In A Dream

                                                 Josephs Dream -  Gaetano Gandolfi

Matthew 1:18-25

When the unthinkable occurs we may find our selves operating in a daze, a dreamlike state where no thing feels real and everything seems a mirage. How did this happen? What does it mean? What do I do now? How am I going to cope with this and the fallout from this situation? We can lose touch with the world we live in and become bambozzzled by anxiety, frustration and stress.

Joseph is just a man. Mary is just a woman. Two material beings plunged into the unreal world of an unwanted child in a time when for this to occur was an outrage. How do you handle not only the possibility of a child but the tragic consequences which was the normal response to such an event? In Matthews retelling of the story agency is given, not to Mary but to Joseph to steer his little family through the crisis.

Joseph was a good man. Mary was a good woman. According to Matthew they hadn’t lived together, they had followed the rules yet, somehow, there was a child on the way. So what to do?

In spiritual matters angels, sleep and dreams play a significant role in discernment and direction. Mary was informed by an angel about what was to occur and Joseph has an encounter with an angel while asleep and dreaming.

Angels have a history. They are the messengers of God, sometimes even, they are the Godhead itself. The Old Testament are full of such stories. They bring a message, interpret a situation and provide direction for the confused and bewildered followers attempting to live out their faith in a material world.

It is no surprise that these encounters occur when one is asleep. They rarely occur when one’s fully awake and engaged in the busyness of life. When we are distracted by our ego self we can fail to see the messenger standing right in front of us. When we are dealing with a disturbing situation, when someone is confronting us or we have been so unbalanced by an event, it is all we can do to defend ourselves in an attempt to stay upright, let alone see the angel present in the situation.

Being asleep is when we allow our subconscious the opportunity to process the events we are working through and to provide us guidance and direction. Sleep is that time when our brain takes the time to recalibrate itself and to put into order the chaos of our days. We miss things when we are awake and busy. We are so focussed on any number of things at the one time that what can be a key element simply isn’t connected with and miss the obvious. Asleep our brain cleans up and puts things together.

One of the things we need to do with computers is to defrag our system, this simply means defragmenting that part of our computer which stores data. A defrag simply puts things back in the right place so what was possibly lost in another place is restored to where it should be. Sleep is the time our brain defrags its storage system and returns things to its proper place.

No wonder one of the wisest pieces of advice is to sleep on it. It does work miracles. In the morning things look different and what seemed impossible before is now so obvious you can’t believe you were so anxious about it.

Dreaming is one of the tools our brain uses to review the day. Sometimes it is a realistic dream, sometimes it is symbolic and metaphorical and may take a little time to unpack, but this parallel world is seen by the ancient worlds as vital to discernment and wisdom. Again being a sleep and entering into a dreamlike world we are open to the present of others, known and unknown because we are no longer relying on our ego for direction.

My father spoke often of his spirit friend who would visit him at night and sit on the edge of the bed. They seemed to have discussed many things and the visitation was real and valuable to my father. He relied on this visitor for advice and direction. It was no doubt a dream like event but it was real, not imagined, for him.

Joseph’s dream like experience is a way of describing the process he went through to make sense of the impossible situation he found himself in. What he had decided to do and how he decided to do it reflect the importance of the event. He wasn’t making a decision on his own. A supernatural experience require(d) supernatural guidance. Being still and silent, asleep, he was able to hear what was there and what he needed to do.

Here we return to the idea of waiting in stillness we discussed last Sunday. There is no panicked running around trying to solve it. It happens in the stillness of waiting, in this case while he is asleep. When we enter into liturgy and the spiritual life we enter into a place of waiting in stillness. Of letting go of ego and allowing what is to come to come, what is to be to be and what we need to discover to appear. This is not simply a passive stillness or waiting but a waiting to see, to see what is to be and how I am to respond.

Joseph responds very differently to what he would have been expected to respond. He didn’t call off the betrothment, he didn’t abandon Mary, he didn’t go away in shame. He was able to discern that something very special was present and he was to take the uncomfortable journey with Mary. He did so because he acknowledged the inner wisdom present in his inner being. He recognised the fingerprint of God and was prepared to go where logic and local law said not to go. He, the ordinary man and Mary the ordinary woman became extraordinary, making it possible for the intersection of the divine and the human, of the perfect and the imperfect, of the infallible and the fallible.

He and Mary made it possible for God to walk among us in the shape of Jesus of Nazareth and experience the enigma that is being human so that humans can aspire to be like God in their relations with one another.

The challenge for you and I is to find the space to be still and wait for the visitation of wisdom. It can happen anywhere and does, indeed happen in our dreams, while we are asleep. But it can also happen, far less dramatically as we sit in the spaces within our liturgy, in the moments before church and the moments after communion. It simply requires us to be still, to wait and to be open to the possibility. Lets try it now. 

