Dreams Deferred: A Sermon on Life’s Dreams with Poems of Langston Hughes

 

 

Lovable and loving, loquacious and lucid, lively and laughing Lutherans, thank you for inviting me to join you on your sabbatical which is coming to an end today.

 

My three tasks were these: 1) to cheer you on in this sabbatical time. I have tried to encourage you to enjoy the many benefits of renewal and quiet solitude; 2) to worship with you and preach. I have tried to keep things moving and on time and to keep every sermon less than 50 minutes in length; 3) to care for you as your sabbatical pastor. I want to tell you how moved I am by the struggles that you are facing in your lives and by the quiet courage and faith which I find in you. I thank you for sharing your stories and heartaches and dreams with me and for listening and caring about mine.

 

In keeping with the words from the Book of Deuteronomy read this morning: “take care to watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life,” I want to invite you for one last time to share with another a very personal thing about yourself.  I invite you to tell someone about a dream which you have had for your life which has not come true, a dream which you have for yourself which has not been realized. This is not a dream which someone else has failed to fulfill for you but a dream which you yourself have not been able to fulfill.

 

This is a very difficult and perhaps even painful thing to do to tell about one’s dreams that are unfulfilled.  To speak about dreams of family or career or love or aspirations which have only been dreams and not become real is most difficult and so, if you cannot do it, you can be silent and ponder this dream in quiet meditation. But if you are able to share it with someone then please do. And for those who are honored with this confidence, this dream is not to go beyond your ears.

 

Langston Hughes, a great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, has written beautiful poems about dreams. One is called “Dream Dust.”

 

                                                            Gather out of star-dust

                                                            Earth-dust

                                                            Cloud-dust

                                                            Storm-dust

                                                            And splinters of hail

                                                            One handful of dream-dust

                                                            Not for sale.

 

And that is what I am asking you to do. To gather one handful of dream-dust, so precious to you that you would not sell it for anything. I am not asking you to sell it but to tell it. You have three precious minutes to tell about your unfulfilled dream.  

 

                                    (A Period of Quiet Conversation and Reflection)

 

 

 

 

Bring me all of your dreams,

You dreamer

Bring me all your

Heart melodies

That I may wrap them

In a blue cloud-cloth

Away from the too-rough fingers

Of the world

                                                                                                “The Dream Keeper”

                                                                                                 Langston Hughes

 

Some of you have shared your dreams with me during this sabbatical time- dreams about love and family and career and I will forever hold them sacred “in a blue cloud cloth.” They are beautiful dreams which you can cherish.

 

But I know that dreams too tightly held can lead to a very painful and tragic existence.  Dreams which are too tightly held can keep you imprisoned in a dream world where you are always trying to fulfill your dream and not able to find abundant life in the real world.

 

When, for whatever reason, a dream does not come true, it is terribly painful. You begin to see your entire life as a failure and yourself as a failure. Loss of a dream is like the loss of someone you dearly love. It is filled with grief and mourning and if you cannot say a gentle goodbye to it, your entire life can be lost along with your dream.

 

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

                                                                                                            “A Dream Deferred”

                                                                                                            Langston Hughes

 

Here is the story of my dream explosion if you would be so kind to listen.

 

I had a wonderful great Aunt Edna who, when I was a small boy, would look at my hands and say to me: “Gregory, you have the hands of a surgeon.” She told me that almost every time we visited her. Aunt Edna was an operating room nurse so I believed her. Because of her and Doctor Borska, who came to my house to take care of us when I was a kid, I began to dream that I could be a pediatrician someday. I never told Aunt Edna that. I didn’t want to ruin her dream of my removing gall bladders. I dreamed my dream for 15 years.

 

I came here to Dartmouth College to become a physician. After four years of classroom struggle as a pre-med, chemistry major, I was not admitted to medical school. And my dream was shattered. I remember sitting in the Nugget in the spring of 1968 watching Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and asking myself: “What are you going to do with your life, Greg?”

