The Problem With Miracles In Our Time
Sermon
Church People Beware!
If the truth be known, most of us would have to admit that we walk a very fine line between believing and not believing. There are times in our lives when, yes, we do seem to believe all these things we say about God when we read the Bible and sing the hymns in our own churches. There are even times when we'd say, yes, we feel close to God, whatever that means.
But there are also those desert times in our lives when we wonder whether or not we believe any of it at all anymore: God, Jesus, the church, discipleship -- all of it seems like so much pie in the sky, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's especially true of miracles, isn't it?
The problem with miracles is that they don't seem to happen any more, so we're not sure we believe in them anymore. So we joke about the miracles in the Bible, especially these. We tell the one about the three preachers out fishing in the boat, two of which walk to shore on the water and when the third tries, sure enough, he sinks, and one of the two says to the other "You think we should tell him where the rocks are?" You can make the one who sank any denomination you want to, depending on your audience. But whatever way it's told, it's not a very ecumenical joke.
Or there's the one about the boy who came home from church and his mother asked him what he learned in Sunday school and he told her about Moses leading Israeli troops using the latest surface-to-air missiles against the Egyptians. And she says, "Are you telling the truth?" And he says, "No, but if I told you what the teacher said happened, you'd never believe me."
We don't know what to do with the miracles in the Bible, so we tell these same old jokes over and over. Or we try to explain them, doing our best to fit them into our view and experience of the world. So the waters didn't really part, in true Cecil B. DeMille fashion, say some scholars, but the wind blew on the shallow Reed Sea as it often does and the waters moved over a little at that moment. And Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes but opened the people's hearts to share the food they had brought and hidden in their coats or Peter had done a head count during the sermon and sent out for 5,000 box lunches to go.
Barclay says about this walking on the water story that Jesus was really at the edge of the shore since the epi ten thalassan could mean either "on the water" or "toward the water." It could mean that the wind had driven the boat to the northern shore of the lake, and Jesus, seeing his disciples "struggling in the moonlight… came walking through the surf of the shore" and so startled the disciples that they were terrified and thought he was walking on the water (William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, vol. 2, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1957, p. 117).
Or there is the even more fanciful attempt by the 18th century German theologian of the Enlightenment Period, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, who suggested it's possible that there was some timber near the shore and that Jesus stepped on it and felt that it bore his weight and he approached the boat on it, clambering in beside the disciples, and the disciples who never saw things very clearly anyway, always saw more than was happening, passed on for posterity the story of Jesus' journey on the cedar wood as if the waves themselves had borne him up (Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, Miracles in Dispute: A Continuing Debate, trans. by Margaret Kohl, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1969, pp. 67-79). I call this one the "lumberjack log-rolling theory" which should change the joke from showing the dumb preacher where the rocks are to showing him where the logs are.
We can't believe in the miracles, so we either joke about them or we try to explain them rationally and in so doing, try to fit them into the world as we know it, but the explanations are often more ludicrous than the miracles themselves.
Of course, biblical literalists want us to believe that God had a magical touch in biblical days and some believe with healings that it still happens today. After all, the Israelites had it right with their view of the human being as a "psychosomatic unity, an indivisible amalgam of body and soul" whereby if either goes wrong, the other is affected. So the verb the New Testament uses for "save" means both to save and to heal and the word used for "Savior" can mean either Savior or physician.
Buechner, hardly an ultra-conservative, is right on this matter: "Ever since the time of Jesus, healing has been a part of the Christian tradition. In this century it has usually been associated with religious quackery or the lunatic fringe, but as the psychosomatic dimension of disease has come to be taken more… seriously… it has regained some of its former respectability (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, New York, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1973, p. 36)."
Another way of saying it would be you don't have to be a follower of Oral Roberts to believe in the miraculous healing power of God. You can even be a Presbyterian or a Methodist or a Baptist or an Episcopalian or a UCC or a Disciples or a Lutheran or a Catholic, even in today's world.
