(Names and places have
been changed to protect the writer. The story is true.)
The day after
the election my old friend, Jeremiah Obadiah Smith, invited me for coffee at Starbucks.
It had been a while since we last talked. Jeremiah started right in, “Thank God it’s over. I’m finished with it. The
debates, the mudslinging, the lies . . .”
“You
mean the election?” I had always known Jeremiah to be a fierce political independent.
His practice was to write in the name of his favorite politician, “ . . . the only man who could deal with such a
mess,” he would say. “Franklin D. Roosevelt.”
I
often reminded him, “FDR is way dead, you
know.” Jeremiah believed that even dead FDR would be the best guy in the
line-up.
Jeremiah
had never been a man of the church. I knew him from my days as a mental health chaplain. When he was a child, his mom and dad had forced
religion on him. He hated church. Combat experience in Vietnam had made him
doubt the existence of God. Three
marriages later he was sure of it. His latest girlfriend had taken him to one those
“Point” church sprouting up everywhere. “Shallow,
Lee, shallow. And loud. What’s the point?” Jeremiah’s invitation to coffee had
piqued my curiosity and so I asked him what was going on in his life. He told
me that he had a very disturbing dream and needed help sorting it out because
he didn’t like where it was taking him.
The ancients understood that unbidden
communication in the night opens sleepers to a world different from the one
they manage during the day. The ancients thought that dreams were a venue in
which the holy purposes of God, perplexing and unreasonable as they might be,
come to us. So I told Jeremiah that sometimes dreams are from God--like
with Jacob, Pharaoh, Daniel, Joseph, and the Magi in the Bible.
“Not this time. No, it was just the Spicy
Thai Basil for dinner. Or not. Listen, it was about Baby Jesus. I was a
character in the Nativity story. You remember how my mom made me be an angel in
that stupid Christmas play when I was like five years old? They made me sing
and I couldn’t sing. It scarred me for life. In my dream I was the innkeeper.
My inn was pretty low rent, like the Clermont Hotel completely furnished with
bedbugs. About dark here come Joseph and Mary. She is plump with child and in a
really bad mood. I had just rented my last room but did Joseph care? I asked
him, ‘What part of “No Vacancy” don’t you understand?’”
“Well, Jeremiah, that is the way the story
goes.”
“ Yes, and so I turned them away.” I
said, “Listen, you can sleep in the re-cycled
paper dumpster; or if you can make it downtown to the shelter, Joseph, you can
go in but Mary has to go somewhere else. They don’t do couples.”
“Jeremiah,
how could you send the Holy Family to a shelter? Those places are dangerous.”
“No, I couldn’t stay on script. I took them
over to the Majestic Grill for dinner and we started to order when all of a
sudden Mary got this look on her face and I knew that baby was coming and I
yelled for help. Everybody in the place whipped out a cell phone and dialed
911.”
“How
did it all end up?”
“Well, next scene in the dream is Mary
sitting in my Barcalounger nursing Baby Jesus and watching Dr.Oz on my
widescreen. Nasty shepherds were tromping through the house and Wise Men were
kneeling on my floor and UPS delivered boxed and boxes of gold, frankincense,
and myrrh.”
“So
what’s your big theological question? Sometimes a dream is just a dream.”
“Lee, do you think that it was just a dream?”
“Jeremiah,
it doesn’t matter what I think. What do you think? Maybe after all these years
of running from Jesus . . . “
“Yeah, I think that I helped birth the little
fellow and then he just moved right into my home.”
“Jesus
is coming soon, Jeremiah Obadiah. Soon and very soon. Merry Christmas.”
Merry
Christmas to all and to all a good night.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment