In a world of Good Friday nightmares, it is time for Easter Dreams.

After the completion of Disney World, someone remarked, "Isn't it too bad that Walt Disney didn't live to see this!" Mike Vance, creative director of Disney Studios replied, "He did see it that's why it's here." (Ministry Advantage, July/August 1994, 3).

Everything in life that we use or hold, eat or watch, wear, sit in or listen to in other words, everything that is a creation of human ingenuity started out as a dream. Before anything can become tangible, it must first become a reality in the mind of its dreamer. Only when the dream is real for one can it become real for all. Not until the dream is real for me can it become real for you.

Zippers, Christmas tree lights, quadruple bypass heart surgery, combustion engines, cotton candy, x-rays, air conditioning, flush toilets, matches, eyeglasses, espresso all these things were once dreams in some person's mind. The dreams of others make our lives tasty, pleasant, sometimes even possible.

So why is it that we live in a world furnished with the dreams of others, yet there are so many nightmares stalking the land?

Why did we first nightmare up nuclear weaponry instead of dreaming up world peace?

Why did we nightmare up high-tech security systems and gated communities instead of dreaming up communities of trust?

Why did we nightmare up fast foods instead of dreaming up a way to feed every hungry child?

Why did we nightmare up apartheid and slavery and Jim Crow instead of dreaming up societies of justice and equality?

One member of the "buster generation" (those born between 1964 and 1983) put it this way: "I had a dream." Writing to his church's newsletter, this young man expressed the despair, cynicism and pessimism of his "buster generation" by speaking about the "death of idealism, of passion and dreaming ... of transforming vision." He spoke of an almost ubiquitous death of dreaming among his peers (as referenced by Sharon Dawn Johnson, "Vision in Mission," The Gospel and Our Culture 5 [September 1993]: 5).

Because the Good Friday nightmare was transformed into the Easter Dream, the way has been opened for ending all nightmares and incarnating all dreams. The Resurrection means that Christians can expectantly:

- dream of plenty in the midst of poverty;
- dream of compassion in the midst of poverty;
- dream of justice in the midst of inequity;
- dream of holiness in the midst of hell;
- dream of love in the midst of hate.

New generations of Christians are despairing of dreaming because they have not yet learned to distinguish between dreaming dreams of happiness and dreaming dreams of joy.

Who says Christians are supposed to be "happy?" Christians are supposed to dream dreams. We've taken too literally what Sunday school and summer camp taught us: "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands ... stomp your feet ..." and do all sorts of other Christian calisthenics. We've put too much emphasis on looking happy and "being happy" instead of dreaming dreams.

It is time for Christians to tolerate no further nonsense about "happiness." The first-century world did not say, "See how happy these Christians are." It said, "See how these Christians love one another." Christians are not necessarily happier than non-Christians, at least as the world defines happiness. But we are more joyful. But we risk more dreaming.

Columnist Russell Baker once wrote in the New York Times that "The truth is I don't feel good most of the time and don't want to. Moreover, I do not comprehend why anyone else should want to." It's normal not to feel good all the time, not to go around happy all the time at least if one is doing something great for God.

Easter dreaming isn't about "happiness." Christians have no "right to happiness." Christians may or may not be more "happy" than non-Christians. Joy, on the other hand, is a condition of "gladness," "delight," "exultation of spirit" or "the beatitude of heaven." Happiness is not a fundamental category for the Christian. Joy is. Joy is the stuff Easter dreams are made of. That "O Happy Day" we sing about teaches us how to "live rejoicing every day," not how to live happily. God did not put us on this earth to be happy. God put us here to enjoy God and glorify God to experience a joy unspeakable and full of glory, the joy that comes from Easter Dreams.

It was with renewed dreams of Easter joy that the women raced back to tell the other disciples what they knew. Christ is risen! The Easter Dream that makes all other dreams possible lives on.

Why did the Berlin Wall come crashing down? Because one church in Leipzig, East Germany, the KikolaiProtestantChurch, began dreaming the Easter Dream. Its pastor, Kristian Fuehrer, believed that it was time the Christian church stopped "diluting the message" of the gospel. So his church started some prayer meetings on Monday evenings, prayer meetings that began with the Easter Dream that "all things are possible."

