Do You Believe in Miracles?

sermon by Carrie Eikler

I have a question easy to ask, but likely hard to answer.

Do you believe in miracles?

Yes?  No?

I’m not going to venture who among you would say yes and who would say no.  But I would venture to guess that among you, there is what I like to call a “but” response.  These but responses are very common among us, I believe.

Do you believe in miracles?    “Yes, but…” 

Do you believe in miracles?    “No, but…”

Do you believe in miracles?

 

Miracles are tricky things to talk about in a Western Christian context.  Add to that a largely Protestant dismissiveness of mystery and a twenty-first century skepticism and rationalism, it is easy to leave the miracles stories in the bible as nice fairy tales, but not things to hitch our hopes on.

When we encounter miracle stories--when we talk about the presence of these stories in our sacred text-- it is, for me, spoken with reservation.

Because our belief or lack of belief in miracles points to something.

It points to how we see God working in the world.  It points to what we do or do not believe is possible in the natural realm.  It points to how and what we put our faith in.

And we are nervous to share those possibilities with other people.  Either our church folk won’t appreciate our rational doubts, or our non-church friends will feel we are too…

I was presented with this…

In Allegheny Mennonite Conference there is a new church plant in Pittsburgh.  It is made up entirely of immigrants from the south Asian countries of Nepal and Bhutan.  You may remember a couple of years ago, a prayer request went out to pray for a baby named Simran.  Simran was born and not expected to live.  Her parents along with other sisters and brothers in the congregation gathered around Simran and prayed over Simran and waited on Simran and blessed Simran.

The doctors had said there was little hope.

Simran is alive and well today.  Was it a miracle?  Was it the prayers?

Then at the Allegheny Conference delegate gathering last October, Simran’s parents brought her to the meeting.  Simran was well beyond the age when most young children walk, but she showed no signs of being able to.  Her parents asked for prayers, prayers to strengthen little Simran’s legs, to help her walk.

The delegate body gathered around Simran and her parents, laid their hands on them and prayed.

We received word that the next day, Simran, who showed no previous ability to walk, took a step.  And then another.  And Simran walked.

Why did this happen?  How did it happen? 

I think what blocks me from fully embracing the possibility of miracles iswhy do some people get them, and some people don’t?  It’s the question Torin’s dad posed recently when preaching on Job…why do bad things happen to good people?

Why didn’t a miracle happen to those who died in the mudslide in Seattle, or the jetliner from Malaysia?  Why weren’t fervent prayers for a miracle answered by the mother who watched her young son die from leukemia, or answered by the young man who watched his partner die of AIDS?

These are the questions that have, in the past, bound me up and prevented me from embracing the possibilities of miracles.

I posed this question to my virtual community on Facebook.  I sometimes post things to generate conversation that might help me process my sermon.  So I simply asked “Do you believe in miracles?”  Here are some of the answers:

“Yes”

“No”

“Anything is possible”

“absolutely. Yet....I think that the miracle is in that we see what is already in place and happening”

"no. I believe in miraculous events, wonders seen and unseen, unexplainable phenomena and grace. But supernatural interventions are never going to be my thing because they are too hitched to a cosmology I don't follow."

"Yes. I believe creation is full of mysteries I will never comprehend, and some of those mysteries are miraculous."

"I believe life is miraculous on so many levels that it feels magical and unexplainable. I believe when incredibly good things happen to us…and being unexpected or unexplainable, we call it a miracle. But when something tragic happens that we can't explain, we don't call it a miracle."

"Miracles are everywhere, constant and ingrained in every cell of our body and every wee atom."

I loved all these answers.  And yet one, from our very own Elesha Coffman, who is now a professor of church history at the Dubuque Seminary responded to the question Do you believe in miracles with the following: Yes, but I’d say they are best glimpsed by not staring straight at them sort of like the Pleiades”.  She then attached a link to a question forum where someone asked the question

“I've noticed that the Pleiades but when I look directly at the constellation, it suddenly goes dim and it's more difficult to make out the individual stars.”  The Pleiades are a seven star cluster that is in the constellation Taurus.  But many have found that the clearest way to see these stars are not by looking directly at them, but to look around them, or to use your peripheral vision.  Once you try to look directly at them, head on, squinty to see the detail, it all goes fuzzy.

The answer to this question has to do with eye structure, which one respondent went into great detail about.  It’s about how we use the rods and cones in our eyes.  The cones in our eyes are greatly sensitive to color and work best in bright light.  This contrasts the works of rods which are more effective in low light conditions.  These rods are located off the center of our retina, meaning we see more clearly at night when looking not at the center or straight on.  This is called “averted vision.”

So what Elesha was pointing to, and a way that helps me look at these miracle stories of Jesus is embracing this averted vision. Not averting as in looking away, but averting as looking around, or looking from a different perspective in the darkness…in the space around the object, the stars, the miracle.

Our rational mind wants to read the miracle stories, or think about miracles in how the story and the action bumps up and challenges our conventional thinking of the physical.  Or we look at the story and hold it up as a biblical truth that validates our traditional thinking of spiritual truths.  So would it mean to look at the miracle stories, not looking at them straight on, but glimpsing them indirectly?

Let’s look at our miracle story today, the raising of Lazarus, with this averted vision.

I like that this all goes down in the dark, so already, we are using a different sort of vision, aren’t we?  Getting those rods in gear.  If we look around the story, we will take our focus off of Lazarus for a moment and the miracles that happened to him and looking at the side at the mysterious miraculous things going on.

And so much goes on in this story, my friend.

My favorite thing that happens is that here Martha gets a chance to redeem her scarred reputation as a whirling dervish who was too busy to sit by Jesus’ feet where Mary was.  You remember.  Martha, Martha.  Why do you bustle about when you could sit here?

Well, here it is Martha’s doing that gets something done.  She runs out into the dark, while Mary sits…you guessed it…at home.  Now I don’t mean to diminish Mary here, but I have to say I’m glad Martha gets some good stuff her way.  This miracle story starts to illumine when can action, busyness, assertiveness…be holy. 


When take our gaze away from looking directly at Lazarus, we see something about Jesus that we don’t come across much: his weeping.  His being moved.  Or as commentator David Howell says, here we witness “that even Jesus finds death horrible and gut-wrenching and real. What a relief that Jesus is moved to tears by our tears when we mourn. There is, as the book of Ecclesiastes tells us, "a time to mourn" (3:4). Apparently even for God.”


And I think that this averted sight can help us not just look at the goodness of miracles in a new way, but the pain of tragedy.  When September 11 happened, many parents sought ways to protect their children from the horror of the event, but media made that challenging.  Mr. Rogers was still alive at that time and he recounted something his mother told him as a child.  When he would see some catastrophe on the newsreels at the movies (because Mr. Rogers didn’t have a TV until he was out of college), when he would feel scared by what he saw, his mother would tell him:
 
“Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, he said, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world…”They are often on the sidelines, but they are there.  That’s where our focus should be.”

Even Mr. Rogers shares this wisdom.  Look around, on the sidelines.  Here you will see miracles taking place.  Small miracles.  Small acts of mercy.
 When we started looking around the miracles, our eye sight changes.  Or maybe it’s our heart. We may unbind the need to look at these stories as factual accounts, and begin to see them as stories that point to something else, maybe even something more amazing, more incredible, more miraculous.