Dreaming Joseph
Sermon
How to Preach the Miracles
Why People Don't Believe Them and What You Can Do About It, Cycle A
Object:
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.
-- Matthew 1:18
Joseph had a problem. What to do about Mary? (God also had a problem. What to do about Joseph, but first things first.)
It was actually more Mary's problem than it was Joseph's. She had the most to lose in this situation. According to the Law of Moses she could have been put to death:
If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death....
-- Deuteronomy 22:23-24a
This law was not enforced by the rabbis at the time Matthew was writing, but it was still considered adultery, a grave offense which would affect Mary's social standing for the rest of her life.
Imagine how young Mary must have felt. Not more than thirteen or fourteen years old, her life was just beginning. She had been excited about her engagement to Joseph, though she must have wondered if she was ready for the responsibilities of wife and mother. She must have thought, also, about what it would be like to be intimate with Joseph. Surely she had received advice from older girls, perhaps from her own mother -- what to expect, how to prepare herself to be a good partner, and now to discover that she is with child. How could it be? She and Joseph had taken long walks together, but always within sight of someone from the family. He had held her hand once when no one was looking, but Mary knew enough about the world to know that babies were not the result of handholding. What was she going to do? Would her family disown her? If she lost Joseph, would she ever have a second chance to be a wife and mother?
Mary is in serious "trouble," as we used to say when a girl became pregnant out of wedlock. In the late 1960s, when I was in high school, there were basically two choices for a girl in trouble. She might be sent away -- to a home for wayward girls or to relatives in the next state -- or she would "have to" marry the boy. More often than not, she and the offending boy would be given what was called a "shotgun wedding." Theirs was not a match made in heaven, but at the insistence of their families, and to maintain some semblance of propriety, they "made the child legal." Though, of course, everybody knew what was up, or would know as soon as the ninth month rolled around. Sometimes, the boy would flee to the military or simply deny paternity, something one could get away with in the days before DNA testing was available.
A Righteous Man
Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.
-- Matthew 1:19
There was no paternity test in Joseph's day. And since an engagement was a legal bond, dissolvable only by divorce or death, Joseph decided to "dismiss her quietly," an allowable legal solution, one that Matthew suggests Joseph preferred because he was a righteous man and did not want to bring Mary to public shame. This also meant she would not be charged with adultery or thought to be a rape victim.
Joseph is shown here to be what we would call a "stand-up guy." He was not only going to do the right thing, he was going to do it in the most merciful way possible. He is what the writers of The Women's Bible Commentary call a model of "higher righteousness," like Tamar, Rahab, Uriah, and Ruth who "also acted in a manner not expected in the social mores of their time, in order to further divine purposes." Joseph did what was right "... even though his action is neither legally necessary nor socially expected."1
We have all known stand-up guys like Joseph, both men and women, who will never run from a bad situation, will always do what is right and suffer any consequence.
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, told a personal story about a righteous man as part of a campaign speech when he was running for president in 2004. The righteous man happened to be a prison guard in a prisoner of war camp where McCain was being held during the Vietnam war. McCain had been placed in isolation and tied in "torture ropes" that grew tighter with each movement. Relief came in the midst of that long night from a most unexpected source. One of the guards came in and loosened the ropes to relieve McCain's pain. Early in the morning he returned and tightened the ropes so the other guards would not know what he had done.
He never said a word to the grateful prisoner, but some months later, on a Christmas morning, as the prisoner stood alone in the prison courtyard, the same Good Samaritan walked up to him and stood next to him for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. The prisoner and guard both stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.2
Esther Raab, a survivor of the Holocaust, tells about the night before she and "... 300 of her fellow inmates at the Sobibor death camp in Poland mounted a daring escape." She said her mother came to her in a dream. Like so many European Jews, they had been separated during World War II, not knowing each other's fate. "I said, 'Tomorrow we are escaping,' and she said, 'I know.' And then she took me by the hand, out of the camp, and showed me the barn that she said I should hide in."
It took Esther two weeks to find the barn because she could only move about at night. When she finally found it, she made "... a startling discovery. Her brother, whom she had believed had been shot to death during a Nazi execution of young Jewish men, emerged from a shadowy corner of the building. He had heard her speak a few Yiddish words. The siblings, each thinking the other had died, were incredulous." Esther's brother had been in the barn for nine months and cared for by a farmer who "... regularly brought him bread, milk, and newspapers." She said the man was thrilled to see her, and kept them alive for nine-and-a-half more months, until it was safe for them to emerge. "That man had seven children, and his entire family was in danger if he had been caught helping us," she recently said in a phone interview. "They would have all been killed."3
One who is righteous is willing to risk everything to be faithful to God. Matthew foreshadowed the kind of righteousness Jesus would call for when he urged his followers to have righteousness that "... exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees ..." (Matthew 5:20). Joseph was the epitome of the faithful Jewish man who made the best of a bad situation within the parameters of the law. The child was not his; what else could he do? God was about to show him what else. (As I wrote at the beginning, this was God's problem, too.)
Joseph decided to sleep on it before he did what he had to do, although one wonders how he could sleep at a time like that. Surely it was a fitful sleep as he wrestled unconsciously with what might have been the most important decision of his life. Can you imagine yourself in a situation like this?
A Righteous Joe: The Story Of A Modern Joseph
Mary didn't know what to do. How could she break the news to Joe? They had only been dating for six weeks, but she knew that he loved her. She could see it in his eyes. And she knew that she loved him. He was so gentle and understanding. There weren't many men in the world like Joe.
Mary had met Joe in the emergency room on the very night of the assault, and they had been together every day since, as if it was meant to be. Joe was there waiting for a friend who had twisted an ankle in a softball game. She sat next to him in the waiting room before they took her in to be examined. Mary had been too upset to talk, and Joe hadn't tried to make conversation. He didn't even ask what had happened. He simply looked at her with tenderness and said, "It will be okay. They will take care of you." Even those few words had been enough to create a bond between them. And Joe had come back later, after he took his friend home, to see if she was all right. By then, Mary was able to talk about the rape; the horror she had felt during the attack and the humiliation and anger that were still growing within her. She was grateful for his presence. Somehow it was easier to talk about it with him than with the counselor who had been assigned to her case. Joe had listened quietly for several hours that night, and had called or come to keep her company every night since, gradually coaxing her out of her small apartment into the world again.
Joe had never once tried to touch her, and Mary loved him for that. He seemed to know without her saying it that she couldn't stand to be touched -- not yet. Soon, maybe. She had found herself longing for that moment and wondering what it would be like during the last couple of weeks. Mary knew that Joe would wait until she gave him a sign, and she had thought that it might be tonight. But when she let him know what the doctor had told her today, would Joe want to touch her? Was this the end of her hope that their love would lead to marriage and a family? What would Joe do when she told him about the baby?4
What Dreams Will Come?
But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."
