Dream Dreams

Advent 7 / 4A: Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18

Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

December 21, 2025

When I was growing up, my grandmother and I had an occasional dispute over whether everyone dreams in their sleep. She would say that she did not. I would say, okay, but maybe you don’t remember them? I’m pretty sure they happen for everyone, particularly in REM sleep. She insisted no. Then I would drop it. I think we had these conversations because dreams were (and are) so fundamental to my basic experience that I could not imagine having no conscious awareness of one’s dreams. I am fortunate enough to remember a fair number of my dreams. Sometimes I immediately know what they were about. Other times, I think, what was that? I’ve also noticed dreams have a way of showing up in key moments of my life, punctuating something I may be struggling through, or showing me something I cannot otherwise quite see. In March of 1997, the spring break of my middler year of divinity school, I had a vivid dream in which I had walked into a bathroom and been startled to see my reflection in the mirror. The face reflected back looked basically like I look now. I woke up and knew with a clarity like never before that I was trans. In fact I had known this in one way or another going back to childhood, but the dream reflected this truth at a different level of consciousness. It had shown me something I had not wanted to see. And in fact I would push it away for another few years before turning to face and work with the truth it reflected.

For those of us fortunate enough to remember them, dreams can have a way of showing us things we may need to see. Our living tradition reflects in layers of stories and theological reflections a sense that dreams can be holy signs. As one scholar of early Christianity notes, “even though the use of dreams to discern orderly structures in the world and to provoke reorientations in self-understanding may seem strange to us… for many people in late antiquity dreaming provided a way for imagining the world well.”[1] Dreams could then and can now help open the imaginations of our hearts to hear how God may be calling us to move forward in the world, warn us against wrong assumptions, and tell us of unexpected resiliencies and possibilities. On this last Sunday of Advent, our readings offer us dream-keys to an emergent reality, inviting us not to be afraid to step into it though the outcome be unclear, to risk realizing it. 

            Advent has been dramatizing the bursting forth of God’s new reality, God’s dream as Verna Dozier wonderfully calls it, in a variety of ways.[2] Our readings have shifted over the course of seven weeks in our extended observance of this season from end to beginning, from apocalyptic visions to John the Baptist’s fierce proclamations of preparation, to Jesus’s teaching, to his impending birth. This reverse progression reminds me of the opening moments of the movie Contact, in which we hear fragments of news events, movies, songs, moving from most recent to most distant in time. As this unfolds, we see the earth – at first huge, then smaller and smaller in space, until it seamlessly merges into an iris revealed in the blink of an eyelid.[3] 

This morning that eyelid is Joseph’s, closed in sleep. He and Mary were betrothed but not married, and the revelation of her unexpected pregnancy exposed them both – but particularly Mary – to judgment and danger. Joseph was tempted, “planned,” we hear, “to dismiss her quietly” (Matthew 1:19). To do his best to smooth over a turbulent situation that likely would have become no less turbulent for Mary, should Joseph have exited the scene, despite his intention not “to expose her to public disgrace” (1:19). But in a dream, he is visited by an angel of the Lord who tells him in no uncertain terms to abandon his plan. “Joseph, son of David,” the angel formally addresses him, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (1:20). This pregnancy was not wrong but scandalously holy. The Holy Spirit was at the very foundation of this story, bringing new life to birth. The child who would soon arrive was momentous beyond all their imaginations. This baby’s name, Jesus, would signify his saving impact (1:21). Thankfully, when he awoke, Joseph remembered this dream. He heard its message clearly, and he acted accordingly. This would not be the last time Joseph would have a life-altering dream. Matthew’s second chapter would feature no fewer than four dreams, and he would have three of them.

