The playwright Lorraine Hansberry asks it: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?"
A dream deferred. A dream deferred is something you’ve put heart and soul into, for a long time, but it’s delayed. It hasn’t come. It’s incomplete. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun?
I purposely brought this Bible to use today. This Bible was presented to me on a special occasion. An occasion that spoke to the dream in my heart. But it also speaks to the dream deferred.
Inscribed inside this Bible are these words: "To Joseph M. Smith, on the occasion of his ordination, From Deer Park Baptist Church, Jan. 5, 1964." You will notice from that that this week I observed the 32nd anniversary of my ordination.
When I was ordained, just a few months after seminary, I had great dreams. I had a strong sense of what I wanted to do and to be for God. I was going to become, among other things, an eloquent preacher, an intellectually respectable teacher, a wise counselor, and a winsome evangelist. Then, at home, I was going to be a faithful husband and a doting father (it was quite obvious to everyone who came to the ordination service that in about three months fatherhood would be thrust upon me). And in addition, I was dreaming about becoming a leader in Baptist ranks, an agent of change for racial justice, a pied piper for young people, and, in my spare time, a writer, a book collector, an organist, and, if memory serves correctly, I was thinking of getting fitted for a suit with a great big red S on the front! Move over, angels, SuperSmith is here!
I have always believed in great dreams. I have always created large plans. You know that from the reports and projections I put out in front of you, year by year. You’ll see it all again in a couple of weeks at annual meeting. Dreams. Plans. Sometimes unrealistic. Often they are not completed. But I have said with the great missionary William Carey, "Expect great things from God, attempt great things for God,"
But this Bible. I carry it today to remind myself and to tell you that dreams are often deferred. Many of the things I promised myself and my Lord at ordination time have not yet been done. 32 years, and what can I show for it? A dream deferred.
Abram had been living with a dream for a long time. But it had not happened. And Abram was getting worried. He wasn’t getting any younger. How was the dream to be fulfilled? How was the promise to be kept?
There, back in the city of Ur, years earlier, Abram had heard God’s call. "Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. J will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing."
A promise and a mission. To be blessed and to be a blessing. But that was all years ago. Abram had set out to gain the blessing and to serve the mission. But now a lot of water has passed over the dam. Now quite a few years had gone by, and-all he had to show for his trouble were many gray hairs and a pair of old worn out traveling shoes!
Abram was now eighty-six years old, but there were no children. How could he become the father of a great nation if there were no children? No blessing and no way to be a blessing to others. How would it be done? How could it be accomplished?
Some of us, too, have set out on long, long journeys. Once upon a time, we set some magnificent goals for ourselves. Long-term goals, great goals. When we started, the goal seemed a long way off, but not impossible. The hill seemed steep but not insurmountable. A couple of our church’s college students have enrolled in courses of study where everything is mapped out, from the freshmen year, right on through a medical degree. Seven or eight years of work toward a goal. Fantastic to be young and to be able to think that way! I pray they are able to maintain their drive, all the way through.
But do you remember? Do you remember having goals like that? Do you recall feeling the stirrings of God’s Spirit, and you thought God was going to do something great in you? You even thought you might do something great for God? But the years have past. And what has happened to the dream? Where are the goals? Is it too late now to get back on track?
What, indeed, happens to a dream deferred? Does it simply dry up like a raisin in the sun? Dry up like November’s leaves and blow away?
I
Have you noticed that the dream is deferred because of the mistakes we have made? We never achieve what we know we could achieve because, early on, we do something that hangs us up. And we never get past that mistake.
Now, you know, when you are young and fired up and full of ambition, you get impatient. You want those goals to be fulfilled right now. You’re kind of like the fellow who was praying for the gift of patience, and told the Lord, "Lord, I want the gift of patience, and I want it right now!"
But impatience leads to mistakes. And those mistakes stay with us; the consequences of our impatience can linger for a long, long time. Abram got impatient. And his impatience led him and his wife Sarai to a serious mistake. Abram said to God, "I can’t be the father of a great nation. I have no children. If I were to die now, I’d have to leave all my goods to one of the household servants. Lord, what are you going to give me, and when are you going to give it?"
God said to Abram, "Look. Look at the stars in the heavens. Look up and see your destiny. Because I promised that your descendants would be as numerous as the stars, and I will fulfill that promise. Just be patient, Abram."
But Abram and Sarai could not wait. Their patience ran out. And, incredible as it sounds, Sarai offered her husband a slave girl, and said, "Here. Conceive a child by Hagar. If it’s a child you want, then a child you shall have. By any means necessary, fair or foul, you shall have what you want." And so the child Ishmael was born, of an illicit union between Abram and his wife’s slave-girl, Hagar.
Ishmael, you see, is the product of impatience. He is the product of the mistaken notion that we can short-cut what God wants for us. We have sold ourselves a bill of goods, thinking that there is a quick-fix way to the blessings God wants to give us. And there isn’t. It won’t come overnight. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and any goal worth pursuing will not be achieved right away. We get impatient, and make mistakes.
Ishmael won’t go away. He’s here to stay. The consequences of our choices have a way of hanging around, long after we know they were wrong. Sarai and Abram thought that an immoral means would lead to a moral end. They thought that a wrong act would produce the right result. It was a mistake. And this dreadful mistake dogged Abram’s footsteps forever. It troubled him. It followed him. It sidetracked him.
Many of us live with mistakes, and we think that because we blundered we’ll never be right again. A failed marriage. A financial disaster. Poor performance in school. Fired from a job. Whatever it is, that mistake, more than likely born out of impatience, seems so big right now. It seems we’ll never get past that early mistake to be what God wants us to be. Ishmael is still hanging around. And the dream is deferred.