-- Matthew 1:20-21
In the midst of this restless sleep, Joseph had a dream. He had the dream, one that would change the course of his life. If you or I had such a dream we might dismiss it as "just a dream" and think no more about it. In the ancient Middle East, dreams were thought to be messages from supernatural powers. It was thought the gods communicated their will for humankind through the dreams of priests and kings. When the Pharaoh of Egypt had his dream about the "seven sleek and fat cows ..." and "seven other cows, ugly and thin ..." he knew God was telling him something significant. He called for Joseph, a prisoner who had made a name for himself interpreting dreams, to come and explain the meaning of his dream. Joseph told the Pharaoh that the dream portended the coming of a great famine. He was then released from prison and put in charge of a strategic planning team that would prepare for the coming disaster. Dream interpretation was a handy skill to have in the ancient world (Genesis 41:1-36).
Dream interpretation was also the source of upward mobility for Daniel, a young Hebrew living in exile in Babylon. When the king, Nebuchadnezzar, had a troubling dream about a great statue, he was bothered by it so much that he was unable to sleep. When his own sorcerers and magicians were unable to interpret the dream he called for Daniel, who was able to tell the king what God was revealing in the dream, and, he, like Joseph was promoted to a position of prominence in the kingdom (Daniel 2:31-49).
In the book of Judges we have the story of Gideon, who overheard one of his soldiers telling a dream just before the start of a big battle. The dream was about a cake of barley bread tumbling into the enemy camp and knocking down a tent. Another soldier interpreted the dream as an indication that Gideon's troops would prevail, and Gideon took it as a sign that God would give him the victory, which God did (Judges 7:9-23).
When Solomon succeeded to the throne of his father, David, God came to him in a dream and asked what he could do for him. Solomon asked for, and was given, wisdom (1 Kings 3:5-15).
In Acts, we read of an Italian centurion named Cornelius who was terrified one afternoon when he clearly saw an angel of God. The angel, whom Cornelius later described as wearing "dazzling clothes," told him to send servants to bring a Jewish man named Peter, who was visiting at the home of Simon the tanner in Joppa, to see him. While the servants were on the way, Peter went up onto the roof of Simon's house to pray. He fell into a dreamlike state and had a vision in which he was encouraged to eat foods that, by the laws of Moses, are considered to be unclean. While Peter was trying to sort out the meaning of this strange occurrence, the three servants of Cornelius arrived and convinced him to go back with them to their master's house. Peter went, and told the people gathered in the centurion's home, "... it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean." Peter's direct word from God and the message that Cornelius received from an angel marked the beginning of a profound change in the life of the early church. Jewish followers of Jesus could now visit the homes of Gentiles and eat with them, something no God-fearing Jew would ever have considered before (Acts 10:1-35).
It was then possible for the gospel to be taken into all the world, a theme Matthew emphasizes in the last paragraph of his gospel: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations ..." (Matthew 28:19a). Also, near the end of Matthew, is an account of Jesus, who, while being tried before Pilate, was almost saved by a dream. Word came from Pilate's wife who had received an urgent message in a dream. She warned her husband, "Have nothing to do with that innocent man for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him" (Matthew 27:19).
Matthew knew his readers assumed that one of the ways God communicates with human beings is through dreams. There are four more accounts of message dreams in Matthew. The wise men, after visiting the Christ Child and Mary, were warned in a dream not to return home the same way they came, but to avoid Herod by taking a different road (Matthew 2:12).
Joseph then had a series of warning dreams of his own: "... an angel of the Lord appeared ... and said, 'Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you: for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him' " (Matthew 2:13). After Herod died, the angel returned, telling Joseph to "... take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead" (Matthew 2:19-20). Joseph took the family to Israel, but then was warned in another dream that Herod's son, Archelaus was ruling in Judea, so they went to Galilee instead (Matthew 2:22). Like the patriarch Joseph, of Genesis, this righteous Joseph got a lot of mileage out of his dreams.
There are many examples of people receiving communications in dreams in the first centuries of the church. Morton Kelsey points out that "... every major Father in the early church, from Justin Martyr to Irenaeus, from Clement and Tertullian to Origen and Cyprian, believed that dreams were a means of revelation. The same view was held by Athanasius ... Ambrose, Augustine, all the Doctors of the church, both East and West, considered the dream a source of revelation, as the Eastern tradition still does." This is no longer true in the Western church. Scholars of the enlightenment, which began with Descartes in the seventeenth century, dismiss dreams as irrational, as Kelsey adds, "... even though [Descartes'] insights came in two famous dreams ... As Protestant thinking came to accept this framework ... it rejected any idea of communication with God or the spiritual world."5
Still, evidence of messages in dreams abound in modern times. Abraham Lincoln told his wife, and his friend, Ward H. Lamon, of a dream he had not long before he was assassinated in April of 1865. He had been working late and not long after he had gone to bed he dreamed that he heard someone sobbing in a nearby room. Lincoln said he followed the sound to the East Room where he saw a corpse on a catafalque, which was guarded by soldiers, and large group of mourners looking on sorrowfully.
"Who is dead?" I demanded of one of the soldiers. "The president," was his answer. "He was killed by an assassin." Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.6
President Harry Truman told about a comforting dream he had at the time his mother died.
