Epiphany Sunday
January 3, 2010
preached at Bethesda (MD) Presbyterian Church
http://www.bethesdapresbyterian.org/
Matthew 2:1-23
Warned in a Dream
“And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,” we are told, “(the magi) left for their own country by another road.” Back to a safe and familiar place, after being guided by a dream-like heavenly light to pay homage to an unknown king in an unknown place.
Based on his dreams, Joseph would soon strike out with Mary and baby Jesus for an unfamiliar place as refugees. And his dreams brought them safely home, as well.
For the magi, for Joseph, for Mary and for God incarnate: Their dreams led them both out of and into danger, before eventually leading them – and this is key – safely home.
If only we could learn from their examples of trust!
If those bejeweled magi or that rustic carpenter Joseph possessed any of the literary flair of the medieval genius Dante Alighieri, they may have initially uttered these words: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”2
And lost they were. Could it get any worse? It could have. They could have remained in Herod’s Judea.
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” John Lennon may have said it. And yet the magi, followed by Joseph, Mary, and the child Jesus, certainly lived it.
All because of their dreams – five in all, four coming to Joseph. At least three of them dreams of warning, that they might avoid Herod and his son Archelaus and their status quo traps.
Who remembers their dreams? The dreams we have when we – like our protagonists today – are fast asleep? Given relatively recent phenomena such as the electric light and the increasingly stress-filled lives we lead, we sleep-deprived souls simply don’t recall our dreams most of the time. Nor are many of us post-Enlightenment folk wont to care – addicted as we are to the juiceless jargon of truth-as-fact. Who bothers with these nocturnal messages anymore?
Who remembers their dreams? Even, the dreams that we have when we are awake? As we enter the dead of another Maryland winter, Langston Hughes fetches us up: “Hold fast to dreams/For when dreams go/Life is a barren field/Frozen with snow.”3
Certainly: We can hold fast. But why? Who cares to dream anymore, when ambition’s call would closet them till we eventually dust them off, turn to the next generation, and say, “Here, kids: play with these!”? Who dares to dream anymore?
Every year – two weekends from now, in fact – we hear from the man whose birthday we have made into a welcome mid-winter holiday. “I have a dream,” we hear him intone. And our hearts are pulled and our imaginations are fired and we say, yes, yes: I have that dream, too! Yes, yes: It’s good to dream that way!
And then what happens? Chances are, very little. For all too often, we fail to connect Martin Luther King’s dreams for our society – in the face of imperial powers that would manipulate them – with our new year’s resolve. And once again, the mournful groan of Langston Hughes is heard throughout the land:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load?
Or does it explode?5
Perhaps, to connect with our conscious dreams again, we need to begin – like the magi and Joseph of old – with the root of them all: those dreams we have while we sleep. We need to begin our exploration there.
They are not all that different from our conscious dreams, really.Matthew 2:1-23
Warned in a Dream
“And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod,” we are told, “(the magi) left for their own country by another road.” Back to a safe and familiar place, after being guided by a dream-like heavenly light to pay homage to an unknown king in an unknown place.
Based on his dreams, Joseph would soon strike out with Mary and baby Jesus for an unfamiliar place as refugees. And his dreams brought them safely home, as well.
For the magi, for Joseph, for Mary and for God incarnate: Their dreams led them both out of and into danger, before eventually leading them – and this is key – safely home.
If only we could learn from their examples of trust!
If those bejeweled magi or that rustic carpenter Joseph possessed any of the literary flair of the medieval genius Dante Alighieri, they may have initially uttered these words: “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”2
And lost they were. Could it get any worse? It could have. They could have remained in Herod’s Judea.
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” John Lennon may have said it. And yet the magi, followed by Joseph, Mary, and the child Jesus, certainly lived it.
All because of their dreams – five in all, four coming to Joseph. At least three of them dreams of warning, that they might avoid Herod and his son Archelaus and their status quo traps.
Who remembers their dreams? The dreams we have when we – like our protagonists today – are fast asleep? Given relatively recent phenomena such as the electric light and the increasingly stress-filled lives we lead, we sleep-deprived souls simply don’t recall our dreams most of the time. Nor are many of us post-Enlightenment folk wont to care – addicted as we are to the juiceless jargon of truth-as-fact. Who bothers with these nocturnal messages anymore?
Who remembers their dreams? Even, the dreams that we have when we are awake? As we enter the dead of another Maryland winter, Langston Hughes fetches us up: “Hold fast to dreams/For when dreams go/Life is a barren field/Frozen with snow.”3
Certainly: We can hold fast. But why? Who cares to dream anymore, when ambition’s call would closet them till we eventually dust them off, turn to the next generation, and say, “Here, kids: play with these!”? Who dares to dream anymore?
Every year – two weekends from now, in fact – we hear from the man whose birthday we have made into a welcome mid-winter holiday. “I have a dream,” we hear him intone. And our hearts are pulled and our imaginations are fired and we say, yes, yes: I have that dream, too! Yes, yes: It’s good to dream that way!
And then what happens? Chances are, very little. For all too often, we fail to connect Martin Luther King’s dreams for our society – in the face of imperial powers that would manipulate them – with our new year’s resolve. And once again, the mournful groan of Langston Hughes is heard throughout the land:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load?
