Preaching on:
Matthew 1:18–25

If you ask just about anyone, “What do we know about Jesus’ human father, Joseph?” they’ll probably say, “He was a carpenter.” That’s like the one piece of information we have about him, but it actually may not be completely accurate. It’s possible he was a stone mason or a wagon builder or a construction worker or a day-laboring handyman. The Greek word we’re translating here just isn’t actually all that specific. So, maybe he was a carpenter and maybe he wasn’t. And, I’m wondering, this morning why don’t we answer this question with something we ARE absolutely sure about: Joseph was a dreamer.
 
We get Joseph’s first dream in our reading this morning. And WOW. Can you imagine what a night that must have been? What Joseph must have gone through? He woke from that dream, not a different person, because he was probably always a faithful and kind person, but he woke up with a completely different life. The life he thought he was going to have for himself, the honor he thought he was going to have, the way his friends and family were going to look at him, the rules he thought he was going to live by, the relationship he thought he was entering into, the safety he thought he was going to enjoy—they’re all out the window.
 
Can you imagine how hard it must have been to believe that crazy dream? How easy it would have been to wake up and say, “Oh thank goodness, it was just a dream, I shouldn’t have had that leftover Chinese right before bed, nothing serious”? And it makes me wonder, if it’s hard to live our dreams and easy to dismiss them, are there dreams you’ve forgotten or are there dreams I’ve given up on, that we were meant to believe in?
 
Joseph believed in his dreams. He listened to them. It wasn’t just this one dream either. Joseph had three more dreams. One would tell him to flee with Mary and Jesus to Egypt because Herod wanted to kill the baby. Another dream would tell him it was finally safe for the family to go back home again. And the last one would send them safely to Galilee and Nazareth. Joseph listened to all these dreams, and he lived out their promises and their warnings. Joseph trusted his dreams.
 
Do we trust dreams? I don’t think we do, really. I don’t think we trust dreams or dreamers very much. Maybe that’s why we say Joseph was a carpenter, even though we can’t really be sure he was. Because almost anything, even if it’s not all that accurate, is probably better than being a dreamer. And when we think of what a father should provide his son, what do we think of? We like to think of his work, his trade, the way he provides for his family. We don’t want to hear too much about his dreams.
 
And we see precisely why we don’t want to hear much about dreams in Joseph’s story: Dreams can disrupt an otherwise honorable and productive life. In the American version of the dream, the dream is our goal which we apply our hard work to in the land of opportunity until we achieve it. We focus on the dedication and the chance to become a self-made person, rather than on the disruption. But of course every great story of the American dream is also a story of disruption—of immigration, of revolution, of the flight from slavery. Dreams in the Bible, and the dreams we have in our beds at night, don’t shy away from this darkness, this uncertainty.
 
The Bible is chock full of dreams, and dreamers, and dream interpretations. There are dozens of dreams in the Bible and even more strange visions in the dark and voices in the night which, at the very least, are like dreams. You can’t read the Bible and come away with any other interpretation than this—God is in dreams. And that’s the trouble with them—according to the Bible, unlike our American dreams, we don’t control dreams. Dreams find us in the dark, and our role is to believe in them, to say YES to everything they portend to us, and to attempt to follow them as they change us. Following the American dream is about self-actualization. But following a Biblical dream is about self-surrender. These two things are not mutually exclusive, of course, but they are very different ways of understanding our responsibility to a dream.
 
If only, if only, God would just make every dream an inspiring source of guidance, giving us insight into our lives and relationships while delighting and refreshing us. I love those dreams! But do you think Joseph got a dream like that? Do you think he woke up saying, “I just had the most wonderful dream?” I imagine he shouted himself awake in a sweaty tangle of sheets and fell out of the bed. And that’s the problem with inviting God into your dreams. There’s not one comforting dream in all of Scripture. They’re all challenges and warnings and upheavals. Joseph dreamed that he would marry a woman everybody thought was unchaste, that he would raise a baby who everybody knew wasn’t his baby, and that he would run for his life from the greatest political and military power of the land into exile in another country.
 
