Reading: Matthew 1:18-25

Preached at Beckley Presbyterian Church on December 19th 2004

 

 

Christmas is a time for dreams.  Dreams of what Santa may leave under the tree or in the stocking hung on the fireplace.  Red-Nosed Reindeers and toy manufacturing elves.  Saying "Boo!" to Grinches and Scrooges.  Dreams of peace and hope and a better world for all people.

 

There is power in dreams.  Not the crazy sort of dreams that we sometimes have where all the events of the day become mangled together and we wake up thinking, "Well, what the heck was that about?"   But the kind of dreams that are better classified as visions.  The kind of dreams that seem as vivid to us as our waking moments.

 

Such dreams don't come very often and indeed don't come to some people at all and, if they do, are sometimes dismissed as irrelevant or too fantastic to be true.  Some of these dreams don't even come when we are asleep, but are what we might call "Eureka" moments when all becomes clear or, after sustained thought or contemplation, a person sees something in a way they hadn't envisioned before.

 

John Lennon wrote a song some years back called “Imagine.”  It's often on the radio at this time of year.  The song speaks of the dream of a world where the barriers created by nationality and religion and prejudice are overcome and people accept each other in a true brotherhood of humankind.  “Why don't you come and join us,” he sang, “That the world may be as one.”  Surely a dream worth imagining.

 

Or again, Martin Luther King's famous sermon, "I Have a Dream," in which he had that tremendous vision for the collapse of racial prejudice and bigotry in America, and in his mind's eye pictured a nation where people would be judged by the color of their blood not the color of their skin.

 

Dreams make a difference.  Or they can and do if they are acted upon.  Our scripture text for next Sunday talks about different sorts of dreams, but today's scripture reading focuses upon the power of a dream that's planted by God, in particular the way Joseph, the carpenter father of Jesus, dealt with what seemed like a no-win situation, when God spoke to him in a dream.  There is power in dreams.

 

The first power in Joseph's dream was to cast out his fear.  Joseph, the Scripture tells us, was a righteous man.  He had a healthy fear of God.  He also passionately cared for Mary, his wife-to-be.  Her pregnancy was an unprecedented dilemma.  He knew what the law of God said about such situations.  He knew that if he wanted to, he could cause a lot of grief for Mary for having put him into the position of having a wife to be already with child.  He knew what people would say.  He had heard their words of disapproval, seen their looks of contempt, and anticipated the whispers and murmurs that a child produced out of wedlock could provoke in a small town.

 

But his heart spoke stronger than his head.  Scripture tells us that Mary was one favored by God.  To steal a phrase from the movies, there was "Something about Mary."  If Mary said she had been visited by an angel and had a child by the Holy Spirit, then it was a possibility she was telling the truth.  But not really.  Things like that don't happen.  Maybe she thought that's what had happened, but plainly she was hiding something or, worse still, losing her mind.

 

In this great turmoil, torn between doing the legal thing and acting in love, Joseph makes the decision to quietly call things off.  There would be no wedding.  Mary would not be disgraced.  He would learn to live with the loss.  Yes, he decided, that's the only thing he could do.  The right thing.  The decent thing.  A way that upheld the laws of God and did what was best for Mary.  Everything was settled.

 

Settled, that was, until his head hit the pillow.  You know how it goes.  Sometimes you work through a situation.  You weigh up the pros and cons, you come to a decision, and it seems right, but as soon as you hit the sack the cogs in the mind start whirling.  It all sounds right but it doesn't feel right.  You toss and turn.  You worry.  You wake up and look at the clock.  Only an hour has passed and you thought you'd been there all night.  And the thoughts just keep pressing in on you.  No peace.  Nothing is really settled.

 

In this state of mind Joseph had a life changing dream.  He wasn't the first Joseph to have been guided by dreams.  There's another Joseph, the one with the coat of many colors, who had found his life changed by the power of a dreams.  There was a history to the notion.  Joseph has a dream of an angel, an angel whose first words to him are "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid."

 

When things are running smoothly, we make the plans.  When troubles come along we tend not to act, but react.  When we act, we are doing something that is based upon our understanding and assessment of a situation.  When we react, we are often coming from a position of fear.  Our defenses are up.  There are all the conflicting emotions of anger and disappointment and confusion thrown in.

