Summary
John sees Jesus with eyes like flames of fire, holding seven stars in his hand, with a two-edged sword issuing from his mouth and a face shining like the sun. Is John hallucinating? Is John dreaming?
Some argue that we can only believe what can be tested in a controlled environment according to the scientific method; everything else is just dreaming.
Of course, the scientific method cannot be tested according to the scientific method, and modern science has demonstrated that all nature is fundamentally supernatural, that space and time had a beginning, and that matter itself is somehow dependent on the perception of a conscious observer.
So who’s dreaming?
And how would you know if you are dreaming?
Perhaps this world, your world, is a dream—your dream.
If it is, then waking from this dream will be downright apocalyptic.
The sky rolls up, the stars fall, the world comes to an end when you’re waking from a dream.
If you wake a person too quickly from a dream, you can give them a heart attack.
The loving thing to do is to whisper in their ear and wake them up slowly.
To the dreamer in his own dream, there is the gradual realization that the whisper can’t be explained by the dream or made to submit to the dreamer. Yet, at first, the whisper is part of the dream—an incongruent part of the dream.
Are there things in this world that can’t be explained by this world, things that cannot be comprehended in three-and-a-half dimensions using the scientific method? How about truth, reason, beauty or love?
God is Love. And Jesus is the Truth, the Reason, and the Good in flesh.
Perhaps He’s whispering, “Wake up O sleeper and rise from the dead.”
In the beginning, we dreamed an evil dream.
We dreamed that we were God and God was like a lab rat.
God let us . . . He let us take His life and nail Him to a tree, and everything died.
Death is our dream, but now, Life is waking us up.
On the island of Patmos, John wasn’t dreaming; he was waking up.
*Sermon discussion questions are available for this sermon here: Discussion Questions “To Dream & Stop Dreaming