So why would we say YES? Well, the Bible is unambiguous on this: God is in dreams, that’s why. If dreams were easy, God wouldn’t need to be in them. So, when we say yes to the difficulties of dreams, we’re also saying yes to God. And when we turn away from challenges that seem too dark, that feel too difficult, we might also be turning away from God’s dream for us.
 
Notice I didn’t say God’s plan for us. It’s much easier to spot God’s plan when we’re looking back on the past in the bright light of day. But in the foggy predawn darkness, just waking up from a dream, it’s hard to see a plan at all. There is so much darkness, so much uncertainty, we don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t know (ultimately) what is going to be asked of us. We see a direction. We see hope. We don’t necessarily get the whole picture—Joseph certainly didn’t. He had to have three more dreams just to get to him to Nazareth, to the beginning of the story. But you and I can only say that Jesus was God’s plan because Joseph and Mary said yes to a hard dream. If we don’t follow the dreams, we never get to the place where we can see the plan.
 
Advent is a time for dreams. Dreams like Joseph’s dreams, life-changing dreams that are, by definition, dark dreams. You don’t necessarily have to go to bed to discover these dreams. Dreams come to us all sorts of ways, we know. Reading a book, taking a shower, talking to a friend, slowly over years of planning and prayer, all at once in response to an incredible victory or terrible loss. Advent is not a silly season with visions of sugarplums dancing in our heads. It is a time for closing our eyes in the dark and trusting that the hard dream, the dream that totally upends our lives, the dream that frightens and intimidates us a little, may not be the nightmare we fear it is. It may be the beginning of God’s plan. Would you be willing to abandon your expectations for life in exchange for God’s hope for the future? Would you be willing to be a part of God’s plan, before it looked like anything more than a dream? 

Preaching on:
Isaiah 11:1–10

This week there was an article on National Geographic entitled, “What is Advent—and why do we mark it with treat-filled calendars?” This just proves my personal thesis of the moment that somewhere along the way we lost touch with the meaning of Advent, and I believe that’s a spiritual loss. I’m hoping to convince you this season that it is, indeed, a spiritual loss and I’m hoping to invite you into this season of Advent with me to begin to address that loss and to restore yourself in this season.
 
National Geographic defines Advent as a season of candlelight, reflection, and expectation that prepares Christians for Christmas. That’s a pretty good start, but because even those of us who observe Advent treat it like it’s a 24-day extension of Christmas, full of Christmas-themed events and Christmas joy and lights, this season I’m also trying to remind us all that Advent takes place during the darkest time of the year, and that darkness is an important part of the season. Because constant exposure to light is not good for us.
 
Scientists are beginning to discover just how bad constant exposure to light is for us physically. Thanks to smartphones and other screens, we’re now studying the effects of certain kinds of light on our natural bodily rhythms and our sleep rhythms, and we’re discovering bad news about how bad it is for us to look at screens after the sun goes down and how disruptive it is to sleep in a room with the lights on in it.
 
Well, what’s true of us physically always also has been true of us spiritually. Just imagine the star of Bethlehem that led the three Magi to the little baby Jesus. You and I live in a place where it would be very difficult for us to see, let alone follow a star anywhere. This is a physical limitation, but it has also become a spiritual limitation. What I mean is, maybe the bigger challenge than physical light pollution would be that none of us would be outside looking at the stars anyway because we’re inside consumed by much brighter lights—streaming shows, scrolling social media, working late—these things can only happen with our bright little screens, but they are also a spiritual choice—choosing or maybe just being overwhelmed by one kind of light, instead of paying attention to another kind of light. But if the power were to go out everywhere for like a week, then we might rediscover our interest in the much fainter, but oh-so-beautiful stars. Advent is meant to be one of those times, a sort of Sabbath in the longest nights of the year where we allow our eyes to readjust to the dark. The physical darkness of the season is a sign, a symbol for what we hope to achieve spiritually. Because in the dark our eyes open up. And from darkness, we can begin to see the beauty of even the faintest stars.
 