 

I completely blotted out the pain of that loss and my failure and I plunged ahead with life. But that dream always remained in the background of my life and I grieved over it and it kept me from finding joy in my life.

 

Now I am fast forwarding to six years ago which was the wonderful time you invited me to Our Savior for the first time. During those few months I was with you, I was also a temporary chaplain at the VA and was roaming the halls of the hospital when a nurse asked me if I could help in Ward 142. Using what furniture he could find to bar the door to prevent the Viet Cong from attacking, a patient had barricaded himself in a ward of four men. I knocked on the door and shouted: “It’s the chaplain! Let me in!” The door swung open and I jumped into the bunker.

 

“The VC are out there, Chaplain!” shouted a man crouching behind his bed. The other three men, with knowing smiles, were relaxing in their own beds.

 

“Where did they come from?” I inquired.

 

“The sergeant sent me out to count how many were dead and they were hiding under the bodies of the dead gooks,” he replied. PFC (ret) Robert Gray let down his guard slightly while his eyes remained fixed on the door. He explained how he grew up the son of a Rhode Island fishing boat captain who sent him up high into the rigging to spot swordfish swimming in the distance. That was Bob’s big dream to be a fishing boat captain. He never made it. He could spot a swordfish a mile away and when he went to Vietnam they put him in a recon helicopter to look for VC on the ground because he could see a wisp of smoke coming from a cigarette.

 

“That’s how good my eyes are!” Gray exclaimed with pride.

 

That’s how good his eyes “were!” Bob’s brain was filled with tumors that any chaplain could see on an x-ray and now he could barely find his way to the bathroom.

 

“What did you do in ‘Nam?” Gray asked.

 

“Nothing; I avoided it. I was a war protester.” I replied.

 

“That’s good! That’s good! I can dig that,” the terminally-ill veteran affirmed.

 

The nurses on the ward were fed up with Bob Gray. Most VA nurses appreciate what veterans have been through and will cut them some slack but there was something about Gray that tested their compassion. Maybe it was his fishing gear.

 

Bob had three expensive fishing poles he brought with him to the hospital along with two tackle boxes and hundreds of lures. When a nurse found a tri-hook on the floor that was the end. “Chaplain, can’t you do something with this man?”

 

“Look, Bob, you don’t want these veterans to step on one of your lures and get sicker than they already are. Why don’t’ you let me put them in my van until you’re ready to do some fishing?”

 

Bob reluctantly agreed but later I learned there was a reason for his relenting.

 

Bob didn’t like sitting around the hospital. As sick as he was he always wanted to go for a walk. I was not supposed to take patients for walks. That was the job of orderlies. But there were never enough orderlies so finally I relented and said: “Let’s go!”

 

We were walking across the parking lot with Bob in his johnny and a big grin on his face. Then suddenly, he cried out: “Ow! Something is biting me! Ow! Ow! “He sat down on the ground and grabbed his foot. I noticed that he only had socks on. “Ow! Ow!” There embedded in his sock was one of his own fish hooks! Bob had been saved from a nasty wound from that hook by his own sock!

 

Not long after Bob almost hooked himself he announced:

 

“I sure would like to do some fishing but somebody has my stuff!”

 

“Look, Bob, I’m a chaplain and there are boundaries I can’t cross. I’m supposed to pray and read the Bible and be a fisher of men.”

 

“Some chaplain you are!” he snorted.

 

The guy had less than six months. His behavior had improved dramatically. He had stopped his barricading. The nurses were smiling at his antics now. He was becoming one of those patients they would never forget and they began to love him.

 

I decided to cross the boundary. I got Bob’s doctors to sign off on giving Bob a pass to go fishing. I recruited a friend of mine to go along and we headed for the Connecticut. The approach to the river was down a steep embankment and Bob took a header coming up feet first with a big smile on his face which had just missed a huge boulder. He had cheated death again.