            In this one, I am struck by how the angel not only addresses Jospeh by name, but also names the root cause of the plan he had made to “dismiss” Mary, namely fear. “Do not be afraid,” the angel said. Do not be afraid to move forward with the original plan to forge a life with Mary, to carry forward on a path toward marriage. That life may seem inaccessible right now. This unexpected turn may make it seem as though everything you had previously imagined is now somehow impossible. You may not understand how the next chapter of your life can unfold given the world you live in, in all its dangers. Yet know that the one who will soon be born, whom you are name Jesus, is Emmanuel. Immanuel was a name proclaimed by the prophet Isaiah, as we heard in our first reading. Intriguingly that child and his mother form part of another dream of sorts – a sign that forms a “visible gesture” that King Ahaz of Judah is urged to receive, “deep as Sheol or high as heaven,” indicating that God was with him and his people in a dangerous and complicated time (Isaiah 7:11).[4] But Ahaz did not want to see such a sign. He protested feebly, “I will not put God to the test” (7:12). Finally, in exhausted exasperation, God gives him a sign anyway, through Isaiah’s prophetic words. A “young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (7:14). As our gospel unpacks the term, Emmanuel literally means “God is with us” (Matthew 1:23). To receive this child is to take into one’s heart the message, God is with you in all of the uncertainty of this path. You do not need to be able to see the whole picture to know the next right step. It can be disconcerting. You are within your rights to want to see the entire map with all its switchbacks, its swamps, its elevation gains. But you cannot right now. What God invites you, invites us, to see, to know in the imaginations of our hearts, is that God is with us, calling us to embrace the in-breaking of the divine reign.   

            God is with us. Even amid your fear. Amid violence in our world, in mass shootings from Brown University to Australia, in ongoing violence in Palestine, in the intensified targeting of immigrants and trans people in this country. In this moment of fear and uncertainty, of anger and frailty, God is with us. Do not be afraid to take the next step though you cannot see the map in its entirety. And when further steps are necessary, God will still be with you, coming in the strangeness of dreams that reveal realities you may not want to see. God is with us to strengthen us for the challenges ahead.

            As I was reflecting on dreams in preparation for this sermon, I asked my kids if they could help me remember any recent dreams – I’ve noticed they often remember ones I’ve shared with them better than I do. One of them remarked on a dream I described to them just a few weeks ago. I was here at St. Aidan’s. We were having a big event and I was expected to speak at it. But then there was someone with a flatbed tow truck in the driveway. The driver urgently needed me to come out and respond to it in some way. On the flatbed was a car sliced vertically right down the middle but also visibly sutured up again with shiny metal like the led that connects stained glass. As I took in this strange site, wondering what the driver wanted me to do, I suddenly realized the event was starting inside. I looked and, lo!, this room was full–much like last evening’s joyous Holiday Party, or our fall auction. I rushed in, only to find swinging through the air from the ceiling, like a cross between a piñata and a Holy Spirit dove on a pole… a huge corgi made out of a flaky cinnamon pastry dough! As I entered the room, it swung across us, and we all reached up to grab a piece off to eat, like challah bread. It was delicious! And I thought, what is this thing? Why a corgi? I woke up and thought, well that was bizarre. It was clearly related to our then-upcoming auction event. But it also struck me as something deeper, a strange sign of the bread of heaven, that comes among us whether I am at the altar or not. That bread feeds us. It is beautiful, delicious, joyous, at points hilarious. It is nourishing. It is preparing and strengthening us for our part in the building of God’s divine dream. Friends, we do that in this place in so many ways, even as we are invited to do it in further ways. Our invitation on this final Sunday of Advent is to know that that call continues to come to us in this place. To open our hearts to the divine imagination inviting us to dream divine dreams, here and now, to keep going, to take the next faithful step. On this day, may we be open to dreaming dreams, receiving and embracing them in all their oddity and insight, to be brought forward on the path together, knowing that God is with us.

[1] Patricia Cox Miller, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 252-3.

[2] Verna Dozier, The Dream of God: A Call to Return (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1991)

[3] The opening sequence of Contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWwhQB3TKXA

[4] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 1-39 (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 69.