Sermon – Waking from a Dream
Isaiah 7:10-16; Matthew 1:18-25
Farmville Presbyterian Church
12/20/25
I wonder just how many Christmases there are between us all here today? A great number of us have seen a great number of Christmas days. Added all together, we may have more than 3000 Christmases by my rough estimation. That is a lot of Christmas Days, and tell me if I’m wrong, but they seem to come faster and faster. I can very much sympathize with the notion that they might run together after a while. Hopefully, yours all have had good and meaningful experiences. Mine have but there is no way I can remember them all. This makes me wonder if we lose the significance of Christmas itself in the great number of special times we have shared. This is more than remembering that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” This is about getting further into what that really means. This is about remembering how truly special this time is for people who are also made that incredibly special. Each year is a Christmas remembrance that we will never see again. We tend to even out time – days run together, seasons run together, years run together, even decades run together. Even though Easter and Christmas are the two most special times for us as followers of Christ Jesus, it is easier to hold Easter because we are an Easter people all the year through. Christmas comes and goes and our lives move on – hopefully to circle back around next year, whichever year it might be. I don’t remember.
One of the things that might help us to keep Christmas in our hearts a little better is to listen, really listen, to the stories and passages that make Christmas so meaningful. We tend to read the same stories and hear the same passages each year. Some you could quote from memory like the poems and songs of this time of the year. They are comforting just because of that, but we can go through the days taking them for granted and assuming there is nothing new to hear. I say it is time to wake up.
That’s what Joseph had to do. Stop and think about this. He first believed that his engagement to Mary was the regular kind of betrothal. They would be married like everyone else and begin a family like everyone else. It was supposed to unfold in a usual way, and even if there were surprises, it would be something that they could handle. A marriage was the highlight of the community in that day. There was a lot of celebration and they were special, but only one changed the world. What Joseph never saw coming was Mary being pregnant with the Son of God. So many of us grew up with an order to family happenings, a right way to do things. We might even struggle today when children or grandchildren don’t follow the expected order for family. Take those expectations and give them to Joseph. He never even remotely considered this would happen to him. Not only was Mary pregnant but it was by someone else. We have no evidence that Mary said anything to Joseph. You might think she would try to explain things to Joseph. Either way, he had none of it, but he did seem to feel sorry for her. Maybe he thought she was lying or mentally deranged or had been abused. Maybe he knew nothing about her pregnancy from her whatsoever. This is a bizarre situation if anything. Then, he had a dream.
He so very much wanted the life he imagined. Thankfully, he was a good and kind person. Even though Mary seemed (justly or unjustly) to have betrayed their relationship terribly, Joseph did not want her to pay the ultimate price. Technically, Joseph could have turned her in to the elders, and she could have been stoned to death for her infidelity. Joseph had a different idea, though. He would just have her put away in shame, and he would not have to think about her, again. He could go on and find another potential wife and have the more regular family he was looking to have. Something HUGE had to step in to change the story, though. This was a hand of God moment to rewrite the plot. It was not going to be the regular order of events, the usual happenings. Instead, that dream impressed on him just how different that marriage would be, how different there life would be, how different their family would be, how different that baby would be. It was clear that he needed his whole world to be reoriented. What was first ordinary became anything but. What was first expected became anything but. What was first his idea of his future became anything but. He had to understand that this relationship was truly special. It was something that had been in the heart of God for hundreds and hundreds of years and would now be lived out in them. Something so world changing was bigger than unique. Each of our marriages is unique. Even when people marry the same spouses a second time, those marriages are different and unique. This was a whole other level of different. It turned the world on its head. Even the prophets struggled to see it coming.
Isaiah was not talking about Jesus when he gave King Ahaz the prophecy I read from Isaiah chapter 7. He was not talking about Mary but some unknown maiden. The word in Isaiah is not a virgin having a baby but a maiden, a young woman. We do not know who the promised child in Isaiah’s time was for certain, but many believe it is good King Hezekiah, the next king in this story of God’s people. What we do know if how desperate times were becoming for the people in Isaiah. Follow me one moment: a massive army was bearing down on the region and two other kings were begging King Ahaz of Judah to join them in their fight against this invading king. God, however, would rather we trust in God’s strength rather than human strength. By the way, this is would make us terribly, terribly nervous today. We can easily understand why the kings of old struggled with trusting in God. We struggle just as much today, and we do not have whole countries in our care. In the end, Ahaz resisted going to war, and God gave him a sign. Ahaz was not a good king, even if this was a good decision. He was not making it for faithful reasons. Still, God gave him a sign. “’Wake up!’ A child is coming who will be the good king. He will show that God is here. He will be proof that God is with God’s people. He will embody the gift of God’s presence.”
Something was happening there in Judah that God wanted us to noticed. God wrote it there in letters too big to miss. The letters were so big that they held a hope that Isaiah never imagined. They showed God was THERE in ancient Judah, and they showed God was THERE in ancient Nazareth where Jospeh was tossing and turning, and they can show that God is HERE in today’s Farmville.
Look around – today we have an expression of church family that is unique. This gathering at this time will never happen again. We are a collection of experiences and ideas and hopes and loves. We carry brokenness, disappointment, and failures. In the middle of this, we also carry faith.
This is what opened the door to Immanuel. It was the willingness to find God-with-Us that made that time special. Do not approach Christmas morning just like any other year. Stop and realize what had to happen, what lives were risked, what hopes were recast, what relationships had to be trusted, what path had to be found just to have this time to celebrate. God is with us, and we were never the same. We will never be the same. To God be the glory. Amen.