Biography
The Rev. Dr. Tony Campolo is Professor of Sociology at Eastern College, St. David's Pennsylvania. He spends considerable time dealing with the challenges that face the poor in our inner-cities and the poor in the Third World nations around the world. He is also the author of many challenging books and the loving pastor of an inter-racial, inner-city church in West Philadelphia. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"Visionaries and Dreamers for God" 
Two things determine what a person is and who a person is. Those two things are these: where a person comes from and where a person is going. Emile Durkheim, one of the great sociologists of all time, said that in order to know where we come from we need traditions and rituals. And he was big on outlining the role of traditions and rituals. He said, “The more traditions that a group has, the more rituals that a group has, the higher the level of solidarity, the higher the level of unity of that group.”

Certainly that is true of family life. Just having come through a holiday season, I know that to be true because holiday times are best when they are filled with rituals and traditions.

Our family is big on rituals and traditions. As our children were growing up, there was always a special way of celebrating Christmas. The children would always get up at our house at six o’clock in the morning. Now, I’m a Baptist, and Baptists do not believe that God is up at six o’clock in the morning, so we always told the kids that they could get the stuff out of the stockings which we hung in their rooms and play with that, but they could never come out of the bedroom and get the good stuff under the tree until we got up.

About eight o’clock, we came out of “the sweet arms of Morpheus” — that’s sophisticated talk from back east, and we would go into the living room and right through the living room into the kitchen and we would eat breakfast. Then they would say, “How do you get your kids to eat breakfast on Christmas morning?”

The answer to that is simple, “We’ve always done it that way!” Rituals and traditions are like that. You always do things the same way. Then we would go in and we would open the presents. Bart, the youngest, would get a present, read the label, see for whom it was intended, and deliver the present. That person would open it, comment on it. That present would be passed around, and everybody would comment on it. Then it was time for present #2.

You say, “It must have taken you all morning to open the gifts.”

Indeed it did.

You say, “That’s terrible.”

No, what’s terrible is allowing the child to jump into those presents, tear away the paper, and in a few minutes Christmas is over. I mean, ritual draws it out. It makes it delicious. It heightens the drama. As you sit there wondering “for whom is the big one?”

In the afternoon we would always visit my parents and my wife’s parents. You say, “Always?” ALWAYS. It’s a ritual — we always do it that way. You say, “Why?” Well, that’s obvious. When I’m old and my wife is old, we want our children to visit us, and the best way to make sure that is happening is to make it into a ritual. When Christmas rolls around for them, if they don’t visit us, they’ll be so uncomfortable, they’ll be miserable. They’re like Pavlovian dogs — “It’s Christmas, we have to go to visit the parents.”

Thanksgiving is the most ritualistic day in American life, is it not? On Thanksgiving, we all sit down at the same places, we all say the same things. Listen to this — we eat exactly the same food. And the comments are always the same. “Great stuffing! What’s in it?”

Same thing as last year, idiot. I mean nothing changes.

But perhaps you have this scene to rehearse. Your son or your daughter is away at school, and there is a call on the telephone about three weeks before Thanksgiving, and you say, “Hey, John, looking forward to seeing you in two more weeks — Thanksgiving. You’ll be home.”

And there’s a long pause. He says, “Well, Dad, that’s why I called. Some of the guys got together and it’s been tense, it’s been tough up here at school, and we thought we’d go to Fort Lauderdale for the break, you know, and take in some rays.”

There’s a long pause and at the other end of the extension is the wife who says, “But, John, we always have Thanksgiving together.”

And he says, “You act like it’s the end of the world!”

Well, maybe, in fact, this dear mother hasn’t read Emile Durkheim, but it is the end of her world and she knows it. Because with the breaking of the ritual, something is lost. We will all be there. We will all sit in the same places. We will all make the same crippled comments. The same food, the same turkey, the same stuffing will be there, but about half-way through the meal, a pall of silence will fall over the family and someone is likely to say, “You know, it’s just not the same.” And you know, it will never be the same again. Rituals are precious.