Certainly all things are possible with God and we want to believe when we are sinking, and sooner or later most of us feel like we are, whether or not we want to admit it. We all have that sinking feeling at one time or another in our lives even more than Garrison Keillor's 25 portly Lutheran ministers stuck out on the lake on Carl Krebsbach's pontoon boat which Pastor Ingqvist suddenly realized was tipping bow to stern and slowly sinking into the lake as they discussed theology and shared their concerns about rural ministry. All the time Pastor Ingqvist kept noticing the boat tipping bow to stern deeper and deeper until one tip too many pitched several of the ministers right into the lake, a renewal of their baptism. "Eight of them took their step for total immersion (Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home, New York, Viking, 1987, pp. 103-108)."
Now that's a comical scene, especially the way Garrison Keillor tells it. But the sinking that Matthew is describing here isn't comical at all. It's the kind of sinking feeling you experience when you're waiting for the doctor's report on yourself or your loved one and sure enough, the doctor says what you were afraid he was going to say. It's the kind of sinking feeling you get when all your friends are dying around you and you feel all alone. Or, you're about to start in a new school and you're afraid you won't know anyone, or your marriage or your business or life itself, is on the rocks, and like Peter you want to cry out, "Lord, save me, I'm about to go under."
Yes, when we are sinking, we want to believe. It's more than "no atheists in foxholes" because we really genuinely want to believe, not just in God, that's easy enough, but that God really intervenes in our lives and our world. We want to believe in miracles, but we're not sure they really happen anymore. We want to believe, but we're not sure we can.
Then suddenly it hits us. The real problem with miracles is not that they don't happen. The real problem is they do. We just don't see them because they happen in ways that we don't think. Augustine had it figured out. Miracles, he believed, are occurrences which are contrary not to nature itself, but to what is known of nature. So, says Sockman, "I do not believe Christ did what he did by suspending or violating the laws which medical science has discovered to be valid. What he did do was to bring into use laws higher than modern science has yet charted (Ralph Sockman, 20 Centuries of Great Preaching, vol. 10, edited by Clyde E. Fant Jr. and William M. Pinson Jr., Waco, Texas, Word Books, 1971, p. 176)."
But more than that, they are acts of God in this sense: "… history is the arena where God intervenes specifically from time to time," comforting us, pressing demands on us and judging us for our disobedience. "It is these extraordinary interventions which, properly speaking, are the miracles of the Bible… they are sufficiently startling, unusual and unexpected to call attention to themselves" and point as signs to the kingdom of God.
So Jesus' miracles of healing and feeding were not told as proof of God's kingdom, but as signs of it and as such only faith recognizes them as acts of God, for miracles don't prompt faith -- faith helps us see miracles. Miracles, then, in the real sense, are "completely inaccessible" to human reason because their causes lie "solely within the will of God," and only faith can recognize this (Keller, op. cit. p. 21). Even the skeptical, doubting Reverend Lewis Merrill in John Irving's, A Prayer for Owen Meany, understood when he said that miracles don't cause belief; they don't make faith out of thin air; "you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles (New York, Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 524)."
The problem so many have with miracles today is that they think they prove something. But what do miracles really prove? Nothing. A thousand miracles would neither prove nor disprove Jesus' teaching. Miracles can neither make true teaching false nor false teaching true. Jesus understood this. That's why he kept downplaying the miracles. That's why he kept telling his disciples to keep quiet about them. You know… the Messianic Secret and all.
There are too many even in our day who think a miracle will show these unbelievers that God exists, but that's not the way miracles work. In Bruce Marshall's novel Father Malachy's Miracle, Father Malachy prays fervently that God would physically move an obnoxious dance hall on Edinburgh Street to the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth. And sure enough, it happens. But instead of bringing reknown to himself and his church, the miracle is a source of embarrassment. Far from strengthening faith in God, it becomes the focal point of public ridicule. Even the police are angry over the disturbance of the peace it causes. "A pretty kettle of fish," says the bishop. "Umph! A miracle in the 20th century."
