Dream On
According to a 2014 letter from the Harvard Neuroscience Institute, there are several factors involved with whether or not you will be able to remember a dream when you wake. First and foremost, we must enter the hypnagogic state. Here, we experience “dreamlike visual, auditory, and physical hallucinations.” The manner in which we wake matters as well. According to Harvard, “we should allow ourselves to ‘float back and remember our dream’ before getting up. Alarm clocks usually don’t allow this luxury.” So, if you are like me and hit the snooze button more often than your partner would like, you now have scientific evidence to support your morning routine.
The purpose and function of dreams in our lives are as varied as the dreams we have each night. According to Sigmund Freud, our dreams disclose a repressed part of our lives or a desire we have been denying ourselves. If you are regularly dreaming about chocolate cake it is because Freud would argue, you have been denying the heart what it wants most - chocolate cake.
My earliest memory of what dreams are and how they function was provided by Walt Disney’s 1950 classic Cinderella.
A dream is a wish your heart makes
When you’re fast asleep
In your dreams you will lose your heartache.
Whatever you wish for, you keep
Perhaps the most famous modern dream can be found as a defiant political stance filled with rich theological undertones. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech”:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification”, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.
Dreams provide us with, according to Walter Bruggemann, “a world other than the one at hand.” In a dream there is an otherness - the dream reveals a reality other than the reality we find ourselves in. MLK understood this, dreaming of a world dramatically different than the world he experienced and we experience today.
So, should she stay or should she go?
Joseph had a dilemma on his hands. Regardless of how Mary had become pregnant, her pregnancy violated the social and ethical norms of first-century Israel. During this time to be pregnant outside of marriage was a “no-no” bigger than humiliation or social stigma.
Mary and Joseph were engaged, betrothed to one another. Engagement in this day was more complicated than buying a ring and getting down on one knee. Mary and Joseph were in a legally binding contract. Since Joseph was not the biological father of Mary’s child, the assumption would be made that Mary was guilty of adultery.
What was Joseph to do?
As a righteous man, Joseph had two choices, and frankly, both choices sucked.
Joseph would have been well within his legal rights to have Mary stoned per Leviticus 20:10 or Joseph could have given Mary a writ of divorce, nullifying the contract most likely established between Joseph and Mary’s father. Scripture tells us Joseph was righteous, so he had no choice.
Joseph was not going to dismiss Mary to be harsh or cruel but rather because the Law required him to do so. Before Christ, righteousness was found in one’s ability to follow and obey the Law.
Joseph did not have a choice.
The ethics of the day would permit nothing less.
Dismissal would have brought as much public shame on Joseph as it would Mary.
There is a reason Linus opted to read Luke’s account of the Nativity and we will as well on Christmas Eve - Matthew’s account of the birth of Christ is uncomfortable. The dilemma faced by Joseph exposes the scandal of the incarnation during a time of year when we seek out sentimental, Norman Rockwell-like Christmases.
Either way, you slice it, because of the culture and social norms, Joseph could not dream of doing anything else when Mary told him she was pregnant.
What Joseph was to do had been settled long before Mary told him what was going on.
Just when Joseph had settled on what course of action he would take, God intervened on Mary’s behalf, on behalf of God’s own son - “As he was thinking about this, an angel from the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because the child she carries was conceived by the Holy Spirit.’”. While Joseph may have had no part in the conception of Jesus, Joseph would be 100% part of the Messiah’s arrival. The divine message, delivered by a dream crashing messenger grafted Joseph, a descent of David, Israel’s mighty king, into the story by asking Joseph to adopt the coming child, passing his family lineage onto the Savior of the World.
So, the angels delivered the heavenly message - you know the story - Mary was saved from the shame of divorce and pain of stoning. The only Family was intact and they made their way to Joseph’s hometown to be counted in the Roman census.
Joseph heard the story, God’s plan for salvation, a plan he and his ancestors had been dreaming about and he, Joseph was changed.
God’s revelation, God’s dreams rearrange our lives, disrupting the trajectory of what we have set for ourselves, just as an intruder in the middle of the night has the ability to suddenly, without warning rearrange the layout of a home.
Disorienting.
Shocking.
Uneasy.
Swift.
Abrupt.
Divine messengers move in this manner, are sent in this manner to grab our attention, shaking us from the norms we have been conditioned to so that we might be changed. Joseph was not the first to experience the sudden arrival of G-d in the dead of night.
Back in Genesis Jacob was visited in a dream and promised redemption from sin and companionship with the divine. Rulers were approached by God: the Egyptian Pharaoh and King Nebuchadnezzar had their power deconstructed and were reminded of God’s ultimate power and intentions through dreams.
Divine realities revealed in dreams leave the recipient and us the recipients of their stories scratching our head because G-d is not interested in the social norms we have been conditioned to accept. God’s concern is the redemption and salvation of all people. All of creation’s renewal.
Often divine dreams seem idealistic and improbable. Take the dream of the prophet Isaiah:
Lion and Oxen, Leopards and Lambs, Wolves and Cattle all laying together in peace.
The peace many experience in the forest or in a field extended to all of creation.
The nations obeying God, all of creation reordered and redeemed.
All of this sounds great, sign me up, but it can feel as though (fully) realizing this dream is beyond us. Even in our wildest dreams, it seems restoration and redemption escapes us, is beyond us.
God’s dreams seem beyond us because they are.
This is the work of God that we get to be a small (very small) part of. The beginning of the dream Isaiah saw was revealed to Joseph. The scandal of the incarnation is that in Christ, God is prepared the rearrange the ordering of creation - beginning not with power and political might but rather through a child born in a manger, and eventually on the cross and in an empty tomb.
While scientists can debate the purpose and function of dreams in our lives, God’s dreams have a specific purpose. In Joseph’s dream, we relinquished control and on the cross and in the empty tomb God’s plan for the redemption and salvation of all people was revealed. All of creation will be made new.
As the shadows of Advent begin to give way to the Light revealed at Christmas, we recall the beginning of the Kingdom of God in a child and in doing so we await the full realization of a dream bigger than we can imagine but not so big that any of us will be left out.
We can dream on because behold, a Savior has come and will come again.
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