“Raise the Roof,” was not only part of a sermon I delivered on January 13 at Monmouth Reform Temple, it was also a chorus/chant from a 70’s Parliament classic hit, “Give Up the Funk,” which I had the honor of being directly associated with.
January 13 was an interfaith service bridging the Temple with Pilgrim Baptist Church honoring the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. My talk was about dreams and my perspective on the infamous “I have a dream” speech. It is my feeling that Dr. King wanted to share his dream as an example, not the goal post on the end zone….
…thus the edict was to unshackle ourselves from the Energy Vampires and permit ourselves to dream. Dr. King was truly outside of the box as he had been to a mountaintop and what he saw was a dream unnecessarily deferred. His goal was to empower all of us to claim our dream, NOT to emulate his…
When I first asked for a show of hands, in the extremely diverse congregation, “does anybody dream at night?” A show of only two sheepish hands prompted me to share a story about the song and how we charged audiences to “raise the roof…” thus I asked again and not only did the show of hands increase to raise the roof of the temple, everyone now was inspired to share their dreams…
Every night I dream, every day I dream and each one I remember, raises the roof for the next one to emerge.
Originally published at medium.com