A Kingdom Miracles Dr. D. Jay Losher 21 June 2015 + United Christian Parish Mark 4:35-41 = miracles l Staggs is a Baptist minister in San Antonio. He s gifted with a dramatic flair and does a mean Dietrich Bonhoeffer imitation in his one person show. Al Staggs tells of his own wife s illness and death. Several friends came by a few weeks before his wife passed. With the best of intentions, they would offer stories of miraculous healings. His wife growing annoyed with such reports finally silenced these well-meaning visitors with: It hasn t worked that way for us. Staggs began to ponder the helpfulness, or the lack thereof, of such healing stories under the circumstances. For all the successful miraculous healing stories, he asks: Has your vaulted prayer program yet kept anyone alive forever?... Eventually we all die, including those who were healed of their particular disease. No one has yet managed to avoid the grim reaper. So why save our success stories for just those precious few who have been allowed a few months or years longer than they would otherwise have had? 1 He has a point and a good one. Miracles today may be rare, but they do happen, yet why you and not me? Does God play favorites? Does Yahweh reward those with stronger faith? Or is it just Adonai keeping to a logic we cannot possibly fathom? he question of the hour: do Tmiracles happen today? We want to think so. The outrage over the horrific massacre at the Emanuel AME church takes the form of a call to action rather than that 1
of a prayer, yet the longing for a miracle, God s miracle is indeed there. The Gospels are full of miracles. Jesus performed a multitude of miracles. Today it is the story of the stilling of the storm; other times exorcisms and healings, the feeding the 5,000, changing water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead, you can name many more. For 1700 years, miracles were part and parcel of the Christian faith. Then came the Enlightenment and at least for the Mainline Church, all that changed. The questions confounding modern Christians are whether the miracles in Scripture actually happened, how they happen, why they happen, and, if they did happen, do they happen today? e have all tried to make sense of W the Bible s miracles. We have all had to come to terms with them one way or another. Some time or another, every one of us has likely prayed for a miracle ~ certainly as children exploring the faith, but some of us continue into adulthood. Almost every follower of the faith has wrestled with them in one way or another. Some parts of the modern church rather naively reject the very idea of miracles in any era. Other parts of Jesus family naively accept miracles as a common happening today and millennia ago. Some contemporary clergy even encourage members to expect a miracle. Most of us are somewhere in the middle with a complex understanding of the relationship between faith and miracles. partial answer can be found in our text A itself. As Jesus miracles go, this stilling of the storm is a relatively minor one. The disciples are in a boat and a terrifying storm blows up. Jesus chastises the wind and stills the storm. The disciples react with awe and wonder. It is short 2
and sweet and straightforward and if we blink we will miss it. But this is a miracle nonetheless ~ and it has a meaning in Mark that is not quite what we think. In the stilling of the storm in Mark, it is not about faith but rather trust: Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith? While the word faith is used here, the point is not so much faith as it is fearless trust in God s power and protection. Jesus message to us modern followers, as well as the Apostles in the boat: we can trust Jesus to be with us always, to let no ultimate harm come to us, even beyond the end of the age. From the Marcan perspective, miracles are not dependent on our faith. Jesus stilled the storm despite his clearly noting the weak faith of the disciples. For Mark, God s purpose in miracles is for awe and wonder at God, yet not necessarily for that awe and wonder to create faith. The Marcan message is that even Jesus most powerful miracles are not the point and are certainly not the reason to follow Jesus. What God does in resurrecting Jesus is the point, the only point of the Gospel. All Jesus signs and wonders point unwaveringly to the resurrection. y mother Jean suffered a severe case of polio in the last polio M epidemic in the 50 s. The rest of her life, she was confined to a bed and wheelchair. When I was in elementary school a family moved in across the street with sons my own age. Steve and I often played together after school. Steve s mother would visit often as well ~ she was of the Expect a miracle! faithhealing side of Christianity. Well-meaning and with the best of intentions, she would pray for healing and tell my mother that she would walk again if she only had enough faith. Over time, the well intentioned prayer took on a more judgmental tone: Jean, you re not walking yet, you don t have enough faith. My mother had some of the strongest faith I have ever encountered. Afterwards on those occasions, my mother would be in tears. I would say, Mother, please don t cry. She s wrong saying your faith is weak. Mother would explain she wasn t crying because she thought her own faith 3
was weak. She wasn t even crying because she couldn t walk. She was crying because the faith of her friend required a miracle in order to believe: God, I ll believe if hat dear friend, with all her good Tintentions, she rationalizes the failure to receive a miracle as a sign of weakness. She reduces prayer down to: Jean, if you were worthy God will give you what you ask. That emphatically is not how God works. Jesus didn t work that way either. God s logic is indeed well above our own logic and God s thoughts are indeed far beyond ours. Those on whom God bestows or does not bestow a miracle is a calculus we cannot make, nor should we ever try. We do not, emphatically do not. earn miracles. God grants miracles not because of our worthiness ~ but in spite of our unworthiness. That s what we mean by grace. What is a miracle? There are plenty of definitions but the one closest to our text today would be: A miracle is anything which the eye of faith discerns as God s presence, power and purpose. Without faith-filled sight nothing appears miraculous. With the eyes of faith, everything and every moment is a miracle. espite being good, post-enlightenment, post-modern people, we D still wrestle with miracles. We use the term flippantly. We call things miracles that really aren t. We often come to God in a crisis of our own making, expecting God to abort the laws of physics and lead us miraculously out of the messes we have gotten ourselves into. More often than not we are disappointed because God doesn t work that way. So we conclude there are no miracles. Yet, the real miracles, the best miracles are the unexpected ones, the surprising ones, the ones we may not have even prayed for. The real miracles, God s miracles are unanticipated. That s grace. That s love. 4
The good news is that miracles come with God s realm ~ indeed miracles are a cardinal sign of God s reign. Living in God s dream reality means healing, health and wholeness are commonplace, even God s perfect justice for a massacre in South Carolina can happen, will happen. Miracles unimaginable. As to the disciples in that capsizing boat, Jesus promises no ultimate harm will come to any of us, even to the end of this age, even beyond to the endless age. God s plan for us does include miracles for which we are in no way worthy ~ unearned, surprising beyond imagination, unlimited in time and space. 1 William J. Bausch, Once Upon a Gospel: Inspiring Homilies and Insightful Reflections, pp. 457-9 5