This Week's Sermon: "Dreaming of a First Christmas"

But it is another scene from it that I am thinking of today—of Macaulay Culkin lip-synching to the song “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas" as he douses himself in aftershave in that iconic hands-to-the-face-screaming bit. That is the other way this movie was a staple of my childhood—as a kid, I loved having snow on Christmas. Loved, loved, loved it. I lived right next door to my elementary school—you just had to go down a short slope behind my backyard—and when it snowed, I’d take my inner tube and go sledding there. The key was being able to brake before you went crashing headlong into the building.

Now, as an adult who has to clean snow and ice off of his car just to go drive in that snow and ice, I am dreaming of literally anything else. Give me bitter cold, fine, or give me rain, or even just give me good old-fashioned grayness, just do not give me snow. I do not dream of white Christmases anymore, except in my nightmares.

But you may still dream of snow on Christmas, and I am not here to take those dreams away from you. Dreaming is a fundamental part of the Christmas experience. As children, it is part of the magic. As adults, it is what helps restore our frazzled brains after helping make the magic. And for Matthew, it is integral to the entire story, from start to finish. Joseph is told in a dream not to divorce Mary, but to remain her beloved and raise the Christ child together. He is then told in a dream to flee Herod’s purges by escaping to Egypt. The Magi are warned in a dream not to return to Herod after they worship Jesus. And once Herod is dead, Joseph is once again told in his dreams to return to Israel and make his home in Nazareth.

Dreams narrate almost every pivot of Matthew’s Christmas story. They give understanding, and from that understanding comes protection from existential dangers to Joseph, Mary, Jesus, and the Magi alike. Matthew’s narrative, in its totality, is not so much about the birth itself—although that is what we are focusing on today—for that part of the story takes just seven verses. The rest is about keeping the newborn Christ alive and safe, and dreaming plays a vital role in that mission.

So, for a few minutes today, lets talk together about the nature of dreaming, of what it can do for us, inspire in us, and what it can do—or, in some cases, cause us to leave undone. New years are prime moments for such dreaming, and not just for New Year's resolutions that are forgotten by President's Day. We have a new minister as well as a new "normal," and I think there is both a need and, I hope, an enthusiasm for a bit of dreaming.

I think that this would be especially beneficial for us after a year that has stopped, or at least put on hold, a lot of other dreams. My family and I are here now, and we love it here in Birmingham very much, but the pandemic has also made it impossible for all of us to get acquainted in the traditions to which we are accustomed, and I imagine that for many of you, who may only see me on your screen once a week, or hear my voice over the phone, it may not be easy to feel as though you are getting to know what it is like to have your minister be me.

It is completely understandable, then, for one of our dreams for 2021 to be some sort of return to normalcy, some semblance of ordinariness. But I think that has to come with an understanding that for many of us, there will be no full return to normalcy. One out of every thousand Americans has died of covid-19 this year, and more still will die in the months before vaccines are widely available.

For the loved ones they leave behind, there is no complete return to normalcy.

I remember my elders in my grandparents’ generation, who were raised during the Great Depression, and the ways in which that singular event shaped their outlooks—insisting on completely clean plates at the dinner table, rationing paper products, and so on.

I think that for many of them, there was no complete return to normalcy.

9/11 is so pivotal an event that it does not even need a year associated with it—everyone already knows the reference. For people navigating airports and aviation employees, people of West Asian and North African descent, Muslims, servicemembers and first responders, and many more, the world changed in an instant.

I think that for many of them, there was no complete return to normalcy.

And not long after Mary gives birth to Jesus and the Magi make their visit, Joseph is warned in one of his dreams to flee Israel for Egypt. And even after Herod is dead, the southern territory of Judea is still unsafe for the Holy Family,

I have to think that for Mary and Joseph, even if their baby was a totally ordinary baby, there was no complete return to normalcy for them after that.

This has always been the way of the world—after shared traumas, there is not automatically a return to normalcy. It instead falls to us to create a “new normal,” that incorporates the lessons learned into how we build up new ways of achieving stability and steadiness from the ashes of the old.

I think of the parable Jesus told to close out the Sermon on the Mount, of the house built on sand and the house built on rock. The former, of course, is washed away, while the latter withstands the storm.

This lesson applies to the Holy Family, and its subsequent dream-inspired flight into Egypt. A home that is built on rock is a home, wherever it may be, that allows the family to survive—a home that keeps, shelters, and protects the family. Egypt was a home-on-rock for the Holy Family, but it was not their forever home. Even still, it protected and sheltered them in a moment of extreme need.

I do not think that is something we probably associate ancient Egypt with inside Scripture. Perhaps most famously, Egypt is the place of bondage for the enslaved Hebrews over a thousand years before Jesus. And Egypt would spend the subsequent centuries repeatedly meddling in Israel’s and Judah’s politics in its attempts to create a buffer for itself against the ascendant empires of the Assyrians and Babylonians. But in this moment, ancient Egypt confounds expectations. It rises to meet the moment. And the Holy Family lives see another sunrise.

While churches have websites and social media pages, those instruments were likely seldom thought of as homes before this past March by any of us. They served particular purposes, and with varying degrees of success. Our worship home has been online because it is what keeps, shelters, and protects us in this moment. It is not our forever home. But it is, for now, our home that is built on rock so that we can return to the home-on-rock that is our beautiful sanctuary when that day comes.

And it can be a home in which we may hopefully feel safe enough to dream together for a bit, of our own hopes for Valley and for the church universal, our hopes for ourselves and our personal walks of faith, our hopes for our Birmingham community and our country, and much more. If it can do so—if our temporary online home here can be a space for us to dream and not only meet, then it, also like ancient Egypt, will have done far more than what we might have originally expected of it.

This is a first Christmas—our first Christmas together. Like *the* first Christmas, mays ours involve just a bit of dreaming, not only to keep us safe, but to keep us going, from one year into the next and from one temporary, online home back to our usual, forever home.

I am eager to do that work of dreaming with you. While I have not been able to do many of the things I ordinarily would to embed myself in a new home on arrival, it isn’t for a lack of enthusiasm on my part. It is simply, and solely, because the pandemic makes it unsafe for me to do so.

So, as we look back on that first Christmas, and all that it entailed: the dreaming, the journeying—and not just for the Holy Family, but for the Magi as well—may we invite ourselves into that selfsame faithfulness to go where the Holy Spirit commands us and to dream in ways that we might hear God’s voice speaking to us, and then respond to that divine voice with divine obedience.

And unlike Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, the promise of Christmas, each year and every year, is that we are not home alone, and never will be home alone, because Emmanuel, God-with-us, has arrived. Wherever and whatever our home may be, we are not, and will not ever be, alone.

That’s a Christmas worth dreaming for, beloveds.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

December 27, 2020