…it had been a dream. Like Solomon, we are people who dream. People who, at certain times, have believed that anything is possible, and that we ourselves can make the dream come true. We are, moreover, a people formed by a national dream and a mythic history that has shaped our lives and those of our children with values of freedom, justice, hospitality, and the possibility of unity in diversity. We believe that we believe this dream….believe in our belief so fervently that even in our darkest seasons when we know, when we can see, that we are failing to be the shining city on the hill about which our forefathers dreamed…we still see ourselves through the eyes of our hopeful imagination, rather than in the harsh light of reality.

It’s hard for people of faith to do otherwise —whether our dream is of ourselves and our families, our faith, or our national pride. I still remember the poem I memorized, and fervently believed, when I was in 7^th grade, in 1968, while our cities burned, our young adults protested in the streets, our visionaries were assassinated, and my own father fought, far away, in Vietnam, in a war that even then, few of us trusted. All evidence to the contrary, I could still stand up and recite

The year’s at the spring, the day’s at the morn
Morning’s at seven, the hillside’s dew-pearled
The lark’s on the wing, the snail’s on the thor
God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.
and see it in my heart’s eye, and believe it.

When Solomon’s kingdom was born, it arose like a phoenix out of the ashes of treachery and deceit, above the bones of the mistakes of David his father and the cynical maneuverings of a court in chaos. But Solomon was a young man, a very young man, whose ideals at the dawn of his day were not sullied by family history nor informed by harsh political reality. He was the son of David and Bathsheba, a young man with power and prestige and boundless hope, and somehow to him, as to some even now, God had made the world and the political order over which he presided a simple and well-ordered place. Good and Evil were clearly defined, and surely acted upon, and there was no one much in evidence to suggest that things might not be altogether as they seemed.

So, shaped as he was by family myth and court history, Solomon entered upon his reign well-armed with Family Values but unchecked by the humility of a capacity for self-critique; full of a prayerful vision of justice, wisdom, and truth, but unimpeded in his vision by a cautionary admission of the ambiguity, murkiness, and flat-out failures of those same dreams in the hands of his father.

Sheltered by this naïve world view (and offered to us in the mythic national history mode of George Washington and the cherry tree) Solomon begins his wielding of national power with a prayer: give me wisdom, the ability to know right from wrong, and good from evil. May I govern fitly, and may I comprehend and order my doings by attending to the ears of my heart. It was a good and noble prayer, out of which flowered the first and most splendid Jerusalem Temple, an era of massive prosperity and national expansion, as well as the most significant literary and cultural movement ever envisioned in Israel: the Wisdom Movement, Israel’s Camelot, which gave us Proverbs and the book of Job, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. Solomon prayed for wisdom, and he may have got it. But the original version of the lectionary reading failed to add one very significant verse to the end of that noble tale of prayers and promises, and that verse is this: Then Solomon awoke; it had been a dream.

Does it destroy the beauty of the dream of Solomon, to admit that what really happened during his reign was far more complicated, far more mixed an ethical and spiritual bag than this “in the beginning” would have us imagine? Does it invalidate the fervency of the prayer, the nobility of the values professed, to learn that Solomon governed so unwisely, wielded power with such lack of balance, that upon his death the Northern and Southern kingdoms split in bitter civil strife, never to be reunited? Does it dim the glory of the Temple to learn that most of the massive building program of Solomon was undergirded by conscription and forced labor? The boy-king had a dream, but in reality, he was a tyrant. When we have to wake up in these jarring ways, do we abandon the dream that is not reality for a more selfish and cynical way to govern ourselves in the world, or can we, who are dual citizens of the kingdoms of the world and the kin-dom of God, hold on to hope, and somehow, somewhere, find a better, more realistic way?

Christianity in the modern era has experimented with a variety of models for achieving these dreams in a nation that, despite our profession of a separation between church and state, still mixes piety, politics and power in a potent and sometimes deadly cocktail. Other religions, dominant in other places, do the same, without being hampered by such distinctions. Here at home, the Presbyterian Church has long been proud that the form of governance which it developed was and remains the foundation of our nation’s way to rule. Secure in historic privilege, for many years it was customary for Presbyterians to be uncritically leaders in government, local and national, our interests and ideals indistinguishable from those of the rule of law. In the time of the Civil War, our church split over the responsibility of people of faith to criticize their government when dual citizenship produced conflicting values: and the church of the South chose a way of private piety that professed to stay pure and apart from the choices of national interest, while sanctioning the sinful practices of slavery that protected their –our—economic well being. Huge evangelical churches today are so melded in their prayerful piety to national interest that sometimes, one cannot tell the difference between a political rally and a service of worship. Churches of all stripes still argue bitterly among themselves about the place of the American flag in the sanctuary, what it represents and whether it helps or hinders people of faith as they attempt to help the commonwealth and common weal. Too many…far too many of my colleagues fall silent when they cannot find the balance, the way, to lift up our place and responsibility as people of faith in a fallen world without straying into partisanship and bitter division.

What should we do? Who are we called to be? And how, by the love of God, can we get there? We enter again a season of political decision and change in which we, the church, can neither afford to be silent bystanders nor partisan dupes—of whatever party! We are in a season of war, and participate along with all our fellow-citizens in accountability for the ways in which our American values and American privilege are being exported across the sea, and barricaded from border to border.

We have a right, more, we have a responsibility as dual citizens to speak the truth in love, to speak truth to power, and to critique our own political progress according to the values that our nation still professes. We can do this in the way Solomon intended, able, as he prayed to be, to discern between good and evil.

We have a unique freedom, rooted in our dual citizenship, to look with unflinching eyes at the real history, the real truth, the real failures of our commonwealth to live into its highest values. We can do this as Solomon prayed, by listening to the ears of our heart.

We can do this because our meta-history, our faith history, reminds us that human institutions are flawed and fragile, rooted as they are in the limited sight and broken abilities of sinful human beings. We can do this with love and with mercy, not with cynicism or despair, because we believe that a loving God intends to, and is already, redeeming this flawed and broken world.

We must do this, because if we don’t, who will?

Last week, when prayer time came, among our common offerings of concern for those who are sick, those who are traveling, those who are in harm’s way, and the nations of the world afflicted by disaster or disease or war, one act stood out to me as poignant and powerful. We have been preaching these past weeks about Jesus, the Bread of Life, and putting before us a vision of Christ’s Table as the place where we are nourished, and where we profess a vision of a Table where all are welcome, where all are fed, where none go hungry, a table of Life that is sustainable, eternal. A powerful metaphor, which I hope can shape our vision of life from day to day and here in this congregation, but which I sometimes fear is too abstract, too distant of an image to serve as a way for us to understand how we reflect the path of Christ. But as our prayer concerns were shared, Frank Smith got up, turned around to address this community, and literally leaned against the communion table, his hand laid upon it, as he spoke with quiet passion about our nation’s complicity in weapons of mass destruction, and our own obligation of faith to speak against violence and the profits of weapons of war that are ours to make and distribute, and ours to stop. In my dream, Frank drew strength and nourishment from the Table of the Bread of Life that is our family table as he prayed. In my dream, we all do, and we all will. Let us pray. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference, living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that you will make all things right if I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonable happy in this life and supremely happy with you in the next. Amen.