God the Dreamer Dreams us Awake

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 22, 2019 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Here we are at the darkest time of the year, when shadow and mystery envelop us, and things lose their crisply defined edges. Is that a person at the end of the driveway, or swaying tree branch? Someone whispering my name, or just the cold winter wind teasing the eaves? We enter into the darkness where our usual clarity and surety are stripped away and we find ourselves in an in-between place where dream, and uncertainty reign.

Of course, it’s also the time of year when we, “rage against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas writes. We string Christmas lights, inflate house-high Santas, drench the manger scene in 200 watt fluorescents in an effort to keep the creep of darkness at bay. Mystery is banished in the movement activated security light by the garage and reign of cold, hard, measurable fact reasserted.

But what if we are called as Christians not to fend off the darkness and the mystery of this time of year, but to embrace it, to enter into it so that something new, something unforeseen, something we can only glimpse perhaps in the upside-down logic of a dream, might come into being, might be born in us?

It’s easy for this Advent-Christmas-Epiphany season to turn into a tightly-ordered time-table of tasks to accomplish. There are the cards to send, the gifts to wrap, the relatives to visit, the food to prepare and the bowl games to watch. We can slip into a kind of auto-pilot where we’re so concerned with doing the next thing that the mystery, the dreaminess, the flat-out strangeness of world gets edged out.

It’s interesting that our Gospel for today features a dream isn’t it? Dreams are those in-between, liminal places where the familiar is made strange and the strange made familiar. As children of the Enlightenment, we don’t usually put much stock in dreams. We call people who don’t play by society’s rules “wooly-headed dreamers” because they aren’t practical, productive, or predicable. But think of all the times dreams figure prominently in Holy Scripture—from Jacob’s dream at Bethel where he sees angels ascending and descending on a ladder and hears God speak those astounding words of promise, “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.” Or Old Testament Joseph’s dreams that awaken him to his calling as the liberator of his people. The Magi wake from their dream and go home by a different way.

God’s ways are not our ways. And sometimes, when hope is at a low ebb, the possibility of possibility trumped by the grim certainty that the way things are is the way they’ll always be, dreams are what God uses to wake us from our slumber, to the startling fact that we’re at the end of our imaginative resources for how to fashion a more just and peaceful world, God is not at the end of his. God the dreamer intrudes into our settled picture of how things are and how the they might be. God the dreamer dreams us awake to save us from the shackles of business as usual and remind us that God is doing a new thing right under our sleepy noses. God the dreamer dreams Himself in us that we might awaken from our human-created nightmare and to God’s dream for the world—deserts coming into flower, the weak-kneed made strong, the haunt of jackals turned into place of verdant refreshment, the blind made to see, the deaf hear, and the knowledge of God’s belovedness for all God’s children taking hold of even the hardest of hearts.

We spoke last week of the Annunciation to Mary—another kind of Holy Intrusion that awakened a little Palestinian teenager to the great adventure of her calling as the God-bearer, the one who through her “Yes,” brought Eternity into time, measureless space into a cradle wrapped in swaddling bands. The Angel Gabriel came as a sacred interruption, a spoke-in-the wheel of Mary’s best-laid plans and opened up unfathomable vistas with the rustling of his wings. Her “Yes,” is our “yes,” our willingness to consent to God’s presence and action in our lives, that God through the Holy Spirit might bring Christ to birth in and through the fragile, quirky, unrepeatable lineaments of our 21st century lives.

Joseph also shows us something important about the proper place of mystery, possibility, hope, and dreams in our lives. I’ve always been haunted (that’s the only word for it, frankly) by that sentence, “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.” Joseph learns that Mary is with child and is tempted to follow the conventional order of things, the way of propriety, the way of rule-following, and uprightness. And it’s significant that Joseph plans this as a quiet dismissal. He doesn’t want to make a big show of it. He’ll do it with tact, grace, and poise and no one will be the wiser. He’ll spare himself the disgrace of being associated with a young pregnant girl and get back to being a righteous man.

Sometimes, in our lives, we make a big show of our dismissals (we storm out of a room or a relationship), but more often than not we do it quietly. We avoid “that person” at coffee hour. We carefully orchestrate our exchange of the Peace of Christ to run out of time at just the right moment when the Offertory Sentence is announced. Or we condescend to put ourselves in someone’s presence, but we’ve closed the doors of our hearts to them—their words, their story, their hopes, their insights, their fears, their dreams roll off us like water off a duck’s back… quietly.

The world of the quiet dismissal, that waking nightmare, is what Joseph is awakened from by his dream. It’s interesting if you look at icons of the Angel appearing to Joseph in a dream that he is often depicted with a frowning face wrapped in a what looks suspiciously like a funeral shroud. The implication is clear—his usual way of making sense of the world is the way of death. But God’s not done. In his dream Joseph is shown a new way of being in the world—a way of being founded on love, not law, a way of being grounded in intuition, imagination, faithful relationship, a way of being that speaks of  trust—not in the conventions of the world—but in the Holy One who has and will continue to do great things for us.

Joseph’s faithfulness to Mary, his willingness to step out in trust, to bear the burden of societal shame and blame in the name of a dream that bigger than just himself plays its own part in the coming of Christ into the world. What, we might ask, would have happened had Joseph chosen the way of the quiet dismissal? What would have happened had he not been dreamed awake by God’s dream for the world? What would have happened if he’d just dismissed the Angel of the Lord as the effect of past-due meatloaf and gone back to his ordinary life?

You see Joseph undergoes a kind of death and rebirth. He dies to his carefully cultivated image as a righteous man who says and does all the right things, and is reborn as a scandalous prefiguring of the way of the cross—that in dying to those old ways of making sense of who he is and how the world works, he rises to new life and enjoys a newfound freedom from societal expectation and rigid adherence to the way things should be. In the process, he’s gifted with the realization that his ways are not God’s ways, and that God will go to whatever lengths necessary to drive home to history-shattering reality that God is with us as the source, the power, the inexhaustible energy of new life, new, more just social arrangements, new, restored loving relationship with God, our neighbor, ourselves, and creation.

Do we think that the Israelites under Pharaoh could ever have imagined what God had in store for them as they went about their lives as productive brick-makers for Imperial power? Do we think that Paul, checking coats and passing out stones at the martyrdom of Stephen could have ever imagined what God’s dream for his life was to be? Do we think that the brokenness, the discord, the tribalism, the fragmentation we see in our own country is the way it will always be?

My prayer for us is that in this season of mystery, in this in-between time, we open ourselves to God’s dream for us, that it might awaken us from the human-created nightmare the world so often appears to be. My prayer is that we make the daring commitment to be dreamed awake by God. My prayer is that like Joseph we might have the courage to let those old ways, the way of the quiet dismissal, be plucked up and torn down, that something new, something that looks like uncontainable love wrapped in swaddling bands in a horse-stall in Bethlehem, might be born in us. My prayer, bothers and sisters, is that we prepare, a mansion in the heart for the one who forsakes the heights and makes his home in us as love.