Bruce Marshall's theology is right on target in this novel. God is not some divine magician ready to pull rabbits out of every hat we offer up in prayer; and miracles do not produce faith. Only in faith do we even recognize them at all. Only in faith did Mary recognize Jesus at the empty tomb. Only in faith did the disciples recognize the stranger on the road to Emmaus. And how do real miracles come to us? Only when all seems lost and the limits of our human resources have been reached and passed, when all hope seems gone and there's nothing left but our faith in God.
It may happen in the dramatic turnaround of an incurable illness. It may happen in the sudden ability to face death unafraid when the illness still prevails and seems to hold you in its clutches to the very end and the miracle is that in the face of your own death you are never defeated. It may come in changed attitudes toward people and events. It may happen through us as the hungry are fed and the naked are clothed in our own churches. The movie Always argues that it happens through the thoughts placed in our minds by angels or loved ones now departed. Who knows how it comes? Whatever way it comes, I know it does as God intervenes at those points when we seem to be sinking the most. I think that that's what the biblical writers believed.
We know that miracles happen in occurrences that are unexplainable except to the eyes of faith. So the 19-year-old Khum Paot recounts her narrow escape from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after an arduous journey with 100 other refugees through miles of jungle, canals, mountains and rivers. Between them and freedom were Communist troops and "a stretch of jungle ground covered with thorns." At midnight the little party crossed a valley between two high mountain ranges. "We could see absolutely nothing," she told a missionary later. "We couldn't even see where to step." Then suddenly scores of fireflies swarmed into view, and by the glow of firefly light, they made their way to the next mountain.
At Kham Put refugee camp Khum Paot was invited to a Christian meeting. When she came in, she pointed to a picture on the wall of the chapel. "I know that old man," she said. "He's the one who led us to freedom." She'd never seen it before, but it was a picture of Jesus.
I don't know how these things happen. I just know they do and only the eyes of faith can see them. I don't know if the waters parted for Moses the way they did for Charlton Heston or what exactly happened by that boat with the disciples that day, but I can tell you this -- you'll never convince them that God wasn't there. Whatever happened, God intervened and saved them. And it still happens today, in our world, in our time.
I know it's not easy to believe in miracles in our time. The problem with them is not that they don't happen. The problem is that they do. The question is do we have faith enough to see them and experience in them God's power and God's presence in our lives? Only you can answer that question for yourself.
But there are also those desert times in our lives when we wonder whether or not we believe any of it at all anymore: God, Jesus, the church, discipleship -- all of it seems like so much pie in the sky, a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. It's especially true of miracles, isn't it?
The problem with miracles is that they don't seem to happen any more, so we're not sure we believe in them anymore. So we joke about the miracles in the Bible, especially these. We tell the one about the three preachers out fishing in the boat, two of which walk to shore on the water and when the third tries, sure enough, he sinks, and one of the two says to the other "You think we should tell him where the rocks are?" You can make the one who sank any denomination you want to, depending on your audience. But whatever way it's told, it's not a very ecumenical joke.
Or there's the one about the boy who came home from church and his mother asked him what he learned in Sunday school and he told her about Moses leading Israeli troops using the latest surface-to-air missiles against the Egyptians. And she says, "Are you telling the truth?" And he says, "No, but if I told you what the teacher said happened, you'd never believe me."
We don't know what to do with the miracles in the Bible, so we tell these same old jokes over and over. Or we try to explain them, doing our best to fit them into our view and experience of the world. So the waters didn't really part, in true Cecil B. DeMille fashion, say some scholars, but the wind blew on the shallow Reed Sea as it often does and the waters moved over a little at that moment. And Jesus didn't really multiply the loaves and fishes but opened the people's hearts to share the food they had brought and hidden in their coats or Peter had done a head count during the sermon and sent out for 5,000 box lunches to go.
Barclay says about this walking on the water story that Jesus was really at the edge of the shore since the epi ten thalassan could mean either "on the water" or "toward the water." It could mean that the wind had driven the boat to the northern shore of the lake, and Jesus, seeing his disciples "struggling in the moonlight… came walking through the surf of the shore" and so startled the disciples that they were terrified and thought he was walking on the water (William Barclay, The Gospel of Matthew, vol. 2, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1957, p. 117).
