There are 21 dreams recorded in the Bible, 15 in the Old Testament and 6 in the New. Of the 6 New Testament dreams, Joseph, the Father of Jesus, has 4 of them. You might want to reflect on that fact. Why? Why Joseph and why so many?
You might remember that there was another Joseph in the Old Testament for whom dreams were also highly significant – Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor DREAM Coat.
Throughout human history, people have felt dreams to be significant as ways in which knowledge and insight can come to us.
In our scientific age, with the advent of Freud and Jung and the science of psychoanalysis, the significance of dreams has taken on a new dimension. The strange thing about the human mind is that we are often unaware of what is going on in our own head. We have no access to our subconscious mind. But in dreams that subconscious mind can break through. Psychoanalysis uses that access to the subconscious in dealing with mental health problems. Problems such as anxiety, depression etc. can be caused by unresolved trauma or deep existential concerns in our subconscious. Dreams can give us clues as to what is going on at the deepest level of our minds.
As Christians we believe that dreams operate at 3 levels –
• Metabolic – you eat cheese late at night, your digestive system has to work hard processing this, so you don’t sleep as restfully and it can give you weird dreams. It is a purely physical phenomenon.
• Psychological – in sleep our minds process the events of the day, or our subconscious can break through, all of which can shape our dreams. Again, this is purely natural.
• Spiritual – We also believe that God can sometimes use our dreams to communicate with us.
All of these 3 can be happening at the same time. So we need to discern our dreams. I see my spiritual director each month and before we meet, I send him the past month of my spiritual journal – my noting down of anything in my life feels is spiritually significant, any sense of God at work, any issues I am struggling, any scriptures that have felt important, and also any significant dreams that I have had. We then work through that material together to try and discern what God might be doing in my life, or saying to me.
Rev Russ PARKER, who was in Leicester diocese for a while, was one of the first people to rediscover the spiritual significance of dreams in the 80s and 90s. His books ‘Healing Dreams’ and ‘Visions in the Night’ give practical advice on how to offer your dreams to God as a way of his speaking to you and how to reflect upon and discern any dreams you might have for their spiritual meaning.
There is a general principle in the spiritual life, called the Matthew 13:12 principle. Jesus talking about how people hear his message says;
Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance.
Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.
Matthew 13:12
What Jesus means is that, when you hear God speak, if you are receptive to that and respond to it, then your attention and receptiveness will be rewarded by God speaking to you even more.
But if you hear God speak and refuse and reject that message, then God won’t speak to you again and you will lose even what little spiritual insight you have.
This applies to all of the divine mechanisms of communication. In whatever way you pay attention to God, that way becomes a way in which God is more likely to speak to you. To put it another way, God speaks to us in the way that we are most paying attention. Joseph pays attention to God speaking in his dreams and God uses that means of communication again and again.
This reality has a very frightening aspect to it. What if Joseph had not recognised that God was speaking to him in his dream. What if he just put it down to eating cheese late at night?
Or, what if Joseph had recognised that it was God speaking but felt that the shame of being laughed at, of losing face in his community, when a baby arrives too early to be legitimate, was too high a price to pay? What if Joseph had ignored his dream and just gone ahead with his plan to separate from Mary? What would he have missed out on? He would never have been the father of the messiah. He would never have been celebrated down through history as St Joseph patron saint of fathers and families.
Do you see the point? This should terrify us.
It means that in the humdrum of our everyday life there is always the possibility that God’s invitation will come to us.
And it will always be an invitation that we can easily miss.
And it will always be an invitation that we can easily refuse.
How terrifying is that?!
So, the first question for us today is, are we paying attention?
Are we making space for hearing God in our daily lives?
Do we have a posture of openness?
Are we paying attention in the circumstances of our everyday lives for signs of God’s activity?
Are we spiritually awake?
The second question comes when we sense that God may have spoken to us. That question is, what are we going to do about it?
Are we prepared to take it seriously?
Are we prepared to obey?
Even if, like Joseph it messes up our nicely-ordered plans? Even if it is costly?
Advent is a time for taking stock. Looking at ourselves long and hard in the mirror. As we think about the Christmas story and the examples of the characters in that story, their openness to hearing from God, their willingness to obey, perhaps we might reflect on our own lives. Amen.
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