Sermon Notes — July 26, 2026
“A Million Dreams”
July 26, 2026
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Ezekiel 37:1-14 (NRSVUE)
The prophet Ezekiel is in exile. He is far, far away from his home in Jerusalem, which has been destroyed by the Babylonian army. Like the other Jewish exiles who are living in Babylon, he cannot imagine what his future holds. He and his fellow exiles feel utterly cut off from God. In fact, they wonder if God has forgotten about them completely, or if God has given up on them, or if this is the end of their story with God.
But God has not given up. God has not forgotten. This is not the end of the story.
Will you pray with me and for me?
At the beginning of Ezekiel 37, God gives Ezekiel a vision. We could even call it a dream. And in this dream, God shows Ezekiel a vast expanse – our scripture calls it a valley – miles and miles of human bones. Dry bones. They have been in the valley for so long, bleaching under the blazing sun, that there is no life in them at all.
In his dream Ezekiel walks all around the valley. He looks at all the bones. He sees how dry they are. He sees that there is no life in them at all.
And when he is finished walking around all the bones God asks him, “Ezekiel, can these bones come back to life?”
(pause)
God asks Ezekiel to imagine. Can you imagine – can you see in your mind's eye–can you imagine, Ezekiel, that these bones can come back to life?
Last week we talked about holy courage – seeing the world as it should be and then working to create that world by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Today we focus on holy imagination – the spiritual practice of opening ourselves to what God might yet do.
A Million Dreams is the opening number from the film The Greatest Showman. The Greatest Showman tells the story – with lots of artistic license – tells the story of Phineas Taylor Barnum – P.T. Barnum – of circus fame. As the film opens, we see young Phineas working alongside his father who is a tailor. One of the families for whom Mr. Barnum works is the Hallett family. Their daughter, Charity, catches the eye of Phineas and they begin a long friendship that eventually leads to marriage and two daughters. At the beginning of the story, when Phineas is poor and surviving by any means necessary, he tells Charity about the million dreams that keep him awake at night – dreams of the world they will create together.
While Phineas Barnum’s imagination may not fit into the category of holy imagination, there is something to be said for the energy he dedicates to his dreams – to following his imagination and to believing that the future does not have to be determined solely by the present.
This is the same kind of imagination that God asks of Ezekiel – to imagine that the present valley of dry bones does not solely determine what might happen in the future. Can you imagine – God asks Ezekiel – can you picture in your mind’s eye – can you imagine that these bones might come back to life?
Ezekiel answers with a non-answer. Only you know, God.
And as Ezekiel speaks to the bones they begin to rattle – these dry bones begin to connect together – the foot bone connects to the leg bone and the leg bone connects to the knee bone. And then Ezekiel says he looks and now there are sinews–tendons and ligaments – connecting muscle to bone and bone to bone. And now there is skin covering the bones and the muscles and the sinews. But they are still lying on the ground. There is no life in them.
And then God tells Ezekiel to call to the four winds to come and breathe on these lifeless bodies scattered in the valley. And the four winds come and Ezekiel says he looks and they are standing on their feet – thousands upon thousands.
This sounds very much like the very first story of holy imagination.
At the beginning of all things when the cosmos was full of nothingness, the Spirit of God hovered over the nothingness and God imagined. God imagined oak trees and baobab trees and giraffes and frogs and mosquitos. God imagined elephants and puppies and irises and Venus flytraps. And God imagined humans who would have their own imaginations. God imagined humans made out of the soil of the earth and then God made one. It had bones and muscles and tendons and ligaments, but there was no life in the human. And so God breathed into that body and it came alive. Just like those thousands of bodies came alive in that valley.
Those dry bones that God showed Ezekiel – God said to Ezekiel, “Imagine that this is the whole house of Israel. Imagine that these are all the people who were removed from their homes and who were forced to stand by, helpless, as their temple was destroyed. Imagine that these are all the people who marched 900 miles to a foreign city where they were strangers. And now imagine. Imagine not only that I can give them life – but imagine that I can bring them back home – the very home that they were taken from. Imagine that they will worship in the temple once again. Imagine that they will once again grow food in their own soil.”