Liturgical Waiting

Matthew 11:2-11

²When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples ³and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” ⁴Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: ⁵the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. ⁶And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”

 

 

As a child I helped my father on the farm. One of my favourite activities was moving sheep from paddock to paddock. Just the old dog, me and 500 hundred sheep. A great time of reflection, day dreaming and slowness that counteracted the busyness of the school week. It was life in the slow lane.

 

My father had set a standard of slowness. If the dust was raised behind the mob you were moving to fast. Slowness necessitated stillness and the inevitable waiting for the mob to graze and move at their own pace. It wasn’t a life of linear progress or rushing to get this done so you could go and do something else. This was all you had to do and it would come to an end when the end came. Any sign of dust indicated anxiety to be somewhere else with something else and not right where you were. This is a waiting to move on.

 

John the Baptist exhibits this last type of waiting in our Gospel reading today. Are you the one we were waiting for or do we have to wait some more? His question is full of anxiety, frustration and impatience. If this is not it, then we have to hurry up and wait for some more. And what are we waiting for?

 

Jesus replies, wait and see. Stop being anxious and looking for something else; stop being anxious and wanting to be somewhere else; stop being anxious and looking in a linear fashion. Look around you and see what is already here, what is already happening and what you are already in touch with. Yes, you have to wait, but the waiting is to see what is already here, mot waiting for another person, idea, experience or event. The kingdom of God has come near and is here. Wait and see.

 

One of the gifts of being an artist is this waiting to see. Walking home from taking may car to the garage for repairs I wandered slowly back along streets near here and was gobsmacked by what I saw. Melbourne in the morning is a place of great light and I discovered beautiful trees, amazing garden scapes and intriguing little finches buzzing around and was made aware, once again, that the Spirit of God is alive in Glen Iris. We simply have to wait and see.

 

We are often to anxious to move on, shift our seeing, all our senses without allowing ourselves to settle into what we see, feel, hear and sense. We pass a cursory glance across our world and those we share it with and move on, looking for something we already have.

 

We are like John, neurotically looking for that definitive moment to complete our hopes and our dreams.

 

It is a challenge to the church to stop our rushing to succeed and to simply wait as the Bride of Christ and be aware the marriage is alive and active now.  In our Sunday liturgy we are called to let go of our anxious searching and engage in a waiting, a stillness, a welcoming presence open to the Spirit’s embrace. Yet it seems we want to rush through the formalities of worship to get on with our busy lives. We give an hour or so and that is all. We have family commitments, morning tea to run, lunch to serve and a busy week ahead and our minds flit back and forward between these competing anxieties and we struggle to be present here, now in a waiting stillness feeding our soul.

 

The liturgy has been skilfully constructed to give us time out from the busyness of life, although we often do our best to make it as busy as possible. Liturgy is a work in waiting and stillness. It is the process of stopping, of letting go and of being available to wait with what is happening for us in that moment. As Jesus says to John, wait with what is happening and allow your self to hear what the spirit is saying to the church.  We can’t do that if we are anxious to move quickly and efficiently through the various sections of the service.

 

The creed isn’t a linear race we have to finish in so many seconds, neither are the Psalms. They have been devised in stanzas allowing us space to sit with what has come before and wait for what is coming next. The are many places of waiting in our service and it is through these spaces that we begin to unload the baggage we bring with us and unhook ourselves from the need to get a to a defined outcome – usually morning tea!

 

John wanted a definitive answer. Jesus said sit with what is already here and make sense of that. Take time to process and unpack your life and your experience and recognise the depth of that experience. Do not be in a hurry to chase after some golden thread of idealised promise. What is, is. Wait with it and allow it to speak.

 

Our liturgy is a rich treasure of stillness and waiting. Our 21^st century sensibilities finds it difficult to sit with empty space – be it on a wall, in our garden or in our worship, yet it is in this waiting space we discover truth. As you have noticed already this morning we have instituted longer spaces, slower movement and a little less urgency in our service. This will become a pattern which I hope will be helpful.

 

I encourage you to enter the church with quiet waiting as your intention. Using this space before the service as a time for sitting in the place of no-thing doing, allowing your presence to deepen and lengthen ready for the liturgy to come. There is time after church to meet and greet, to chat and swap stories and to share aches and pains. Prior to and during the greeting of peace let us find our centre and be still and know that God is God; that we are more than our anxieties and this is a safe sanctuary for being at rest.

 

Finally I would say, as we begin to explore our liturgy and the treasure it holds, to be still, very, very still, and above all else do not wobble! Waiting without anxiety will open up the vista of the treasures we already have and allow us to avoid repeating Johns frustrations.

 

Let us be still. 

The Amazing Void

Luke 24:1-12

 

Sometimes a nod is as good as wink, don’t you think? As a kid I thought so. If I didn’t get a direct no to something I asked my parents, teacher or someone supposedly in charge, then I took it as a yes. A nod is as good as a wink.  The result; I was in trouble more times than I thought it fair.

 

On Easter eve we need to be careful to not invoke that saying here. The women come to the tomb. They have a special task to do. They had the necessary spices to anoint the body with even though the tomb had been sealed by the Romans. Were they aware of this or were they expecting to have the customary access to the body? They were surprised, not that the stone had been rolled away, like they were expecting to be able to get in.