They have to be broken, of course. The group has to come to an end so new families can start. We don’t want our children tied to our families forever but it still hurts because rituals are precious things. They remind us of things that must not be forgotten.

Indeed, religious experience is partly ritual, isn’t it? It’s partly ritual. That’s why, if you’re Jewish, you know there is such a thing called the Seder Feast. I taught at the University of Pennsylvania, and the students who even were atheists would always come and want to borrow my children. If they were Jewish, they wanted to borrow my children for the Seder Feast. And dumb me — I would lend them out. I say “dumb” because I could have rented them. And I would say to these students, “Students, you don’t even believe in God,” and they would say, “Yes, but we’re Jewish.” And the rituals kept them Jewish. Tevya understood this. Remember in that wonderful musical, “Fiddler on the Roof” — he said, “Tradition — because of our traditions we know who we are, where we come from, and what our lives are all about.”

Our religious experience is partly tradition and partly ritual. When Jesus asked us to remember his death, he wrapped it up in a ritual and made it a tradition. And every time I break bread or drink of the cup, I remember his words, “Do this in remembrance of me. As oft as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, you remember my death until I come again.” The ritual reminds us of what should not be forgotten.

Then there is the ritual of baptism. We have all kinds of denominations. I always like to joke because I’m a Baptist and we baptize one way and you baptize another way. It’s OK — you baptize your way, and we baptize His way, and it works out alright in the end. The important thing, however, is that baptism reminds us that when we accept Jesus as personal Savior and Lord, we begin a whole new life.

Perhaps you don’t have enough ritual in your family, and if you don’t have enough ritual, you will have children who will forget what must not be forgotten. You will have children who will slip away from those things that need to be maintained with security.

Do you have family devotions in your family? “The family that prays together, stays together.” You say, “It is just a ritual. Surely, rituals aren’t that important.” Rituals are what hold us together, what give us solidarity.

As a sociologist, I’ve been intrigued with observing religious groups. Obviously, the Jewish people have greater rituals than Christians, but among the Christians, the Roman Catholics have more rituals than Protestants. Have you noticed that? And on the way to church as a boy, I always noticed that that’s the way it was. I always noticed that there were more people going to the Catholic church than to my Baptist church. And I would always ask my mother, “Why do the Baptists not go to church, and the Catholics go to church in such numbers?”

The traditional Protestant answer always was, “They go out of fear.”

Of course, that doesn’t work.

The truth of the matter is that the Catholics understand ritual, and that’s what held the Roman Catholic Church together for so many years — the mass, the ritual. You say, “Is it all so important?”

Yes, we have to be reminded of things. So many things are quickly forgotten. Do you have prayers that you say like The Lord’s Prayer? Are there prayers when you put the children to bed? Are there times in your life when there are family devotions?

You say, “These are rituals. They aren’t important.” They are important because without rituals and traditions we do not know from whence we come. We do not know the values of our past. Rituals remind us of yesterday.

Whenever I would be confronted with some students who wanted to get married, they would always give me the same bit. They would come to me when I was teaching at the University and say, “We want to get married,” and I would marry them for free before class. And they would always make up their own vows. And I’d say, “If you make up your own vows, I do not marry you.”

And they’d say, “You don’t understand. We’re the ones who are getting married.”

And I would say, “No, you’re wrong. You’re very, very wrong. You are not only getting married but all of us are getting remarried.”

You know what it does to me when I sit there in the congregation and watch a couple getting married? He says, “I, John, take thee, Mary, to be my lawful wedded wife, and I do promise and covenant before God and these witnesses ...” Do you know what’s going on in my mind? I go back in time. More than twenty-five years I go back and I can hear myself saying it, “I, Anthony, take thee, Margaret, to be my lawful wedded wife and I do promise and covenant...”

Do you see what ritual does? It takes something that happened a long time ago and makes it contemporaneous. We need our rituals.

