The Fourth Sunday in Advent
“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” “The whole world needs a Christmas dream.” Have you ever noticed how often dreams and dreaming come up in Christmas songs? Dreams seem to come with the season, and this morning’s gospel lesson is no exception.Joseph, who was engaged to Mary, has a dream in the passage in front of us this morning from the first chapter of the gospel according to Matthew. Joseph has three more dreams in next Sunday’s gospel lesson from the second chapter of Matthew. This Joseph who was engaged to Mary was apparently every bit the dreamer that his Old Testament namesake was.
In the world in which the New Testament was written, dreams were not interpreted psychologically as expressions of the wishes and desires of the subconscious mind. Dreams were not understood neurologically as a function of electrophysiological brain activity. In the world of the New Testament, dreams were taken spiritually, if you will, in that dreams were regarded as a means of receiving a message from God. And in the gospel of Matthew, Joseph was a dreamer.
In chapter 1, after Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant with a child that could not possibly be his, Joseph had a dream. And in that dream an angel appeared to him and told him to marry Mary anyway, because the child she was carrying was God’s doing. When he woke, we are told, Joseph took that dream as a message from God, and he did as the angel in it told him.
The gospel of Matthew has no interest in Joseph’s dream apart from the message from God that it contains. In the ancient world, the medium was not yet thought of as the message, as the twentieth-century communication theorist Marshall McLuhan taught us to think.
But what would it take for a “righteous man,” as Joseph is described in Matthew 1:19, a good, law-of-Moses-abiding man with an outstanding pedigree—descended as he was according to the genealogy in Matthew 1:1-17 from Abraham and David and Solomon and the kings of Judah—what would it take for such a man to marry a woman who was carrying a child that could not possibly have been his? In first-century Palestine, it would been unimaginable for a good Jewish man such as Joseph to do such a thing.
Unless . . . unless something entirely disrupted his sense of righteousness and order. Unless something utterly interrupted his way of thinking. Unless something completely altered the state of his reason, a man such as Joseph would have removed himself from Mary’s situation and gone on with his righteous and pedigreed life and found himself a similarly righteous and pedigreed wife.
In this morning’s gospel lesson, the medium is the message, not the message alone. As dreams are often wont to do, Joseph’s dream disrupted righteousness and order, interrupted thinking, and altered reason. To marry Mary anyway is an idea that comes in from the outside of righteousness, remote from thinking, and beyond reason. What happens to Joseph in this morning’s gospel lesson is every bit as unexpected as the fact that Mary was unexpectedly expecting.
As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ in the world and in our lives, Joseph’s dream reminds us that rightly understood, Advent and Christmas are disruptive, interruptive and altering. One of the great Christian heresies of our time and place is the popular assumption that being a Christian, following Jesus, is a confirmation of our sense of righteousness and order, an endorsement of our way of thinking, an affirmation of our reason. Nothing could be farther from biblical truth.
Jesus the son of Joseph (as he was called in the gospel of John in 1:45 and 6:42) grew up to say, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:34-39). Those are Jesus’ words, but he learned them from Joseph. Because when Joseph “followed his dream”—when Joseph abandoned righteousness and pedigree and thought and reason to marry Mary anyway—it would have cost him dearly in family and friends and social standing.
And that brings us to the content of the dream, the message. In this morning’s gospel lesson, the message is the message, not the medium alone. The message is of two parts: 1) marry Mary anyway 2) because the child she is carrying is God’s doing. The message is this: first, expect the unexpected; and second, it’s about what God is up to, not what you are up to.
Expect the unexpected. Have you ever known someone for a long time, only to discover something about them that you did not expect? When Bev and I married, we had known each other since we were both 10 years old. She thought she knew me. She really did. So you cannot imagine the surprise it was to her to discover that this otherwise free-spirited, undisciplined and sometimes off-the-wall guy would end squeeze the toothpaste tube carefully from the bottom instead of in the middle. And even worse than that, he wound up becoming a Baptist preacher! You think you know someone, and then it turns out that you don’t know them all that well after all. All of us have had that kind of experience at one time or another with one person or another and sometimes even with ourselves—or if we haven’t had it yet, we will.
(By the way, for those of you who keep up with such things, you might be interested to know that after last Sunday’s sermon, this week beside my sink in the double vanity in our master bathroom a brand new tube of toothpaste appeared. It didn’t have a sticky-note on it that read, “Shut up, already,” but it could have.)
Sometimes the unexpected comes to us for good and sometimes the unexpected comes to us for ill, as in a decline in our health or the death of a spouse or a child or the end of a marriage or the end of a job or the end of a business or the end of an entire sector of the economy. But either way, for good or for ill, we should not be surprised. We should expect the unexpected.
I used to love surprises. And then I became an academic administrator. When I became an administrator, a manager of policies and a controller of procedures, my love for surprises disappeared. My priorities became systematization, operationalization, procedurefication. I know those last two aren’t even words, but that’s the point. The message of Joseph’s dream—marry Mary anyway—reminds us that we cannot control the Holy Spirit; we cannot control the church which is the body of Christ; we cannot control God, no matter how hard we try and no matter how often or long we pray in the hope that we can.
So expect the unexpected, in life and with God, because it’s not about what you’re up to; it’s about what God is up to. In Joseph’s dream, it is as if God said, it’s not about you, Joseph. It’s about me. It’s not about your righteousness or pedigree or thinking or reason. It’s about my saving work in the world. “You are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). “‘They shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means, ‘God is with us’” (Matthew 1:23). It’s as if God said, “Get on board with me, Joseph.” The message of Joseph’s dream is the same to us, no matter how many times we have to hear it for it to sink into our thick skulls. It’s not about our righteousness or thinking or reason. It’s about God’s saving work in the world.
Sometimes I think that one of the reasons our culture has turned December into the most frenetic and distracted month of the year is so that we will not be tempted to listen to Joseph’s dream. Joseph’s dream reminds us that getting on board with God requires setting a lot of things aside, putting a lot things down, giving a lot of things up. As Jesus grew up to say, it requires us to put other people’s expectations aside to embrace the unexpected and to get on board with God.
Next Sunday morning, we’ll look at where that dream can take you. But for now it is enough to consider whether you will be taken at all by Joseph’s dream. Expect the unexpected. And it’s not about what you’re up to; it’s about what God is up to.
Photo by Tacit Requiem. Used by license under Creative Commons.
This material is Copyrighted © 2010 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.
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