... Mary Jane called to say Mama had pneumonia and might not live through the day. The president ordered his plane, the "Sacred Cow" made ready ... Somewhere over Ohio, dozing on a cot in his stateroom, he dreamt Mama came to him and said, "Good-bye, Harry. Be a good boy." He later wrote, "When Dr. Graham came into the room on the Sacred Cow, I knew what he would say." She had died at 11:30 that morning.7
King Abdullah of Jordan receives messages of affirmation and comfort from his father, the late King Hussein, in dreams:
"I'm not a person who's really into spirituality, but I have had a couple of dreams that have been so unique," the King said. "One of the times his majesty came to me was the day I went to the Baqa camp, the Palestinian camp. I went just to tell Hamas, 'Oh yeah, you think you have support here? Well, I have support here, too.' That night I had a dream that H.M. stepped off an airplane -- we were in Tanzania or something, I don't know why, you know how dreams are -- and he just came and gave me a big hug and said, 'I'm so proud of you.' "8
Angels Speak In Dreams
Renita Weems writes in her book, Listening for God, about a strange night vision she experienced in her bedroom at the age of seventeen. "Two people appeared and sat on the empty bed across the room, whispering to each other and noisily thumbing through the pages of a book. They never looked at her, but communicated with her all the while they were there." Weems ran downstairs and woke her stepmother. "She heard me out ... and without appearing the least bit surprised or flabbergasted by the dream, assured me that the people in my dream were probably angels coming to tell me something." Weems believes that "while some dreams are forgotten the moment we awake ... the ones we remember, whether laughing or trembling, are kernels of truth, pinches of revelation, whispers of God's voice."9
Laura Wassink received a message from an angel when she was a young girl, ten or eleven years of age:
I was sleeping in my bed when in the early morning hours something woke me up. I had a full-length mirror on the wall next to my bed, and when I looked at it, I saw an angel standing at the foot of my bed. However, when I looked at the foot of my bed, she was not visible. Then slowly I saw her walk around my bed toward my head. I was terrified. When she neared the head she became visible to me and I can, even thirty years later, see her in my mind. She was short, I'm guessing probably five feet tall, with long brown hair to her waist. We communicated by telepathy. She pointed to a picture I had of Jesus in my room, and told me that he loved me very much, but wanted me to pray more. I looked at the picture and the smile appeared bigger. Then she said, "Do not be afraid." I nodded but could not speak. I was awestruck at the fact that we were communicating in that manner. Then she smiled at me and then just disappeared. I laid there for a while contemplating what she said.10
Sometimes the message is simply the presence of an angel. While we were planning his father's funeral in 1993, my cousin, Daniel Sumwalt, told me about flying to see his mother just before she died several years before. He had fallen asleep on the plane from Wisconsin to Florida. He saw his mother's room in a dream and he saw someone lift his mother's feet. God or an angel was at the foot of the bed. Then the angel took her, and when he woke he knew that she had died. He asked to see her body when he arrived at the hospital. The room was just as he had seen it in the dream. His sister told him that the nurse had come in and elevated his mother's legs just before she died.11
Sometimes the message in the dream is the presence or touch of a deceased loved one. In their book, Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions, Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkeley give examples of visitation dreams. A 32-year-old teacher named Kim went to visit a friend who was dying of cancer and felt deep regret after his death because she forgot to hold his hand one last time before he died. The night he passed, she had a dream. "I am lying in my bed when I see Keith at my bedside and feel the warmth of his skin as he slowly reaches for my hand. He stands close to me and holds my hand gently, but firmly, for a long time. This feeling of his hand is so real, too real to be a dream ... I never experienced in dreams feelings that felt so real." The authors add that when she awoke, "... the touch of Keith was still in her hand."12
I visited with John McLaughlin, a member of our congregation in suburban Milwaukee, in the spring of 2005, a few weeks after the death of his wife, Mary. He told me he was sitting beside her bed at St. Joseph's Hospital, half sleeping, half awake, when he saw three angels come through the window on a beam of light. One stood at the foot of the bed and one on each side. The one at the foot seemed to be saying prayers and then made an upward sign with his hand. John watched as Mary's spirit came out of her body and ascended up through the window with the three angels. When he approached the bed, Mary was not breathing and there was no pulse. He pushed the buzzer for the nurse who came immediately and confirmed that she had passed. John said to me, "It was so vivid. I want you to tell people about what I saw."13
All My Stories Are True
All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel" which means "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from his sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.
-- Matthew 1:22-25
I have been writing and telling stories for over 25 years. Often people come to me after I have told a story in a sermon and say, "Was that a true story?" My standard response has become, "All of my stories are true, and some of them really happened." Fred Craddock puts it this way, "Happens all the time."
When I tell a story, I hope that, as my listeners and I live in that world for a while, we will come out transformed, as Jesus' hearers were when he told the parables. I seek to tell modern stories in my sermons that will help the congregation experience stories from the scriptures, like Joseph's dream of the angel, more fully. Hearing a story can be a dream-like experience, which, as Morton Kelsey writes, sometimes "... show us parts of ourselves that we do not want to see." The listener enters a meditative, dream state where one is "not only more open to the depth of one's self, but also beyond the world of psychoid realities where one is able to come into contact with the realm of God...."14
Almost every year I write a Christmas story to send with the Christmas cards to our family and friends. In 1998, I wrote a story inspired by Matthew's account of Joseph's dream. It was also inspired by a certain obsession that overtakes my wife, Jo, every year just before Christmas.
www.ChristmasHouse
John Sumwalt
Joe and Marilyn Naazerman were living the busy, successful, and very comfortable suburban life when Joe had his famous dream. They were in their late fifties, looking forward to retirement and very much enjoying their empty nest years now that they had the Christmas House and all of the fun and hoopla it had brought into their lives. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The story really begins several years before Joe's big dream. It was the year their youngest son, Jimmy, went away to college. Marilyn fell into a deep depression that wouldn't go away. The therapist said it was not uncommon for a woman in her stage of life; and after a time, with the help of Prozac and weekly therapy sessions, Marilyn began to feel like herself again. The Christmas House helped, too.
Joe and Marilyn had bought a big, old Victorian house just after they were married. It had nineteen rooms, including five bathrooms, seven bedrooms, and a three-story tower that was their pride and joy. For years and years, the Naazermans had spent every spare minute renovating their dream house. The last major phase, the completion of the tower rooms, including authentic Victorian wallpaper, had been finished in time for Jimmy's graduation party.
"Perhaps you need a new project," the therapist had suggested to Marilyn. And that was when she decided to put up the Christmas lights. It was a fairly modest display that first year, a few strings of white lights around the tall arborvitae shrubs on each corner of the house, an eight-foot blue spruce with blue lights on the balcony over the porch, a large balsam wreath on the front door with a lighted red bow, and mounted high above the tower roof, on a wire frame etched with soft yellow twinkling lights, a five-foot-high star. Marilyn received many positive comments from her neighbors and friends, especially about the star.
The next year, Marilyn hired two high school boys from her Sunday school class to help make a few additions to this modest display of lights. They started the day after Labor Day. That was Joe's first clue that something extraordinary was going on. When the electrician appeared to install an additional circuit breaker, and when he stumbled over the four-foot-high pile of stringed lights in the garage, Joe knew that Marilyn was indeed planning something big. But he didn't say anything. It was a relief to see her so happy again. Joe decided he would do what he could to help. He booted up the computer and did a web search. A site called www.christmaslights caught Joe's eye. It was just what he was looking for, a treasure trove of plans for light displays and specific instructions for design and installation. Joe downloaded the whole website and printed it out. When he showed it to Marilyn she was delighted with all of the ideas, and glad to welcome his help.
They set to work. Their goal was to have it all completed and to have a grand lighting ceremony on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6. It was also Marilyn's birthday. They just made it. Joe was putting the finishing touches on the star when the reporter from the television station arrived with a camera crew. The reporter interviewed Joe and Marilyn as their neighbors and friends began to fill up the yard. There were well over a hundred people gathered, with necks craned upward, when Marilyn flipped the master switch at precisely 7 p.m.
At first the crowd was silent, and then a crescendo of oohs swooped up over the house and filled the night air. It was a dazzling sight! The carefully crafted light sculptures were stunningly beautiful, "like a great painting," one of their friends said, "a true work of art." There were no garish plastic Santas with sleighs full of toys, no reindeer named Rudolph with blinking red noses, no impish elves wrapping presents to beat the clock, no snowmen with carrot noses and stovepipe hats; this was the real Christmas story, the authorized version, come to life in lights.
Forty feet above the chimney, on the western side of the roof, was an angel with gold-tipped wings and arms outstretched. The angel, hovering over the house with no visible means of support, appeared to be over ten feet high and was surrounded by a host of smaller angels, also with wings unfurled. Below them, on the edge of the roof, was a small flock of sheep and awestruck shepherds, hands shading their faces as they peered into the night sky at this unlikely invasion of heavenly host.
