When Joseph Awoke (12.22.19)

When Joseph Awoke
Matthew 1:18-25
December 22, 2019
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: 

‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
   and they shall name him Emmanuel’,
which means, ‘God is with us.’ When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

—Matthew 1.18-25

There’s been a lot of talk about dreams around here lately. I’ve heard maybe a dozen of you share your recurring dreams, vivid dreams, upsetting dreams. I’ve listened in on amateur dream interpretation in the kitchen and the fellowship hall. One of the Sundays of Advent, the children and youth talked about paying attention to dreams and even writing down dreams that seem important. One of my recurring dreams happened again last night (or so early this morning that I completely overslept): extra rooms in a house. Rooms we’d forgotten about or didn’t know where there. This time they were wonderfully decorated and useful rooms. Rooms I very much wish we could access and would love using. Guest rooms, sitting rooms, grand hallways. And I always discover these rooms and their contents as we’re planning to move out of the house. I open a door or turn a corner and discover I’ve only been living in one small portion of what is actually the home. I’ve heard your dreams of flying. Dreams of trying to run but having legs like concrete. Dreams of a very targeted tornado striking a local business. Whatever the dreams, they are a mysterious part of our lives that we often readily dismiss, but the ancients viewed dreams as a portal—a window of seeing into another realm.

This is a dreaming season. We’ve just come out of the longest night of the year—the winter solstice of more dark than light. And Advent calls us to tap into an imagination so big and so extraordinary that an entire world can be changed through the birth of a baby boy. What will it take for us to be people of dreams and imaginations? Dreams in scripture are a mystical reality that confer spiritual truth, serve as a sure sign of God’s presence, and become a way for humans to hear the message of God. That’s what we are invited to consider today: when is dreaming a holy portal into imagining a totally new way of being in the world. So new that the world itself might be made over?

Scripture recognizes visions and dreams in poetry, in history, and in prophecy. From Genesis to Revelation, the texts make clear: “God breaks into the human experience through both dreams [by night] and visions [by day].” How can we be present to this in-breaking of Divine presence?

If you were with me on Wednesday nights many months ago, we talked about spiritual practices and The Sacred Enneagram. In Huertez’ book he groups all types of people into three categories and says every person needs a spiritual practice of stillness, silence, and solitude. For some, the idea of stillness is terrifying and impossible. For others, it is the sheer, heart-thumping silence. And then, for folks like me, it is the daunting prospect of true solitude. Huertez says we need to practice meditation or contemplative prayer not just for the value of prayer itself but because that contemplative pace draws us into an uncomfortable area (stillness, silence, or solitutde) and then stretches us through our practice. I find it fascinating that in dreaming, we access all three of these categories. It’s almost as if the only way to get still enough and silent enough and alone enough to actually encounter something really wild and holy and other-worldly is to fall asleep.

Now before we go much further, let me be clear: I do not believe all dreams are hidden messages from God. Our subconscious minds are complex and full of nooks and crannies that science is still discovering. There are nightmares and night terrors and goofy dreams and nonsensical dreams. Not every dream means something big and world-changing. What I’m inviting us to consider and play in for just a little while is the metaphor. How can we view this entire concept of Advent as the beginning of radical dreams changing the world—an inaugural season in the Church of expanding imagination because we believe as a people that only the wildest of dreams will enable re-think what this old world could really look like.

One of my very favorite texts we read every year usually comes up on Pentecost Sunday—late Spring/early Summer. Words from the prophet Joel appear again in the 2nd chapter of Acts as explanation for an inexplicable scene in which people of all nationalities are talking and hearing in their own languages across what should be barriers. The scene is so weird, in fact, that onlookers accuse the crowd of being drunk early in the morning. But Peter points to scripture for support of their raucous behavior:

‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my servants, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit
and they shall prophesy.

Somehow, God’s wild-yet-steady presence in this world as rushing, roaring Spirit is wound up in the ways of prophesy, visions, and dreams. What we long to domesticate, organize, make bylaws and articles of incorporation around, regulate with Robert’s Rules of Order is actually the stuff of dreams and visions. Advent compels us to stop controlling the thing and listen for the metaphors, instead. Dance in the symbols. Delight in the imagery that draws us into something fresh and possible. 

Most of us have heard this story for years. Mary and Joseph are engaged to be married—engaged in an ancient, legal agreement that has to do with a legal promise of marriage some time in the future. Then Mary miraculously becomes pregnant, not by her betrothed, Joseph, and the legal precedent is for Joseph to cut her off from their marital promise. The concept of this ancient arrangement is so odd to our ears that I don’t want to use modern words like divorce or annulment because they don’t get at the situation. Mary and Joseph weren’t planning a picture-perfect destination wedding with a cute hashtag that all of their friends would admire/envy. In this 1st century agreement, Joseph’s legal right and cultural opportunity (if not obligation) would be not just to end the deal but to ruin Mary. 

