Advent Gifts, by Ruthie Nicklaus. Commissioned by St. Paul’s for our use this Advent.
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What good are dreams, really?
You have dreams. So do I. We all have nightmares too. Do they matter?
(Do we matter?)
What good are dreams, really?
I have dreams so fantastic that I would need to live in a different timeline, on planet Earth in a beta universe, for those dreams to come true. (Incidentally, I mentioned something offhand about parallel universes the other day and our parish administrator Emily said — I think with real affection — “oh, you’re a sci-fi nerd, I see.” Yes, yes I am.) Anyway, we have fantastic dreams, wild and illogical fantasies, ecstatic leaps of the imagination.
What good are these?
Well, of course I think they can do us some good.
Our dreams might help us cope with our hard realities, which all too often just fall to earth with a thud. We struggle in this mortal life, and our wild dreams keep us going, and sometimes steer us in creative directions.
Our dreams might shock us with juxtapositions, pairing people or events from different parts of our lives, revealing how even our enemies can help and even guide us, and that maybe we have something to offer them, too.
And speaking of enemies, dreams can work as mirrors, reflecting back to us who we really are, like it or not. In a bad dream, people with whom we’re in conflict can show us things about ourselves, things we usually avoid.
Our dreams can even help just by being trifles, whimsies, fluff pieces, crazy jokes, wild ridiculous adventures. God of the burning thornbush is terrifying, but also playful. We shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously.
But our dreams can also rattle us to our bones — even those among us who are sensible inside and out, orderly, stable, and predictable. Dreams can disturb, and even terrify, us.
And so we draw alongside Joseph of Nazareth this morning as he awakens from a dream — Joseph the respected elder who plies his trade, Joseph the Galilean citizen with an impressive family tree, Joseph the perplexed fiancée of a young woman in trouble, Joseph who plays an enormous role in our faith story, but says not a word. Not one word.
This is Joseph the Dreamer, the second to bear that name. The first one, Joseph the patriarch, was a dreamer too, but that Joseph had many things to say. This Joseph is holding back. “Those who know don’t speak,” goes the saying. This could be Joseph’s motto. “Those who know don’t speak.” He is different from his relative, the priest Zechariah, who blurted out something anxious and doubtful only to suffer a literal gag order from God’s angel. Zechariah was forbidden to speak until the birth of his son John. But Joseph needs no divine limit-setting. He is not a mansplainer. He knows how to keep his mouth shut.
But his dreams — well, they are in sharp contrast to his taciturn modesty. Joseph’s dreams are vivid, startling, disruptive, and provocative.
And his dreams save lives.
The first to be saved is Mary, his fiancée, who would not have lived long if Joseph had “dismissed her quietly,” as this respectable, risk-averse man had been planning to do. The circumstances of her pregnancy were … unsettling. Scandal was looming. If he broke things off with her, discreetly, he would escape public shame. He could keep his business, his household, his assets and his friends. No one would question this choice.
But Mary would be cut loose, a scandalously pregnant girl with no name, no prospects, and few choices — all of them hard choices. Her life expectancy would plunge. And her child would suffer a similar fate. He would have been named something — not Jesus necessarily, for that idea came from Joseph’s dream, too — but in that patriarchal world, he would have been the son of None. He would have led a life nearly as fraught and desperate and dangerous as his mother’s, and he would likely tend her grave in his young adulthood, assuming she even got to have a grave.
And so Joseph’s dream pulls him up mightily into a heroic role and a triumphant identity: he is the respectable man who first protects and then empowers a woman, and gives her odd son a name, and all the while Joseph deflects attention from himself, not saying a mumblin’ word.
Then he has another dream, this time alerting him that his family needs to go on the run, to Egypt, to escape political repression. The second dream happens after the baby is born, transforming the Holy Family into a family of refugees, much like the families who approach our southern border with trepidation and even terror.
All this from a respectable man from the north, from the agricultural and peaceable countryside around the Lake of Galilee, from the prosperous town of Nazareth, from a settled (if occupied) land in which Joseph could have lived out his years in relative comfort and contentment.
But he chose instead to listen to his dreams.
And today he presents us with a gift. We are flush with gifts by now, spending this Advent opening one gift after another. We received the gift of community from the sanguine first-century Christians who joyfully formed house churches in the troubled cities of antiquity; we received the gift of challenge from our nomad Israelite ancestors, the “Dusty Ones”* whose faith in God was forged in the harshest wilderness; and we received the gift of humility from John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, the sons of Zechariah and Joseph. Finally, today, Joseph himself has given us a gift. And the gift is —
A dream journal. A glittering book filled with blank pages. We can keep this book at our bedside, and scribble into it all of our dreams, even the scary ones, even the odd ones, even the ridiculous ones.
What dreams do you want to record in your dream journal? What idea sparkles within you? What hope bursts up from your heart, exploding in your most desperate dreams? What fear grips you in the wee hours; what tidings of great joy do you hear as dawn finally breaks over you, huddled as you are under the blankets?
Joseph of Nazareth wants you to write down all of your dreams, the grand ones, the silly ones, the sad and scary and bizarre ones — all of them. Write them down. God speaks to us in our subconscious, in the dreams that pulse through us quietly, intriguingly, persistently. God in Jesus becomes human — becomes “enfleshed,” — and so, logically enough, God also appears in our bodies, where our dreams arise. We dream with our bodies, we hope with our hearts, we imagine with our minds, and we work with our muscles and our bones. In all this, God is with us — Emmanuel — just as God drew close to Joseph of Nazareth, so close that God was closer to Joseph than Joseph was to himself.
God needs no journal to remember our dreams, or remember us. For God is deep within us, speaking to us as we dream. Some of us have wild dreams for St. Paul’s, and those dreams enjoy pride of place with me, your priest who can hardly wait to move boldly into our future here. Others of us dream of reconciliation with someone, even if that seems nearly impossible. Or we dream of a thriving neighborhood, safe children, a healed city, a restored nation, a healthy atmosphere, and temperate oceans chock full of life. These are fantastic dreams! (Even reconciliation may seem exotic and absurdly impossible; yet nothing is impossible with God.) And when we write down these dreams, when we let them guide our actions, we stand to lose a lot, just like the refugee Nazarenes who fled to Egypt.
Dreams are costly. They put us to work. They call us to turn around, to change our ways, to decide against doing the thing we had planned to do, the thing we had wanted to do. Joseph wanted to dismiss Mary quietly. That’s what was done, in his time and place. That would have solved problems for him.
But this is how God saves lives. We listen to God in our dreams, and we wake up, get up, and do a new thing. This is how the world is repaired; this is how God’s people are reconciled; this is how peace and justice prevail over the face of the earth. Can you even begin to imagine what God will help us accomplish?
Christmas is coming, and at the center of the Christmas Good News is the story of a birth. Just imagine what we can give birth to, if we listen to God’s voice in our dreams, and say Yes. Can you imagine it? Can you stand it?
I think you can. We all can. We got this. God is with us; God is within us. And God is firing our wildest, most glorious dreams.
***
*The late Thomas Cahill referred to the ancient Israelites as the “Dusty Ones” in his book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels.
Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent (Year A), December 18, 2022, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 7:10-16
Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25