Living Into the Dream Preached on December 2nd 2019 At Wollaston Congregational Church Scripture: Matthew 1:18-25 We enter our story this week, as history is on he brink of cataclysmic change. The calendar, to be used by most of the world, is about to shift. From BC (Before Christ) or BCE (Before Common Era) to AD (Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord) or CE (Common Era). The destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, and the destruction of all Jerusalem, will happen within the century. The Jewish faith will shift from temple based worship to Rabbinical Judaism. Followers of Jesus will begin to found the Church, which will become the major world religion for at least 2,000 years. Joseph knows none of this. Joseph is a carpenter in a small town in Nazareth, according to Luke. He works for the Roman elite in the nearby city, Sepphoris. And according to Matthew he is a devout Jew. He knows his law, and colors inside the lines. He is ready for marriage and is betrothed to a young woman, Mary. She is in her late teens, the typical age for marriage for Jewish women of the 1st century. Joseph is about ten years older. Life is as he expected it to be. He is doing all the right things, the unexciting things. He is content, quietly looking forward to his upcoming marriage and hoping for children soon. But Joseph is about to experience a cataclysmic change in his own life. It comes like a punch to the gut. He learns that his betrothed, Mary, is already pregnant. And he knows he is not responsible. Joseph has only one recourse under the law. He must divorce her. She has clearly committed adultery. And yet, he cares. The shame, and possibly the punishment, would destroy Mary. He couldn’t do that to her. After all, how much say does a young girl have in these matters? He hasn’t grown up with his eyes closed. Some men are not so righteous as he is. He paces his small home anxiously, late into the night. Eventually he resolves to end the betrothal quietly. Mary’s family can deal with the consequences. Once he has decided, he can finally rest. He lies down and drifts into an uneasy sleep. While he sleeps he is visited by an angel in a dream. This is the first in a series of dreams for Joseph, each directing him to a new course of action. Each one calling him to do something he would never have thought of before. Each revealing one more step on the dangerous journey ahead of him, as he becomes the earthly father of the child Jesus. The angel says “Joseph, Son of David, do not be afraid …” He comes with instructions on how Joseph is to take Mary as his wife, and raise the child as his own. The child is going to be the longed for one, the anointed one. He is going to be Emmanuel, God is with us. And so, Joseph awakes with a change of heart, the words “do not be afraid” and “God is with us” echoing in his head. He has a renewed sense of purpose. He has had a complete flip. He goes out to tell Mary’s family, “no problem”, he will still take Mary as his wife. When we sleep our reasoning brains disengage. Our subconscious engages and sometimes even creates solutions to problems. No wonder we often say we will “sleep on it” when we have to make a difficult decision. Joseph is presented with a difficult decision and then some. His message from the angel may be a matter of sorting things out. And yet, it is also more than that. There is a transition to a different way of thinking. You might say, Joseph grows up during that night’s sleep, or at least grows more. To use psychologist Carl Jung’s terminology he grows from the “first half of life” to the second. Joseph has been raised in the Jewish tradition, he has learned the laws and right behaviors. He has learned to color inside the lines. That is the work of the first half of life. What the angel tells him will lead him to the freedom to color outside the lines. It will lead quiet Joseph to become an agent of cataclysmic change: the coming of Jesus to the world, the fulfillment of God’s dream for the world. Joseph might have been scared by this news. He’s not accustomed to coloring outside the lines. But this is what God is calling him to do. Note the parentheses of the angel’s speech. As if to give him the confidence to make this leap in faith, he begins with “do not be afraid” and ends with “God is with us.” Jung said that “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” [1] Developing a healthy ego involves learning the rules of life. Children do best when they are given firm boundaries. They need to know what is allowed and what is not. This is what keeps them safe into adulthood. As we grow older we realize that there are times when the rules do not work. Situations change, nuance is called for. We move beyond the “black and white” and learn to work in the grey areas. We learn that we cannot always color inside the lines. In church, our Sunday School years gave us a grounding. But that will not fit us as adults. Now we are called to bring our adult eyes, ears and minds to the stories and scriptures. As