Faces on Faith: Christmas hopes and dreams
A couple of years ago had a special opportunity to revisit an old Christmas classic.
My wife Linda had purchased one of those talking books for two of our granddaughters, and wanted me to record the story. As you turn every page, you press a button, and then you read whatever is on the page. When you come to the end, your child has your voice reading to them – even if they lives hundreds of miles away.
The book in question was Clement C. Moore’s famous poem about St. Nicholas. “Twas the Night before Christmas,” it begins in its familiar rhyming pattern . . . and then it goes on to describe a visit from Santa Claus. I had a great time recording it, mustering up all the gusto I could as intoned the familiar words. One of the lines, you may remember, goes “The children were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of sugar plums danced through their heads.”
This is also the season for that perennially favorite ballet “The Nutcracker.” It too is all about a dreams – in particular, one fantastic dream complete with fighting mice and a handsome nutcracker prince.
The most famous of secular Christmas stories, Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” That story is built around a whole sequence of dreams filling the head of one Ebenezer Scrooge.
And of course, who could forget, the best-selling Christmas song of all-time, the old Bing Crosby standard “White Christmas,” which wistfully informs us that the singer is “dreaming of a White Christmas.”
Are you detecting a pattern here? The secular stories and songs of Christmas are full of references to dreams – and no wonder! For the original Christmas story, the one found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, is studded with dreams. Indeed, in Matthew’s account, every single plot twist in the story rests on a dream. Each and every time someone has to make a major decision they find the answer in a dream. Joseph can’t decide whether or not he should still marry the pregnant Mary, he has a dream, is told by an angel to take her as his wife and to name the child Jesus. Later, after Jesus is born, the Magi pay him a visit and then are warned in a dream to stay away from Herod. Joseph, in another dream, is then warned to take Jesus and Mary and flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s wrath. And finally, after they get to Egypt, Joseph has yet one more dream and is told it is safe for him and his family to return to their homeland. In less than half-a-page of text, Matthew tells us about four different dreams. Each and every one of them crucial to the very survival of Jesus. Had Joseph or the Magi not had their dreams, Mary might have wandered as an outcast, ostracized by society for having a child out of wedlock, or Jesus might have been killed as an infant.
The reality is that if Joseph and the Magi hadn’t had their dreams, we wouldn’t be preparing for Christmas. If Joseph and the Magi had failed to believe in their dreams, Dec. 25 would be just another day in the year. And if they had not acted on their dreams, ours would be a pretty hopeless world. But they did dream, they did believe, they did act. And so we find ourselves preparing once again to celebrate the birth of the One who brings hope into our living.
Dreams are crucial. Yet all too often we dismiss our dreams as a frivolous waste of time. “Stop daydreaming,” we tell children lost in imaging a bright new future. “Oh he’s such a dreamer,” we say of someone who we think is unrealistic. “In your dreams!” we sarcastically respond to someone who expresses something seemingly out of reach. We treat dreams as being something less than real and dreamers as those who are out of touch with reality. But if truth be told, dreams are not less than real – often they are greater than real. Often they are that which propels us forward into a new reality and a more promising future. So let us all pay attention. There is, of course, a powerful lesson in all of this for you and me. For in this Advent season we are reminded that we too must dream; we too must believe; we too must act.
The Rev. Dr. John H. Danner, Sanibel Congregational United Church of Christ.