Or does it explode?5
Perhaps, to connect with our conscious dreams again, we need to begin – like the magi and Joseph of old – with the root of them all: those dreams we have while we sleep. We need to begin our exploration there.
Over twenty years ago – as a troubled and depressed and eventually an addicted young man – I had the good fortune to find myself a patient of a psychiatrist who happened to be one the finest hypnotherapists in the country. Barely in my twenties, I was still blessed with a highly suggestible mind – an ideal candidate for hypnosis. So the good doctor would suggest, while I was under hypnosis, that I would dream in my sleep. And that I would awake when I dreamt in my sleep. And that I would recall everything about the dream I had just had. And that I would not be able to fall back asleep until I jotted down every last detail of what I had just dreamt.
Friends: It worked. Somewhere in our attic lies a sizeable folder full of those recorded dreams – four pages long, some of them, and single-spaced. It frustrated me no end that I could not fall back asleep until I wrote everything down!
Dreams such as, in the middle of the 1984 presidential primary race, Democratic front-runner Walter Mondale racing down Capitol Hill in a wheelchair, with his ex-astronaut challenger John Glenn in a wheelchair behind him, harping about “the right stuff.” Seems my subconscious, childlike as always, was communicating my fear of growing old – with the fear of commitment (racing from the Capitol building!) and possibly ending up in a wheelchair that growing old would entail. While all along my conscience lurked in the background, whispering: Do you have the right stuff?
Our dreams can warn us quite clearly about our anxieties – as well lead us into our deepest longings. As with my “right stuff” dream, they may warn us of our fears of growing old. Warn us that our particular church as an institution could die, as you may know and remember this church to be. And that the kingdom of God as we imagine it just may not come if it does go – as we know it and house it – despite all our mightiest efforts!
We must be willing to be led by dreams that warn us that we must die in order to live! That we must not continue lock-step with our comfortable Christendom notions of old; Herod’s subjects, after all, were all about being controlled. But that we must die in order to live that we might follow the example of the magi and Joseph: the example of being led.
Which are we, then: Controlled … or led? As individuals? As a nation? As a church?
“But Chuck,” I have heard several say – or at least imply – “We are old. And certainly, too old to dream.” Our scriptures beg to differ. “Where you going, Abraham?” his puzzled neighbors must have asked him. Can’t you just see him: on his walker, puzzled as the rest, responding, “I don’t know! I don’t know!” All he knew was that he had a dream – a call from God. And that call was leading him to a place he did not necessarily want to go.
A similar thing transpired the Day of Pentecost. As the Spirit caught fire among thousands of former strangers, Peter proclaimed the prophet Joel’s visionary words – among others, “your old men shall dream dreams.”
We can dream! We can! But let us be careful: Our dreams will often warn us before they will lead us.
They warn us not to return on the road that our dominant society would have us be led down – that “God-and-country” is no longer one word. They warn us that church is no longer a voluntary civic association of being around good people – at least as our world would define “good”. They warn us that we are called to follow a different road: a covenant community of creating disciples. Uncertain about where our dreams will take us, but relying on the immense wisdom God has planted among us to see us along the journey. Not comparing the purity of the “respectables” with the impurity of the “unrespectables”. But engaging in spiritual practices beyond Sunday morning worship: practices that teach us and lead us to trust – actually trust – in God’s dreams for us, rather than struggle to preserve present arrangements or micromanage to control grandiose outcomes.
“Chuck, we are old. Too old to embrace new life. And certainly, too old to dream”. Too old to whom? To God?
Do you believe we as a church can dream again? And will then know what to do with these dreams, once God leads us into them?
Our dreams are God-sent, and hence they are good – warnings or no! They are good because they lead us into kingdom resolutions.
Each of us has a dream – that is: Each of us has a call. A call as a church your Session will explore at its retreat next weekend, callings we will explore next week, during the Baptism of the Lord Sunday, and callings we will explore during Jesus on Tap in upcoming months.
Our callings – individual, or church – may not come to us as clear as Joseph’s. And angels of the Lord may not appear to us in high definition.
And yet, we can always be led in prayer by the promise today of a prophet named Isaiah. Speaking of a once-exiled people, Isaiah speaks of their exodus and their promised land … and ours, as well:
It was no messenger or angel
but (God’s) presence that saved them;
in love and in mercy redeemed them;
and lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.6
Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.
* * *
1Adapted from “Collect for the First Sunday After Christmas,” in A New Zealand Prayer Book: He Karakia Mihinare o Aotearoa (Auckland, New Zealand: William Collins Publishers, 1989), p. 557.
2From Dante’s “The Inferno”, as quoted (with “pass” for “way”) by Roger Kahn in The Head Game: Baseball Seen from the Pitcher’s Mound (NYC: Harcourt, 2000), p. 240.
3From the poem “Dreams” by Langston Hughes. Found in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (NYC: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). Also found at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dreams-2/.
4Metaphors borrowed from William Sloane Coffin, in A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), pp. 76-77.
5“Harlem: A Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes. From Montage of a Dream Deferred (Holt, 1951). Found at http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dream-deferred/, et. al.
6Isaiah 63:9.
Charge and Blessing
CHRISTMAS BEGINS
“When the song of the angel is still,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among peoples,
To make music in the heart.” (Howard Thurman)
Go out into the world in peace, to make music in God’s heart.
