to rest in a dark tomb.  With him were buried the hopes and the dreams of all those who had left behind hometowns, jobs, even families to follow the itinerant rabbi who spoke of the coming of the kingdom of God.  Those who followed Jesus had dreams about how Jesus would make the world, their world, better.  Some dreamed of a land freed from Roman rule.  Others dreamed of justice.  Some simply dreamed of enough ... enough food, enough shelter, enough cash to be secure.  Some thought, that with the coming of the kingdom of God, the end must surely be drawing near.  They dreamed of being found on the right side of God’s certain judgment.  Maybe some just dreamed of God, drawn to Jesus because he made them feel close to the divine.  Maybe some were thrill seekers or the chronically curious, regardless, each person had a dream, a vision of how life would be for them, for Jesus, for the world, as they followed him into Jerusalem.  And each of them watched their dreams die with Jesus on that Roman cross just outside the city.  Those dreams where buried with Jesus, as surely dead and he was.

And then came Easter morning.  According to Luke’s gospel, the women, who had followed Jesus’ body to the tomb on Good Friday, whose hopes and dreams had also died with him, having observed he Sabbath, returned with spices to anoint his body.  What they found was the stone rolled away and the tomb empty.  The body was gone.  In its place, two men, perhaps angels, tell them:

“Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.”

Photo by Jaime Owens

It would be an understatement to say that they didn’t see that coming and neither did the other disciples, who received the news from the women as an “idle tale.”  Yet the truth, God’s truth, a truth beyond all hope or expectation, won out in the end.  The one who had escaped the tomb appeared to them again and again over the course of forty days.  And with him, was born, in the hearts of those who followed Jesus, new dreams, bigger dreams, dreams that they could never have dreamed on their own.

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Sometimes we have to let what is meant to die, die, so that what is meant to live, can live.  What was laid to rest in that tomb was not what emerged.  The resurrected Lord was glorified; the same, yet changed.  He appeared and disappeared at will.  At times he was recognizable, with the marks of his suffering plain to see, but at other times he appeared incognito, revealed only in the breaking of the bread.  And what of those dreams that were buried with him?  They too had been transformed, changed.  The disciples could never have dreamed of how the world, their world, would change after Jesus’ death.  They didn’t see the resurrection coming … and neither do we. 

Our dreams die too.  Things don’t always go as expected.  Life doesn’t unfold as planned.  But letting die what must die, leaves room for resurrection and with resurrection comes new dreams, divinely inspired dreams that will surely carry us beyond what we could ever imagine on our own.

That is how the kingdom comes.  Dreams lost.  Dreams found.  The world, our world ... changed.  Resurrection!