So that was Christmas! Today we take down the decorations and put them back into boxes for another year.  Now we feast on leftovers and there are no more gifts to unwrap or family members to visit or cards to send.  The Ghost of Christmas Past.

But what about the dream?  What of all the hope for the new, the light in the darkness, and the birth of a new age into our midst?  Does the dream die along with the season, or are there still visions and dreams that will lead us into a New Year?

Before Christmas we took a look at the power of a dream that touched the life of Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus.  We saw how before Jesus was born, an angel appeared to him in a dream and took away his fear, guided him to marry Mary and to accept the impossible as a possibility.  That was not the end of Joseph’s dream life.

And Joseph isn't the only one in the Christmas story who is empowered by a dream or a vision. There were the visitors from the East who came to pay homage to the newborn King of the Jews.

We heard in our reading of King Herod, whose vision of the world and the hold onto things he counted as significant, resulted in great tragedy for the families with young children in the land where Jesus was born.

Not all visions are visions of the Kingdom of God.  Herod had a kingdom already, but there was a darkness that lay over his life that expressed itself in paranoia and fear.  Visions are not all the same, and neither do they mean the same thing to all people. The Men from the East had a vision of a King that was very different from the Jewish expectation of the Messiah.

Consider then the vision of Herod.  The land of Judea was a far-flung and troublesome outpost of Roman occupation.  The Romans viewed the Jews with a combination of mistrust and respect. They knew they could be a rebellious people, but also intensely loyal if they thought they were on the side of right.  The Romans knew the Jews did not readily accept outsiders but had their own way of doing things and working out their problems.

So the lands of Israel and Judah enjoyed a fair deal of tolerance and could regulate their life through something approaching home rule.  As long as they made no waves that reached Rome, then they could be left well alone.  But they needed somebody in charge, some figurehead that recognized Roman power yet was Jewish enough not to be considered an abomination to those he sought to govern.

That task fell on the family of Herod.  Although they were little more than puppet governors whose strings were pulled by Rome, they took their task, and its attendant privileges, with deathly seriousness.  Often self-indulgent and many times blind to the needs of those around them, they maintained their position through fear, through alliances, and through murder of those who got in their way.  (Sounds more like an episode from the Sopranos than the Bible!) 

Herod has to watch his back.  There were others, even family members, who would happily see him disposed of.  Herod kept busy building and maintaining his own little empire.  He had no time for compromise.   When he learns of the birth of a New King for Israel, he interprets this as a threat.  "A new King has born?  Then who am I…. King has-been?"

Scripture tells it this way.  "When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men."

Herod had a dream.  His dream was a nightmare.  It was a dream full of demons, a disturbing vision of a world where he was all in all.  It was vision that left no room for dissent or tolerance but rode roughshod over any who dared to question.

There have been many dreamers since Herod who traveled a similar path.  Chairman Mao in China, Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Nazi Germany, those in every land who justify their abuses of power by such terms as "Ethnic Cleansing" or "Being for the Common Good" or "In the Interest of the State." 

Once the Extremists or the Fundamentalists of any philosophy, be it religious or political, take the upper hand, there seems to be no restraint upon the evils they are prepared to inflict for the sake of their cause.  Not all dreams are good dreams.  Not all dreams are the same.

Matthew quotes to us Jeremiah's words, "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

What of the vision of the Wise Men?  Despite the images of Kings with flowing beards and comedy camels that we place in our nativity stories, we know very little about those gentlemen, except that they had an understanding of the importance of Christ's birth which had come to them through their understanding of the heavens.

Some speculate that they were Persians, descendants of the astrologers and religious communities that we read about in Old Testament Books such as Daniel.  Others suggest they were from an African Nation.  Again some compare them to the scientific Islamic communities of the Middle Ages where a fusion of science, learning and religion resulted in a great renaissance of Islamic culture.

One thing is for sure. If you were on the streets and saw them coming, you'd be thinking, "You guys ain't from ‘round here, are you!"  What ever it was they were seeking, it was something different from the shepherds or even the Jewish people as a whole.  It is part of the genius of the Gospel of Matthew.  He is the writer of the most Jewish of all the accounts of the life of Jesus, and he tells us that there were Gentiles who greeted the Savior’s birth with gifts that were symbolic of the life he would face.

You have heard the expression "Thinking outside of the Box."  That's precisely what we need to do if the dreams we express at Christmas Time are to become anything more than ancient yet heart warming fables and legends of some distant time.

The Wise Men remind us that the dream we think of as Christmas is a lot bigger than a holiday celebration.  It's bigger than our families, bigger than our church, bigger than our city, bigger than our state, bigger than our denomination, bigger than our nation, bigger than the narrow confines we sometimes place upon our beliefs.  Oh yes, Jesus died for our sins, yet not for our sins alone but for the redemption of the whole world.

There is a global aspect to the gospel message that we so easily ignore.  "Go into all the world," Jesus told his disciples.  'All the world' is a pretty big place, don't you think?   I always used to wonder as a child how Santa managed to get around to all those houses and down all those chimneys in one night.  Then I learned about Quantum Physics and theories of Relativity and, well, it seems that time is a relative concept.

Two hours of listening to a sermon can seem like an eternity, but one line in a child's prayer that touches your heart and causes tears to well up in your eyes can stay with you forever.  So moving on, as the time for relating to my dinner approaches, I want you to consider the continuing dreams of Joseph.

An angel had come to him to tell him he was to marry Mary.  But that wasn't it.  The dreams kept coming.  He was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt.  He was told in a dream to go back to Israel. You would think he'd be getting used to the idea of angels in dreams, but that one took him by surprise.  "An angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream."  It's obviously not something you can get used to!

Still, he kept his head about him.  When he realized that it was another of Herod's line, his son Archelaus, who was going to be in charge, he wisely headed for a different part of the country. Replacing Herod with his son was like replacing a headache with a toothache! Again there is a dream, and finally the family settles in the district of Galilee.  All this is happening against a background of words and visions of prophets from years before.

So is the dream just for Christmas?  No way.  Our lives need to be continually nurtured by the Spirit of God.  There's a New Year coming.  We don't know what it will hold.  It's time to put away the old and head for the new.  All along the way, the promises of God will remain sure.  There will continue to be angels to guide us and prophets to inspire us.  There will be those taken captive by dreams of darkness and those who are envisioning a better day.

As we come to the end of the year and another Christmas passes by, I encourage you to place your life into the hands of a God who can be trusted.  God will at times seem slow and absent to respond to your needs, but the reality will simply be that the Spirit is working so quietly that our noisy lives haven't picked up the signals.  At other times it will be like the angel who arrives suddenly.  “Whoa,” Lord, “Slow down.  I'm playing catch up back here.”

No matter.  Keep the Faith.  For the Great Shepherd of the Sheep, Our Lord Jesus Christ is quite capable of leading His flock through another year of still waters, terrifying valleys, and green pastures.  

So to God's name be the glory.

AMEN!