Lucia Lloyd’s sermon: Joseph and God's Messages
Dec 22, 2019
Advent 4, Year A
Matthew 1:18-25
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Ultimately, we all come from God, and ultimately, we all return to God. The things that seem to separate us and divide us turn out to be very superficial things, in the end, and I expect that ultimately, on the deepest level, we are much more united with God and with one another than we realize. I like the image of each of us as a wave, in which we take form in our own separate shape for a while, but we are all part of the same ocean.
This is not a new idea that originated with me this week, of course. Mystics and saints and poets from a variety of cultures over many ages have had a sense of this underlying unity with God and each other, and have used a variety of metaphors to try to describe it, knowing all the time that no metaphor can describe it fully.
We are so often in the habit of paying attention to the most superficial details of our days, that we often neglect these deeper aspects of our lives, these deep connections between our souls and God, between our souls and the souls of those around us. So I am glad that our lectionary reading today gives us Joseph. Joseph is mentioned briefly in the other gospels, and we read a bit more about him only in the beginning of Matthew. In these passages, what is striking about Joseph are the prominence of his dreams and the way he responds to them. In fact, the passages about him are overwhelmingly about the way God speaks to him in a dream not once, but four times.
In the first dream, the angel tells Joseph not to be afraid, to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her is from the Holy Spirit, and to name the child Jesus because he will save people from their sins. It is a dream of hope, and joy, and salvation.
Still, the scriptures are not naive. You remember the second dream has a very different tone. The angel comes to Joseph in the second dream with a warning of danger. Herod is a ruler with a nasty temper who cares only about his power, not about how his actions affect other people. So Herod thinks his power might be in question, his temper flares, and all the children under the age of two are slaughtered. Joseph does not have the power to prevent Herod from doing this. Because of the angel’s warning, he is able to rescue the people he can. His third and fourth dreams are also about the slaughter of the innocents: how long it will take until the danger is over, and how far away they need to be. We know that all of this is in addition to the dream of the magi in Matthew’s gospel, in which they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, but to return to their own country by another road.
Why is it that God chooses to speak to us in dreams? Or maybe the better question is, why is it in dreams that we are able to hear God? The reasons have to do with the fact that our resistance to God in particular, and truth in general, is much lower when we are asleep. There may be things we are reluctant to recognize, because they are outside our comfort zone, and so in our waking lives we keep our defenses up so that we won’t recognize them. As we sleep, we can no longer put our hands over our eyes, or our hands over our ears. God knows that if left to ourselves we’d be likely to stay in our comfort zone forever, and miss out on all the good that lies beyond our comfort zone. So to help us out God sends us dreams.
I used to think that God speaking to people in dreams happened only in Bible stories, and not to ordinary people in modern society. And then I think back to a day a number of years ago, when I was scrolling through Facebook, as part of my ordinary life in modern society. one day, a number of years ago, and came across a post from a guy I knew slightly. He was an Episcopalian with a law degree and a good job with the government in Northern Virginia, named Matt Rhodes. I’d met him when his church and my church had done a retreat weekend together. Among all the other things people put in their Facebook status updates, he mentioned a dream he’d just had. In the dream he was hanging pictures on the walls of a new home, and the picture he was hanging was a picture of Katherine Jefferts Schori. who was Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church at the time. His other Facebook friends were making various little comments and jokes, but I thought, “That sounds like it might be a call to ordination dream.” So, I Facebook messaged him and asked if he’d been considering making some transitions in his life, and he said he had. So, I messaged again, and asked if he’d been wondering whether he might be called to ordained ministry. He said as a matter of fact, he had been wondering that, but he hadn’t told anyone. There was the reluctance to admit this to anyone else for fear of what they would say, and the reluctance to admit even to himself, that this thing that had always been for other people, might be God calling him. There were the fears that he wasn’t worthy of the calling, the fears of the sacrifices it would entail, the fears of the unknown. So, I called him on the phone, and very gently and pastorally, I gave him a kick in the butt. I also told him what the next step in the process is—a conversation with his rector, and offered to be an outside sounding board and supporter as he began the process, an offer he took me up on numerous times, in which I alternated between listening quietly, giving more kicks in the butt, and cheering him on. It was a joy to recall that whole process when I was a presenter at his ordination, and it is a joy that he is now serving God as a priest. Do I believe God spoke to him in that dream to tell him what God wanted him to do? Yes, I do. And even though he hadn’t quite gotten God’s message at first, when I mentioned, in that first phone call, that moving into a new house decorated with a picture of the Presiding Bishop sounded like moving into a new role in The Episcopal Church, it immediately rang true. God enabled him to begin working through his fears and fulfill his calling.