Now there are two things we try to do with those mistakes. There are two ways we try to handle those lingering Ishmaels, those stubborn consequences. Neither one of these things works. But we try them anyway.
We deal with the consequences of our mistakes either by denying them or by substituting a second best.
If we are not going to be able to be all that God wants us to be, we either try to shove the mistakes of the past out of sight, denying them. Or we try to plug in a second best, some kind of substitute for the real thing.
Let me unpack these two things with Father Abram and Mother Sarai.
II
First, we try to deal with our lingering mistakes by denying them. By suppressing the memory and hiding the evidence. Because we recognize that that sin we committed out of impatience, that sin we committed out of immaturity … because we recognize that that is holding us back and is like a millstone around our necks, we want to get rid of it. We want that mess out of our lives. So we go into denial.
Listen to their story: "Sarai said to Abram, ’I gave my slave girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. ... ’ But Abram said to Sarai, ’Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please.’ Then Sarai dealt harshly with her; and she ran away from her."
We almost always try to deal with our guilt by pushing it away. Out of sight, out of mind. If you cannot see Hagar and her son Ishmael, they don’t exist. If you cannot hear the slave-girl and her ill-begotten son, you can avoid confronting them. If we suppress the memory of the mistakes you have made, we suppose we have done with them. If we push down, out of consciousness, the sins we’ve committed, we think we have done with them and they won’t bother us any more.
The only trouble with that is that, as the angel of the Lord spoke to Hagar and said, "return to your mistress", so also the Lord says to you and to me, "you can’t hide. You can’t hide from yourself and you can’t hide from me." As the saying has it, No place to run, no place to hide. The conscience is a strange and terrible thing. For a while, at least, we can suppress painful feelings about what we have done. We can deny it and make excuses for it and explain it away. For a while.
But we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and the day comes when the memories come rushing back, like a floodtide, and overwhelm us. The moment comes when the dam bursts and a thousand thousand sins and indiscretions and mistakes pour over us, and we are miserable.
I have seen this on the death bed. I have heard this from men and women who, in the last hours of their lives, let loose with all the stuff that has been held back, and cry out, for there is no longer any chance. No longer any opportunity to do what they wanted to do, were called to do. When we just deny, deny, deny, we can get relief for a while. But we will never really be free of that weight.
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun? One answer is, it does not so much dry up as it gets buried, covered over like the snow covers the flaws and blemishes of our streets and houses. But the day comes when the Lord sends the angel of truth, and it all comes tumbling out. Too late to do anything about it, because we have compounded our mistakes with denial.
III
The other answer, as I suggested earlier, is equally popular, but equally wrong. And that is that we try to substitute second-best for what God really wants. We try to limp by on less than what God has intended for us.
God said to Abraham … his name had been changed by now, as a part of God’s promise. God said to Abraham and to Sarah ... her name changed too: ’" will bless her, and I will give you a son by her." Well, that just sent Abraham into a fit of giggles. He laughed in the face of the Lord and said, "Can a child be born to a man who is a hundred years old? And can Sarah, who is ninety years old, bear a child?" Lord, you are ridiculous, you know! Please don’t put it out that f am going to do these things at my age. Lord, don’t you know I am past it?
And then, for me, the key statement: Abraham said to God, "O that Ishmael might live in your sight!" O that Ishmael might live in your sight. Lord, why don’t you take this boy and use him instead of the child you seem to think we should have. Lord, why not take this second-best instead of what you have planned?
Oh, how we are tempted just to get by! How we are tempted to settle for so little, to let the dream dry up. How we do think that, hey, anything is good enough for God, and we shouldn’t have to put out our very best! Jimmy Carter wrote his political autobiography a few years ago; its title was, Why Not the Best? Mr. Carter says that he learned somewhere along the way that you cannot really satisfy the desires of your heart if you just limp along with second-best efforts. You cannot win the race, you cannot feel fulfilled, and, most of all, you cannot really hear the Father’s "Well done" on the strength of second-best.
Oh, Lord, can’t you just take Ishmael, so that Sarah and I won’t have to carry more responsibility? Oh, Lord, can’t you just go with Ishmael, so that we can relax and retire? And Lord, the dream that we would be blessed and be a blessing ... can’t you just do that some other way?
But God says, "No. No. Your wife shall bear you a son. And you will call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant." God says, Abraham, I want you to have the best. I want you to be fulfilled. I want you to know, when it is all over, that you have achieved your goal and fulfilled your dream. Abraham, I want you to have more than Ishmael, I want you to have Isaac. I want you to have more than a disappointment; I want you to have fulfillment. I want you to have more than second-best; I want you to have the best. Abraham, I want to take you from mistake to mission. From mistake to mission.
You and I have lived through more than our share of mistakes and sins. I dare say there is not a person in this room who is not feeling the bitterness of all the things we wanted to do, but didn’t do.
Some of us went into denial, and tried to invent reasons, perfectly logical and understandable reasons, why we have not been all that we were called to be.
Some of us plugged in to second best. We’ve said, well maybe I didn’t fulfill my dream, but I did do this or that, a few things.
But the lingering question: What does happen to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun? I ask you this morning to get in touch again with your dream, your life’s calling. It’s not too late.
It is not too late to breathe life back into the dream. It is not too late to seek with God the Isaac he wants to give you, rather than the Ishmael you have settled for. It is not too late to get past the mistakes and into the mission.
Why? "This one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and staining forward to lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."
Why? "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation. Everything old has passed away, see, everything has become new!"
It’s not too late to dust off the dream. From mistake to mission.
