Nightmares and Dreams

Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

I wonder, sometimes, whether Joseph experienced his night-time visitations as glorious dreams of salvation, or as disturbing nightmares.

An angelic visitation is pretty terrifying to start with, according to all the witness of scripture. Add to that the news that the king is specifically looking for your kid, to murder him.... If Joseph didn’t wake up gasping, in a cold sweat, I don’t know why.

Because it’s not just the news that the child is in danger, but that he’s got to leave everything behind: home, job, his network of family and friends, language, familiarity – and flee to a country that hasn’t always been the best place for his people.

Egypt was a place of refuge for long ago ancestors, for another Joseph who had dreams, but that refuge turned into a place of oppression, danger, murder, slavery, and prejudice. Egypt is the place that God had to free Israel from, that Moses had to lead the people away from.
And now God wants this child who is supposed to save Israel to go to Egypt?

Matthew is evoking all of this on purpose in Joseph’s story, because Matthew wants us to see Jesus as a new Moses – a leader who saves his people, who has a uniquely close relationship to God, who can interpret God’s will and give God’s law, speak God’s word with authority.

Which is an inspiring promise of relief and renewal when you’re reading the story. A story that promises Jesus will be a good leader, someone to solve the problems we all face, is hopeful and joyful when someone else is telling it.

But it’s a lot harder to live an inspirational story than to hear one.

It’s undoubtedly terrifying to live it, and still Joseph does precisely what God commands: gets up, takes the child and his mother, goes to Egypt and stays. And then he has another dream, another unnerving encounter with a messenger of God in his sleep. He receives the news that the threat to the child’s life is over, and another set of “get up, take, and go” instructions – which again Joseph follows precisely.

But he can’t go home again. There’s news on the way, and another dream: It’s still dangerous in Bethlehem. Joseph has to find another home for his family. Has to take them to the half-foreign Galilee, to the useless little town of Nazareth, entirely the wrong place for a Messiah or Savior to grow up. Where they’ll start over; outside the security of family and the familiar, building from scratch.

No, I don’t think Joseph enjoyed his dreams, his divine visitations.

But he responded to them with his whole life.

And both Matthew and the folks who choose our Sunday scripture readings want us to notice Joseph’s responsiveness. You and I are supposed to notice and appreciate how Joseph’s full and prompt obedience to the word of God not only saves his own family, but makes God’s plan for salvation work.

We’re supposed to notice and appreciate that God works through the dreams of a Joseph, and calls salvation out of Egypt all over again. To appreciate that Jesus, like Moses, escapes certain death as an infant to become a leader and savior.

And that’s another nightmare right there.

Hiding in the background of this story of salvation and obedience is a deep, bitter tragedy. We don’t hear it read this morning, but this whole story of Joseph saving Jesus by his obedience to dreams is wrapped around and rooted in the massacre of infants.

Jesus escapes Herod’s order to kill the children of Bethlehem just like Moses escapes Pharaoh’s order to kill all the boy children of Israel.

Both great leaders are survivors almost before they are even people, and their survival is the sign that they are the leading edge of deliverance for all God’s people. Both Jesus and Moses are protected for God’s work in a painful tension between rescue and tragedy, hope and grief, good news and bad.

I struggle with this story all the time. It’s so bitterly unfair. God sends a dream to save Jesus, but all the other children of Bethlehem are murdered.

I feel an echo of survivor’s guilt, knowing that the person I need most in this story survives, but other children are unjustly murdered. I grieve for the tragedy of Bethlehem, and I want God to save them all. 
I don’t want my good news – the inspiration and hope of a miraculous escape, of divine intervention, and the echoes of a previous deliverance that promise new salvation here and now – I don’t want that good news mixed with bad news, with unjust and pointless tragedy.

But it is.

It always is.

There is not a single time in human history without unjust and pointless tragedy. Some people die of treatable illness while others are saved. There are Pharaohs and Herods ordering slaughters small and large in every single generation. Infants and toddlers, innocent and fragile, are shot by accident or on purpose in wars and homes and schools. There are families displaced by violence across the world and a few miles from us. There are parents in every age who weep unconsolably as their children are torn from them by governments or individuals, by accident and disaster, or by malice and cruelty.

But there is also no time in human history when God is not working for redemption, renewal, hope and healing.

Divine good news, salvation, hope, and freedom always comes mixed in with elements of tragedy, grief, and pain. In all God’s history with us, all God’s long work of salvation, faith and redemption and healing come always amid a world that is violent, bleeding, and broken. Because God is always working even when all around us says that God is absent, or has failed.

Which is why the story we read and tell today matters.

We tell the story of Joseph’s disturbing dreams, of the child Jesus’s narrow escape, the family’s awkward move to Nazareth for God’s purposes of salvation, and the tragedy of Bethlehem’s children because this is precisely the context in which God comes to our lives. 

Like the story we tell at the center of our Christian faith, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, today’s story of salvation isn’t meant to teach us to ignore pain or evil, or to keep us from grieving our tragedies. It’s not meant to make us forget our pain, or to swaddle us in untouched, satisfied contentment.

If we look for God only where the world has already been made perfect – only in stable, successful, challenge-free families, only in perfectly safe neighborhoods, only in complete and easy healing, only in unmixed, easy love - we will never meet God, because none of that safe perfection actually exists.

In the midst of all the tragedy, fear, and failure that saturate our daily news, it can be a relief, in a way, to know that we will always meet God in the imperfect, the terrifying, the tragic. With so much tragedy, fear, and failure to go around, it’s essential to know that this is the exactly context in which God works.

It doesn’t make the tragedy less sad or scary; it’s meant only to help us expect and see and respond to the call of God in the difficult and scary places of our lives.

The stories of God’s salvation almost have to be messy, have to acknowledge the tension of good news with grief and pain, so that you and I recognize our own world, our own story, in God’s story.

And when we do, God calls us to respond like Joseph, to obey our own dreams of salvation. To commit ourselves to following God’s call as closely as we can; to act in hope, confidence, and faith even when we have every reason to fear.

In the ongoing violence, tragedy, and loss that seem like evidence of God’s failure, God still acts. God messes with our dreams, calls us to take risks, invites us to see salvation happening anyway, and to respond, to get up from our own risky dreams, take God’s unexpected gifts in hand, and venture into the unknown, where God is already, always, crafting salvation.