Epiphany 4A 2026

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ A long time ago in a diocese far, far away, I read a book entitled Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language. I remember it being an interesting book, but didn’t take to heart its real meaning until God decided to remind me what I had forgotten. 

I was in seminary, a place where dreams often find themselves encountered by nightmares. My life was changing in many ways; two other journeys through graduate school didn’t seem to be nearly as personally challenging as did the present. And, the death of a mentor and both of my grandmothers in a four-month span caused much introspection. 

I started having nightmares, really vivid ones that startled me from sleep with the feeling that there was a presence in the room that I feared seeing. I remember being afraid to open my eyes in the darkness to peer into that dark corner where I sensed the presence was lurking. I do remember its shape and purpose forming in my thoughts. It was a vampire, and I did not have Buffy on speed dial, which actually didn’t even exist then. 

These dreams occurred, often nightly, until I posed a question and dared answering it. What is it that seems to be draining the very life out of me? My inability to face the answer led to other issues affecting my life and my ability to glimpse even a slight possibility of what I’ve since understood as Jesus’ promise of abundant life. 

Okay. Enough true confessions, lest someone begin writing a script for the next Lifetime or Hallmark movie. I tell you this because today’s lessons point us in directions away from ways of life that are often draining away God’s purpose for us, God’s promise to us, even, dare I say, God’s dream for us. 

Israel is in trouble, problem child that it has been since Jacob started limping. Corinth is a fractious place, the haves positioned against the have nots, while some others come along and make spreading the Gospel a competitive sport. Jesus’ followers are learning a new way of life, a movement that will challenge the status quo not only of religious leaders, but will expose the lie taught by the governing Pax Romana. 

In The Many Lives of Greta Wells, the author Andrew Scott Greer writes of a young man walking in the New York City snow with his sister and his dog, who does what dogs do at every tree along the way. A woman emerges from her front door in her housecoat and yells at them to “take their dog away. They’re killing the trees.” The young man looks at her and asks, “Ma’am, are you the person you dreamed of being when you were a young girl?” 

I want to paraphrase that question for us as the parish known as Immanuel Highlands. Are we the parish, the people God dreamed of us being when our founders were led to form this part of the Body of Christ in 1870? Looking even further back, are we all together, as that Body, Christ’s Church, whom God dreamed of us being as Christ was raised from the dead? Are we, some of the spiritual descendants of that rascal Jacob, renamed Israel, whom God had in mind, the God whom Jacob wrestled with all night, resulting in that limp I mentioned a few minutes ago? 

The answer we may not want to admit is perhaps “not sure,” or even, “no.” And so, we gather from week-to-week to hear and ponder again what it takes to turn that “no” into a resounding “yes.” Resounding, mind you, because it will be echoed by the God who dreams us into being in the first place. 

To reach that “yes,” we may find ourselves in a great reversal similar to those Beatitudes we might have memorized in Sunday School. We might need to lay aside, slay if you must, our individual achievements and self-congratulations to not just see others as our equals, but to choose equality with them by changing our judgmental opinions of both of us. 

We might also hear that “yes” in response to our uttering the “no.” The world has changed since 1870, let alone since the day of Jesus’ resurrection or of Jacob’s all-night wrestling match. We can’t change that, nor can we stop the changes that lie ahead of us. God’s yes could come as the response to evidence that, no matter what, we remain faithful as we live into the promise of abundant life, reaching out to others with one hand as we reach out toward the possibilities of God’s dream for all of us with the other. 

Yes might mean that we let go of worship as being something we do for a prescribed hour and five minutes on Sunday (with music, forty minutes without) and see true worship as an all-encompassing way of life, our offerings being our whole selves and not just a portion of our paycheck. 

We might need to remember a phrase we hear once a year so that we can truly “walk humbly with our God.” Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. In other words, we are not God. If we see an outward and visible sign of our faith in our accomplishments and our possessions, then we have to admit that the god we worship is pretty much the person we see in the mirror. 

Of course, understanding the meaning of God’s dream might also mean setting aside memories that once exhibited life, but whose re-creation results in life being drained from us. Our devotion to the past too often finds our grip around our own necks, and risks seeing our dreams turned into nightmares of confusion and burnout that cannot offer life, only death in some form as an escape from them. 

So, after all that, what is God’s dream for us? While we engage a process to rediscover the answer, let us keep in mind that it’s been the same all along. From the moment of creation, through the call of Abraham and the prophets, even in the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, God’s dream is the same: faithful children, heirs of a promise that has once and for all eliminated the nightmare of eternal death, choosing instead to present the gift of abundant life that goes on forever. How that dream becomes flesh and lives among us is our commentary on our own re-awakening.