 

What they were surprised at was the fact that the body was missing. As I am sure you and I would be. What they had expected was not the case. How did this happen? What had happened?  Even the words attributed to the young men in shining clothes only hint at the possibility of a resurrection. It is not enough for the Peter and the disciples. They need more than a nod is as good as a wink, and they go home and put all down to the emotion of the moment.

 

 David Ewart suggest "This passage contains no resurrection. But this lesson also contains trusting the amazing void."

 

What a powerful though for us tonight as we envisage what is to come, “trusting the amazing void”. Nothing is definite. It could be or it could not be. What we seek may come and it may not come. Children waiting for the tooth fairy, Santa Claus and Easter Bunny embrace the amazing void – that huge dark hole between when they start wishing for the special day and when it actually comes.

 

Dogs live in the present moment so much that when you say I’ll be back in an hour, they immediately look at you and go ‘are you back yet?” There is no gap between now and later, all is now.

 

Not for us humans and we often want to rush over the void to the moment when all is as it should be. We will do anything to get by the ‘amazing void”. The idea of trusting it is foreign to us. We need certainty, health, happiness, control. The dark place of emptiness and uncertainty is to be avoided at all costs. Yet for many of us we will spend a great deal of time in that place and be asked to trust it as a place of renewal, hope and possibility.

 

For example:

Only a handful of Rhodes scholars have had a disability but the newest Australian scholar Matt Pierri is not out to change the world, just people’s perceptions.

His own world changed three weeks before his 16th birthday in 2007 when he broke his neck playing Australian football at school and was left a quadriplegic.

He spent the next three weeks in hospital followed by five months in rehab.

The Year 11 student kept up his studies while attending rehab and regaining movement in his hands and returned to school to complete Year 12 the following year. He is now the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship”

He trusted the amazing void.

 

Our world is full of those, who like Matt and for various reasons, have had to trust the untrustable and find a new way of making meaning. Often it is no where as exciting as a Rhodes Scholarship, it is often just the courage to keep on keeping on, doing what needs to be done, and doing it over and over again.

 

Mother Teresa writes in her letters to her spiritual advisors that for some 30 years she had no confirmation of the presence of Jesus. Somewhere along the way Jesus had seemed to disappear yet she kept on doing what she was called to do, even in the midst of the dark and threatening void.

 

Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest and writer, Thomas Merton, modern mystic Eckhart Tolle and others all talk about the dark night of soul in which they were forced to trust when all seemed lost.

 

Easter Eve is that moment in the story of holy week. Jesus has died on the cross and been placed in the tomb. Now, when they thought they at least had the certainty of his body, they are left with no thing to mourn. The dark place of mourning just got darker. When you think it can’t get any worse, it does. Murphys’ rule and Murphy was an optimist!

 

Yet there is a glimmer of light, a word that points to the possibility of a risen Jesus. For Mary and the women this sends them running back to the men. For Peter it is just another strange event in his experience of Jesus and seems to far fetched and bewildering to even consider.

 

All this leaves them with a void, an amazing void, a void that is the tomb and the incredulity of the situation. So this is what Jesus talked about at the temple about pulling it down and building it up in three days, is this what he meant? Surely not. Yet…..

 

Sitting in the dark place of hopelessness and bewilderment allows our senses and reason to expand to embrace the possibility, to get us looking for something else, something that transcends and transform our situation. We need to take the time to allow the mysteries held in the void to become clear to us and to speak into our lives, not all at once, a little bit at a time. For Mary and Peter and the disciples the empty tomb and the possibility of a resurrected Jesus was too much to hold at one time, and needed time to allow them to begin to embrace the situation.

 

Loss of health, death of a loved one, a tragic accident, shocking news and more can hurl us into this amazing void from which we will eventually emerge transformed and different, but not all at once. We have to sit in it and allow it to unfold itself one frame at a time over, often, a lengthy period of time.

 

In the Easter story from Palm Sunday to Easter day we are asked to sit in each space and explore the experience of that day, the challenge of Palm Sunday, the love of Maundy Thursday, the violence of Good Friday and now the void of the empty tomb.

 

Each will unfold itself as it will and you will be transformed by the journey. Amen. 

What Are We Waiting For?

Today is the first Sunday in the season of Advent, a season which sees us frantically gift buying, feast preparing, travel planning and house cleaning in preparation for a holiday which, somewhere in the back of our head we know has something to do with religion, but we are not sure.

We have heard a cutesy fairy tale about a baby born in a manager to a unmarried couple surrounded by farm animals and shepherds and highlighted by a bright spotlighting star. We know, we think, that the baby’s name was Jesus, we think his family name was Christ, his father a carpenter, and as he grew up he became a bother to the more respectable members of society and ended up on the wrong side of the law. We know there’s more to the story, but does it really matter, and is this what Advent is all about?

Well, in short, yes and no. Click on the link on the left hand side for more.....