By Reverend Laurie DeMott

In the scriptures for today, that becomes a very important question because the dreams of the baker and the cupbearer are understood to be messages from God giving them a glimpse into their future. Joseph, who has himself had dreams foretelling his future will interpret the baker’s and the cupbearer’s dreams and later interpret the dreams of Pharaoh himself telling them that “the interpretation of dreams belongs to God.” So the question, “Did you dream last night?” would not be an idle question for the people of biblical times because they believed that dreams were a gateway to the divine.

Dream analysis has been practiced by many cultures throughout the ages. An ancient Greek manual on dream interpretation explained, for example, that "If a debtor dreams that any of his teeth fall out, regardless of their type, it signifies that he will pay off his debt." We might be inclined to think it means he needs to floss more but then dictionaries of dream symbols are not always straightforward. Nor are they always ancient. Point your browser at a website called Dream Moods.com and you will find a dictionary of 4000 keywords and images that appear in dreams and the meaning of those symbols. Maybe, for example, last night you dreamed of baboons. Well, according to Dream Moods.com that is God (or your subconscious depending on your philosophy) telling you that you have been expressing yourself in an inappropriate manner. But maybe you dreamed not about baboons but about eating noodles: well, those noodles are a prediction that you will be experiencing small losses soon and the website warns that if you saw yourself chowing down on a really huge plateful of macaroni, you'd better put away that charge card because you're in for a huge financial hit pretty soon.

And we are informed that if you dreamed that ever popular dream image of a xylophone, it means you will be achieving your greatest ambitions with high honor. Michael Phelps must be dreaming of xylophone orchestras!

I haven't had any dreams about baboons, noodles, or xylophones. My most recurring dream has me standing at the pulpit trying to preach while nobody in the congregation is paying a bit of attention but I don't need Dream Moods.com to interpret that for me.

Nor does Joseph really need a dreaming dictionary to interpret the dreams of the baker and the cupbearer. It doesn’t, after all, take a Jungian psychologist to understand that dreams of blossoming vineyards and succulent grapes trigger positive emotions in all of us while birds devouring a basket of bread feel much more threatening. Joseph’s interpretations were not grounded in the understanding of esoteric symbols but in his ability to “feel out” the dream. One rabbi suggested that Joseph’s skill was as much in reading people as it was in reading dreams.

But whether Joseph’ skill was in reading the symbols of dreams or in fact, in reading faces, both methods of interpreting God’s word fall into the category of what theologians call “personal revelation.” Personal revelation is any experience in which you have a sense of God speaking to you personally in a particular moment, the means of which might include a dream, vision, mystical experiences, or even simply a strong gut feeling.

Though we usually think of personal revelation as something big and flashy – the vision on the Road to Damascus kind of thing – many Christians actually have numerous experiences that fall in the category of personal revelation. How many times have you heard someone share a story something like this: “I was feeling really anxious about my future when a stranger walked by and greeted me saying, ‘It’s such a beautiful day that I just feel lucky to be alive,’ and suddenly it was as if I heard God saying to me, ‘Let go of your worries and focus on your blessings.’” Hearing God speak to us through the words of others, random events, or even beautiful sunsets are all experiences of personal revelation because in those experiences, we are sensing God’s presence in an intuitive way in that moment alive and intimate.

Many years ago, the theologian John Wesley developed a system that I have shared in many of our adult studies in which he describes four typical sources of divine inspiration. Wesley drew a box and then divided it into four equal segments using a horizontal line and a vertical line (like a foursquare court). In those four segments he wrote: scripture, church tradition, human reason, and revelation. Those four elements of inspiration, he said, stand in balance with one another and provide us several different avenues to understanding God’s word in our world. Because of our personalities and backgrounds, some of us may seek inspiration through one avenue more predominately than others – for example, Catholics are more likely to turn to church tradition for guidance to God’s desires while Baptists turn to scripture. Likewise, engineers might be more inclined to use their brain to reason out their theology while artists feel God’s presence through their intuition. Nevertheless, Wesley’s quadrilateral recognizes that God speaks in many ways and we should respect the freedom of God to do so.

Which is all fine and good, but there is a problem with the category of personal revelation that I think is not found in the other categories. Namely, to say that God can speak to our individual consciousness in mystical ways is to make claims that are ultimately untestable. If I say, "Scripture tells us such and such," you can break out your Bible and argue my position, but if I say, "I had an overwhelming sense of God's presence telling me to do such and such," what are you going to say? "No, you didn't?"