 

Through his dream Joseph moves from being a person who is reacting from a position of fear into somebody who is acting upon the basis of God's Word.  There's a whole sermon in there about living our lives by acting upon God's Word or living our lives only on the basis of our fears, but I'll have to save that for another time!

 

 For now I'll just make the point that if we, like Joseph, can have lives that are shaped by the visions and dreams of God's Word and God's Kingdom, that is a far better perspective to have than just drifting through our days from crisis to crisis, for God's perfect love casts out all fear.  The first power that Joseph's dream had was to cast out his fear.

 

The second power of Joseph's dream was that it gave him specific directions.  He was to take Mary as his wife.  The child that she would bear was indeed conceived by the Holy Spirit and he was to name him Jesus, Immanuel, 'God with us'.

 

Most of you know me well enough by now to know that my mind doesn't always go along the lines it's supposed to.  When I read through this passage again it struck me that this happened before the days of ultrasounds and medical technology, and you had no way of knowing a child's gender.  What if the child had turned out to be a girl?  That might have put a different kind of spin on the history of the world! 

 

Before my first child was born, there was naturally much speculation about whether the child was going to be a boy or a girl.  At the clinic where we lived they didn't do ultrasounds unless there was a medical necessity to do so.  So you had to go on your intuition.

 

As the time of birth came closer, church people and spiritual folk, on a number of occasions, took me to one side and said things like, "I don't know why I'm sharing this with you, but I just feel like I need to tell you that your baby's going to be a boy."  As I was going through my devotions, bible studies, and prayer times I just kept getting all these passages and notions about my child being a boy.  Yvonne and I were so sure it was going to be a boy that we only looked up boy's names and only looked at little baby boy clothes in the shops.

 

The birth came at around eight in the morning and along came a beautiful, perfect little baby .. girl!  Now, I was delighted that all was well and, forgetting about the boy thing, ran home to call my parents.  "Hey," I said, "News!  Your first grandchild, Helen, a little girl was born at eight o'clock this morning!"   "We've got some news as well," came the reply.  "Sorry to have to tell you that your grandma (my dad's mum who had lived with us in the family home as long as I could remember) died this morning shortly before eight o'clock."

 

Boy, was I a bag of conflicting emotions!   What was I to do?  Jump for joy at new life, or grieve the loss of my wonderful Scottish grandmother?  I got down on my knees by my bed and started to pray and pour out my heart to God.  As I was praying, I remembered all that stuff about people coming up and telling me I was going to have a baby boy.  "Lord," I said, "Now what on earth was all that about?"

 

As clearly as I have ever heard the voice of God in my inner self, something whispered with a smile, "Good Joke, hey?"  I just wept tears of joy.  If ever there was a moment when I needed to hear such a thing it was right then.  When I was in college we learned all about the intellectual arguments for the existence and non-existence of God.  We studied the different philosophical views of fate and time.  But that was all in the head.  The knowledge of God, I believe, grows somewhere in the heart and is nurtured by those times that we just can't explain.

 

Joseph's dream cast out his fear and gave him specific directions.  It was no joke though.  The savior of the world was coming.  Light was about to be born in darkness.  All things would change.  A new hope.  A new vision.

 

The third thing we see about Joseph's dream was that it changed the impossible to the possible.  The power of a dream.  We're talking here about the power of the kingdom of God.  When we allow it to get a grip on us, when we allow the message of Jesus Christ to not only be born in us but nurtured and grown in us, when we start to grasp the significance of His birth, His life, His death and resurrection, when we start to see our lives as places where the Holy Spirit can come and breathe in us God's winds of challenge and change, then slowly but surely the impossible turns to the possible, and the possible becomes the probable, and we start to live lives that are acting upon God's promises rather than simply reacting to the things that go in the world.  The Kingdom becomes real, and God's love becomes alive, and Christmas isn't just a holiday but a holy celebration of what could be.  Truly a time to dream, for there is power in a dream!

 

Remember the words of the prophet in Joseph's dream:  "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."  Now there is the impossible becoming the possible!  Here is our cause for celebration.  God is with us.  Christ is with us.  The Holy Spirit is with us.

 

I wish you and yours every blessing during this Christmas Time.  Dare to dream a little.  Imagine what could be.  Contemplate the possibilities, and only God knows what visions and hopes may be born within us if only we will accept that God's way is best. 

 

Rev. Adrian J. Pratt