Last week I confessed to you all a recurring nightmare I’ve had over the years, one in which I have to take a final exam without any knowledge of the subject. The last time I told someone about this, they kindly sent me an e-mail about something called dream interpretation – I guess so I could find out how crazy I am. Now, if you are familiar with the principle of dream interpretation, the things we dream about are supposed reveal much deeper, fundamental aspects of our psyche. Dream about an Oldsmobile or a Saturn, and you may be afraid of becoming obsolete at work. Or something like that. Frankly, I am not sure I buy the premise of dream interpretation.

But something in that e-mail caught my eye – bullet point Number 2:

Money: Money in dreams symbolizes what you value or find most important in life. If you dream of suddenly receiving a sum of money, this indicates that you are at a time in your life when your values are becoming very clear to you. If you have dreams of losing money, you may be experiencing a time of feeling separated from your sense of meaning in life.

Hmmm. “If you dream about money…this means your values are becoming clear to you.” My, my. That makes a rather fundamental assumption about human nature, doesn’t it? That at the very base of the human heart, what we value most deeply is money? Really? Now there are those critics of the American character who, pointing to the materialism and consumerism of our age, might argue that this is true. But I want to suggest otherwise.

I take a broader, maybe more optimistic view of us Americans: I think our national character reveals a lot about idealism, about a desire for liberty and human dignity and a sense of hope about the future that few if any other nations can match. And, as historians and commentators have observed about the previous century, Americans are capable of great self-sacrifice. Seventy years ago US soldiers went abroad to fight a global war to stop darkness from spreading over most of Europe and much of Asia. Four years later, these soldiers came home, putting violence and death behind them, dreaming of starting families, ready to work hard. Part of this dream was to buy a home. For millions, this dream took the form of a brick ranch house, 1,300 square feet with a one-car garage – oddly, a garage in which a ‘55 Packard would not fit!

This spirit, this hopeful vision for the future that embraced hard work, discipline and saving, came to be called something. Do you know what it was? “The American Dream.” Over the next fifty years, the generation called “the greatest” (and the one that followed it) created the largest amount of wealth in the history of the world. Something new, a middle class, was born. Many other things, a myriad of products and appliances, not to mention modern marketing and advertising, things about which our grandparents never dreamed, were also born. And all of it was premised on sweat, saving, plus an abiding faith that one’s children might one day have a better life with greater opportunities than their parents had had – that they might even be able to go to college. The dream created wealth, required wealth – but it was not, I would argue, a dream about money.

And yet, something has gone wrong for the dreamers – hasn’t it? The story can be told by only a few numbers: in 1982, the average American citizen spent 89.5 percent of her income, and saved the remaining ten-plus percent. In 2006, before our present malaise began, the average person spent 101% of his income – actually creating for the first time in our history a statistical anomaly: a negative savings rate. Most any statistic on consumer debt can take your breath away: in 1980, US consumers owed $355 billion dollars, a figured that rocketed to $1.7 trillion dollars by 2001, and stands now at over $2.4 trillion. That’s trillion with a “T.” I’m not even sure how many zeros that is.

Much of this debt is thanks to something that our grandparents never imagined. They bought things on something known as “layaway.” Nobody buys on layaway anymore, as far as I know. How do we buy things? With credit cards. Banking industry studies show that those who shop with credit cards – which is nearly all of us now – spend 125 percent more than those eccentrics who use cash. The average US household now holds more than $6,500 in credit card debt, with some placing that number much higher, above $9,000 – either way, a figure that is double to triple the average household debt in 1990. Of course, many Americans do not carry a revolving, month-to-month balance, which means that others of us are so many tens-of-thousands below the surface, we’ll be servicing debt literally for decades, especially if paying only the minimum balance.

I could go on, but I doubt I need to; you know the rest. You know our addiction to credit and consumption has been fueled not so much by rising incomes than by the perennial certainty that, at least if we’re not making more, our stock-market-based IRAs and 401Ks are growing all the time, and – hallelujah! - our home values will finally bail us out when at last we sell. Right? No. Not now. Not for several years. Truth is, the American Dream, which served two generations of our nation so well, for so long, is looking more and more like an American nightmare. We feel less secure, less certain that hard work will yield a predictable result, less sure that our children will make their way in the world as we once did. In the land of the free and the brave, we are becoming the indentured servants of our creditors...with a minimum payment due of only 2%.

This month, I propose we give some serious consideration to what this means to those who do not trust in money, but who place their trust in the ultimate value of the Kingdom of God, and in Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. I call this series “Contentment: Living with Enough in a Get-more World” because I think that we’ve been told some lies about what contentment is, and how we can locate it. I will suggest we’ll only find it in God’s economy of abundance and grace.

I should warn you in advance that this may put us out of step with the culture around us. After all, we have been told since September 2001, at least, that our patriotic duty is – what? To sacrifice? To go on scrap iron drives and buy war bonds to support our troops? No. We’ve been told to consume. That’s what our leaders have commissioned us to do. To shop. That’s how we will beat those terrorists! Friends, we have been told this explicitly. We also have heard, nearly every day, that the only way we will escape our present economic doldrums, the only way we’ll put our friends and neighbors back to work and restore the glory of our country is for something called consumer spending to go up. And that means getting back on the credit wheel, like rats at the feed-bar, consuming, spending, borrowing – and finding very little sense of peace. This is not what a loving, provident God wants for us. This is not, according to the Bible, why God blesses a people with prosperity. According to the Scriptures, as we will see, this is why empires topple and nations crumble. Because greed and envy, gluttony and selfishness are sins, after all, sins, and like all sins they lead to death. I wish we could conclude otherwise. Perhaps we can leave that debt for our children to pay off, too?

Let this be the place in our lives, the community in our lives that lifts up another way. And not for our own sakes only, for this News is Good for all the nations. There is a remedy to the stress, the financial anxiety that crowds out the joy and hope that are by-products of living to glorify God. Today, World Communion Sunday, we begin by asking our Father to invite us to occupy a new place, to invest in a different kind of treasure, to dream a better dream. One of promise for future generations, such that the hard work and sacrifice of so many have not been in vain. To claim that promise, to proclaim God’s abundant Kingdom to those not yet born, means waking up from our dreams of lesser things. Can we leave the nightmare behind and find the contentment we were made to enjoy? By God’s grace, I think so.

Let us pray.

Lord, this night has gone on long enough. We’re too anxious, too much of the time. We know what it is to wonder where the money goes, how we can find anything like a generous spirit in us, when we can find the simple joy of the present moment, without it being drained away. We very much want to live otherwise.

So empty us, Lord, renew in us a right spirit, rooted in the abundance of your love. Awaken us to new life, resulting in a looser grip on the things of the world, and tighter hold on the promise of life in your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. In his name we pray. Amen.