Dreamscapes
Psalm [120], 121, 122, 123 • Psalm 124, 125, 126, [127]
Num. 22:21-38 • Rom. 7:1-12 • Matt. 21:23-32
Yesterday we celebrated the feast of St. Peter, so I am stepping a bit out of line to touch on that important day and its readings.
In the reading from Acts, Peter has a transformative moment from a trance. Trances and dreams play some interesting roles in scripture. There are Jacob’s dreams of the ladder to heaven and, later, his dream calling him home, and Joseph gets his dreamt assurance that he should not divorce the pregnant Mary and his warning to flee with mother and child to Egypt. Revelation seems one trance or vision after another, and the Old Testament has its own, as when Balaam tells the disappointed Balak of his vision of God’s blessing on the Israelites.
Psychologists, starting with Freud, tell us that in such moments things that have been swimming around in our subconscious can rise up and break the surface of awareness and, with that, can call us to action. Many Indian peoples recognize dreams as liminal, “thin” places where the spiritual and unseen can draw close with warning, prophecy, and crucial insight. In “Black Robe,” a film I show my class in American Indian history, a young Jesuit priest, after traveling with Algonkin people for weeks, asks “What can we say to people who think that dreams are the real world and all this is an illusion?” And then: “Perhaps they’re right.”
Peter’s role during Jesus’s ministry is often as a kind of foil. He gives Jesus the chance to clarify what he is trying to get across to us by jumping to some wrong conclusion or following some misguided impulse. “Let’s all stay up here on the mountain!” “Help! I’m sinking!” “Don’t talk about being killed in Jerusalem!” Which gives Jesus the chance to say to him (and to us): “You’re missing the point! Listen to me!”
And then Jesus is killed, resurrected, risen to heaven, and Peter and the other apostles are out in the world trying to figure out exactly what they are supposed to be doing. In this reading, things come deliciously full circle for Peter the Impulsive. Early church authorities in Jerusalem have been on his case for his reaching out to Gentiles rather than sticking where they say he should, strictly with Jews.
Peter answers by telling of a trance or dream he had while praying, which in turn led him to an encounter with the Holy Spirit while meeting with some of the uncircumcised. This sounds to me like a welling up through the trance of an understanding that Peter had absorbed, despite all his thick-headedness, from his time with Jesus. The jist of the story he tells the early leaders is that the gospel, the good news, is for everyone—that the circumference of God’s loving embrace is infinite. His telling the story seems to have come down to, “You’re missing the point! Listen to me!”
They did, as Peter had before them, and as we should do our best to do as well.
Written by Elliott West
Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.