On the eastern side of the house, high above the tower, was the star, three times as high and wide as it had been before. The star's soft yellow lights twinkled and glowed as it lighted the way for the travelers below. Wise men on camels traversed from afar over the peak of the roof, bearing gifts that shimmered and glistened in a golden light. To the rear of the camels, lower on the roof and cast in a harsher light, was King Herod waving angrily to helmeted soldiers with spears and swords.
And beneath the star, on the balcony over the porch where the blue spruce had been the year before, was the silhouette of a simple stable. There were cattle nearby and the donkey, all gazing toward a manger where the babe was swaddled in what can only be described as a heavenly light. Mary and Joseph beamed over the child, and across the way an innkeeper looked on curiously from the doorway of his inn.
The crowd on the lawn below stood quietly for a long time, looking up at this wondrous sight. And then suddenly all the lights went out and music could be heard coming from speakers somewhere in one of the second floor windows. It was a recording of a church choir, singing "Angels We Have Heard On High." When they came to "sweetly singing o'er the plains," the angel and the heavenly host reappeared. Then came "shepherds, why this jubilee," and once again the shepherds lit up the night. The crowd joined in, singing along as each scene appeared in turn: "Come to Bethlehem and see," "We three kings of Orient are," "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed," and "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright...."
When the last note of "sleep in heavenly peace" had dissipated in the night air, the crowd began to applaud, quietly at first, and then wildly, cheering at the tops of their voices. This was a light show like they had never seen before: a human creation that pointed dramatically at the creator come to join the created, in the flesh.
Word of the Naazermans' unusual light display spread like wildfire. People came in droves. Television, radio, and newspaper reporters descended like a plague; the police department had to hire extra officers to maintain order at what everyone, by then, was calling simply the "Christmas House."
This went on for several Christmas seasons. Each year the light display was a little bigger and better than the year before. Recorded music was replaced with live choirs, as every choral group in the city vied for an opportunity to sing at the Christmas House. Joe developed a website -- www.ChristmasHouse -- where visitors could take a virtual tour of the light show. One Christmas Eve, the Today show did a live remote broadcast from the Naazermans' balcony. Al Roker, in the days when he was still in his portly incarnation, stood by the manger and did a special Christmas weather report predicting partly cloudy skies with intermittent showers of "peace on earth and mercy mild." Joe rigged the lights so it appeared that Al had angel wings.
It was the following year, on the night of December 5, that the angel appeared to Joe in a dream -- not the angel he had attached to the roof but the real thing, or so it seemed to Joe as he sat straight up in bed, trembling for over an hour, pondering what the angel had said: "Joe, do not be afraid of what is about to happen in your life. A child will come to Marilyn, and you must care for him, for the child is a gift to you from God."
The next morning, Joe said nothing to Marilyn about his disturbing dream, attributing it to the stress of preparing for another busy Christmas season. That afternoon, Joe took off work early to get ready for the annual premiere of the Christmas House light display. He was surprised to find Marilyn still in her housecoat, sitting at the kitchen table, looking like she had looked during her months of depression. She told him that her stomach had been upset that morning, so she had stayed home from work; she said it felt like a mild case of the flu. And then she dropped the bombshell.
"Joe, your friend, Greg Hoster, down at social services called this morning." Joe knew Greg from Rotary Club. They worked together in the food tent at the fair every year, and they both served on the finance committee at church.
"Greg said they have a newborn baby boy who they haven't been able to place in a foster home. He asked if we would consider taking care of him for a few weeks. I told him this was the busiest time of the year for us, and he said he knew that, but all of their foster parents already have their quota of children and everyone else he has asked said no. I told him I would talk to you and get back to him this afternoon." Joe took a deep breath, then he wrapped his arms around Marilyn and said, "Call Greg and tell him 'Yes.' " And then he told her about the dream.
They picked the baby up at the hospital at about 5 p.m. Joe had called the radio and television stations, asking them to make an announcement postponing the opening of the Christmas House light display. They put little Manuel in a hastily organized nursery in the second floor tower room. It had been Marilyn's sewing room, and it was her favorite room in the house because of the way the morning sunlight streamed in through its floor-to-ceiling windows.
Joe called their grown children and all of their friends to tell them the news. Greetings and gifts flowed in from far and wide. The lights above the Naazermans' Christmas House never did get turned on that Christmas season, but the light in their nursery never ceased to shine. Little Manuel had turned their lives upside-down and stolen their hearts. Joe saw a glow in Marilyn's eyes that he hadn't seen since their children were young, and he couldn't remember ever being happier himself.
In February, when the call came from social services saying they had found a young couple who wanted to adopt Manuel, Joe looked at Marilyn and said, "Why don't we adopt him?" Marilyn gave him one of her best "you've got to be kidding me" looks and said, "Joe, you are 59 years old, and I'm 57. We'll be almost eighty by the time Manuel graduates from high school!" So Joe and Marilyn said good-bye to their little gift from God. It was one of the hardest things they had ever had to do, though the young couple who adopted Manuel promised to send pictures and made them promise to come and visit.
Many more babies visited the Naazerman nursery in the years that followed, and Joe and Marilyn took them all into their hearts and cared for them until room was found in other hearts.
One Christmas Eve, following the candlelight service at church, Joe and Marilyn walked to the parking lot with Greg Hoster and his wife, Jan. Joe said to Greg, "I have always wondered how it was you happened to call us about Manuel that day. Anyone else would have thought we were the last people in the world to take in a newborn."
"Well," Greg said, as he dusted the snow off the windshield of his car, "I guess I figured that anybody with a fifteen-foot star shining over their house was just asking for a baby."
____________
1. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Runge, editors, The Women's Bible Commentary, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 253-254.
2. From a speech delivered by Senator John McCain in Virginia Beach on February 28, 2000, just prior to the Virginia presidential primary. http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/category/politics/mccainspeech....
3. Damien Jaques, " 'Esther' Keeps Alive Painful Memory of Camp, Escape," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 15, 2004.
4. John E. Sumwalt, Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales For Cycle A (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 20-21.
5. Morton Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), pp. 167-168.
6. Web Garrison, The Lincoln We Never Knew (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1993), pp. 251-252.
7. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 571.
8. New York Times magazine, February 6, 2000.
9. Renita J. Weems, Listening for God: A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 98-99.
10. Laura Wassink is a member of the Praise Fellowship Church in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where she works for the American Orthodontics Company. She is the mother of three grown children. Laura and her husband, Don, enjoy going to the local Christian coffee house to meet other Christians and love having bonfires in their backyard.
11. John Sumwalt, journal entry 3-15-93, a dream related to me by my first cousin, Daniel Sumwalt, who lives in Allenton, Wisconsin.
12. Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkeley, Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), p. 19.
13. John and Mary McLaughlin were married for 51 years. Mary Todd was born September 12, 1934, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. A caring Christian woman, Mary was in worship with her family every Sunday in the 8 a.m. chapel service at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in suburban Milwaukee.
14. Op cit, Morton Kelsey.
-- Matthew 1:18
Joseph had a problem. What to do about Mary? (God also had a problem. What to do about Joseph, but first things first.)