Another experience was in some ways similar and in other ways the opposite. A continuing education program I was in more recently had a session on dreams and the Spirit. My group decided to look at a recurring dream of one clergyperson, who dreamed that her arm had lots of pins stuck in it, and she had to pull them out one by one. Seeing her arm full of pins horrified her, and pulling them out was painful. As the members of the group asked her questions about the dream, I asked her what happened after she pulled out a pin, whether there was any lasting damage to her arm or any lasting pain, and she suddenly realized there wasn’t. She had mentioned earlier that day that her hospice work had been taking a toll on her, especially since she was also dealing with her own dying relatives, and she wasn’t sure how much longer to keep doing it. I asked her, are the pins related to your griefs? And she immediately said, “yes!” and I could see her body visibly relax with that recognition. It felt therapeutic. I believe that even our painful dreams are sent to us to heal us.
I am a fan of rational cognitive intellect and rigorous analysis. I am a fan of facts and verbal precision. All of them are ways in which we can know God better, know ourselves better, know our world better. Still, today’s gospel passage reminds us that important as those things are, they are not the only way God speaks to us. God also speaks to us through things such as dreams, to make us aware of deeper truths about ourselves, our world, our healing, and what God is calling us to next. Dreams are one of the ways in which we experience that the wave of our individual life is also part of the ocean of unity with God and with one another. We have the example of Joseph who listens to what the angels tell him in his dreams, and we can draw from him encouragement to do the same. Who knows what amazing messages God might have for each of us?
This is not a new idea that originated with me this week, of course. Mystics and saints and poets from a variety of cultures over many ages have had a sense of this underlying unity with God and each other, and have used a variety of metaphors to try to describe it, knowing all the time that no metaphor can describe it fully.
We are so often in the habit of paying attention to the most superficial details of our days, that we often neglect these deeper aspects of our lives, these deep connections between our souls and God, between our souls and the souls of those around us. So I am glad that our lectionary reading today gives us Joseph. Joseph is mentioned briefly in the other gospels, and we read a bit more about him only in the beginning of Matthew. In these passages, what is striking about Joseph are the prominence of his dreams and the way he responds to them. In fact, the passages about him are overwhelmingly about the way God speaks to him in a dream not once, but four times.
In the first dream, the angel tells Joseph not to be afraid, to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her is from the Holy Spirit, and to name the child Jesus because he will save people from their sins. It is a dream of hope, and joy, and salvation.
Still, the scriptures are not naive. You remember the second dream has a very different tone. The angel comes to Joseph in the second dream with a warning of danger. Herod is a ruler with a nasty temper who cares only about his power, not about how his actions affect other people. So Herod thinks his power might be in question, his temper flares, and all the children under the age of two are slaughtered. Joseph does not have the power to prevent Herod from doing this. Because of the angel’s warning, he is able to rescue the people he can. His third and fourth dreams are also about the slaughter of the innocents: how long it will take until the danger is over, and how far away they need to be. We know that all of this is in addition to the dream of the magi in Matthew’s gospel, in which they are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, but to return to their own country by another road.