Within a short time, in his words, the people praying encountered "in our services and meetings ... the miraculous experience of feeling the effect of the Word." God's presence "was with us. It was with us, all of us," and soon the number of prayers swelled to over 200,000 people, 90 percent of whom were non-Christians but were drawn by this Easter energy. It was these prayers who poured from the meeting on that fateful Monday evening to protest in the streets, Wir sind das Volk ("We are the People"), and created the movement that toppled the Berlin Wall.

Why they hadn't felt it before, Pastor Fuehrer theorizes in a recent interview in the Christian Science Monitor, was because the church had been seduced by "the bourgeois image of Jesus as one who doesn't disturb, who is only passive," who is there only to make people happy. Through prayer and Bible study, they found a "Jesus that spoke directly to the people the truth" rather than a Jesus that diluted the truth. They found in a resurrected Jesus the power to dream again good dreams for their city and their nation. Indeed, Pastor Fuehrer believes it may be more difficult to keep the Easter Dream alive in freedom than in oppression because in freedom, one is tempted to dream materialistic dreams instead of spiritual dreams.

For 40 years, we had in the East the experience of theoretical materialism and atheism. In the past two years, we are confronted with something new actual materialism. Materialism used to be a theory; in this integration with the West, it is a fact. It is more difficult to identify "the enemy." The "anything goes" mentality coming from the West is a problem for the church. In this pluralistic [mess], it is hard for young people to find their identity, to find true values to stick with. [Kristian Fuehrer, "We Lost Our Fear and Went Onto the Street," interview by Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor, 17 August 1994, 19].

What's your Easter Dream? Will you dedicate your life to dreaming God-sized dreams for our world?

[A great way to end this sermon would be to ask your people to name their Easter Dreams first for the world, then for your city, then for your church. You can do this either by having them call out their Easter Dreams right from their seats or by polling your people during the week and reading the congregation's Easter Dreams at the end of your sermon. Then consecrate these Easter Dreams on the altar of prayer and remind them that no dream has ever come true without sacrifice.]

Alternative Sermon Idea

"Baptism in a Coffin."

Begin the sermon by citing John Henry Newman's Easter sermon, where he distinguished Resurrection joy from Christmas joy: "At Christmas we joy with the natural, unmixed joy of children, but at Easter our joy is highly wrought and refined in its character. It is not the spontaneous and unartificial outbreak which the news of Redemption might occasion, but it is thoughtful; it has a long history before it and has run through a long course of feelings before it becomes what it is. It is a last feeling and not a first." (Thomas H. Stahel, "Of Many Things," America, 23 April 1994, 2).

Then use Ralph Wood's metaphor of "Baptism in a Coffin" and the story that inspired it as a base for building your sermon. Wood was invited by one of his former students to accompany him to the local minimum-security prison for a baptism. Reluctantly he agreed, and together they went to the prison. The baptism turned out to be a real joy. "It was as close to a New Testament experience as perhaps I shall ever have," Wood wrote. A guard escorted the prisoner from behind a fence that was topped with razor wire. There were just the three of them, with the guard looking curiously on.

"The barefoot prisoner stepped into a wooden box that had been lined with a plastic sheet and filled with water. It looked like a large coffin, and rightly so. This was no warmed and tiled First Baptist bath, with its painted River Jordan winding pleasantly into the distance. This was a place of death: watery chaos from which God graciously made the world and to which, in rightful wrath, he almost returned it.

"Pronouncing the Trinitarian formula, the pastor lowered the new Christian down into the liquid grave to be buried with Christ and then raised him up to eternal life. Though the water was cold, the man was not eager to get out. Instead, he stood there, weeping for joy. When at last he left the baptismal box, I thought he would hurry away to change into something dry. I was mistaken." The prisoner, the newborn Christian, told them, "I want to wear these clothes as long as I can .... In fact, I wish I never had to take a shower again." They walked to the nearby tables and sat quietly in the Carolina sun, "hearing this new Christian explain why his baptismal burial was too good to dry off. 'I'm now a free man,' he declared. 'I'm not impatient to leave prison because this wire can't shackle my soul. I know that I deserved to come here, to pay for what I did. But I also learned here that Someone else has paid for all my crimes.'" [Ralph C. Wood, "Baptism in a Coffin," Christian Century, 21 October 1992, 925-926].