Joseph: A Listener and Obeyer - A Communion Meditation
/The way we each individually see the world has been slowly built, over decades, in a million tiny ways. What we thoughtlessly assume to be true has been proven to us over and over again. These observations and beliefs slowly get proven or disproven until they merge together, and are seemingly etched in stone. If we are to unbelieve one thing and start believing something different, the new thing has to disprove all those little proofs. This isn’t an easy thing to do.
I’ve had thousands, possibly millions, of dreams throughout my lifetime. And once in a blue moon I’ll wake up from a dream and it will change my plans, if ever so slightly. I woke in the middle of the night one night this past week because I had dreamed that our three-year-old son was sitting on a couch that caught fire. I woke up, knowing instantly that it hadn’t really happened, but still, scared by the image spawned by the dream, got up and walked through all of the house, just to make sure the dream didn’t somehow indicate something about our waking world. Of course, I didn’t find anything, and went back to bed. That image of our son threatened by fire on a couch was just a dream.
So what was it about that dream Joseph had? What was it about that angel that was so compelling, so convincing, that Joseph chose to immediately obey it? His plans before he went to bed had been based on this new apparent betrayal by his betrothed, Mary. They were reasonable plans, given the bizarre, unexpected circumstances. Common sense said that she must have been fooling around! He presumably had every right to publicly shame her for this. Everything he had ever seen or known piled up into proof and support for this one conclusion: it was a generous, merciful thing for him to do quietly what was obviously the right thing to do: divorce the dishonorable woman.
But that dream … that angel … must have been very powerful. We don’t have a record in the Scripture text of a discussion, a disagreement, any friction on Joseph’s part. As far as we’re told, he just got up, and obeyed. All that common sense, that lifetime of learning social norms and scriptural interpretations, was quietly set aside, or at least dramatically reinterpreted, in the face of this dream, this angel.
The only way I can make sense out of Joseph’s immediate obedience is that God had been speaking to him, revealing Himself to Joseph in little ways, for years. Listening, and obeying, had become a habit. So God knew, from seeing the habits Joseph had developed, that Joseph was a listener, and an obeyer.
All of Scripture, and especially the gospels, challenge the understanding of the world we’ve received, both from the world at large and from other Christians. When we come to this table, hear the Word spoken and preached, receive our instructions to go out and make disciples, all of our conventional wisdom gets tested.
So how do you handle that challenge? When you step into this sanctuary, look up at the body and blood of Jesus—of Jesus!—sitting here on this table, do you expect to be changed? Even a little? Have you made a habit of listening for God’s direction, listening with your life, as Buechner puts it, and then obeying what you receive?
Maybe the angel visited Joseph because Joseph was ready for a visit, open to the God of Creation, his ancestors, his world, building on God’s work and story in the past, but in unexpected ways. Are you ready to be visited? Are you ready to obey? Or would God be wasting His breath to send you an angel?
For this is what the Lord himself said, and I pass it on to you just as I received it. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant between God and you, sealed by the shedding of my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it." For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until Jesus comes again.