children and young adults, we were encouraged to color in the lines as Christians. And the lines were in the shape of a church building. I always colored inside the lines. I was the so-called “good” older child of the family. I learned to behave and did so in order to avoid disapproval. I did my homework on time. I helped in the house, and was only a little bit moody as a teenager. I always went to church and Sunday School and never asked not to. When I experienced the call to ministry, my thinking was much the same. I expected it would be hard to become a pastor. I thought about all the studying required and how I had not been in formal education for many years. I thought about the fact that the last time I wrote an essay for credit was in my teens. Now I was in my late forties. What I had not thought about was how my expectations would be challenged. I expected I would be needed to provide pastoral care to church members, old, young and in-between. I’d do hospital visits and home visits. I’d officiate the baptisms, marriages and funerals of my congregants. Maybe I’d lead youth mission trips, Bible studies, or put on a nativity pageant. It would be hard work, and it would be clearly defined. I, too, was used to coloring in the shape of a church building. What I have discovered is that my work is not so clearly defined. In recent months the work has been more about forging relationships between other church and religious leaders in the community. It has been about building relationships with organizations who work with the our addicted neighbors and our unhoused neighbors. That is the wonder of this calling, for us here in this place. My friends, we – Wollaston Congregational Church – have been called to notice that cataclysmic moment for our generation. We have to somehow figure out how to work together, with our fellow Christians and people of other faiths or convictions. We have hidden out in our own bastions for too long. That is the message us who support small congregations in large, expensive, aging buildings. Those congregations and all around this city and in the communities beyond. We are being called to color outside the lines of the church building shape. Pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany at the time of Hitler. Bonhoeffer “… founded the Confessing Church which became the center of German Protestant resistance to the Nazi regime [and their persecution of the Jewish people.]” The members of the Confessing Church were in the minority in Germany. Few other churches of Europe had the courage or the conviction to stand against Hitler. Bonhoeffer was seriously disappointed in religion and religious people. If they were unable to stand up against this unspeakable evil, what was the point? While he was imprisoned by the Nazis, because of his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, he wrote “We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by ‘religious’…” [2] Bonhoeffer had a big picture view of what was happening. He believed that religion had failed. And he wondered “What is a religionless Christianity?” Although Bonhoeffer died many years ago, Church and our world is still grappling with this cataclysmic shift. The European church, in its pre-World War II form simply wore out. The former way of doing things did not work any longer. We, the church of today, are being called to a shift in thinking, to a second half of life mindset. Jesus will no longer fit into the church shape building we used to like to color. This may sound like scary stuff. We might be as scared as Joseph was when he heard about Mary’s pregnancy and wondered what was coming next. We remember the challenging call to Joseph, to take Mary as his wife and become the earthly father of the child Jesus. We know what came next for him. It was a dream instructing Joseph to take his family to flee to Egypt to avoid the wrath of King Herod. And still we can remember that the words of the angel were surrounded by these parentheses: “do not be afraid” and “God is with us.” We – you and I – are probably not visited by angels in our dreams. Instead, we are reminded of what Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls “God’s Dream.” We have read about it in his children’s book of the same name. “God’s dream” is a vision of a world in which little children of every color, creed and nation, join hands in recognition, friendship and forgiveness. Tutu’s book expresses the African principle of Unbuntu, “I am because we are.” And so, we move toward Christmas and anticipate welcoming Jesus into our lives once more. May we not be afraid to live into the dream: I am because we are … all because God is with us. May all God’s people say, Amen [1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/332083-the-first-half-of-life-is-devoted-to-forming-a [2] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/588bcd399f74561e5f64a486/t/58b765251b631b4e73e0ef32/1488413990197/Dietrich+Bonhoeffer%2C+all+excerpts.pdf
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