 

Bob “fished” for twenty minutes spending most of the time trying to unravel his line twisted like the synapses in his brain. He made about two casts. But when he came up from the river he was smiling broadly and said:” This is the best damned fishing I’ve done in a long time!” Then he took us out to a Chinese restaurant.

 

Bob died of a brain hemorrhage while he was on the can. “That often happens,” stated his nurse not making me feel any better. All of us were crying. I had lost a brother.

 

I got the boot from the hospital because I didn’t have the required training so I went to New Mexico in 2003 and got what I needed. I was invited back to the VA a few years later and one day typed the last four numbers of a patient’s social security into the computer. Along with that patient’s name, up popped the name ROBERT GRAY! How lucky could I get I thought as I relived those months being Bob’s chaplain.

 

As I passed by the nurse’s station that very same day, one of the nurses caught me. “Chaplain, I have something for you.” She pulled out a foil pouch filled with fishing lures. “We found these last year. Bob must still be here!” she laughed.

 

 “I’m sure of it!” I expounded confirming Bob’s resurrection.

 

“I think he would like you to have them,” she said presenting the lures to me like medals of valor. I was honored to receive them.

 

So that is the story of the explosion of my dream.

 

These are the hands of a surgeon. These are the hands of surgeon who for a short while got to be a chaplain. These are the hands of a surgeon who for a short while got to be a chaplain and who, by the grace God, got to be a sabbatical pastor of this most amazing congregation. That is how God explodes dreams. It’s painful when they explode but dreams exploded are only dreams deferred and dreams deferred are dreams you never even knew were possible.

 

Langston Hughes wrote about dreams and I end with this one:

 

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

                                                                                                                        Dreams

                                                                                                                        Langston Hughes

 

I feel I would like to add a couple of words to Langston’s poem- the words “but not too fast.”

 

Hold fast to dreams, (but not too fast)

For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams, (but not too fast)
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

 

For you who are holding dreams too fast, holding on to dreams which have died, let other dreams come. Hold fast to dreams but not so fast that you become a broken winged bird.

 

Hold fast to dreams, but not too fast, for when dreams go life can become a dream again. A barren field can bloom with the beauty of God.

 

Thank God for you, dear Lutherans. This sabbatical has been a spring-time for my soul- a dream come true.

 

I will neither forget the things that my eyes have seen here nor let them slip from my mind all the days of my life.

 

 

To the Glory of God and for the Congregation of Our Savior Lutheran Church, Hanover, NH

August 30, 2009

 

Gregory W. Marshall

Sabbatical Pastor

 

Langston Hughes

(from www.poets.org)

James Langston Hughes was born February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. His parents divorced when he was a small child, and his father moved to Mexico. He was raised by his grandmother until he was thirteen, when he moved to Lincoln, Illinois, to live with his mother and her husband, before the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. It was in Lincoln, Illinois, that Hughes began writing poetry. Following graduation, he spent a year in Mexico and a year at Columbia University. During these years, he held odd jobs as an assistant cook, launderer, and a busboy, and travelled to Africa and Europe working as a seaman. In November 1924, he moved to Washington, D.C. Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1926. He finished his college education at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania three years later. In 1930 his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature.

Hughes, who claimed Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties. He wrote novels, short stories and plays, as well as poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in “Montage of a Dream Deferred.” His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period—Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen—Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Langston Hughes died of complications from prostate cancer in May 22, 1967, in New York. In his memory, his residence at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, New York City, has been given landmark status by the New York City Preservation Commission, and East 127th Street has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

In addition to leaving us a large body of poetic work, Hughes wrote eleven plays and countless works of prose, including the well-known “Simple” books: Simple Speaks His Mind, Simple Stakes a Claim,Simple Takes a Wife, and Simple’s Uncle Sam. He edited the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro and The Book of Negro Folklore, wrote an acclaimed autobiography (The Big Sea) and co-wrote the play Mule Bone with Zora Neale Hurston

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