Why is it that God chooses to speak to us in dreams? Or maybe the better question is, why is it in dreams that we are able to hear God? The reasons have to do with the fact that our resistance to God in particular, and truth in general, is much lower when we are asleep. There may be things we are reluctant to recognize, because they are outside our comfort zone, and so in our waking lives we keep our defenses up so that we won’t recognize them. As we sleep, we can no longer put our hands over our eyes, or our hands over our ears. God knows that if left to ourselves we’d be likely to stay in our comfort zone forever, and miss out on all the good that lies beyond our comfort zone. So to help us out God sends us dreams.
I used to think that God speaking to people in dreams happened only in Bible stories, and not to ordinary people in modern society. And then I think back to a day a number of years ago, when I was scrolling through Facebook, as part of my ordinary life in modern society. one day, a number of years ago, and came across a post from a guy I knew slightly. He was an Episcopalian with a law degree and a good job with the government in Northern Virginia, named Matt Rhodes. I’d met him when his church and my church had done a retreat weekend together. Among all the other things people put in their Facebook status updates, he mentioned a dream he’d just had. In the dream he was hanging pictures on the walls of a new home, and the picture he was hanging was a picture of Katherine Jefferts Schori. who was Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church at the time. His other Facebook friends were making various little comments and jokes, but I thought, “That sounds like it might be a call to ordination dream.” So, I Facebook messaged him and asked if he’d been considering making some transitions in his life, and he said he had. So, I messaged again, and asked if he’d been wondering whether he might be called to ordained ministry. He said as a matter of fact, he had been wondering that, but he hadn’t told anyone. There was the reluctance to admit this to anyone else for fear of what they would say, and the reluctance to admit even to himself, that this thing that had always been for other people, might be God calling him. There were the fears that he wasn’t worthy of the calling, the fears of the sacrifices it would entail, the fears of the unknown. So, I called him on the phone, and very gently and pastorally, I gave him a kick in the butt. I also told him what the next step in the process is—a conversation with his rector, and offered to be an outside sounding board and supporter as he began the process, an offer he took me up on numerous times, in which I alternated between listening quietly, giving more kicks in the butt, and cheering him on. It was a joy to recall that whole process when I was a presenter at his ordination, and it is a joy that he is now serving God as a priest. Do I believe God spoke to him in that dream to tell him what God wanted him to do? Yes, I do. And even though he hadn’t quite gotten God’s message at first, when I mentioned, in that first phone call, that moving into a new house decorated with a picture of the Presiding Bishop sounded like moving into a new role in The Episcopal Church, it immediately rang true. God enabled him to begin working through his fears and fulfill his calling.
Another experience was in some ways similar and in other ways the opposite. A continuing education program I was in more recently had a session on dreams and the Spirit. My group decided to look at a recurring dream of one clergyperson, who dreamed that her arm had lots of pins stuck in it, and she had to pull them out one by one. Seeing her arm full of pins horrified her, and pulling them out was painful. As the members of the group asked her questions about the dream, I asked her what happened after she pulled out a pin, whether there was any lasting damage to her arm or any lasting pain, and she suddenly realized there wasn’t. She had mentioned earlier that day that her hospice work had been taking a toll on her, especially since she was also dealing with her own dying relatives, and she wasn’t sure how much longer to keep doing it. I asked her, are the pins related to your griefs? And she immediately said, “yes!” and I could see her body visibly relax with that recognition. It felt therapeutic. I believe that even our painful dreams are sent to us to heal us.
I am a fan of rational cognitive intellect and rigorous analysis. I am a fan of facts and verbal precision. All of them are ways in which we can know God better, know ourselves better, know our world better. Still, today’s gospel passage reminds us that important as those things are, they are not the only way God speaks to us. God also speaks to us through things such as dreams, to make us aware of deeper truths about ourselves, our world, our healing, and what God is calling us to next. Dreams are one of the ways in which we experience that the wave of our individual life is also part of the ocean of unity with God and with one another. We have the example of Joseph who listens to what the angels tell him in his dreams, and we can draw from him encouragement to do the same. Who knows what amazing messages God might have for each of us?