The Daily Guide. grow. pray. study. from The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, United States for for Wednesday, 04 January 2017 - "Another dream, another unwanted journey"

The Daily Guide. grow. pray. study. from The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, United States for  for Wednesday, 04 January 2017 - "Another dream, another unwanted journey"
Daily Scripture:
Matthew 2:13 After they had gone, an angel of Adonai appeared to Yosef in a dream and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother, and escape to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you to leave. For Herod is going to look for the child in order to kill him.” 14 So he got up, took the child and his mother, and left during the night for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until Herod died. This happened in order to fulfill what Adonai had said through the prophet,
“Out of Egypt I called my son.”[Matthew 2:15 Hosea 11:1]
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Reflection Questions:
Counter to the impression given in many Christmas pageants, Joseph did a lot more than stand by the manger while shepherds worshipped baby Jesus. Herod had killed some of his own sons who were potential rivals for his throne, so he certainly wouldn’t flinch from deadly action to try to wipe out the newborn Messiah. Matthew said God worked through Joseph’s attentive obedience to keep Mary and baby Jesus safe from the king’s dangerous paranoia.

• Joseph surely did not wake up every day and do whatever he had dreamed about the night before. Yet it was a life-and-death matter for him to promptly obey the dreams Matthew recorded. How can you discern which thoughts, dreams or “inner nudges” are from God? (Books like Bill Hybels’ The Power of a Whisper, Dallas Willard’s Hearing God and Adam Hamilton’s Why? offer in-depth insights into that important question.)
• In Jesus' day, Alexandria, Egypt’s population was probably about one-third Jewish. There were also other Jewish communities in Egypt. This made Egypt a safer refuge for Joseph, Mary and Jesus than it might be today. What people or places have given you safety or comfort in times of trouble in your life? Does realizing that Joseph, Mary and Jesus were refugees from political violence in any way speak to your perspective on the refugee issues that often generate heat in discussions today?

Today’s Prayer:
Loving Lord, like your people of old, you came out of Egypt, thanks to your vigilant, obedient parents. Help me know how to mix wisdom and compassion in welcoming strangers in your name. Amen.
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Our GPS Insights blog shares reflections each day from our pastors, staff and congregants.
Read today's reflection from Wendy Connelly. Wendy is wife to Mark and mom to two kids and is a seminary student at Saint Paul School of Theology.
Listen to today's Insight read by it's author, Wendy Connelly.
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Dreams play a vital role in the direction of God’s people. In today’s gospel, Joseph heeds a prophetic dream and obediently guides his family to Egypt. In the Hebrew Bible, another Joseph augurs the future through a series of interpreted dreams. Abimelech, Jacob, Solomon, Daniel, Pilate’s wife, Peter were dreamers, all.
I’ve kept a dream journal for many years. It sits beside my bed, a pen at-the-ready. I consider their study a spiritual discipline, though when I open up about the way dreams guide, warn, and sometimes reveal things I could not otherwise grasp, people often look at me askew.
This week, I had a robust conversation with my friend, Jim Kreider, a professor at the University of Kansas who specializes in working with people who have various supernatural experiences. We spoke of the suspicions that surround mystical experience, including dreams:
Wendy: As a seminary student, there are certain terms that we attach to the supernatural. We speak of visions, locutions, the word of knowledge. There are dreams, theophanies, healings, miracles, angels, visitations. Yet I find that many religious people, particularly those who identify as Christian – and I’m speaking from my own cultural milieu here – that most religious people in the West today have lost touch with the mystical tradition. That everything conduces to either what we believe or how we behave, but this sense of wonder and of Mystery is so deficient and anemic. What was once a vibrant characteristic of faith, is now labeled “new age” and “suspect”…
Jim: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s a huge loss. You read any sacred text, from any religious tradition and they’re just rife, they’re just full of these mystical experiences. And in fact, you know when I was younger, I thought that those were all metaphorical, or they were teaching tales – stories – which I think at one level they are. But at another level, they’re absolute reality, and so much is lost by trying to… well, I get it, we have to codify spiritual experience, which is so abstract, in order to make it accessible to our human minds, particularly at the level of consciousness we’re at today. So we turn it into something that’s accessible and concrete and palatable, but by doing so we lose the breadth and depth of what spiritual reality really is. We kind of put the divine, the numinous, into a little box, because that’s what we can tolerate. So it’s, rather than we being made in God’s own image, it’s kind of like we make God in our own image because then we can get it, we can understand that. And we lose the mystical. We lose it.
If you’re looking to take up a new spiritual discipline in 2017, consider keeping a record of dreams. Because surely, this world needs more dreamers.

WENDY CONNELLY
Wendy Connelly is wife to Mark and mom to two kids and is a seminary student at Saint Paul School of Theology.

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The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection
13720 Roe Avenue
Leawood, Kansas 66224, United States
913.897.0120
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