“We are such stuff as dreams are made on;
 and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

So speaks Prospero towards the end of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest,  a play which relies heavily on illusion and on things being what they are not.   What Shakespeare seems to be suggesting is that our lives have a dreamlike quality. What seems real is actually imaginary and what worries or preoccupies us will be melted into air. 

When one is up against it, this seems an attractive prospect and I sometimes think that it would be rather nice if what  I see as real will disappear like a dream – indeed that it is a dream and soon we will wake up from it and it will be no more – or at least, be just a vague memory.

It may be, therefore, that this morning I am preaching to you in a dream and that when I wake up you will all have been an illusion...  You may wish that was true too!

Whatever fancies I entertain, there is little doubt that dreams play some part in our lives. Every one of us dreams and part of our sleep time – about every 90 minutes, is occupied with dreaming.

 Sleep research owes a great deal to the work of those two famous Psychoanalysts,  Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, both of who, in different ways, saw dreams and their interpretation as somehow important to understanding how we tick as human beings.

Whether Dreams can interpret past events and put them into some kind of order or context  or foretell the future is hard to say. What is clear is that dreams have always been part of religious activity.

In the Old Testament, dreams played a significant part. We need think only of Jacob’s dream at Bethel in Genesis Chapter 28  in which he saw a ladder set up on earth with its top reaching into heaven. The angels of God ascended and descended upon it and eventually, the Lord God stood beside him and gave  Jacob a message about his  destiny and promised to be with him always.

Biblical dreams, in both Old and New Testaments, became channels through which God revealed himself and communicated some message which generally led to action.  In the New Testament, one of the most important dreams as far as we are concerned was Peter’s dream in Acts Chapter 10 in which Peter saw heaven opened and a sheet being lowered on which all sorts of creatures were offered for Peter to kill and eat. Peter protested that nothing profane had ever passed his lips but God told him that nothing he had made clean could be called profane.

When Peter interpreted the dream he realised that it was about the future direction of the Church. Up until then Christianity was confined within the Jewish culture but, through the dream, God was telling him that actually, it was all right to reach out with Christ’s message to non-Jews, to the gentile world.

It was this dream which led to the spread of the Christian faith – even here to Essex!

The Christmas story contains a number of significant dreams:  The Magi, or Wise men, for example, were warned in a dream to travel home by a road which took them away from Herod to ensure the safety of the Christ-child;  Two other dreams involved Joseph and in both an angel appeared to him with a communication from God.  The second, after the birth of Christ, contained a warning that Joseph should take the Holy Family away to Egypt to escape Herod’s clutches. 

The first dream we heard today as part of our Gospel. In this dream Joseph received assurance from God about the pregnancy of Mary and he was given his part in the Incarnation.

Both these dreams stand in the Biblical tradition of ‘Visions of the night’ which came to certain selected people. None of those involved expected such a visitation and there was a sense that they were chosen by God not only to receive his message but also because he knew they would act upon it.

Visions of the Night belong, then, to the area of Vocation and were calls from God to some ministry, mission or action.  In Joseph’s case this is clear – He had a significant part in the birth of Christ. He was called in the dream to fulfil it.  Now, it may be that when Joseph fell asleep that night it was to a troubled sleep. He was wrestling with the devastating news that the young maiden he loved and hoped to marry was pregnant. Jewish law was quite clear what should happen. She should be handed over to the religious authorities and then stoned to death.  Joseph, being a righteous man, and doubtless a compassionate one, had no wish for this to happen. He would break off their engagement quietly, without fuss. What love this man showed! 

You can imagine what turmoil was going through his mind as he lay down to sleep.  The angelic message was to allay all his anxieties and set him on a path of guardianship of the Holy child and his mother.  His role is sometimes described as the man in the background and, in certain circles, as foster-father but it goes much deeper than that: his role was as significant as Mary’s, albeit for a shorter time. His fathering of Jesus was as real as any other and cannot be diluted. This becomes clear because he  named the child – Jesus - and in the very act of naming claimed fathership over him.

Names were much more significant in Biblical times than now and each one conveyed a meaning – in the case of Jesus, Emmanuel – God with us.  But it was also significant who did the naming. It was always done by the legal father.  So when John the Baptist  was born the relatives wanted to call him Zechariah after his father but Elizabeth was insistent that he should be called John. The dumb-struck father was appealed to and he wrote on a tablet – “His name is John.”  No one could then dispute the choice – the legal father had spoken.

In giving Joseph the power to name Jesus, the angel was giving him direct authority from God to assume the fatherhood of the child.  The dream, then, confirms Joseph’s vocation just as the appearance by Gabriel to Mary confirmed hers.  The elements of that vocation are the same if not necessarily present in the same order.  Both Joseph & Mary were in a troubled state. Both were visited by an Angel. Both were given a commission – something they had to do for God – and both accepted the will of God.  Many who have been visited by God and chosen for some work in God’s name will recognise the pattern but, of course, it doesn’t apply to the few but to all.  We may not, as of old, be granted a Vision in the Night in precisely the same form as those who engaged with God in a dream but Visions from God take many forms. 

In Christian spirituality we often take physical words and give them a new meaning.  So, for example, we talk of the heart when we mean something different from the organ which pumps blood around our bodies. We use the word, spiritually, to mean the depths of the soul.  We also speak of Inner Vision  and inner seeing when we are not talking about the physical work of the eye but of some interior sight which enlightens our spiritual being.

The state of dreaming only occurs through a kind of sleep known as ‘rapid eye movement’ (REM). It is so called because the eyes move in bursts of activity, similar to when we are awake and look around.  Using inner vision may be thought of in a similar way.  Vision is about seeing not what is there but what is possible on a bigger scale.  The REM of the Spiritual Life is about becoming both aware of God within and attentive to His Will and Purpose for us. This is the birth-place of true Vision.

Living attentively to God is something that is common to all the Biblical dreamers and it ought to be common to all Christians.  It means living a life which goes beyond the surface and which sees bigger possibilities. It also means becoming true to the image of God within us.  That sometimes means that we do not accept situations at face value but go beneath the surface to what is really required of us.  The surface reaction of Joseph was to dismiss Mary and dissolve their engagement.  But that was not what was in his heart and the dream confirmed this. 

Because he was attentive to God, what came about was God’s bigger purpose and the way he turned over Joseph’s predicament and made it a new opportunity. Joseph was, with Mary, to work alongside God in the fulfilment of God’s plan.  And so must we.  Just as we are called to bring Christ to birth in our hearts, so we are also called to be the Guardian of the treasure of His soul – which is the Love he holds for human beings and for their ultimate and total well-being.  This love is forever vulnerable and can be thwarted by the forces against God which work in the darkness of the human mind and heart.

So, with Joseph we are called to protect, to husband, to foster and to father that same love so that it shines in a darkened world and becomes in itself the Vision of the Night which dispels the darkness both of human sinfulness and demonic mischief.  That is not an easy task, and as we saw in today’s Gospel, Joseph’s human frailty almost lost the day but he found Trust in God from within and those who Trust in God will always prevail in the working out of God’s will.

That is what Joseph discovered, and so may we.