It was actually more Mary's problem than it was Joseph's. She had the most to lose in this situation. According to the Law of Moses she could have been put to death:
If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death....
-- Deuteronomy 22:23-24a
This law was not enforced by the rabbis at the time Matthew was writing, but it was still considered adultery, a grave offense which would affect Mary's social standing for the rest of her life.
Imagine how young Mary must have felt. Not more than thirteen or fourteen years old, her life was just beginning. She had been excited about her engagement to Joseph, though she must have wondered if she was ready for the responsibilities of wife and mother. She must have thought, also, about what it would be like to be intimate with Joseph. Surely she had received advice from older girls, perhaps from her own mother -- what to expect, how to prepare herself to be a good partner, and now to discover that she is with child. How could it be? She and Joseph had taken long walks together, but always within sight of someone from the family. He had held her hand once when no one was looking, but Mary knew enough about the world to know that babies were not the result of handholding. What was she going to do? Would her family disown her? If she lost Joseph, would she ever have a second chance to be a wife and mother?
Mary is in serious "trouble," as we used to say when a girl became pregnant out of wedlock. In the late 1960s, when I was in high school, there were basically two choices for a girl in trouble. She might be sent away -- to a home for wayward girls or to relatives in the next state -- or she would "have to" marry the boy. More often than not, she and the offending boy would be given what was called a "shotgun wedding." Theirs was not a match made in heaven, but at the insistence of their families, and to maintain some semblance of propriety, they "made the child legal." Though, of course, everybody knew what was up, or would know as soon as the ninth month rolled around. Sometimes, the boy would flee to the military or simply deny paternity, something one could get away with in the days before DNA testing was available.
A Righteous Man
Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.
-- Matthew 1:19
There was no paternity test in Joseph's day. And since an engagement was a legal bond, dissolvable only by divorce or death, Joseph decided to "dismiss her quietly," an allowable legal solution, one that Matthew suggests Joseph preferred because he was a righteous man and did not want to bring Mary to public shame. This also meant she would not be charged with adultery or thought to be a rape victim.
Joseph is shown here to be what we would call a "stand-up guy." He was not only going to do the right thing, he was going to do it in the most merciful way possible. He is what the writers of The Women's Bible Commentary call a model of "higher righteousness," like Tamar, Rahab, Uriah, and Ruth who "also acted in a manner not expected in the social mores of their time, in order to further divine purposes." Joseph did what was right "... even though his action is neither legally necessary nor socially expected."1
We have all known stand-up guys like Joseph, both men and women, who will never run from a bad situation, will always do what is right and suffer any consequence.
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, told a personal story about a righteous man as part of a campaign speech when he was running for president in 2004. The righteous man happened to be a prison guard in a prisoner of war camp where McCain was being held during the Vietnam war. McCain had been placed in isolation and tied in "torture ropes" that grew tighter with each movement. Relief came in the midst of that long night from a most unexpected source. One of the guards came in and loosened the ropes to relieve McCain's pain. Early in the morning he returned and tightened the ropes so the other guards would not know what he had done.
He never said a word to the grateful prisoner, but some months later, on a Christmas morning, as the prisoner stood alone in the prison courtyard, the same Good Samaritan walked up to him and stood next to him for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. The prisoner and guard both stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.2
Esther Raab, a survivor of the Holocaust, tells about the night before she and "... 300 of her fellow inmates at the Sobibor death camp in Poland mounted a daring escape." She said her mother came to her in a dream. Like so many European Jews, they had been separated during World War II, not knowing each other's fate. "I said, 'Tomorrow we are escaping,' and she said, 'I know.' And then she took me by the hand, out of the camp, and showed me the barn that she said I should hide in."
It took Esther two weeks to find the barn because she could only move about at night. When she finally found it, she made "... a startling discovery. Her brother, whom she had believed had been shot to death during a Nazi execution of young Jewish men, emerged from a shadowy corner of the building. He had heard her speak a few Yiddish words. The siblings, each thinking the other had died, were incredulous." Esther's brother had been in the barn for nine months and cared for by a farmer who "... regularly brought him bread, milk, and newspapers." She said the man was thrilled to see her, and kept them alive for nine-and-a-half more months, until it was safe for them to emerge. "That man had seven children, and his entire family was in danger if he had been caught helping us," she recently said in a phone interview. "They would have all been killed."3
One who is righteous is willing to risk everything to be faithful to God. Matthew foreshadowed the kind of righteousness Jesus would call for when he urged his followers to have righteousness that "... exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees ..." (Matthew 5:20). Joseph was the epitome of the faithful Jewish man who made the best of a bad situation within the parameters of the law. The child was not his; what else could he do? God was about to show him what else. (As I wrote at the beginning, this was God's problem, too.)
Joseph decided to sleep on it before he did what he had to do, although one wonders how he could sleep at a time like that. Surely it was a fitful sleep as he wrestled unconsciously with what might have been the most important decision of his life. Can you imagine yourself in a situation like this?
A Righteous Joe: The Story Of A Modern Joseph
Mary didn't know what to do. How could she break the news to Joe? They had only been dating for six weeks, but she knew that he loved her. She could see it in his eyes. And she knew that she loved him. He was so gentle and understanding. There weren't many men in the world like Joe.
Mary had met Joe in the emergency room on the very night of the assault, and they had been together every day since, as if it was meant to be. Joe was there waiting for a friend who had twisted an ankle in a softball game. She sat next to him in the waiting room before they took her in to be examined. Mary had been too upset to talk, and Joe hadn't tried to make conversation. He didn't even ask what had happened. He simply looked at her with tenderness and said, "It will be okay. They will take care of you." Even those few words had been enough to create a bond between them. And Joe had come back later, after he took his friend home, to see if she was all right. By then, Mary was able to talk about the rape; the horror she had felt during the attack and the humiliation and anger that were still growing within her. She was grateful for his presence. Somehow it was easier to talk about it with him than with the counselor who had been assigned to her case. Joe had listened quietly for several hours that night, and had called or come to keep her company every night since, gradually coaxing her out of her small apartment into the world again.
Joe had never once tried to touch her, and Mary loved him for that. He seemed to know without her saying it that she couldn't stand to be touched -- not yet. Soon, maybe. She had found herself longing for that moment and wondering what it would be like during the last couple of weeks. Mary knew that Joe would wait until she gave him a sign, and she had thought that it might be tonight. But when she let him know what the doctor had told her today, would Joe want to touch her? Was this the end of her hope that their love would lead to marriage and a family? What would Joe do when she told him about the baby?4
What Dreams Will Come?
But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."
-- Matthew 1:20-21
In the midst of this restless sleep, Joseph had a dream. He had the dream, one that would change the course of his life. If you or I had such a dream we might dismiss it as "just a dream" and think no more about it. In the ancient Middle East, dreams were thought to be messages from supernatural powers. It was thought the gods communicated their will for humankind through the dreams of priests and kings. When the Pharaoh of Egypt had his dream about the "seven sleek and fat cows ..." and "seven other cows, ugly and thin ..." he knew God was telling him something significant. He called for Joseph, a prisoner who had made a name for himself interpreting dreams, to come and explain the meaning of his dream. Joseph told the Pharaoh that the dream portended the coming of a great famine. He was then released from prison and put in charge of a strategic planning team that would prepare for the coming disaster. Dream interpretation was a handy skill to have in the ancient world (Genesis 41:1-36).