Can we imagine what God might yet do?
As I was studying for this sermon another vision came to mind, this one from the New Testament, from the book of Acts. It’s part of a larger and more significant story, but in this story Peter, Jesus’s disciple, is with other Christians in the port city of Joppa. While he is waiting for lunch to be served he goes to the roof of the home where they are staying and he starts to pray. And as he is praying, God gives him a vision. In his vision the heavens open up and something like a large linen sheet comes down from the sky. And in that sheet are all sorts of four-legged creatures and reptiles and wild birds. There are lots of different kinds of animals in the sheet but they all have one thing in common. Peter and his Jewish brothers and sisters are forbidden by Jewish law to eat them. They are unclean. But then a strange thing happens. As Peter is looking at all of these animals in his dream, God’s voice speaks to him and God says, “Get up, Peter. Kill the animals and eat them.” And Peter is horrified, and he shouts back to God, “I will never do that! I have never eaten these animals and I never will!” And God gently responds, “Don’t ever consider something impure if God says that it is pure.”
Peter and God go back and forth three times before the light bulb finally comes on for Peter. It wasn’t that immediate, but in a series of events following his vision Peter comes to realize that neither he nor his brothers and sisters who follow Jesus should ever exclude – or consider unclean – any child of God. This vision is a turning point in the early church. It literally changes everything.
Holy imagination reminds us that we never assume what God might do, or what God might ask us to do.
One more example, a little more contemporary, but not that contemporary.
John Wesley – John Wesley did not mean to start another Christian denomination. He was an ordained priest in the Church of England who simply believed that followers of Jesus should live out their discipleship in very practical ways. And God asked John Wesley to imagine something different…imagine taking the good news of new life through Jesus out of the church walls and bringing it to people who wouldn’t – or couldn’t, in many cases – come into the church building. John Wesley actually wrote in his journal that he considered this practice vile. But he did it anyway. He began preaching in the open air, in the fields around Bristol, in England, to the coal miners and laborers. He wasn’t opposed to the people – he had simply never imagined a world where the Word of God was shared outside of the church building and outside of regular worship.
But when Wesley saw what it meant to those coal miners to have someone bring the good news to them instead of waiting for them to come to the church building – when he saw that he was deeply moved. Thousands of people came to hear him preach, and their lives were transformed, by the gospel of course, but also by Wesley’s willingness to come to them and meet them where they were. Literally, where they were.
And for John Wesley – and for us sitting here today – that changed everything. Besides preaching outside in the fields, Wesley trained laypeople to preach and to teach religious classes. Those tasks had always been done by clergy. He asked his brother, Charles, to set his hymn lyrics to popular pub tunes so that people who weren’t familiar with the hymns could sing them.
Wesley stopped limiting God’s call on his life to what he could imagine. He opened himself to the possibilities of what God might yet do.
This is holy imagination.
The whole history of salvation is a history of God inviting God’s people to use holy imagination. To imagine a world in which every human treats every other human as God’s beloved child; to imagine a world where humans treat the earth as a treasured home; to imagine that despair can be countered by hope and that death can be defeated by life. Prophets and poets throughout scripture have invited people to imagine that God might be doing something new, something that they could have never imagined by themselves – a world where instruments of destruction are turned into tools that we use to plant seeds and grow food; a world where people who thought they were supposed to exclude each other sat down to feast together. The story of our life with God is a story of imagining what God might do.
And six hundred years after God showed Ezekiel all those bones and asked him to imagine life in them, Jesus lived among us and used his own life to show us once and for all what could come from God’s holy imagination. A world where we need not fear death because it no longer has power over us. A world where we can risk including the people we thought we were supposed to exclude; a world where we can risk using power to heal rather than harm; a world where we can build our lives on love and welcome instead of fear and anger.
And it changed everything.
This week I invite you – I invite us all – to pray for holy imagination–to pray that we might all open ourselves up to what God might yet do, through each of us and through all of us together, Christ’s body, seeking to offer the love and life of Christ to a world that needs hope and welcome and redemption.
Holy imagination.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.