Fifty years ago today, the most powerful, religious moment in our shared public history occurred: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  And I can’t help but believe that we’ve missed the most important part.

I’ve written about how we’ve domesticated King’s message and the intention of the moment into it’s direct opposite purpose. I’ve written about what King’s sermon at the wading pool was not simply a call for civil rights, but for our living out the very Kingdom of GOD.

And I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t our usual arguments about racism and the power of nonviolent protest. It is a lack of something simple and important:

• We have come really far.
• We have a long way to go.
• And it is our responsibility to fix it.

We don’t often speak like that. Our argument culture makes us “pick a side” and decide between how much we’ve accomplished and how much we have yet to accomplish. This is a simple, binary false choice between past or future. Or pessimism and optimism. Or conservative and liberal.

A recent poll showed the stark contrasts between different people’s views on what has been accomplished and what needs to be done. The political divide is more obvious than it is explainable. We read this and it makes sense, even if we can’t quite wrap our finger around what it means.

We don’t want to face the fact that it isn’t so easily divided or justified. I think it is something much darker.

We don’t dream.

And perhaps even worse, in our behavior we reject the very idea that GOD does.

GOD’s dream for us is the very identity of the Christian condition–that we have hope for the future, that we are living the way of the Kingdom before the Kingdom even arrives, that we bring justice to our communities, that we love one another in the very grace of GOD. And when King reminds us in this historic speech sermon of what GOD dreams and that it is his dream, we are reminded that it is our dream, too. A dream of not peace as the absence of conflict, but GOD’s peace: a just, equal, liberated world that is the embodiment of shalom.

The question isn’t whether or not the Dream is our reality, it is a question of whether or not we are making it so. ‘Cause Baby, we have a long way to go.