Or there is the even more fanciful attempt by the 18th century German theologian of the Enlightenment Period, Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, who suggested it's possible that there was some timber near the shore and that Jesus stepped on it and felt that it bore his weight and he approached the boat on it, clambering in beside the disciples, and the disciples who never saw things very clearly anyway, always saw more than was happening, passed on for posterity the story of Jesus' journey on the cedar wood as if the waves themselves had borne him up (Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, Miracles in Dispute: A Continuing Debate, trans. by Margaret Kohl, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1969, pp. 67-79). I call this one the "lumberjack log-rolling theory" which should change the joke from showing the dumb preacher where the rocks are to showing him where the logs are.
We can't believe in the miracles, so we either joke about them or we try to explain them rationally and in so doing, try to fit them into the world as we know it, but the explanations are often more ludicrous than the miracles themselves.
Of course, biblical literalists want us to believe that God had a magical touch in biblical days and some believe with healings that it still happens today. After all, the Israelites had it right with their view of the human being as a "psychosomatic unity, an indivisible amalgam of body and soul" whereby if either goes wrong, the other is affected. So the verb the New Testament uses for "save" means both to save and to heal and the word used for "Savior" can mean either Savior or physician.
Buechner, hardly an ultra-conservative, is right on this matter: "Ever since the time of Jesus, healing has been a part of the Christian tradition. In this century it has usually been associated with religious quackery or the lunatic fringe, but as the psychosomatic dimension of disease has come to be taken more… seriously… it has regained some of its former respectability (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, New York, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1973, p. 36)."
Another way of saying it would be you don't have to be a follower of Oral Roberts to believe in the miraculous healing power of God. You can even be a Presbyterian or a Methodist or a Baptist or an Episcopalian or a UCC or a Disciples or a Lutheran or a Catholic, even in today's world.
Certainly all things are possible with God and we want to believe when we are sinking, and sooner or later most of us feel like we are, whether or not we want to admit it. We all have that sinking feeling at one time or another in our lives even more than Garrison Keillor's 25 portly Lutheran ministers stuck out on the lake on Carl Krebsbach's pontoon boat which Pastor Ingqvist suddenly realized was tipping bow to stern and slowly sinking into the lake as they discussed theology and shared their concerns about rural ministry. All the time Pastor Ingqvist kept noticing the boat tipping bow to stern deeper and deeper until one tip too many pitched several of the ministers right into the lake, a renewal of their baptism. "Eight of them took their step for total immersion (Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home, New York, Viking, 1987, pp. 103-108)."
Now that's a comical scene, especially the way Garrison Keillor tells it. But the sinking that Matthew is describing here isn't comical at all. It's the kind of sinking feeling you experience when you're waiting for the doctor's report on yourself or your loved one and sure enough, the doctor says what you were afraid he was going to say. It's the kind of sinking feeling you get when all your friends are dying around you and you feel all alone. Or, you're about to start in a new school and you're afraid you won't know anyone, or your marriage or your business or life itself, is on the rocks, and like Peter you want to cry out, "Lord, save me, I'm about to go under."
Yes, when we are sinking, we want to believe. It's more than "no atheists in foxholes" because we really genuinely want to believe, not just in God, that's easy enough, but that God really intervenes in our lives and our world. We want to believe in miracles, but we're not sure they really happen anymore. We want to believe, but we're not sure we can.
Then suddenly it hits us. The real problem with miracles is not that they don't happen. The real problem is they do. We just don't see them because they happen in ways that we don't think. Augustine had it figured out. Miracles, he believed, are occurrences which are contrary not to nature itself, but to what is known of nature. So, says Sockman, "I do not believe Christ did what he did by suspending or violating the laws which medical science has discovered to be valid. What he did do was to bring into use laws higher than modern science has yet charted (Ralph Sockman, 20 Centuries of Great Preaching, vol. 10, edited by Clyde E. Fant Jr. and William M. Pinson Jr., Waco, Texas, Word Books, 1971, p. 176)."
But more than that, they are acts of God in this sense: "… history is the arena where God intervenes specifically from time to time," comforting us, pressing demands on us and judging us for our disobedience. "It is these extraordinary interventions which, properly speaking, are the miracles of the Bible… they are sufficiently startling, unusual and unexpected to call attention to themselves" and point as signs to the kingdom of God.
