Everyone dreams. Maybe we don’t always remember our dreams, but they happen none the less.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the ordination of women. I was one of those women who, in 1994, became a priest. While the ordination was important, so was the occasion the next day, when I was to preside at the eucharist for the first time – this is the service where bread is taken, blessed, broken and shared. The night before I presided, I had a dream. A very vivid dream. I was taking the service and was dreaming about the moment after everyone had come up for communion. When I looked into a silver ciborium/ silver container I realised that all the bread was still there – none of it had been taken nor eaten. My dream no doubt gave form to my anxieties. For many of the people coming to that service it would be the first time to receive communion from a priest who was a woman. Thankfully, you’ll be pleased to know, that dream – or nightmare – didn’t materialise!
Some dreams, like that one, aren’t hard to interpret. Others are much more complicated – even when we are told about the details of what has been imagined.
In our first reading the people who interpreted dreams are horrified that the King doesn’t only want to know the interpretation; he wants them to tell him what he dreamt. Unsurprisingly, “the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans” are left scratching their heads. They protest that what the King has requested is impossible. No one can imagine what another person dreams.
Yet the King is insistent. Unless they can do what he commands they’ll be torn limb from limb and have their houses ruined.
Maybe this is hyperbole – maybe not.
When absolute rulers get an idea fixed in their head it is hard for those around them to know what will happen next. I’m delighted to see that next week the BBC’s latest and last instalment of Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’ will begin. In the books there’s a great quote, which I know I have used here before but think its worth repeating, it is quote about Henry VIII, another absolute ruler:
“You can be merry with the King, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”
Well, in our reading from the Book of Daniel the claws of King Nebuchadnezzar are there for all to see – and he means business.
There is a stand-off between the magicians and the King which is only ended when someone has the wit to go and get Daniel. Daniel addresses the question with confidence and gives the credit to his God. He sees that the King has been troubled by dreams which no doubt plague many tyrants: the question of the future, and of what comes after. Daniel’s perception of the King’s dreams is about a statue that is broken up and pulverised into dust, so that not a bit remained.
Daniel interprets the dream as the future diminishing of the Kingdom. In some ways this is a mixed message. It suggests that under Nebuchadnezzar Babylon has reached its highest power.
In other words, this will be looked back on as the glory days. The peak of all the power, dominion and wealth that the Kingdom could attain. But Daniel has more to tell the King. After the kingdoms that will supplant Babylon, God “will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed”. People living at the time of Daniel knew that empires came and went. Some might last a long time but, eventually, they all come down to the dust about which Daniel speaks. This is the fate of all human structures – but Daniel sees a different kind of a kingdom that won’t end. A kingdom of a fundamentally different nature.
Like the book Revelation, from which our second reading came, the Book of Daniel is known as ‘apocalyptic literature’. It is part of a collection of prophetic writing about a future revealed, and an intimation of the end of time. The end of our reading from Revelation makes clear that the kingdom God will create is of a fundamentally different nature. Unlike the wars, tragedies and tumult which are the experience of earthly kingdoms, the Kingdom of God is a place where: “They will hunger no more, and thirst no more”. Where ‘God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’
When we look around our world today, we see how much this kingdom is needed. The Kingdom of God is more than a dream.
It is a future that breaks into our present, a Kingdom of which the Church is a living sign.
The anxiety that gave rise to my dream the time I first presided at communion was partly a fear that what I offered in God’s name would be rejected. Perhaps, like Daniel, we all have to find the courage to proclaim this Kingdom, even when we think that it won’t be what people want to hear and to reflect in our words and deeds the love of the one eternal King who sustains the world.