Dream interpretation was also the source of upward mobility for Daniel, a young Hebrew living in exile in Babylon. When the king, Nebuchadnezzar, had a troubling dream about a great statue, he was bothered by it so much that he was unable to sleep. When his own sorcerers and magicians were unable to interpret the dream he called for Daniel, who was able to tell the king what God was revealing in the dream, and, he, like Joseph was promoted to a position of prominence in the kingdom (Daniel 2:31-49).
In the book of Judges we have the story of Gideon, who overheard one of his soldiers telling a dream just before the start of a big battle. The dream was about a cake of barley bread tumbling into the enemy camp and knocking down a tent. Another soldier interpreted the dream as an indication that Gideon's troops would prevail, and Gideon took it as a sign that God would give him the victory, which God did (Judges 7:9-23).
When Solomon succeeded to the throne of his father, David, God came to him in a dream and asked what he could do for him. Solomon asked for, and was given, wisdom (1 Kings 3:5-15).
In Acts, we read of an Italian centurion named Cornelius who was terrified one afternoon when he clearly saw an angel of God. The angel, whom Cornelius later described as wearing "dazzling clothes," told him to send servants to bring a Jewish man named Peter, who was visiting at the home of Simon the tanner in Joppa, to see him. While the servants were on the way, Peter went up onto the roof of Simon's house to pray. He fell into a dreamlike state and had a vision in which he was encouraged to eat foods that, by the laws of Moses, are considered to be unclean. While Peter was trying to sort out the meaning of this strange occurrence, the three servants of Cornelius arrived and convinced him to go back with them to their master's house. Peter went, and told the people gathered in the centurion's home, "... it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean." Peter's direct word from God and the message that Cornelius received from an angel marked the beginning of a profound change in the life of the early church. Jewish followers of Jesus could now visit the homes of Gentiles and eat with them, something no God-fearing Jew would ever have considered before (Acts 10:1-35).
It was then possible for the gospel to be taken into all the world, a theme Matthew emphasizes in the last paragraph of his gospel: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations ..." (Matthew 28:19a). Also, near the end of Matthew, is an account of Jesus, who, while being tried before Pilate, was almost saved by a dream. Word came from Pilate's wife who had received an urgent message in a dream. She warned her husband, "Have nothing to do with that innocent man for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him" (Matthew 27:19).
Matthew knew his readers assumed that one of the ways God communicates with human beings is through dreams. There are four more accounts of message dreams in Matthew. The wise men, after visiting the Christ Child and Mary, were warned in a dream not to return home the same way they came, but to avoid Herod by taking a different road (Matthew 2:12).
Joseph then had a series of warning dreams of his own: "... an angel of the Lord appeared ... and said, 'Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you: for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him' " (Matthew 2:13). After Herod died, the angel returned, telling Joseph to "... take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead" (Matthew 2:19-20). Joseph took the family to Israel, but then was warned in another dream that Herod's son, Archelaus was ruling in Judea, so they went to Galilee instead (Matthew 2:22). Like the patriarch Joseph, of Genesis, this righteous Joseph got a lot of mileage out of his dreams.
There are many examples of people receiving communications in dreams in the first centuries of the church. Morton Kelsey points out that "... every major Father in the early church, from Justin Martyr to Irenaeus, from Clement and Tertullian to Origen and Cyprian, believed that dreams were a means of revelation. The same view was held by Athanasius ... Ambrose, Augustine, all the Doctors of the church, both East and West, considered the dream a source of revelation, as the Eastern tradition still does." This is no longer true in the Western church. Scholars of the enlightenment, which began with Descartes in the seventeenth century, dismiss dreams as irrational, as Kelsey adds, "... even though [Descartes'] insights came in two famous dreams ... As Protestant thinking came to accept this framework ... it rejected any idea of communication with God or the spiritual world."5
Still, evidence of messages in dreams abound in modern times. Abraham Lincoln told his wife, and his friend, Ward H. Lamon, of a dream he had not long before he was assassinated in April of 1865. He had been working late and not long after he had gone to bed he dreamed that he heard someone sobbing in a nearby room. Lincoln said he followed the sound to the East Room where he saw a corpse on a catafalque, which was guarded by soldiers, and large group of mourners looking on sorrowfully.
"Who is dead?" I demanded of one of the soldiers. "The president," was his answer. "He was killed by an assassin." Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.6
President Harry Truman told about a comforting dream he had at the time his mother died.
... Mary Jane called to say Mama had pneumonia and might not live through the day. The president ordered his plane, the "Sacred Cow" made ready ... Somewhere over Ohio, dozing on a cot in his stateroom, he dreamt Mama came to him and said, "Good-bye, Harry. Be a good boy." He later wrote, "When Dr. Graham came into the room on the Sacred Cow, I knew what he would say." She had died at 11:30 that morning.7
King Abdullah of Jordan receives messages of affirmation and comfort from his father, the late King Hussein, in dreams:
"I'm not a person who's really into spirituality, but I have had a couple of dreams that have been so unique," the King said. "One of the times his majesty came to me was the day I went to the Baqa camp, the Palestinian camp. I went just to tell Hamas, 'Oh yeah, you think you have support here? Well, I have support here, too.' That night I had a dream that H.M. stepped off an airplane -- we were in Tanzania or something, I don't know why, you know how dreams are -- and he just came and gave me a big hug and said, 'I'm so proud of you.' "8
Angels Speak In Dreams
Renita Weems writes in her book, Listening for God, about a strange night vision she experienced in her bedroom at the age of seventeen. "Two people appeared and sat on the empty bed across the room, whispering to each other and noisily thumbing through the pages of a book. They never looked at her, but communicated with her all the while they were there." Weems ran downstairs and woke her stepmother. "She heard me out ... and without appearing the least bit surprised or flabbergasted by the dream, assured me that the people in my dream were probably angels coming to tell me something." Weems believes that "while some dreams are forgotten the moment we awake ... the ones we remember, whether laughing or trembling, are kernels of truth, pinches of revelation, whispers of God's voice."9
Laura Wassink received a message from an angel when she was a young girl, ten or eleven years of age:
I was sleeping in my bed when in the early morning hours something woke me up. I had a full-length mirror on the wall next to my bed, and when I looked at it, I saw an angel standing at the foot of my bed. However, when I looked at the foot of my bed, she was not visible. Then slowly I saw her walk around my bed toward my head. I was terrified. When she neared the head she became visible to me and I can, even thirty years later, see her in my mind. She was short, I'm guessing probably five feet tall, with long brown hair to her waist. We communicated by telepathy. She pointed to a picture I had of Jesus in my room, and told me that he loved me very much, but wanted me to pray more. I looked at the picture and the smile appeared bigger. Then she said, "Do not be afraid." I nodded but could not speak. I was awestruck at the fact that we were communicating in that manner. Then she smiled at me and then just disappeared. I laid there for a while contemplating what she said.10
