Matthew 1:18-25
Advent 4 / Year A
“We belong to two worlds,” writes
Kate Farrell. “The invisible,
hard-to-know eternal one we come from and the noisy, obvious, temporal one all
around us.” Countless numbers of the
world’s poems, myths, teachings, and traditions hint at our dual reality. Take Plato, for example. He made sense of our nature by saying we
first live in the eternal world but then leave it behind when we drink from the
Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, prior to being born. But it is not total forgetfulness, he says,
and thus we see human beings from all cultures and conditions and ages trying
to find the first world while living in the second.
In the Bible’s story of creation
found in the second chapter of Genesis we are told God forms a human out of the
dust of the earth, but this person only becomes a living being when God breaths
into him the breath of life. In a
theological sense, then, we are dust and breath, physical and spiritual,
temporal and eternal, of this world and of another realm, of the earth and of
God.
To be fully alive, fully human,
means learning to cultivate both aspects of our nature; learning to embrace both
the dust and the breath. And more than
embrace them, learning how to integrate them; to hold both as distinct and
complementary parts of our lives. For
many of us, the breath is what we do on Sunday morning – it is church – and the
dust is what we do the rest of the week – we work, we go about the business of
managing a home, we shop or sail or talk on the phone. If asked how we connect the two, many might
say the breath helps us to be better people, to live moral lives, and to
remember God as we live in the world of dust.
And this is not a bad place to start the work of integration, but there
is more… much more than this.
In this morning’s reading from the
Gospel of Matthew we hear again the story of Jesus’ birth. Luke’s Gospel tells the story from Mary’s
perspective, while Matthew focuses on Joseph’s side of the drama. Joseph is for us a model of dust and breath,
of living both in the temporal realm and the eternal. We are told he is engaged to be married when
he learns his fiancée is pregnant. The
text tells us he is a ‘righteous man,’ an apt description of dust and
breath. The way he integrates the two
leads him not to anger, vengeance, or wrath toward Mary, as we might expect,
but to a concern for her dignity and welfare.
Thus, he plans to end the engagement quietly.
At this point the text takes a
startling turn. Joseph falls asleep and
begins to dream. In it, an angel appears
to him and reveals to Joseph his fiancée is to bear God’s child, the
Savior. Joseph awakes and the rest of
the story, as they say, is history. He
will dream again, learning the child is in danger and so he takes his family
and flees to Egypt. There, after a time,
Joseph will dream again and understand it is safe to return.
If the task of becoming fully human
is the task of deepening integration between dust and breath, then Joseph gives
us much to ponder. More than being a
‘good person,’ he hears the voice of angels, discerns the meaning, and acts decisively
in accordance with what he perceives.
There is something in Joseph which allows him to bridge the
forgetfulness Plato described. What do
you think it is? I don’t know I can
describe it for you, but this I do believe… whatever it is, it is not unique to
Joseph. It is there for each one of
us. Maybe more important than describing
the thing Joseph has is searching for it within our own soul, accepting it, and
embracing it.
In his poem Evening, the German writer Rainer Maria Rilke pens this wonderful thought:
your life is
sometimes a stone in you,
sometimes a star.
There are times when we sense our
life is a stone, temporal, nothing but dust; and there are times, usually brief
and fleeting, when we know ourselves to be a star, eternal, wild with the
breath of God animating everything about us.
Creativity seems to be one way to
ascend as a star. Writers, artists,
musicians, poets, and actors seem to be able to lay hold of the eternal in a
way we uncreative types struggle to find.
More and more I find I find the breath of life within me as accept it is
already there. I spent this week
pondering when angels speak to me. I
have come to realize the forgetfulness wanes and breath flows and the star
rises and the voices speak when I write, when I walk, when I am in the shower
(there is something about water, like at baptism, which opens us to God’s
Spirit), when I read, when I garden, and when I can sit in church and worship.
And, I recognize angels try to
speak to me when I dream. I remember one
vivid dream from some time ago. I was in
the basement of the house where I grew up (and my childhood home is a setting
for many of my dreams). This particular
time it felt deep and foreboding. As I
tried to climb the stairs out of the basement the first tread gave way. The minister from my youth was in the
basement, silently watching as I repaired steps. I woke from my dream with a sense my near
future was going to test me and be challenging.
Basements are dark and difficult places.
The way out of the pit I was about to experience would not be easy, but my
dream reminded me I know how to fix the stairs.
All those people from my past who have invested so much in me had
prepared me for the work ahead. I
carried this dream with me throughout a turbulent season in life. Without it, I might have been overwhelmed. With it, I managed to find breath in the
midst of dust.
Think about today’s reading. Isn’t it amazing to realize God’s entire plan
of salvation rests on one person paying attention to a dream! You and I… we are no different from
Joseph. There is a mystery at work in
our lives; a mystery from before the world began. It is the rising star beckoning to us as the
stone sinks, it is the eternal reaching out to us in the temporal world, it is
the breath giving life to the dust. When
do you hear the voices of angels?
