What Would Jesus Say

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall name him Emmanuel,”

which means, “God is with us.” When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.

What a dream Joseph had. I don’t know about you but my dreams are not like that. Mine tend to be a little stranger. But when I think about dreams, I almost always recall a dream a good friend of mine told me about several years ago.

My friend Lee passed away a few years back but he was a faithful member of my previous church and very active in the Wednesday morning men’s Bible study that I taught. We usually studied the scripture passage that I would be preaching on the following Sunday. I often joked with the guys that on any given Sunday, if things did not go well in my sermon preparation, I would just call on one of them to bring the Word of the Lord that morning. That’s what my friend Lee dreamed about.

He dreamed that it was the following Sunday. I stepped into the pulpit — we used a pulpit in that sanctuary — and looked out at over the congregation. Then I said, “Today’s sermon is going to be preached by Lee.”

Not knowing what else to do, Lee made his way to the front and stepped into the pulpit. He looked out at the congregation, opened his mouth … and out came these words:

Then he dreamed that he looked heavenward and said, “Lord, if ever there was a good time to take me, now’s the time.”

I chuckle every time I think about Lee’s dream. What you may not realize and what Lee may not have realized is that preachers have exactly those same feelings almost every Sunday. We’re just not as honest about it.

What a dream. If there is any common thread between Lee’s dream and Joseph’s dream, it may be that we tend to dream when we’re anxious. Anxiety of one kind or another seems to be at the heart of many dreams. So on this Sunday before Christmas let’s think about Joseph’s anxiety that bubbled out in his dream 2,000 years ago.

The angel announced to Joseph that the child born of Mary was to be named Jesus “for he will save his people from their sins.” That angelic announcement was incredibly good news: the child conceived in Mary will be named Jesus — Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua which means God Saves — and he will save his people from their sins. To be saved from our sins means to be forgiven. Forgiveness is the heart of Joseph’s dream. Forgiveness is God changing — not giving people what they deserve, which is judgment, but what they need, which is mercy. The birth that we’re going to celebrate on Tuesday — the reason for the season — means that our Savior was born. God has changed. We are forgiven. So we need to forgive.

Which takes us back to Joseph and his strange dream. What made Joseph so anxious that from a human point of view he dreamed as he did? He was anxious about two things. He was anxious about his engagement to Mary and about his own moral situation.

The text tells us that Joseph and Mary were engaged but not yet living together because the marriage customs of their time involved a two-stage process. The first stage was engagement but this was much more formal than in our time. When a woman was engaged to a man she was committed to him through formal vows. This often occurred when the woman was quite young, twelve or thirteen years old. At that point, however, society already viewed her as the man’s wife, waiting a period of time, usually about a year, for the second stage. That was moving out of her family’s home and into the home of her husband. Joseph and Mary were between these two stages.[1]

Then Joseph discovered that Mary was pregnant and he knew he was not the father. What would you think? Joseph thought the same: Mary has been unfaithful. That thought threw him into a marital and moral quagmire. What was he to do? The moral law was clear and we’re told that Joseph was a righteous man which means he cared dearly about the moral law. The law said he should cast the unfaithful one aside, perhaps even have her stoned to death (see Deuteronomy 22.13-30).

But Joseph didn’t want to do that because in addition to caring about the law he also cared about Mary. So he was going to forgive her as much as he could and as quietly as possible just break off the engagement. But Joseph was all churned up about it and in that anxious state he dreamed. He dreamed an amazing dream in which the angel of the Lord spoke to him about himself and Mary and the Child who would be the Savior, the one who brings God’s forgiveness.

What impresses me in the story is that Joseph had enough courage to change his mind about Mary. He was obedient to what his dream said. I don’t know if I could do that. We dream all kinds of strange things, as we’ve already seen this morning. Joseph woke up and walked across the small village of Nazareth to see Mary.[2] Nazareth had a population of about 2,000 people, not quite big enough to walk along anonymously; Joseph was well known. I wonder if he worried about the looks people gave him: What are they thinking? Do they know about Mary what I know about her?

Don’t minimize how hard it was for Joseph to trust his dream. Do you trust yours? I don’t trust mine very much. I certainly don’t trust them to be God speaking to me. Joseph’s dream went against everything he could think with his mind or see with his eyes. God speaking in a dream? More likely, too many onions or too much wine speaking. But Joseph obeyed the dream. So the text questions us. What or whom will we obey? In other words, by what dream will we live?

I don’t have time today but I think I could make a case that our lives are shaped by the dreams we follow. People dream of many things: fame, wealth, power, success, happiness. Are these the dreams we follow? Maybe, maybe not. We certainly don’t admit such out loud. Or maybe the dreams we follow are the broken ones, the fears and failures, the hurts and resentments that we do not or cannot let go. By what dream will we live?

Even though it’s a cold, snowy December, baseball is much in the news right now, and not for good reasons. Everyone who loves the sport has been troubled by the steroid scandal and the recent Mitchell Report, regardless of what happens next, means that the last two decades will always be known as the Steroid Era.

