I Have A Dream
First Sunday after Christmas Day, Year A
Art: “The Holy Family fleeing from Herod (Mt 2/13) travels through the night” By Adam Elsheimer.
Joseph was a dreamer. Having heard the extraordinary news about Mary’s pregnancy in a dream, this Sunday’s Gospel recounts three dreams. First, an angel warns Joseph to flee to Egypt; Herod seeks to kill the newborn King. Having fled, Joseph dreams that Herod has died and that it’s safe to return. But then, a third angel appears to Joseph, warning him to fear Archaleus, Herod’s son, so Joseph diverts to Nazareth.
Matthew types Jesus as a new Moses. (Exodus is not part of this week’s readings, but it could have been). Both Moses and Jesus are born into a dangerous time for Hebrew male infants: Pharaoh sought to kill all Hebrew baby boys, and Herod, wishing to assassinate the future king, and furious that the Magi tricked him, slaughters all the male infants in Bethlehem. Moses flees Egypt fearing for his life; Joseph seeks refuge in Egypt. God tells both that they can go home, “for those who were seeking the child’s life” (or, in Moses’s case “your life”) “are dead.”
Matthew likely found additional parallels in Jewish tradition. Josephus’s Antiquities recounts a story about Amram, Moses’s father, whom YHWH tells (again in a dream) of Moses’s future as liberator of his people. In this recounting, Pharoah slaughters the Hebrew babies not simply because he fears their increasing numbers (as Exodus says), but because he is told, as Herod was, that a saviour for the Hebrews has been born.
Our most enduring Christmas story also revolves around a dream. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was inspired by a visit Dickens made to one of the “Ragged Schools,” ostensibly dedicated to providing basic education to London’s poorest, but in fact foul places of filth and neglect. After the visit, Dickens shifted from writing a newspaper editorial about the controversial Poor Laws to producing, in six weeks of white-hot creativity, the Christmas tale against all which are measured, a tale both overtly Christian and grounded in current social reality.
Early on, Ebenezer Scrooge, “self-contained and solitary as an oyster,” sneers at the idea that people might choose death over life in prison or workhouse. “‘If they would rather die,’ says Scrooge, ‘they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.’” That night, Scrooge has three dreams that transform him. In the second, the ghost of Christmas Present introduces Scrooge to Ignorance and Want, two children “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish.” When Scrooge, the light of redemption starting to pierce the oyster, asks “have they no resource or refuge,” the ghost of Christmas present echoes Scrooge’s own words: “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?” Ultimately, straight from Isaiah 11, it is a child, Tiny Tim, who saves Scrooge from himself. Tim tells his father that “he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas day who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Scrooge’s dream of Tiny Tim’s empty chair at the next Christmas breaks his heart wide open, and his generosity to the Cratchit family in turn saves Tim.
Neither should we forget another dream, deeply embedded in our American history. Martin Luther King Jr., whom many see as our own Moses, had a dream, of a day when “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream;” a day when Isaiah’s prophecy will come true, “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.” In other words, when we unite to banish ignorance and want, and children of all races join hands as sisters and brothers. Dr. King knew that our destinies are inextricably bound. As the Spirit showed Scrooge, we promote ignorance and want at our peril.
This week, as we celebrate the coming of the Christ child, we find ourselves in a different sort of dream: a nightmare, populated by silk-stockinged ghouls bent on retribution rather than redemption. The current occupant of the White House, who would have been the unreformed Scrooge’s favorite politician, wants (Pharaoh – like) to reduce the “surplus population” of immigrants by driving millions of them out of the country. This modern - day Scrooge keeps Christmas by posting a bizarre image of himself wearing a Santa Claus hat with the heading “Daddy’s Home,” while thousands of immigrant families wonder what hellhole detention facility their Papa has been shipped off to.
Caught up in these atrocities is the fate of those immigrants known as, yes, “Dreamers,” people brought to the United States as children without documentation. Under the DACA “Deferred Action” program they are allowed to remain and hold temporary work permits. Estimates peg the number of Dreamers in the country at around 550,000. But DACA is under attack. The government no longer processes new DACA applications. There are numerous court challenges to DACA, including one that has made its way to the Supreme Court. The current administration takes the position that DACA confers on Dreamers no immigration status and urges them to “self-deport,” which is an Icy-hearted euphemism for leave home. “To reduce the surplus population,” we can hear from the Oval Office.
Is it overblown to detect kindred spirits among Pharaoh, Herod, and the current occupant of the White House? Or to see our current immigration atrocities as modern parallels to the persecution of the Hebrews and the slaughter of the innocents? Not to the victims, I trust. We could certainly pray for a few spirits to haunt the White House this Christmas Eve. Scrooge’s Christmas Eve dream is filled with memories of heartlessness from his past, up to that very day when he ran off a poor waif who sang a Christmas carol in front of his door. Those memories save him; he returns, if not from the dead, at least from the edge of his own grave, a man that “knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.” Perhaps a midnight visitor could take the President on a trip to one of the immigration prisons housing thousands whose only guilt is having come here for a better life.
But here is a different dream – my dream -- for this Christmas season. In a moment of beautiful, poetic justice, someone cruelly and unjustly evicted by the current administration will return to lead the country out of the valley of dry bones where it finds itself. A Dreamer perhaps, someone who has known no home but this one, who believes in what this country could be (not what it sadly appears to be at the moment), who has been forcibly evicted or “self-deported” will be sent back by God to redeem the country from its enslavement to the forces of ignorance, hatred and oppression. Both Moses and Jesus fled their homelands to escape official violence. God sent both back, as liberators. Moses freed the Hebrews. Jesus redeemed all of us. Perhaps someone, to quote Dr. King, “battered by the storms of persecution” will come back, just as Moses and Jesus came back, and inspire us to live out the true meaning of our creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all are created equal.”
In fact, I don’t simply dream that we will be redeemed; I am convinced of it. The forces of persecution and prejudice that currently hold sway can no more stop it than Scrooge could extinguish the light streaming from the head of the Ghost of Christmas Past. After all, behind it will be the same force that parted the Red Sea, and that burst the tomb open that Easter morning.
For we remember that Tiny Tim did not die, but lived to say “God bless Us, Every One!” May it be so, this blessed season.