Sunday, December 18, 2022

Make God's Dream Come True: A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent Year A

 



When I sat down with the readings for this week, the discussion about Joseph and his experience of encountering God's messenger in a dream was the winner for my attention. I especially thought about the experience of dreaming. Reading through some commentaries...I realized something I hadn't noticed before: the only "voice" we hear in the pericope, besides the narrator, is God's. Both Joseph and, even more importantly Mary, are silent. And subtle, yet important, reminder that we need to not do so much talking as listening. 

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Text:   Matthew 1:18-25

 

How many of us have had dreams?

I don’t remember all the dreams I’ve had, but I have had few very vivid ones. The types of dreams where when I woke up… I had to wonder “Did that really happen?”

Those are the most disorienting, aren’t they?

The dream world can be such a fantastic place. Sometimes it can be a startling or unsettling. It can be blissful and pleasant.

Ultimately…it’s a place where once we’ve moved around in it and have had whatever strange and amazing adventure… we come out of the dream a little different than before.

Some dreams can stay with us in a way that… even if we didn’t actually sprout wings or whatever… we’ve had an experience that has changed our perception.

If we were struggling with a problem before we went to bed… sometimes our unconscious mind is able to pull together disparate threads of information… and put the puzzle pieces together in such a way that now… an answer becomes clearer.

That seems to be what has happened to Joseph in this scene from Matthew’s Gospel. He went to bed thinking he had solved a problem…but his dream presents him with another and better solution.

We know that Mary and Joseph are engaged…and that Mary has been found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.

Our biblical narrator knows this pregnancy is by the Holy Spirit.

Mary knows this to be the case…although Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t present her side of the pregnancy story.

It’s not clear what Joseph knows…beyond the fact that his bride-to-be is now pregnant…and he knows he’s not the father. If he knows that this pregnancy was a divine intervention… he may or may not believe it.

What is clear is that Joseph is righteous… meaning he is a just man… a good guy… knows and lives by the law.

And the law says that he has every right to tell his teenage bride to get lost.

He could ruin her life forever.

Dismiss her as an adulteress and be done with her.

But Joseph reaches a different conclusion.

Even though he knows his rights in this patriarchal system… he also knows the system would be cruel to Mary.

And even though this is not a marriage of love in the way we think about marriage… he must have felt some affection for her.

So instead of drawing attention to his now-pregnant young bride… he decides his best way out of this mess is to send her away quietly.

This is still not a great option for Mary. But it keeps the matter more hush-hush.

This dilemma… this tension between what is right by the law and what is right by the heart… provides the opening for God to step in.

And using the mechanism of the dream state…where the ego can’t interrupt to sideline this divine conversation…God uses one of the angels to intervene. 

“Don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, Joseph, Son of David.”

Don’t be afraid…by the way… is a favorite phrase in the Bible.

And it always seems to be said at the very moment when being afraid would be the logical choice.

And having an angel tell you not to be afraid?

I don’t know… I think that might be go, “Uh-oh! Now what?”

The angel tells us what the “Now what? is for Joseph.”

Stay with Mary.

This is a special child…conceived in holiness.

You’re going to name him “Jesus.”  

Jesus…the Greek version of the very common Hebrew name Joshua.

A name that means “God saves.”

And that’s what Jesus will do.

Not just the people of Israel who are an occupied people.

The liberation Jesus will offer extends to all people… no matter who they are… where they’ve been… or even where they’re going.

This dream of Joseph… this angelic vision… is not just his dream.

This is God’s dream coming to fruition.

This is God going into action deliberately seeking out this couple to change the trajectory of how things were going to happen in the world.

Joseph’s dream helps to fulfill God’s dream to enter our existence through Jesus… to become one with us by becoming one in flesh and blood with us.

And…despite all the promises of a coming Messiah who will baptize with fire…and John the Baptist’s conviction that the Messiah was going to kick-butt and take names….

Jesus is an ordinary baby born in the most meager of circumstances.

He is not one of means.

As I said…even his name… Jesus… was pretty run of the mill.

It was in the top three of favorite boy baby names in First Century Palestine.

To have the one named “God Saves” come into the world as a baby of such regular parents…and not some royal figurehead… shows how God works through ordinary people to do extraordinary… daring… and wonderful things.

This is how God’s purpose gets acted out over and over.

This Messiah…this Jesus… is very much on the same level with you and me.

And he came to teach us a way to live and move and have our being that frees us from the petty and mean-spirited ways in which we put down ourselves and other people…and infuse the world with more love.  

That’s the audacious dream of God!

Always seeking a way of deliver humanity out of the nightmare of oppression and self-limiting thinking.

We are invited to make this dream of God come true.

Just like Joseph… we’re called to take part in God’s action plan to help achieve God’s dream...a world that looks more like Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom where prey and predators don’t feel the need to threaten and bully another into submission.

All of us have been through a lot these past few years between COVID and the cancerous venom of our political discourse.

It seems oddly perfect then that this Gospel story mutes the voices of both Mary and Joseph… and the only one who gets to speak…really… is God.

Perhaps that’s the lesson for us as we prepare to welcome this baby Jesus on Christmas morning.

Maybe it’s time for us to do a lot less talking about Jesus and about God…and actually listen and do the work of reconciliation and relationship building to achieve God’s dream for the world.

What a thing it would be to have that dream come true!

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

 

 

 


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