Sometimes the message is simply the presence of an angel. While we were planning his father's funeral in 1993, my cousin, Daniel Sumwalt, told me about flying to see his mother just before she died several years before. He had fallen asleep on the plane from Wisconsin to Florida. He saw his mother's room in a dream and he saw someone lift his mother's feet. God or an angel was at the foot of the bed. Then the angel took her, and when he woke he knew that she had died. He asked to see her body when he arrived at the hospital. The room was just as he had seen it in the dream. His sister told him that the nurse had come in and elevated his mother's legs just before she died.11
Sometimes the message in the dream is the presence or touch of a deceased loved one. In their book, Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions, Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkeley give examples of visitation dreams. A 32-year-old teacher named Kim went to visit a friend who was dying of cancer and felt deep regret after his death because she forgot to hold his hand one last time before he died. The night he passed, she had a dream. "I am lying in my bed when I see Keith at my bedside and feel the warmth of his skin as he slowly reaches for my hand. He stands close to me and holds my hand gently, but firmly, for a long time. This feeling of his hand is so real, too real to be a dream ... I never experienced in dreams feelings that felt so real." The authors add that when she awoke, "... the touch of Keith was still in her hand."12
I visited with John McLaughlin, a member of our congregation in suburban Milwaukee, in the spring of 2005, a few weeks after the death of his wife, Mary. He told me he was sitting beside her bed at St. Joseph's Hospital, half sleeping, half awake, when he saw three angels come through the window on a beam of light. One stood at the foot of the bed and one on each side. The one at the foot seemed to be saying prayers and then made an upward sign with his hand. John watched as Mary's spirit came out of her body and ascended up through the window with the three angels. When he approached the bed, Mary was not breathing and there was no pulse. He pushed the buzzer for the nurse who came immediately and confirmed that she had passed. John said to me, "It was so vivid. I want you to tell people about what I saw."13
All My Stories Are True
All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel" which means "God is with us." When Joseph awoke from his sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus.
-- Matthew 1:22-25
I have been writing and telling stories for over 25 years. Often people come to me after I have told a story in a sermon and say, "Was that a true story?" My standard response has become, "All of my stories are true, and some of them really happened." Fred Craddock puts it this way, "Happens all the time."
When I tell a story, I hope that, as my listeners and I live in that world for a while, we will come out transformed, as Jesus' hearers were when he told the parables. I seek to tell modern stories in my sermons that will help the congregation experience stories from the scriptures, like Joseph's dream of the angel, more fully. Hearing a story can be a dream-like experience, which, as Morton Kelsey writes, sometimes "... show us parts of ourselves that we do not want to see." The listener enters a meditative, dream state where one is "not only more open to the depth of one's self, but also beyond the world of psychoid realities where one is able to come into contact with the realm of God...."14
Almost every year I write a Christmas story to send with the Christmas cards to our family and friends. In 1998, I wrote a story inspired by Matthew's account of Joseph's dream. It was also inspired by a certain obsession that overtakes my wife, Jo, every year just before Christmas.
www.ChristmasHouse
John Sumwalt
Joe and Marilyn Naazerman were living the busy, successful, and very comfortable suburban life when Joe had his famous dream. They were in their late fifties, looking forward to retirement and very much enjoying their empty nest years now that they had the Christmas House and all of the fun and hoopla it had brought into their lives. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The story really begins several years before Joe's big dream. It was the year their youngest son, Jimmy, went away to college. Marilyn fell into a deep depression that wouldn't go away. The therapist said it was not uncommon for a woman in her stage of life; and after a time, with the help of Prozac and weekly therapy sessions, Marilyn began to feel like herself again. The Christmas House helped, too.
Joe and Marilyn had bought a big, old Victorian house just after they were married. It had nineteen rooms, including five bathrooms, seven bedrooms, and a three-story tower that was their pride and joy. For years and years, the Naazermans had spent every spare minute renovating their dream house. The last major phase, the completion of the tower rooms, including authentic Victorian wallpaper, had been finished in time for Jimmy's graduation party.
"Perhaps you need a new project," the therapist had suggested to Marilyn. And that was when she decided to put up the Christmas lights. It was a fairly modest display that first year, a few strings of white lights around the tall arborvitae shrubs on each corner of the house, an eight-foot blue spruce with blue lights on the balcony over the porch, a large balsam wreath on the front door with a lighted red bow, and mounted high above the tower roof, on a wire frame etched with soft yellow twinkling lights, a five-foot-high star. Marilyn received many positive comments from her neighbors and friends, especially about the star.
The next year, Marilyn hired two high school boys from her Sunday school class to help make a few additions to this modest display of lights. They started the day after Labor Day. That was Joe's first clue that something extraordinary was going on. When the electrician appeared to install an additional circuit breaker, and when he stumbled over the four-foot-high pile of stringed lights in the garage, Joe knew that Marilyn was indeed planning something big. But he didn't say anything. It was a relief to see her so happy again. Joe decided he would do what he could to help. He booted up the computer and did a web search. A site called www.christmaslights caught Joe's eye. It was just what he was looking for, a treasure trove of plans for light displays and specific instructions for design and installation. Joe downloaded the whole website and printed it out. When he showed it to Marilyn she was delighted with all of the ideas, and glad to welcome his help.
They set to work. Their goal was to have it all completed and to have a grand lighting ceremony on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6. It was also Marilyn's birthday. They just made it. Joe was putting the finishing touches on the star when the reporter from the television station arrived with a camera crew. The reporter interviewed Joe and Marilyn as their neighbors and friends began to fill up the yard. There were well over a hundred people gathered, with necks craned upward, when Marilyn flipped the master switch at precisely 7 p.m.
At first the crowd was silent, and then a crescendo of oohs swooped up over the house and filled the night air. It was a dazzling sight! The carefully crafted light sculptures were stunningly beautiful, "like a great painting," one of their friends said, "a true work of art." There were no garish plastic Santas with sleighs full of toys, no reindeer named Rudolph with blinking red noses, no impish elves wrapping presents to beat the clock, no snowmen with carrot noses and stovepipe hats; this was the real Christmas story, the authorized version, come to life in lights.
Forty feet above the chimney, on the western side of the roof, was an angel with gold-tipped wings and arms outstretched. The angel, hovering over the house with no visible means of support, appeared to be over ten feet high and was surrounded by a host of smaller angels, also with wings unfurled. Below them, on the edge of the roof, was a small flock of sheep and awestruck shepherds, hands shading their faces as they peered into the night sky at this unlikely invasion of heavenly host.
On the eastern side of the house, high above the tower, was the star, three times as high and wide as it had been before. The star's soft yellow lights twinkled and glowed as it lighted the way for the travelers below. Wise men on camels traversed from afar over the peak of the roof, bearing gifts that shimmered and glistened in a golden light. To the rear of the camels, lower on the roof and cast in a harsher light, was King Herod waving angrily to helmeted soldiers with spears and swords.