So Jesus' miracles of healing and feeding were not told as proof of God's kingdom, but as signs of it and as such only faith recognizes them as acts of God, for miracles don't prompt faith -- faith helps us see miracles. Miracles, then, in the real sense, are "completely inaccessible" to human reason because their causes lie "solely within the will of God," and only faith can recognize this (Keller, op. cit. p. 21). Even the skeptical, doubting Reverend Lewis Merrill in John Irving's, A Prayer for Owen Meany, understood when he said that miracles don't cause belief; they don't make faith out of thin air; "you have to already have faith in order to believe in real miracles (New York, Ballantine Books, 1989, p. 524)."
The problem so many have with miracles today is that they think they prove something. But what do miracles really prove? Nothing. A thousand miracles would neither prove nor disprove Jesus' teaching. Miracles can neither make true teaching false nor false teaching true. Jesus understood this. That's why he kept downplaying the miracles. That's why he kept telling his disciples to keep quiet about them. You know… the Messianic Secret and all.
There are too many even in our day who think a miracle will show these unbelievers that God exists, but that's not the way miracles work. In Bruce Marshall's novel Father Malachy's Miracle, Father Malachy prays fervently that God would physically move an obnoxious dance hall on Edinburgh Street to the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth. And sure enough, it happens. But instead of bringing reknown to himself and his church, the miracle is a source of embarrassment. Far from strengthening faith in God, it becomes the focal point of public ridicule. Even the police are angry over the disturbance of the peace it causes. "A pretty kettle of fish," says the bishop. "Umph! A miracle in the 20th century."
Bruce Marshall's theology is right on target in this novel. God is not some divine magician ready to pull rabbits out of every hat we offer up in prayer; and miracles do not produce faith. Only in faith do we even recognize them at all. Only in faith did Mary recognize Jesus at the empty tomb. Only in faith did the disciples recognize the stranger on the road to Emmaus. And how do real miracles come to us? Only when all seems lost and the limits of our human resources have been reached and passed, when all hope seems gone and there's nothing left but our faith in God.
It may happen in the dramatic turnaround of an incurable illness. It may happen in the sudden ability to face death unafraid when the illness still prevails and seems to hold you in its clutches to the very end and the miracle is that in the face of your own death you are never defeated. It may come in changed attitudes toward people and events. It may happen through us as the hungry are fed and the naked are clothed in our own churches. The movie Always argues that it happens through the thoughts placed in our minds by angels or loved ones now departed. Who knows how it comes? Whatever way it comes, I know it does as God intervenes at those points when we seem to be sinking the most. I think that that's what the biblical writers believed.
We know that miracles happen in occurrences that are unexplainable except to the eyes of faith. So the 19-year-old Khum Paot recounts her narrow escape from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after an arduous journey with 100 other refugees through miles of jungle, canals, mountains and rivers. Between them and freedom were Communist troops and "a stretch of jungle ground covered with thorns." At midnight the little party crossed a valley between two high mountain ranges. "We could see absolutely nothing," she told a missionary later. "We couldn't even see where to step." Then suddenly scores of fireflies swarmed into view, and by the glow of firefly light, they made their way to the next mountain.
At Kham Put refugee camp Khum Paot was invited to a Christian meeting. When she came in, she pointed to a picture on the wall of the chapel. "I know that old man," she said. "He's the one who led us to freedom." She'd never seen it before, but it was a picture of Jesus.
I don't know how these things happen. I just know they do and only the eyes of faith can see them. I don't know if the waters parted for Moses the way they did for Charlton Heston or what exactly happened by that boat with the disciples that day, but I can tell you this -- you'll never convince them that God wasn't there. Whatever happened, God intervened and saved them. And it still happens today, in our world, in our time.
I know it's not easy to believe in miracles in our time. The problem with them is not that they don't happen. The problem is that they do. The question is do we have faith enough to see them and experience in them God's power and God's presence in our lives? Only you can answer that question for yourself.
