It's a Miracle
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 10, 2006
Do you believe in miracles? On any given weekend in the fall, lots of football fans do. There are miracle catches and Hail Mary passes and miracle upsets—at least if you believe the sports announcers.
Miracle is a word that’s tossed around pretty loosely these days. Those football plays weren’t miracles. Now, if a team never bothered to practice and didn’t bother to even design any plays…now perhaps a spectacular win could be a miracle. But maybe not even then.
We tend to use the word miracle to mean something unexpected or something unlikely. The Red Sox winning the World Series? That seemed to be against the odds, since they’d been trying for a century. And the so-called ’69 Miracle Mets? Flukey and unexpected, but hardly a miracle. Both of those teams were made up of professional, highly trained, not to mention highly paid, baseball players. Call me crazy, but I’ll bet good money that this year’s World Series will be won by a team of professional, highly trained, highly paid baseball players.
You see, the odds are longer for some teams than others. But nothing’s impossible, even for the Cubs.
Even some wildly improbable occurrences turn out to have better odds than you’d think. I did an internship in hospital chaplaincy at a Catholic hospital on Long Island a few years ago. I remember running into one of the nuns I worked with in Washington, in the bookstore of the National Cathedral.
At the time, we were stunned at the coincidence—but it was only a coincidence, hardly a miracle. After I thought about it, it was a Saturday afternoon, when the tourists are out by the busload. New York and Washington are easily accessible. Washington is a big tourist city, so it’s not like we met in Omaha. And where are a nun and a seminarian more likely to run into one another, in a cathedral gift shop or a baseball park?
In our case, it wouldn’t be a baseball park. Sister Edith is a Yankees fan. Yuck. But you see, what seemed wildly improbable was actually statistically reasonable. You probably have similar stories, and while they’re fun stories, they’re not miracles.
The real miracles are the things that would take a supercomputer to figure out, if even that. Think about the percentage probabilities of your birth—once you figure in the chances of your parents meeting and falling in love, then down to the very possibility of the particular sperm and egg joining …. it’s amazing. The fact that you’re who you are and not, well, not your brother or your somebody never born…the odds of that are so high that I think of you as a miracle.
And on the other hand—well, we all had to be somebody. So maybe the miracle isn’t in the fact that I’m who I am and you’re who you are, but rather that we’re anybody at all. That God put us humans here on this earth, through that crazy evolutionary way of his creation. That God decided we were worth putting here at all, and loves us enough to keep around despite all our boneheadedness—that to me is a miracle. That’s the big-picture view of miracles. Creation as miraculous.
That big-picture view helps me in looking at the miracles in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus performs two miracles. First, he hears the plea of the Syrophoenician woman and heals her daughter, without lifting a finger. Then he heals a deaf man. Here, he does lift a finger, putting his fingers in the man’s ears. Two impressive miracles.
But you have to ask, so what? Jesus walked around healing people. He’s God! Are we supposed to be surprised that Jesus, God on earth, could heal people? How does that affect us today?
Well, if that’s all Jesus ever did, then it wouldn’t mean much to us. It would be a cute story, but not much else. But this story is more than just a cute story. It’s in Scripture for a couple of reasons. First, because these things happened. We believe that the stories of the Gospels are faithful retellings of the authentic life of Jesus.
But in addition to that, these events are in Scripture because they tell us something about the power of Jesus in relationship to our lives. They tell us that the healing power of Jesus does not just affect the deaf man or the Syrophoenician woman. In fact, if miracles only affected them, they wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else and we wouldn’t read about them today. But the power of Jesus does reach us today—it reaches you and me, everyone everywhere. All of creation. This is the big-picture view of the miraculous power of Jesus.
Both of these miracles came in response to prayer. The Syrophoenician woman came to Jesus, asked for healing for her daughter, even engaged in a back-and-forth with Jesus. Have you ever prayed that way? Not just asking for things, but truly communicating with the Holy One. Here, Scripture shows us that this is not only possible but desirable.
In the case of the deaf man, others asked Jesus for his healing. Intercessory prayer. Not only possible but desirable. We pray for ourselves and we pray for others. And Jesus listens, Jesus responds. Jesus performs miracles.