And beneath the star, on the balcony over the porch where the blue spruce had been the year before, was the silhouette of a simple stable. There were cattle nearby and the donkey, all gazing toward a manger where the babe was swaddled in what can only be described as a heavenly light. Mary and Joseph beamed over the child, and across the way an innkeeper looked on curiously from the doorway of his inn.
The crowd on the lawn below stood quietly for a long time, looking up at this wondrous sight. And then suddenly all the lights went out and music could be heard coming from speakers somewhere in one of the second floor windows. It was a recording of a church choir, singing "Angels We Have Heard On High." When they came to "sweetly singing o'er the plains," the angel and the heavenly host reappeared. Then came "shepherds, why this jubilee," and once again the shepherds lit up the night. The crowd joined in, singing along as each scene appeared in turn: "Come to Bethlehem and see," "We three kings of Orient are," "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed," and "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright...."
When the last note of "sleep in heavenly peace" had dissipated in the night air, the crowd began to applaud, quietly at first, and then wildly, cheering at the tops of their voices. This was a light show like they had never seen before: a human creation that pointed dramatically at the creator come to join the created, in the flesh.
Word of the Naazermans' unusual light display spread like wildfire. People came in droves. Television, radio, and newspaper reporters descended like a plague; the police department had to hire extra officers to maintain order at what everyone, by then, was calling simply the "Christmas House."
This went on for several Christmas seasons. Each year the light display was a little bigger and better than the year before. Recorded music was replaced with live choirs, as every choral group in the city vied for an opportunity to sing at the Christmas House. Joe developed a website -- www.ChristmasHouse -- where visitors could take a virtual tour of the light show. One Christmas Eve, the Today show did a live remote broadcast from the Naazermans' balcony. Al Roker, in the days when he was still in his portly incarnation, stood by the manger and did a special Christmas weather report predicting partly cloudy skies with intermittent showers of "peace on earth and mercy mild." Joe rigged the lights so it appeared that Al had angel wings.
It was the following year, on the night of December 5, that the angel appeared to Joe in a dream -- not the angel he had attached to the roof but the real thing, or so it seemed to Joe as he sat straight up in bed, trembling for over an hour, pondering what the angel had said: "Joe, do not be afraid of what is about to happen in your life. A child will come to Marilyn, and you must care for him, for the child is a gift to you from God."
The next morning, Joe said nothing to Marilyn about his disturbing dream, attributing it to the stress of preparing for another busy Christmas season. That afternoon, Joe took off work early to get ready for the annual premiere of the Christmas House light display. He was surprised to find Marilyn still in her housecoat, sitting at the kitchen table, looking like she had looked during her months of depression. She told him that her stomach had been upset that morning, so she had stayed home from work; she said it felt like a mild case of the flu. And then she dropped the bombshell.
"Joe, your friend, Greg Hoster, down at social services called this morning." Joe knew Greg from Rotary Club. They worked together in the food tent at the fair every year, and they both served on the finance committee at church.
"Greg said they have a newborn baby boy who they haven't been able to place in a foster home. He asked if we would consider taking care of him for a few weeks. I told him this was the busiest time of the year for us, and he said he knew that, but all of their foster parents already have their quota of children and everyone else he has asked said no. I told him I would talk to you and get back to him this afternoon." Joe took a deep breath, then he wrapped his arms around Marilyn and said, "Call Greg and tell him 'Yes.' " And then he told her about the dream.
They picked the baby up at the hospital at about 5 p.m. Joe had called the radio and television stations, asking them to make an announcement postponing the opening of the Christmas House light display. They put little Manuel in a hastily organized nursery in the second floor tower room. It had been Marilyn's sewing room, and it was her favorite room in the house because of the way the morning sunlight streamed in through its floor-to-ceiling windows.
Joe called their grown children and all of their friends to tell them the news. Greetings and gifts flowed in from far and wide. The lights above the Naazermans' Christmas House never did get turned on that Christmas season, but the light in their nursery never ceased to shine. Little Manuel had turned their lives upside-down and stolen their hearts. Joe saw a glow in Marilyn's eyes that he hadn't seen since their children were young, and he couldn't remember ever being happier himself.
In February, when the call came from social services saying they had found a young couple who wanted to adopt Manuel, Joe looked at Marilyn and said, "Why don't we adopt him?" Marilyn gave him one of her best "you've got to be kidding me" looks and said, "Joe, you are 59 years old, and I'm 57. We'll be almost eighty by the time Manuel graduates from high school!" So Joe and Marilyn said good-bye to their little gift from God. It was one of the hardest things they had ever had to do, though the young couple who adopted Manuel promised to send pictures and made them promise to come and visit.
Many more babies visited the Naazerman nursery in the years that followed, and Joe and Marilyn took them all into their hearts and cared for them until room was found in other hearts.
One Christmas Eve, following the candlelight service at church, Joe and Marilyn walked to the parking lot with Greg Hoster and his wife, Jan. Joe said to Greg, "I have always wondered how it was you happened to call us about Manuel that day. Anyone else would have thought we were the last people in the world to take in a newborn."
"Well," Greg said, as he dusted the snow off the windshield of his car, "I guess I figured that anybody with a fifteen-foot star shining over their house was just asking for a baby."
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1. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Runge, editors, The Women's Bible Commentary, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), pp. 253-254.
2. From a speech delivered by Senator John McCain in Virginia Beach on February 28, 2000, just prior to the Virginia presidential primary. http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/category/politics/mccainspeech....
3. Damien Jaques, " 'Esther' Keeps Alive Painful Memory of Camp, Escape," Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, September 15, 2004.
4. John E. Sumwalt, Lectionary Stories: Forty Tellable Tales For Cycle A (Lima, Ohio: CSS Publishing Company, 1992), pp. 20-21.
5. Morton Kelsey, The Other Side of Silence: A Guide to Christian Meditation (New York: Paulist Press, 1976), pp. 167-168.
6. Web Garrison, The Lincoln We Never Knew (Nashville: Rutledge Hill Press, 1993), pp. 251-252.
7. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 571.
8. New York Times magazine, February 6, 2000.
9. Renita J. Weems, Listening for God: A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 98-99.
10. Laura Wassink is a member of the Praise Fellowship Church in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where she works for the American Orthodontics Company. She is the mother of three grown children. Laura and her husband, Don, enjoy going to the local Christian coffee house to meet other Christians and love having bonfires in their backyard.
11. John Sumwalt, journal entry 3-15-93, a dream related to me by my first cousin, Daniel Sumwalt, who lives in Allenton, Wisconsin.
12. Kelly Bulkeley and Patricia Bulkeley, Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), p. 19.
13. John and Mary McLaughlin were married for 51 years. Mary Todd was born September 12, 1934, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. A caring Christian woman, Mary was in worship with her family every Sunday in the 8 a.m. chapel service at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in suburban Milwaukee.
14. Op cit, Morton Kelsey.
