Sermon preached at Evensong on the Fifth Sunday after Trinity 2025

Genesis 41: 1–16, 25–37
1 Corinthians 4: 8–13

What do we make of dreams?  Should we pay attention to them, try to remember them, jot them down, discuss them with a therapist?  Or are they just the flotsam and jetsam of our thoughts; the random bits of mental detritus being cleared away while we sleep, so that we can begin the new day with the mental equivalent of a pristine beach, cleared and made level by the receding tide.

Most of us probably sit somewhere in the middle; finding dreams interesting, wondering what we might learn from them, but also being quite ready to shrug our shoulders and just say ‘that was weird’ and move on. 

Pharoah’s dream, in our first lesson this evening, was not an occasion for shrugging shoulders.  The sequence of fat and then thin cows, plump and then blighted heads of grain, the sense of duplication and the repeated number seven, clearly played on Pharoah’s mind.

Wisely, he sought advice to understand the dream.  His magicians and wise men, the therapists of his day, couldn’t apparently offer any interpretation.  Couldn’t, or wouldn’t, I wonder?  Nobody would want to convey bad news to an all-powerful, mercurial monarch.

Fortunately, there was someone at hand, the cupbearer, who remembered being in prison with a young Hebrew who had proved to be rather good, rather accurate at interpreting dreams.

Joseph, we will remember was originally sold into slavery after rather injudiciously sharing with his brothers a dream that implied that he would one day rule over them.  This would indeed come to pass, but at the time it got him thrown into a pit and then sold to passing traders.

Joseph seemed to be particularly good at predicting the future based on dreams.  It was a gift that took him a little while to marshal properly; a gift that had got him into trouble, but now, with Pharaoh, would present him with an astonishing opportunity; turning around his fortunes, those of the land in which he had been exiled and enslaved, and, eventually, those of his Father and his brothers too.

I wonder what we feel about dreams predicting the future? This tale of Joseph might at least suggest that it is a subtle business, and a rare gift to be able to interpret properly.  Scientists create models, based on measured experience, to try to predict everything from next week’s weather to the speed and associated effects of climate change.  The models are complex and require enormous computer-processing capacity, and results can vary widely with even the tiniest changes in circumstance.  Whether AI will do any better remains to be seen.  If predicting the future based on measured data is far from assured, then what are the chances that a sleeping brain could ever do better?

Perhaps we might hesitate from being too dismissive.  Having spent centuries, arguably since the Renaissance, imagining ourselves in distinction from the rest of creation, over and against creation as those who measure and master it, we are perhaps beginning to reappreciate our interconnectedness; our inescapable dependence upon and within the whole cosmos as a single dynamic entity. 

We are perhaps beginning to realise that time is not distinct from creation, from the cosmos, but integral to it, part of it, and may not be limited to our linear apprehension of it.  At the risk of going way beyond my scientific competence, I am told that time and space may curve.

Perhaps it is only in dreams and visions that our intellect can begin to explore the more distant realms of this connectedness, the more mysterious aspects of what just might be knowable.  If the interpretation of this fragmentary and allusive information is a gift more developed in some rare individuals, we may need to be prepared to hear things we might not like, which might not be convenient, from people who we might find difficult to trust.

In a world where trust in the predictions of scientists is under extraordinary pressure, we must be careful that we don’t start running after any self-proclaimed clairvoyant, whose predictions suit our preconceived agendas.  We mustn’t become unintelligent about this. 

The point is to exercise all of our God-given intelligence, including those sources of knowledge that are more mysterious – some might say, more right brain than left; more to do with how things connect rather than how they break down into parts.  But, to be clear, we need both – this isn’t about right brain versus left, or faith versus science, but about valuing all avenues to the truth about the cosmos, which we will never be able to fully measure or master because we are within it.

In the second lesson this evening, we heard a snippet from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he is developing his theme about foolishness and wisdom.  He is writing to a church that is confident in its intelligence, spiritual gifts and affluence.  They don’t think they have anything to learn from the foolishness of apostles who bless when they are reviled, endure when persecuted and speak kindly when they are slandered.

The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, Paul tells them; Paul who in a vision, a kind of dream, heard Christ’s call to turn away from persecution and to become a messenger of the Gospel; the confident, learned Pharisee who discovered, in Christ crucified, a wisdom for which he is content to be considered a fool.

Pharoah listened to Joseph’s interpretation of his dream, and listened to Joseph’s plan to make provision for the years of famine, and to avert disaster.  Overseers were appointed, and one fifth of the harvest was stored during each year of plenty. 

This dreamer, this interpreter of dreams, could easily have been ignored – considered foolish, even alarmist.  I’m sure that storing 20% of the crops would not have been the most economically advantageous thing to do.  Did Joseph face criticism for undermining the Egyptian economy; putting in crazy artificial restrictions; on the basis of what, a dream?

If we are to survive as a species it seems more important than ever that we seek a wisdom that is not restricted to the wisdom of the world; whether a narrow trust in science or free-wheeling market economics or national protectionism.  We need all the wisdom on offer to us, and, above all, that wisdom which (we are taught) sweetly orders all things, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, a whole cosmos of time and space, hold together; the wisdom that speaks to us no less in dreams and visions; the wisdom that once walked among us telling stories of a Kingdom, of Good News for the poor; the wisdom that appeared to us as foolishness, as a dreamer put to death on a cross, and buried, and raised.

We proclaim Christ crucified – declared St Paul to the Corinthians – foolishness to some, but to everyone whom he calls, the power of God and the wisdom of God.

May we have grace to attend to this wisdom in all things, in all ways of knowing, and even in our dreams.