There are theologians who don’t believe in miracles, especially the sort of miracles involving delivery from certain death, inexplicable bolts of lightning, sudden physical healing—basically anything that involves nature behaving in unnatural ways.
And those theologians are wrong. I don’t want to argue with them this morning—I’ll save that particular argument for another day, because today I’m taking the big-picture view of miracles. Not the individual healing or the individual answered prayer. But rather the big-picture healings, the big-picture answered prayers.
As I said earlier, I think our very creation and continued existence on this earth is miraculous. One of the ways God upholds that miracle is through his church, the continued existence of God’s one holy catholic and apostolic church. It’s amazing—perhaps miraculous—that the Christian church has persevered for two millennia.
I am convinced that the church’s continued existence is one of the primary ways that God performs miracles in the world today is through the Church and her work.
Just think of it:
The blind are given sight—I’ve met folks from the Anglican church in Pakistan, where hundreds of Muslims pass through their hospital and eye clinic. I know it happens.
The sick are healed—You probably know of the clinic at St. Michael and All Angels, which makes tens of thousands of dollars worth of medicine available every month to those who cannot pay. You know it happens.
The naked are clothed—My seminary classmates opened a clothing shelter to do just that. My friend Chris organized fellow students into a brigade to hand out clothing to Katrina victims. I’ve seen it happen.
The hungry are fed—I’ve ladled out soup far and near, at the Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side and at the Soup Bowl in Anniston. You’ve handed out meals on Thanksgiving right here at St. Luke’s. You’ve made it happen.
Every time the folks in a church come together to make a meal for the family when there’s a funeral. When they give money to the rector’s discretionary fund, so a needy person’s power won’t be cut off. Every time a child drops a dime in the offering plate, slowly learning what it means to give.
Every time, it adds up. All these little things add up, so that every time we act through the Church in the name of Christ, we add to the miracle that is the Church of Christ on earth.
Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. Our faith is not dead. Our actions in and through the church constitute the ongoing miracle of Christ on earth. A church without works is a church without miracles.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church is a church that resonds to the needs of the world with prayer, with action, with living faith. And that’s why I believe in miracles.
Amen.
September 10, 2006
Do you believe in miracles? On any given weekend in the fall, lots of football fans do. There are miracle catches and Hail Mary passes and miracle upsets—at least if you believe the sports announcers.
Miracle is a word that’s tossed around pretty loosely these days. Those football plays weren’t miracles. Now, if a team never bothered to practice and didn’t bother to even design any plays…now perhaps a spectacular win could be a miracle. But maybe not even then.
We tend to use the word miracle to mean something unexpected or something unlikely. The Red Sox winning the World Series? That seemed to be against the odds, since they’d been trying for a century. And the so-called ’69 Miracle Mets? Flukey and unexpected, but hardly a miracle. Both of those teams were made up of professional, highly trained, not to mention highly paid, baseball players. Call me crazy, but I’ll bet good money that this year’s World Series will be won by a team of professional, highly trained, highly paid baseball players.
You see, the odds are longer for some teams than others. But nothing’s impossible, even for the Cubs.
Even some wildly improbable occurrences turn out to have better odds than you’d think. I did an internship in hospital chaplaincy at a Catholic hospital on Long Island a few years ago. I remember running into one of the nuns I worked with in Washington, in the bookstore of the National Cathedral.
At the time, we were stunned at the coincidence—but it was only a coincidence, hardly a miracle. After I thought about it, it was a Saturday afternoon, when the tourists are out by the busload. New York and Washington are easily accessible. Washington is a big tourist city, so it’s not like we met in Omaha. And where are a nun and a seminarian more likely to run into one another, in a cathedral gift shop or a baseball park?
In our case, it wouldn’t be a baseball park. Sister Edith is a Yankees fan. Yuck. But you see, what seemed wildly improbable was actually statistically reasonable. You probably have similar stories, and while they’re fun stories, they’re not miracles.
The real miracles are the things that would take a supercomputer to figure out, if even that. Think about the percentage probabilities of your birth—once you figure in the chances of your parents meeting and falling in love, then down to the very possibility of the particular sperm and egg joining …. it’s amazing. The fact that you’re who you are and not, well, not your brother or your somebody never born…the odds of that are so high that I think of you as a miracle.