And people of God, you need more than rituals to be a Christian. Jesus not only wants to remind you that he died on the cross for you, Jesus not only wants rituals that remind you that his body was broken and his blood was shed, Jesus wants to inspire you with visions and dreams. If there is anything that Jesus wants to do for you and to you tonight, it is this: it is to rekindle a dream and a vision. God has a wonderful plan for your life. God has a vision of what you can be. God has a dream of what you can become. And he wants you to experience that vision and that dream. He wants you to see the possibilities that are inherent in your life.

Many of us feel guilty over the things that we did that we should not have done. I tell you there is something that is even more deserving of guilt. It’s failing to become all that God wants you to become, failing to be all that Jesus wants you to be, failing to achieve what Jesus has called you to achieve. When God called you and placed you here on this planet, it was because he had something very special for you to do.

I remember one time in my life promising God that I would do the things that he wanted me to do, that I would be the person he wanted me to be, I would go to the places he wanted me to go. I wouldn’t let anything deter me from realizing the dreams and the visions that he had for me.

Perhaps you are like that. Most of us have those times, but then we blot them out, and we allow the world to seduce us into its normative patterns, and we lose the vision that God had for us. We set aside the dream that he had.

I don’t know when it happened to you. I’m Baptist. We have revival meetings. We are always coming down the aisle, and it was always happening to me at the altar. I don’t know if you’re Baptist. We’re people who are into those kinds of things: a thousand verses of “Just As I Am”, you come down just as you are and go out just as you were in a lot of cases. But we were in to that kind of thing.

Perhaps it happened to you on top of a mountain. I mean, if you are Presbyterian, you’re big on mountain-top experiences because Presbyterians don’t have any retreats or revivals. They have summer Bible-conferences and they get you on top of a mountain and they sing a hundred thousand verses of “Kumbaya.” That’s their thing. And they really get into that.

But you get moved at those meetings, don’t you? And you begin to cry and you say, “God, I promise you I’m going to be what you want me to be, I’m going to do what you want me to do, I’m going to live like you want me to live.” Remember once when you promised God that you were going to be everything he expected of you? You were going to do everything he required of you. You were going to live the life that he wanted you to live.

God has great things for you and great things for me, and nothing is more sinful than to fail to live up to the great things that God has called us to do, and to be, for him and for his kingdom.

You know, I get to a lot of college campuses. And sometimes the students depress me, particularly the students in the 80s. They have lost their dreams. It’s not like in the 60s. You ask, “Did you like teaching in the 60s?” I loved teaching in the 60s! You never had to prepare a lecture. You walked into the classroom and said, “Hi,” and they fought with you for twenty minutes. They would say, “Why are you using this sexist language?” And I would say, “I only said ‘Hi’.”

And they would say, “Yes, but it was the tone and the manner of oppression that was in it.” I would die. But they were great. The students of the 60s were great. They were visionaries. They were going to end racism, and sexism, and militarism, and poverty. They were going to create Utopia, and they were going to do it tomorrow morning.

And you say, “Isn’t it good that we got beyond all that stuff?”

No sirree, it’s not good at all. Because the Bible says that when the young men no longer have their visions and the old men no longer have their dreams, the people perish. And there is a perishing in the world today. I go to the classes and I pour out my heart and every nerve and sinew tingle with the excitement of God, and after I pour out my heart and share my truth gleaned from existential suffering, some klutz in the last row raises his hand and says, “Do we have to know this for the final?” And I die a little bit. And I wonder what happened to the dreams, what happened to the visions, what happened to that great hulk of humanity. I worry about kids today.

I was speaking at a school in the midwest and there was a negative response in the audience. And we started questions and answers and at one point I grew angry with the crowd and I said, “You know, you scare me. You young people scare me. You’re twenty-one and I’m almost fifty, and I’m younger than you are because a person is as young as his dreams and as old as his cynicism.” I will never forgive this generation for being so disinterested that they had to take Star Trek off the air. I mean I loved that great ship Enterprise taking off into outer space with Spock, and Kirk, and Sulu, and all the menagerie of wierdos, and a voice would come in and say, “Challenged to boldly go where no man has ever gone before.” Oh, that’s great. And I get scared when I look at people who don’t want to do the great things that God has called them to do, the great things that God has called them to be, unwilling to go where God has called them to go. Instead of going where no one has ever boldly gone before, they settle for the mundane.