You see, I’m trying to rehabilitate the spiritual symbol of darkness. Darkness has gotten such a bad rap in our culture. We associate darkness with evil, danger, and being hopelessly lost. Light is knowledge, righteousness, beauty, and truth, and darkness is their opposite. But we forget that we live in a world with a lot of bad lights. I heard a story recently of how beach bandits would sometimes set up false lighthouse lights to lure ships onto the rocks, wreck them, and loot them. There’s such a thing as bad light. Alex Jones, for example, is a bad light. He leads people to him with the light of lies and with hate speech masquerading as the moral light of free speech. When you speak hate and defend yourself by saying you just have a patriotic belief in free speech, that’s not the truth. Perhaps you do really believe in free speech for everybody, but you also believe in hate speech. Let’s not forget that. That’s what’s making you money, right? Not patriotism. Jones has made himself millions and millions of dollars doing this.
 
He’s an extreme example, of course, and it is fully evil, what he does, but—back to my point--it’s not darkness. Darkness doesn’t work hard to mislead you. That’s the work of a bad light. Darkness isn’t trying to trick you. If you trip in the dark, that’s just because that’s the way darkness is, but darkness isn’t trying to mess with you. Darkness just is. And what it is can be wonderful. Darkness is rest. It’s quiet, it’s meditative, it’s contemplative. And darkness is also the place of incubation—the place where creation literally began. It began in darkness. And it’s where all new life begins.
 
Our scripture reading this morning is such a magnificent vision of hope. Imagine a world where the lion lies down with the lamb, a world of peace and justice, a world where there is no more pain, a world where the oppressed are heard and uplifted, and the wicked are finally silenced. It is a light-filled prophecy. And where does this light-filled prophecy come from?
 
It comes from the dark. It is a branch, our reading says, growing up from the roots of Jesse, from the deep earth, under the dark soil, where no light can go, there is a dream that is being incubated, a dream of a future hope for peace and justice. This deep longing does not come from the light. It wasn’t dreamed up while swinging from the light-filled crown of a healthy, growing tree. It comes from the deep, dark, quiet, contemplative, life-giving roots of a stump.
 
Christmas is the day that the branch shoots up out of the ground. Christmas is the day the child takes the lion by the whiskers and leads him. Christmas is the day we walk outside proudly wearing the belt of our faithfulness. But Advent is those roots, it’s all the days and years of darkness that incubated and grew that dream and that made its reality possible. When we skip that kind of darkness, because we think darkness is just depressing or just too scary, we get an empty Christmas, don’t we? We get a Christmas that’s pretty, but leaves us feeling unsatisfied, unfulfilled. Every adult in this room has felt that feeling at Christmas at some point or another. Why? Because nothing has come alive within us. Because nothing has been incubated within us. Because we avoided the dark.
 
This is the good news, beloved. Have you ever lived through a time in your life when you didn’t know what to do? When you didn’t know where to turn to? You weren’t sure what tomorrow would bring? You didn’t know when things would get better? Advent is the season in which we learn not to try to rush our way out of the darkness. We all know that the darkness can be uncomfortable. That you can’t see what’s coming. That’s scary. But darkness is also the place where new life, hopes, and dreams for the future are incubated. Darkness is not a problem to be fixed. It’s an experience to be endured with candlelight, reflection, and contemplation. It is an opportunity to grow a new branch for a new journey in a new direction.
 
So, this Advent, try turning off the lights. You can do this, physically, to the actual lights in your house, as a physical signal to your spiritual side that you want to spend some time in the dark. Darkness is not necessarily for feeling depressed or pessimistic or bad in any way (but it’s fine if you do feel that way). Ultimately Advent darkness, pre-dawn darkness, root darkness, incubating darkness is about turning down the brightness on the all the world’s lights (good and bad) and sitting in quiet emptiness for a while, without being stimulated by anything but the hope and the expectation for the coming of Christ into our world and into your life. Spend a little time in the dark this Advent. On Christmas Eve, a star will appear in the sky. Will you be ready to see it? Will you be able to feel the promise of Christmas kicking in the dark within you?