Ordinary Dreams and God's Voices
The Rev. Patricia A. Gillespie
Jeremiah 31:7-14
Psalm 84
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Matthew 2:13-15,19-23
Well, here we are. It's the year 2000 and things look pretty much the same. No rapture. No Armageddon. No Son of Man trailing clouds of glory. No nuclear disaster. No computer crashes or internet crisis. Not even a little Y2K electric outage.
We drink champagne, cook new year's dinners, and watch football. All those predictions of Y2K disasters, and then nothing. A whole new millennium is welcomed just like every other year. Then it's back to business as usual. Maybe next year, the most disappointed say hopefully .... next year will be the real millennium because after all we forgot to count a year zero.
When all those digits on the calendar change, something in us looks for something spectacular to happen ... I even celebrate when the odometer in my car rolls over. But when the calendar rolled over to 2000, the conversation at my house went like this. "Ya know, it's kinda disappointing that the world didn't end." "I don't mind so much that the world didn't end, but SOMETHING could have happened."
This year change should have been really good. But it seems that God doesn't operate by our calendar.
Prophets make predictions. We have great expectations. But the incredible, spectacular things happen on occasions of God's choice rather than according to our calendar.
The messiah is born; shepherds and kings come and go. And then, in today's gospel, life just goes on as usual.
Well, almost. After all the excitement is over, Joseph should be able to take his little family home to Nazareth. But then he has this dream about an angel who tells him what to do. And he just does it.
How long since an angel appeared in your dreams and told you what to do? And if a dreamy angel did tell you what to do, would you do it?
Not many of us think of dreams as messages from God anymore. Some of us ignore our dreams as insignificant. Others, who take dreams seriously, examine them with various psychological theories. Or maybe we believe God sent angels to Joseph's dreams, but surely not to ours.
I wonder if that kind of thinking isn't heresy. Who are we to limit the ways in which God might speak to us?
There is a wonderful line in Bernard Shaw's play "Saint Joan" where it is not Joan, the supposed heretic, but her questioners who seem to be guilty of the heresy of limiting what God can do.
The maiden soldier was questioned about the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret who speak to her daily.
A captain asks her: "How do you mean? voices?"
Joan replies: "I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God."
Robert responds: "They come from your imagination."
And the saint says: "Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us."
God can use any way God pleases to get the message to us. God will not be limited by our ideas of proper communication any more than God will be limited by our making of calendars. Neither will God be limited by our narrow assumptions that God stopped speaking once the Bible was written down.
If we believe that God loves us, that love requires a relationship which implies communication of some sort. A loving God still tries to communicate with us: God is still sending God's Word into the world.
God may not choose to speak in spectacular events when the calendar rolls over, or only in the dramatic crises in our lives. God's Word is still all around us in the ordinary happenings of "life goes on as usual." For some it may be voices and visions. For others it may be dreams. It may be the voice of a friend, an angel, a story, or an unexpected event.
We, God's beloved, need only learn to listen for God's message for us. Listen in the silence, listen in the music, listen in dreams, listen in prayer. Listen in unexpected places: an old movie, a silly joke, or the TV news. God speaks in our delight and in our pain, in moments of celebration and times of deepest despair. God's love is so great and God's Word is so powerful that it may break through anywhere, anyplace, and anytime.
And, lest you think God speaks only to saints like Joseph and Joan, the prayer from today's reading is for all of us when it asks for "a spirit of wisdom and revelation" and for "the eyes of our hearts to be enlightened." God's message, like God's Word, is given to all of us.
Listen again to Shaw's Saint Joan, when she is questioned by the king.
Charles says: "Oh, your voices, your voices. Why don't the voices come to me? I am king, not you."
And the saint replies: "They do come to you; but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from your heart, and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stop ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do."
Listen.