About 20 years ago, a man in Texas had a vision that he described in this way: “God showed me a vision that almost took my breath away. I was sucked into the Spirit ... and I found myself standing in the very presence of Almighty God. It just echoed into my being. And he said these words to me.... ‘Many of my ministers pray for my people, but I want you to pray the Prayer of Agreement with them’ . . . I have never seen the presence of God so powerful.... From that day forth, as I have been faithful to that heavenly vision, I've seen every kind of miracle imaginable happen when I pray the Prayer of Agreement with God's people."

This man established a ministry in which he taught that all of life's trials, especially poverty, were a result of sin, but if people prayed the prayer of agreement with him, God would reward the person with miracles and vast material riches. The prayer of agreement said that God would provide miracles if a person in turn made a “vow” of financial commitment to the ministry. The bigger the financial commitment, the bigger the miracle. People were so captivated by the power of this man’s vision that, at its height, his ministry was taking in more money than Madonna and Michael Jackson combined.

The evangelist’s name was Robert Tilton, and he was eventually investigated for fraud. ABC Prime Time showed a clip of Tilton standing in a mountain meadow in Colorado telling his viewing audience that he was heading into the wilderness for prayer just as Jesus did. Unlike Jesus, however, Tilton chose to have his wilderness experience in a posh ski resort flying first class to get there and even toting along 3 suitcases and his own television set for the 5 day stay. During the investigation, reporters determined that Tilton’s financial worth was approximately $60 million, but the most damning evidence against Tilton was not his money or his lifestyle – it was the picture of dumpsters filled with the prayer requests of viewers, tossed out by the ministry staff who kept only the checks.

It is these sorts of all too familiar stories that make us question the legitimacy of personal revelation. Visions, mystical voices, “burdens of the heart”, speaking in tongues, flames of the spirit, dreams, and even gut feelings are ultimately untestable and thus are easily manipulated or even faked. We want to believe that God really spoke to Joseph through his dreams – or to Moses in the burning bush or to Paul on the road to Damascus or even to ourselves in the overwhelming feeling we had one day of God’s spirit lifting us up from our despair – but at the same time, those experiences make us nervous and we wonder if such experiences are just our own greatest desires masquerading as God.

Certainly these were the doubts that Joseph’s family had when he reported that his dreams had revealed the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him. After all, how can one really tell whether this dream was a message from God or just the typical fantasy of the youngest child in the family imagining the day when he will be top of the totem pole instead of the bottom? But later in Joseph’s story, it is not his dreams that are the focus of the plot, nor do his interpretations say anything about his own future. He does try to use his gift to interpret dreams to win his release from prison but even that doesn’t happen initially and he continues to languish forgotten in his captivity.

When Paul received his vision on the road to Damascus, it led him not to fame and glory but to hardship and eventually martyrdom. When Moses heard God speaking in the burning bush, he did everything he could to argue his way out of what he knew God was asking him to do in that vision. And when Jesus bowed his head in the Garden of Gethsemane, the revelation he received called him not to personal gain but to the cross for the sake of the people.

In fact, while dream analysis obsesses over the meaning of the symbols of our dreams for our individual lives, the revelations that the Bible records contain the word of God not for the dreamer but for God’s people. God does speak to individuals in the Bible but does so because God is using that person as a vehicle to deliver hope to the rest of the people. We read the claims of people like Tilton and distrust his visions because they appear to benefit him while costing others while we can read almost exactly the same claim by someone like St. Francis and believe that God really did speak to him because his vision resulted in his giving up his great wealth to devote himself to a life of poverty and service toward others.

And so it turns out that the untestable claims of personal revelation are not so untestable after all. God is concerned always with the wholeness of all people, not just the happiness of individuals, and so the mystical experiences that lead a person to show greater concern for others, to comfort the broken-hearted, lift the poor from their poverty, bring a voice to the forgotten, and healing to their neighbors, are genuine experiences of God. And anything else is probably just your own ego talking.

God’s ways can be mystical but, in fact, they are not all that mysterious. Whether God is speaking to you through scripture, church tradition, the reasoning of your intellect, or the promptings of your intuition and personal revelation, God’s words will all be a variation on the same theme: Love your neighbor; care for the people, and I will be with you always to guide you in your task.

On the other hand, if you do dream of baboons, it wouldn’t hurt to ask yourself if maybe you need to work on your manners.