Recall with me the parable of the young man, a younger son in his family, who tells his father he wants his inheritance now and wishes to leave the family. The father complies, gives his son a percentage of the family fortune, and the son runs off to squander the money in riotous living, the old language goes. We learned together the concept of a qetsatsah—the legal right the community had to shun this boy for taking and wasting family money, particularly while his father was still alive. And if the community got to the son before the father could, then the father could not have ever welcomed the son home because the community would have banished him forever in a cultural ritual that was legally binding. And so the father waits and watches, seeing the son while he is still far off down the road, running to him, throwing a robe on him, slapping a ring on his finger, throwing a lavish party. The father welcomes the son before the community can enact this legally viable cut-off ritual.

This is the kind of thing Joseph has every legal right to do as a man in the early 1st century. By all appearances, Mary has broken the contract, and Joseph can culturally cut her off and ruin her life. Even before the dream, however, Arlen Hultgren notes, 

“Joseph ‘planned to dismiss [RSV: ‘divorce’] her quietly’ (NRSV). It may seem surprising to many in our day that Joseph is called ‘righteous’ as he contemplates divorcing Mary in her time of need (1:19), but the accent must surely be upon the clause saying that he was ‘unwilling to expose her to public disgrace,’ wanting to keep the whole matter quiet.”

Already, something is going on within Joseph that makes him hesitant to value the ways of retribution and ownership that his culture values. Already, Joseph questions the law because somehow he knows in his body a different way is the right way. There is already something stirring in him that is of God, that is radical, that is bold, that values Mary as a woman of valor and dignity and worth and not just the property owed to him in a legal contract. And when this man, already stirring with thoughts and intuition and instincts about how the world could be, falls asleep, the dreams and visions that come to him magnify the impulses he already feels. In his dreaming, he fully imagines that the world as it is does not have to be all there is. A world as it could be and should be is possible. And Joseph will be part of that radical, holy transformation.

Professor Ronald J. Allen writes, “Joseph was face to face with an unlikely manifestation of the Realm of God. [The gospel writer] Matthew wants those who encounter this message and this movement in similar fashion to do as Joseph did: To believe the message is of God and to become part of its movement.”

Friends, we are such a staid bunch. What will it take for us to believe the wild and unexpected message of God? What dream or impulse or holy moment will spark a radical imagination in you to become part of the movement of God to make a new world out of this old one? This is the stuff of dreams because it’s completely illogical. When we wake up from a dream that has been somehow more real than real life, we can have trouble getting oriented. If it’s a bad dream about a spouse, we can wake up angry with that spouse for a little while even though we know it doesn’t make sense. If it’s a dream about a house full of secret, wonderful rooms, we can wake up hopeful and energized by the possibility of something new. 

The gospel writer leans into this phenomena because it’s as difficult to understand now as it was then. And he wants us to know that the weird and wonderful stuff of our daydreams and night-dreams can completely reframe and rearrange the way we know our lives. I love this message coming to us on the morning after the longest night of the year. In a season that sparks so much nostalgia and looking backwards, the stories before us in our sacred text are inviting us to instead imagine something totally and utterly new altogether.

When Jospeh awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took Mary as his wife. When Joseph awoke, he acted on his instinct and impulse to not ruin and abandon this woman as was legally and culturally his right. When Joseph awoke, he rejected the legal narrative that his life was of more value than Mary’s. When Joseph awoke, he stepped into a future that made little sense awake but was absolutely real in his sleep. When Joseph awoke, he joined the movement of God and became part of the very Way his unborn son would embody. All of this from a dream, a vision, a wild hunch that just because the world IS one way doesn’t mean it has to be that way.

Carry this possibility with you, my friends. Just because the world IS one way doesn’t mean it has to be that way. The possibilities are endless when we dream the wild dreams of God, embrace the swirling visions of Spirit, and embody the path of Jesus the Christ. This is my dream for you this Advent and Christmas season and well into the new year. May you dream dreams and have visions and live them out fully with your everyday, walking around, waking lives.

Amen.

December 22, 2019
Prayers of the People

CALL TO PRAYER

In this spiritual practice, we silence and still ourselves, this time not alone but together, to name the world as it is and consider a world as it could be. This is the dreaming work of living in between a story that was and a story that will be. We tap into the prophetic imagination in the space we hold together.

Let us pray.

SILENCE

O God, we have seen enough of this old world as it is to become jaded and cynical. To believe the crooked win and the cheaters stay on top. We have seen enough of this old world to believe that the greedy hoard more resources at the expense of the poor and simply look away from suffering. Don’t let us become jaded. Don’t let cynicism rule the day.

We have also seen enough of this old world to know it is beautiful and that more people are kind than they are crooked. We have seen enough of this old world to know that love is real and big and powerful. We have seen enough of this old world to know when a moment is good and true and worth holding. Make us people who hold onto those truths and use them to dream something new rooted in the beauty and love and kindness and goodness we know.

Make us dreamers who dismantle systems rooted in crookedness. Make us visionaries who grab the crooked and make it straight. Call us to join you in crying out for the greedy to be toppled and the suffering poor to be lifted up. In these last days of Advent, whisper to us in the quiet of our sleep of a world you are still creating and calling into being. And may we join you in being makers of something new that is rooted in the Hope, the Peace, the Joy, and the Love we have encountered this season.

It is with the steps of Christ before us, the Spirit’s breath within us, and the Love of God around us, that we are bold to live just as we are bold to pray, saying:

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, As it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. 
For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, Forever. Amen.