I was in New York and I went to see “The Man from La Mancha”. 1 was sitting there see, and the woman next to me started yelling at her husband, “John, stop it, stop it. You’re exposing yourself. You’re exposing yourself.”

You know, I leaned forward. I wanted to see what was going on. And sitting next to me was this guy crying his eyes out. And I knew why he was crying. He was crying because Don Quixote was singing:

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To strive with your last ounce of courage,
To go where the brave dare not go.

And the world will be richer for this,
That one man bruised and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage,
To reach the unreachable star.

People, rituals are fine, where you have come from is OK, and I think we need the traditions that rivet us to the past, but more important is knowing where we are going, knowing what our future is. That is why I believe in a thing that we call “conversion.” Conversion says, “Look, we don’t care where you come from. We’re more concerned where you’re going.” So many people who are into counseling, ruin people because they think that all we have to do to understand who a person is and what a person is, is to understand where that person has come from and the experiences of his background as though your background is the most important thing about you.

I’m here to declare the good news of the gospel. Your past can be blotted out. Your past can be forgiven. Jesus is a God of new beginnings and he wants to say to you here and now, “I have something special for you to be, something special for you to become, I have a whole new future in store for you. I don’t want to know where you have come from — I want to know where you are going.”

Listen to what the Bible says about the past, “Forget those things which are behind. Press towards the goal of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

There’s a lot wrong in your past. There’s a lot wrong in my past. I mean if you knew what there was to know about me, you would turn off the set right now. You would not listen to me. If I knew what there was to know about you, I wouldn’t be talking to you. Let’s get this straight. Whenever somebody says, “You’re supposed to be a Christian. I know non-Christians who are better than you.” Of course, so do I. But if that person is so wonderful without Jesus, can you imagine how much more wonderful he would be with Jesus. And if you think I’m so rotten with Jesus, can you imagine what I would be like without Jesus? People, you don’t understand me unless you understand where I am going, what God has called me to be, what God has called me to become, and what God has for me — he has for you.

He wants to speak to you today and he wants to make you a hero for his kingdom. He has something beautiful and something wonderful and something special to achieve through you. The call of God is to become a hero. Only humans can become heroes, because to be a hero you have to be able to fail. And failure is not the worst thing because God has a way of turning our failures into victories. The cross looked like a failure, but the resurrection turned it all around.

I can’t wait until I go to be with God. I can’t wait until I get to heaven. I’m going to walk through the gates and there will be the angels. And I’m going to say, “Get out of my way, angels. You’re only messengers. You don’t know what it’s like to be a hero for God and to do the great things he calls one to do. Move aside, angels. You’re messengers. Go get me a hamburger.”

And I’m going to go up to the throne of grace and say, “Michael, move aside. I want to sit down next to my Jesus because my Jesus and I are going to talk about the great things he has called me to do and be.”

Listen to me carefully. Listen to me well. Anything can happen. Anything can be. Don’t listen to anyone who says that you can’t become a new person because here’s the good news. There is a Jesus who died for you in the past to take away your sins and to make you into a new person. And that Jesus comes to you here and now and inspires you with great dreams and great visions of what you can become. Don’t lose your dreams. Don’t lose your visions. Remember what you once promised God you were going to do. Remember what you once promised God you were going to be. Be it! Do it! Jesus wants to come in and enable you to do it today. You say, “I’m too old.” Well, Abraham was 94 years old when he got his vision and he changed the world. God really wants to do something special in you and through you. He has some special work for you to do. He has some mission for you to complete. He has some ministry for you to render. A heroic thing is waiting to be done.

Let God speak to you. Let God inspire you. If you’re young, have visions. If you’re old, have dreams. For without visions and dreams, people perish. Amen.