But a good story about baseball and one of my favorite stories is about the dream of baseball. In fact, the story was made into a movie called “Field of Dreams,” now almost twenty years old. The movies was based on a 1982 novel by W. P. Kinsella called Shoeless Joe. It tells the story of an Iowa farmer named Ray Kinsella. Standing in the middle of a cornfield one day, Ray hears a small, persistent voice: “If you build it, he will come.” Build what? A baseball diamond, in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.

The voice was “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, a member of the infamous 1919 Chicago Black Sox baseball team. They were accused of throwing the World Series that year. The voice made no sense to Ray, he was ridiculed for listening to it. But he obeyed the voice and built a ball field. Then the ghosts of “Shoeless” Joe and other Sox players disgraced in the scandal came for a few games with Ray.

If you build it, they will come. What a crazy dream. But to make the movie they actually built a ball field on the Lansing family farm in Dyersville, Iowa. And years later, people still come just to sit and toss the ball around on that field of dreams.[3] In the movie, the Field of Dreams was a place where people who sacrificed parts of their lives for others were given a second chance and the film climaxes with forgiveness and Ray reconciling with his deceased father.

Interwoven with in that fictional story is the true story of “Moonlight” Graham. Graham had two dreams: one was to play major league baseball, the other was to be a medical doctor. He was a doctor, for 50 years, in the little town of Chisholm, Minnesota where he was loved and respected by the entire community.

But before becoming a doctor, back on June 29, 1905, Archibald Wright “Moonlight” Graham made his major league debut with the New York Giants. He was put in right field in the top of the ninth inning with his Giants leading the Brooklyn Dodgers by ten runs. In less than five minutes, three quick infield outs by the Dodgers ended the game. “Moonlight” never even touched the ball and because the Giants didn’t bat in the bottom of the ninth, he never had a chance to face a big league pitcher. That was the end of his major league career. He “retired” without an official at bat and went on to school to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor.[4]

But in the movie, Moonlight Graham finally did get his time at bat on the Field of Dreams. He even drove in a run by slapping a sacrifice fly to right field. But earlier in the film when Ray Kinsella commented to Moonlight Graham that his baseball career and lifelong dream had lasted only five minutes and would be considered a tragedy by many people, Doctor Graham replied, “Son, if I’d only got to be a doctor for five minutes, now that would have been a tragedy.”

By what dream are we going to live? Are we going to live by our regrets or by hope? Are we going to live by what didn’t happen or by what did happen that should not have happened? Or are we going to live by forgiveness? Forgiveness and salvation were Joseph’s dream. What a dream! Let that be our dream too.

The Christmas dream is that through a very young Mary, engaged to an often anxious but courageous Joseph, God was clothed with human life to be near us, to save us, to forgive us. It still takes courage to believe in that dream. So much in the world and in our own lives contradicts it. But what a dream.

More than a century ago, Phillips Brooks (1835-1893), the famous preacher of Boston’s Trinity Church,[5] was in Jerusalem one Christmas and went to an impressive worship service that lasted several hours. Afterwards, as he was winding down, he spent part of his evening on a hillside outside of Jerusalem, looking out over the little town of Bethlehem, to which Joseph and Mary had traveled from Nazareth so long ago. He realized that Christ is still there in Bethlehem and because he is, he is with us too. Phillips Brooks then remembered that night by writing the words to what we know as the lovely carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

Dear friends, our lives, our homes, our families are like Bethlehem. There is no place too dark, too small, too ordinary, no life too troubled and no life too insignificant where Christ cannot come to speak forgiveness. That is the dream by which we must live for it is the greatest and truest dream of all: “O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord Emmanuel.”

[1] Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997) 12-13.

[2] John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1991) 277. “Granted, then, that Nazareth was a village of close to 2,000 people, practically all of whom were Jews, the existence of a synagogue with some educational program for Jewish boys is a likely hypothesis.”

[3] Field of Dreams, online, www.fieldofdreamsmoviesite.com/distance.html, Internet, 22 Dec. 2007.

[4] From the Moonlight Graham Baseball Card, The Greatest Films: online, www.filmsite.org, 19 Dec. 1998.

[5] Phillips Brooks was born in Boston in 1835. He graduated from Harvard University in 1855 at the age of 20. In 1859 he graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary and was ordained in 1860. He quickly gained fame as preacher and patriot. In addition to his moral stature, he was a man of great physical bearing as well, standing six feet four inches tall. In 1869 he became rector of Trinity Church in Boston. He preached Sunday after Sunday to great congregations. He was for many years an overseer and preacher of Harvard University. In 1891 he was elected sixth Bishop of Massachusetts. Brooks died unmarried in 1893, after an episcopate of only 15 months. His death was a major event in Boston. One observer reported: “They buried him like a king. Harvard students carried his body on their shoulders. All barriers of denomination were down. Roman Catholics and Unitarians felt that a great man had fallen in Israel.” See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Brooks, Internet, 22 Dec. 2007.