According to tradition, Joseph was the strong, silent type - an older carpenter who willingly submitted to impotent fatherhood - a second-string player in the drama of God's human birth. But according to scripture, none of this is true. All that is actually recorded in the Bible is that Joseph was a dreamer - a righteous man who transformed the meaning of righteousness by taking seriously his dreams.
To be righteous, according to Torah, is to be law-abiding. And so, as a law-abiding Jew, Joseph could have had Mary stoned to death - the punishment commanded in the twenty-first chapter of Deuteronomy for betrothed women who slept with other men. But, to be righteous, according to Torah, also means to be merciful - so Joseph, a man of compassion, decided, instead of stoning, that he would dismiss Mary as his wife, quietly. What never occurred to Joseph is that there is yet another way to be righteous - the way of mystery, the way of surprise, the way of acceptance and forgiveness and grace. Joseph, all on his own, couldn't imagine how God could be present in so difficult and embarrassing and dangerous a situation as Mary's pregnancy. And so, God had to help him. In the deep darkness of sleep, God came to Joseph, God spoke to Joseph in a dream, God brought truth into the irrational depths of Joseph's intuition. In ways deeper and more magnificent than the mind can imagine, God changed Joseph. And because God changed Joseph, Joseph became a channel of God's grace in the world.
Seventy times in scripture, God becomes real and present through dreams - sleep dreams, day dreams, intuitive dreams, vision dreams. Seventy times in the Bible the forgotten language of God bubbles up out of the depth of the human soul. Adam, Noah, Moses, Jacob, Joseph I, Isaiah, David, Daniel, Elizabeth, Joseph II, Paul, Ananias, John - these earthy, needy, confused people become the mouthpieces of God. How? By listening to and honoring their dreams. How? By moving beyond the controlled rationality of their minds.
In recent years, scientists have been able to establish the presence of dreams in the sleep of every single human being. The movement of the eyelids and brain waves during sleep has uncovered the certainty that each one of us dreams an average of an hour and a half each night - that our inner worlds spin six or seven dreams every time we sink into our pillows. Whether we remember them or not, dreams are truth for us, because they uncover the world of our unconscious self - the memories, feelings, needs that our mind rarely acknowledges. Psychologists now know that if this unconscious material is ignored, if it is not acknowledged and integrated in some way into our experience of living, then we will suffer great mental and emotional distress. We will experience persistent anxiety about the meaning and dependability of life. Dreams, visions, hunches are the way we compensate for the spirit and truth we have cut out of our lives. Dreams are the way we discover the full image of God that rests deeply within each one of us. Our dreams - waking dreams and sleeping dreams - these are spiritual windows into our souls.
And so Joseph dreamed. And what he discovered was that Mary's baby was not a disgrace, not an embarrassment, not a problem, but instead the very possibility of hope for himself and for the world. Joseph dreamed, and what he discovered was that he could behave in a new way, that he must behave in a new way - that is if he wanted the God in him, the God in Mary, the God in the world to survive. Joseph's dream did not give him rational explanations or scientific facts or detailed instructions - the how, what, where, why of Mary's pregnancy. Instead, Joseph's dream gave him inspiration. His dream invited him, practical, solid Joseph, to become a partner with God in mystery. Not understanding, but believing, Joseph woke up. In faith, Joseph responded. With courage, Joseph risked new behavior. And excited by hope, Joseph assisted in giving birth to God - a new God for a very old world. Such is the power of dreams.
Recently I was talking to a man in his mid-forties - a good man, a righteous man, a bored man. All his life he's done what is right - worked hard, been faithful in his marriage, been responsible to his children. But life for him has become stale. His marriage is stale, his mind is stale, most of all, his imagination is stale. A few months ago this man had a dream. In the dream he was cleaning his house and unintentionally pushed against the wall in the living room. A secret door opened up showing him a room in his house he had never discovered. The room was an adult play room - complete with fireplace, sofas, and glass windows open to the beauty of the world. This dream has helped my friend to take stock, to realize what is missing in his life, to help him know that there is newness waiting for him in the marriage and the life he already has.
Where are your dreams and visions, needs and intuitions this day? Is the unconscious voice of God whispering to you in your heart, in your sleep, in your feelings, in your hunches? What is the restlessness which is stirring you up and echoing in your emptiness and bubbling within your fears and anxieties? What is it that God is trying to say to you in the undiscovered parts of who you are? How is God pushing you to give more life to the world? How can you this day, this year, sink into your dreams, trusting them and following them, so that God can be born in you, so that God can be born through you into this world of woe?
The story of the angels and the shepherds, the star and the wise men, the peasant mother and the stoic father - this ancient tale about a baby God finding a home in our world - none of it makes much sense. And historians and scientists find delight in the illegitimacy of this tale. But God persists anyway. You see, my friends, Christmas is not about fact or fiction. Christmas is about incarnation. Christmas is God's dream becoming flesh. Christmas is God's invitation to each one of us to experience in our most inner selves the coming together of the human and the divine, to sense the possibilities of our own living, to sense the possibilities of the world's healing. Christmas is our opportunity to believe that beneath the predictable patterns of practical living there is the imagination of God's love - an imagination that can make all things new.
Frederick Buechner has written: "If the Christmas tale is true, it is the chief of all truths. What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the Child may be born again in us - in our needing, in our longing for him."[1]
My friends, my prayer this holy season is that this may be so - for you and for me. Amen.
1. Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 55-56.