PROMISES AND DREAMS
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church, Middletown, NJ
December 13, 2020
Texts: Isaiah 43:1–21; Matthew 1:18–25
Most of us have had the experience. It's almost morning and you are suddenly startled by your dream. Sometimes it is pleasant, even exhilarating, and halfway between sleep and wakefulness, you try to hold onto the dream by almost consciously adding the rest of the storyline. Many of us have also had the opposite experience, being shaken awake by a terrible nightmare.
I only have a vague memory of the story my father told me, that after being read the story of Little Red Riding Hood, of running to my father's bed and shaking him awake because there was a wolf at my window. I must have been no more than five years old at the time but the wolf's nightmarish image is still in my mind. However, that really palpable fear did not translate into my conscious life because I oppose the delisting of wolves as an endangered species and the aerial hunting and killing of wolves. They really are magnificent creatures.
Our English word “nightmare derives from the Old Norse word “mara” referring to a spirit or goblin that would sit on people's chests as they slept and trouble them. In an age when people really believed that dreams somehow connected them to God, nightmares could prove to be frightening. They could be ladders to heaven as for Jacob or a promise of destruction as for Nebuchadnezzar. The Talmud, a book of Jewish commentary on the Torah, compiled between 200 and 500 CE contains more than 200 references to dreams. And our human belief in the power of dreams cuts across cultures and religions. The ancient Hindu Vedas as well as the super-rational Confucians all believed in the power of dreams.
In our own way today we also believe in the power of dreams. In fact, we use the word dream not just in reference to what we experience at night but in reference to our national culture, as in our phrase “the American Dream,” a term coined by James Truslow Adams in 1931.
Truslow defined it as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” He went on to write that “too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." The American dream is more than a dream of wealth; it is a dream of equality.
Dreams have a habit of becoming corrupted. The corruption of our goals, our dreams can begin early in our lives or later. We enter higher education and our professional lives with dreams of what we hope to accomplish. The corruption is seemingly mundane with each loss seemingly small, but these small losses in our dreams add up to a larger loss of a dream and we end up wondering what happened to us. Corruption can become so overwhelming that it ends up with terrible consequences for all. Imagine the dream of young boys or girls in the company of their heroes, whether in a church or sports setting, and find themselves horribly abused. Dreams can become nightmares very easily.
We want to transform our dreams into reality, but before we ask how to do that, we should ask the first, basic question: What kinds of dreams do we have? Are they dreams that are based on the values that are essential to our faith: love, mercy, peace, justice––the dreams that look beyond ourselves? Or are they dreams that are only focused inward on our own lives, what we hope to accomplish only for ourselves? Our lives reflect our dreams.
This morning's reading from Isaiah was composed at a time when the Babylonian captivity had just ended in 538 BCE, about two hundred years after the first thirty-nine chapters were composed by the original prophet Isaiah who warned of calamity if Israel did not stay to the true path of God's law. The dream of this Isaiah is seen as God's promise of return to Jerusalem and to begin the building of a second temple which would serve as a focal point for the worship of God.
The dream also includes the promise of God to establish justice and equity. The return was really of the religious and political leadership, descendants of those who had been taken into exile by Babylon. The kingdom became a client state of Cyrus' Persian Empire, one that was permitted a certain degree of autonomy. But, if we look at Isaiah's poem, the dream is a promise.
By the time Joseph had his dream, the promise of restoration had become a nightmare, one of brutal Roman occupation, with little hope for a future of justice and equity. The temple leadership, more concerned with self-preservation than anything else, was in full collaboration with the Roman authorities, claiming, of course, that they at least were able to preserve the sanctity of the Temple for the worship of God.
As we know from other parts of the Gospels, the temple leadership was corrupt, always exacting what they considered their “fair share” from the people who lived in abject poverty and misery. They wanted no promise of God's new reign, only their own power. The baby we see as cute and cuddly this time of year grew up to be a challenge to their power and authority. As so well sung in Jesus Christ Superstar, “This Jesus, this Jesus, this Jesus must die.”
But before we get to that part of our story, let's focus on the dreams and promises given us this special season for, indeed, they are dreams and promises of great joy, as in the song of the angels recorded in Luke's Gospel. They are dreams and promises of a new way of relating to each other and to God. They offer us a new vision of God, one that is not just the God in a temple but the God in our hearts who enables us to turn our dreams into reality, sometimes not quite what we expected, but still a reality to move us into a new way of thinking and being.
The essential part of the Matthew text this morning tells us to trust our dreams of what can be, not just to look at what could be wrong with us, our church, our community, even the world. The crux of Joseph's dream is not just to accept a young peasant woman as his wife even though she is pregnant, but to trust in our instincts of kindness and goodness, in that spark of the divine and holy each of us carries within us.
However, the culture that we have helped to create, tells us to ignore that part of ourselves, to be fearful, self-centered, focused on money and power above all else, but we have another option. That option is to trust in the dream that encompasses more than our own selves. In that way, we will dream those dreams that transform into the reality offered us by God's promise to be with us no matter what. That was the promise God gave those Jews returning from Babylon, to Joseph as he took Mary as his wife, and to us, as we work to create a world that reflects God's promise of justice and love.
Let us pray: God of our dreams, enter into our hearts and imaginations enabling us to live your promise given us through the One we follow, even Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.