They are powered by a holy resolve that is incessantly subversive

Getting back to Slow Wisdom As A Subversion of Reality by Walter Brueggemann

Fifth. The triad of fidelity specializes in dreams that are not held back by circumstance whereas the triad of control takes life as a present possession to be kept the way it is to perpetuity. The totalizing system of those who make the rules, manage the money and administer the power and mobilize their wisdom is every day everywhere evident among us.  That totalizing system aims to maintain  advantage.  The capacity to control and own to perpetuity is evident through deregulation and the stacking of cards by law and by predatory management that finally ends in a society that is short on social possibility.  

So Pharaoh, in his totalizing sovereignty could finally state in his illusion about himself, "The Nile is my own, I made it."  He forgot that the Nile was a gift.  

And so Jezebel can say to her pouting, husband king, "Do you not now govern? Get up and be cheerful and I will give you his vinyard.  Are you not a king, are you not entitled, do you not possess the leverage to have what you want?"  She imagines that the land is hers to give Ahab. And when she has done her nefarious manipulation, she says to her wimpish husband-king, "Go take possession of the vinyard of Naboth for he is not alive but dead."  And the narrator says as soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead he went and took possession.  It's all about realized eschatology, that what we have is permanent, to be secured and protected through entitlement.  

And from below comes the cadence of the dream.  Dream is always subversive of present arrangement, the dream always intruded into the sleep of Pharaoh who thought he had everything.  And then he dreamed seven lean cows and seven blighted shocks of wheat.  

And Nebuchadnezzar, who had it all dreamed of a tree being cut down, driven from his power to insanity. The Prophets or voices of God's dream, they say, all the time, "In that day, in that day, the days are coming, the day to come, is a day of disarmament when swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, the day is coming when the Lord will act against all heapers," - this is the text I was reading in class on 9-11, Isaiah 2 "For the Lord has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that's lifted up against all the cedars of Lebanon and against all the oaks of Bashan, against all the high mountains, against the lofty places, against every high hill, against every fortified wall.  The days are  coming and they cannot be stopped."  

They are powered by a holy resolve that is incessantly subversive.  

And if we trace the dream of subversion we can follow it from Martin at the Lincoln Monument where he said repeatedly, "I have a dream." And the reason we follow his cadences is that we know that is dream is the dream of our society writ deep.  It is the dream of God for justice, righteousness and steadfast love. And like all such dreamers, Martin had no clue about how to get from here to there.  He only knew that the dream had substance and force and could not be stopped. The trajectory of the poets imagined that the dream is still underway, still overcoming apartheid, still working dignity for the weak, still demanding equity for the poor, still ensuring an end to the of the systemic violence that we choose to call "policy."  

The university is always deciding how it will serve the forces of possession.  In the real world it must be so but it must also do other than that and more than that because the world is not closed into present power arrangements.  The world does not stand still simply because we arrive at our preferred arrangements.  And so the dreamers finally were able to say, "Go tell John that the blind see and the lame walk or the lepers are cleansed or the deaf hear and the dead are raised and the poor have good news because the world is always breaking open beyond possession to dream. And the dream continually bites us. 

Who do you imagine is more likely to work for equality, economic justice, all of the things that The Reverend MLK jr. abbreviated into that Beloved Community I mentioned the other day, someone who believes we are material objects or someone who believes what Walter Brueggemann presents as the alternative to the triad of control?   

I think, in the end, the failure of the secularist, materialist mind even retaining those minimal habits of feeling good will that can be found among them to actually achieve anything is the force that MLK thought bent the arc of the universe toward justice, the kind that might show up better in a dream than in any scientific measurement because science isn't made to measure that kind of thing.  It is measured in considered, shared, observed and lived human experience and human history.  

The dream certainly bites those big and little would be Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzars among us, the investors, the fund managers, the billionaires and millionaires but it bits us would be alternative in another way, we have to be the conscious, actual producers of that dream in life.   It is one of the tragedies of MLK that that one speech was coopted and distorted into a pantomime to be delivered once a year on a Monday holiday of depleted meaning.  It might have gotten more to the point if he'd said, "I have a demand," or "I have a warning"  though it probably wouldn't have gotten as far as it did if he put it in those terms.   You've got to be really careful what words you choose and often even then they'll steal it and use it against your intentions.   The holy resolve that is incessantly subversive is what the dream really is and the belief that it is possible and will come but only if we make it come.