Miracles

I Kings 17:8-24, Luke 7:11-17

June 6, 2010

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

I had miracles on my mind this week, and I began to notice how many conversations I had with people that would include one of us saying, “Now that’s a miracle!” Thing is, though, what was being identified as miracles were things like a boss actually being nice for a change or a child cleaning up their room unasked or getting a parking place on the street in the middle of New Haven! And I began to think how our definition of “miracle” has come down in the world.

Then I went to visit little Olivia in the hospital and found myself walking down hallways of rooms with very sick children whose parents, like the mother of the little boy in Zarephath in our story from I Kings, prayed for a miracle to heal their children. To get there I drove through streets of New Haven past homeless people, and I thought of the widow in the gospel story who surely would have been homeless since her only son, her only economic support in the world, had died. And I began to think that a true miracle in New Haven would not just be the restoration of some funding for an overflow homeless shelter this winter, which was accomplished, but some way to overcome the mental, physical, family and social problems besetting so many of the homeless in our city so that they could live secure and happy lives. And we are all praying for some kind of divine intervention with that oil spill! A kind boss, a clean room or a parking place are great things, but healed children and whole adults and a correction of this human created disaster in the gulf would be miracles.

Or would they. Exactly what is a miracle, anyway? In the Bible and church tradition, a miracle is usually defined as an act of divine intervention which creates an exception to natural law or usual human experience of the world. It is an Act of God, but in a different way than insurance policies use that term. It’s not a natural disaster, but an act which upsets the natural order for a specific, positive, reason. That’s how it’s often defined.

Now many modern, progressive Christians would say that there really are no miracles; everything in the Bible labeled a miracle has some sort of natural explanation. For instance, the feeding of the 5000 is often explained by saying that people were shamed by how the little boy was willing to share his small meal so they all got out the food they’d been hiding for their own use and shared it and so there was enough. In the stories like these two today which speak of someone dead being brought to life, some people say that these two weren’t really dead, but just appeared to be, and they were resuscitated as many people are today using something as simple as CPR. If miracles are seen as simply human actions which can be explained, the theory goes, then smart people will be more willing to be part of the church since they won’t be asked to believe anything which seems so patently unbelievable. Belief in miracles becomes something that Pentecostal or Evangelical Christian leaders foist off on the simple-minded.

But that’s not the only problem with believing in miracles. We wonder why God intervenes in one situation and not in another. Why did God bring the widow of Zarephath’s child back to life and not so many others? Why does one person get healed from cancer and call it a miracle of divine intervention when other equally good people do not? Why did the Berlin Wall fall down but not the barrier between North and South Korea? It makes God seem to be capricious and random. Or, as some say, we get a miracle if our faith is strong enough and we deserve it.

So the choice seems to be to say that if we search hard enough, science or psychology can explain everything we call a “miracle” and so God is not really part of this picture, or to say that if we just pray hard enough God will undoubtedly hear us and respond and if God does not, then maybe we are at fault. Or to say that it’s all beyond our capacity to understand and so we have to be resigned and patient when God doesn’t make the miracle we ask for.

I think there is another way for faithful, intelligent people to look at this matter, and I am influenced in my thinking by a modern UCC theologian named Bruce Epperly. Part of our problem in talking about miracles is that definition we started with, that a miracle is divine intervention that creates an exception to the natural order. It makes it something that God from outside does to change what’s “normal.” What if we thought about miracles as God on the inside, working steadily and patiently on the eternal project of the wholeness of creation? A miracle is a change not engineered from without, but a change that bubbles up from within the natural order, indeed recreating what is natural or normal.

This doesn’t really explain what is or isn’t a miracle or why they seem to happen to some people instead of others, but it changes the way we think about miraculous events. In the Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the stories of Jesus and the early church, miracles usually happened not just to make life better for one person, but for a greater purpose. God needed this widow in Zarephath to care for Elijah, and the miracle of making enough food and healing her son had to do with the larger prophetic project. Jesus’ miracles almost always had a larger agenda. He spent the majority of his healing time on those considered outsiders in his society: widows, children, Gentiles, those with diseases like leprosy or mental illness that got them cast out of society. He was making a point about the character of God and God’s challenge to what seemed at the time to be the natural order of society, and the response of the people to the miracle of healing in today’s story illustrates that the crowd got the point. They didn’t say, “Oh how nice for our sister and her son,” but “A great prophet has risen among us” and “God has looked favorably on the people.” Any one miraculous event is part of a larger picture and purpose. It may seem odd to say it, but it’s not really about the individuals involved. It’s about a continuing movement of God within our world to bring shalom; it’s about continuing signs that yes, in a world so filled with pain and failure, there is still evidence that God is at work and wholeness is possible. Miracles indicate that what seems to be the natural order of things may not be the order of things that God intends at all.

The actor Spalding Gray once described evil as a great cloud that moves over the earth and settles at random from place to place: Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kosovo, Rwanda. If that metaphor works for evil, then God might be understood as an underground spring that bubbles up continually from place to place in the world where the hard ground has been softened and the living water can bring life, unexpected, miraculous, challenging what seems to be the inevitable, from our point of view. Not God from above and outside, but God from among us. What seemed impossible becomes possible not because unnatural or supernatural things happen, but because wholeness bubbles up where we don’t expect it and catches us by surprise. It’s just a different way of thinking about what is natural.

Like bread and cup. These are the signs of God present in the most basic ways in our lives. What we eat and drink, filled with God’s spirit of wholeness, of holiness, of possibility and power. God’s deep desire for our wholeness and holiness and possibility and power for good expressed not in grand spectacles of power, but in what is right here, in what looks naturally like one thing, but may be something else in the natural order of God. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote “We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence not in unsolved problems, but in those that are solved.”

Is a problem solved a miracle? Perhaps. If it is solved in a way that brings hope and wholeness to the world, then it is definitely God at work. Whether or not it happens to me or those I love, I am glad God still bubbles up for good, sometimes revealing that what seems to me to be the natural order of things is actually not what God has intended for the world from the beginning. I am expecting miracles. Amen.