And on the other hand—well, we all had to be somebody. So maybe the miracle isn’t in the fact that I’m who I am and you’re who you are, but rather that we’re anybody at all. That God put us humans here on this earth, through that crazy evolutionary way of his creation. That God decided we were worth putting here at all, and loves us enough to keep around despite all our boneheadedness—that to me is a miracle. That’s the big-picture view of miracles. Creation as miraculous.
That big-picture view helps me in looking at the miracles in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus performs two miracles. First, he hears the plea of the Syrophoenician woman and heals her daughter, without lifting a finger. Then he heals a deaf man. Here, he does lift a finger, putting his fingers in the man’s ears. Two impressive miracles.
But you have to ask, so what? Jesus walked around healing people. He’s God! Are we supposed to be surprised that Jesus, God on earth, could heal people? How does that affect us today?
Well, if that’s all Jesus ever did, then it wouldn’t mean much to us. It would be a cute story, but not much else. But this story is more than just a cute story. It’s in Scripture for a couple of reasons. First, because these things happened. We believe that the stories of the Gospels are faithful retellings of the authentic life of Jesus.
But in addition to that, these events are in Scripture because they tell us something about the power of Jesus in relationship to our lives. They tell us that the healing power of Jesus does not just affect the deaf man or the Syrophoenician woman. In fact, if miracles only affected them, they wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else and we wouldn’t read about them today. But the power of Jesus does reach us today—it reaches you and me, everyone everywhere. All of creation. This is the big-picture view of the miraculous power of Jesus.
Both of these miracles came in response to prayer. The Syrophoenician woman came to Jesus, asked for healing for her daughter, even engaged in a back-and-forth with Jesus. Have you ever prayed that way? Not just asking for things, but truly communicating with the Holy One. Here, Scripture shows us that this is not only possible but desirable.
In the case of the deaf man, others asked Jesus for his healing. Intercessory prayer. Not only possible but desirable. We pray for ourselves and we pray for others. And Jesus listens, Jesus responds. Jesus performs miracles.
There are theologians who don’t believe in miracles, especially the sort of miracles involving delivery from certain death, inexplicable bolts of lightning, sudden physical healing—basically anything that involves nature behaving in unnatural ways.
And those theologians are wrong. I don’t want to argue with them this morning—I’ll save that particular argument for another day, because today I’m taking the big-picture view of miracles. Not the individual healing or the individual answered prayer. But rather the big-picture healings, the big-picture answered prayers.
As I said earlier, I think our very creation and continued existence on this earth is miraculous. One of the ways God upholds that miracle is through his church, the continued existence of God’s one holy catholic and apostolic church. It’s amazing—perhaps miraculous—that the Christian church has persevered for two millennia.
I am convinced that the church’s continued existence is one of the primary ways that God performs miracles in the world today is through the Church and her work.
Just think of it:
The blind are given sight—I’ve met folks from the Anglican church in Pakistan, where hundreds of Muslims pass through their hospital and eye clinic. I know it happens.
The sick are healed—You probably know of the clinic at St. Michael and All Angels, which makes tens of thousands of dollars worth of medicine available every month to those who cannot pay. You know it happens.
The naked are clothed—My seminary classmates opened a clothing shelter to do just that. My friend Chris organized fellow students into a brigade to hand out clothing to Katrina victims. I’ve seen it happen.
The hungry are fed—I’ve ladled out soup far and near, at the Catholic Worker on the Lower East Side and at the Soup Bowl in Anniston. You’ve handed out meals on Thanksgiving right here at St. Luke’s. You’ve made it happen.
Every time the folks in a church come together to make a meal for the family when there’s a funeral. When they give money to the rector’s discretionary fund, so a needy person’s power won’t be cut off. Every time a child drops a dime in the offering plate, slowly learning what it means to give.
Every time, it adds up. All these little things add up, so that every time we act through the Church in the name of Christ, we add to the miracle that is the Church of Christ on earth.
Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. Our faith is not dead. Our actions in and through the church constitute the ongoing miracle of Christ on earth. A church without works is a church without miracles.
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church is a church that resonds to the needs of the world with prayer, with action, with living faith. And that’s why I believe in miracles.
Amen.
posted by Michael+ at 5:22 PM
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