John 6:1 – 14
July 26, 2009
Last week we talked about our connection, or lack of connection, to God in this frenzied world. We looked at one thing we can do that might facilitate that connection – which is to keep the Sabbath. Good suggestion for busy folks.
This morning I want to look at another way we might better connect with God. However it’s a bit less conventional in mainline protestant circles than Sabbath keeping. In fact it surprises me a little bit that this is where my study, and hopefully the Holy Spirit, led me this week. I have been wondering if we all might benefit from believing in miracles – specifically the miracles of Jesus.
Hopefully you know me well enough to know that I don’t mean we should ignore science, historical study and the rational world. I could no more ignore such things as I could ignore you sitting in front of me right now. But I want to explore whether there is a way we might “believe” in miracles without leaving the real world of science and rational thought.
Similarly to how the call to Sabbath comes to us in the midst of our busy world, the idea of believing in miracles comes to us in our post-enlightened, rational, trust-only-in-science world. And it is as counter-cultural as the idea of Sabbath keeping in our fast paced society.
In general, the miracles in the bible have lost their power to speak to us and really affect us in similar ways to how they affected, for example, those present at the feeding of the 5,000. We can be, and often are, instructed by these miracles – meaning we look at what we might learn for our own context that will offer suggestions of what we should do. And is not necessary to believe that a literal miracle happened in order for us to find this instruction. But I know that while I can glean some instruction from the feeding of the 5,000, I am not profoundly and permanently changed by this miracle because, to put it bluntly, I don’t believe in it.
There are two reasons, at least, for our disbelief in, and emotional disconnection from, the miracles in the bible. First, we are well on the other side of the Enlightenment. It is a given. In the 18th century there was a massive shift in thinking that challenged how people – including Christians – thought the world worked. For one thing, we found scientific explanations for things that had previously been considered miracles. And the theologians and pastors and scholars of the day who were brave enough to integrate what others were learning with the Christian faith came to trust science over the possibility of miracles. They no longer believed any miracles could happen – including the ones in the bible. And we sit here today as heirs of that shift. Which – by the way – is good, because I suspect had no one integrated the Enlightenment with Christianity, none of us would be here today.
Second, when we post-Enlightenment folk buy into the debunking of miracles in the bible, it is based on an assumption: We assume “miracle” means something that happens outside of the rational world and then we dismiss it because it is outside of the rational world. It is a kind of circular logic. In short, we equate the word miracle with magic. When we read stories like this one where Jesus and the disciples fed the 5,000 people, it comes off as a magic trick...like he snapped his fingers or waved his hand and all of a sudden mounds of food appeared that weren’t there before. Of course that can’t happen – at least not without a scientific explanation. So we don’t believe in what happened that day.
These two things have served to minimize the stories in the bible that include miracles, reducing them to metaphor, or just stories made up by the author to make some theological point. At worst, we belittle the authors for being so naïve as to believe in this “stuff”, making them and the story look silly and irrelevant.
I don’t know how the disciples or early Christians understood or made sense of these events. We can’t know. But what matters in terms of our ability to recover the power of the miracle is the effect the event had on those present. It doesn’t matter whether or not we believe in how Jesus made miracle happen. Rather we need to trust the authenticity of what people experienced at the time, both those present and those who relayed the story for others to hear. It is the effect that is miraculous.
The people of antiquity were not silly to believe in such a miracle; they were eloquent in sharing the effect of that miracle with others, so that we could connect with the power of Jesus to heal and feed and do exactly as he set out to do from the very beginning.
There was a lot of coverage this week of the celebration of the anniversary of the moon landing. I missed it in real life so enjoyed being brought back to that time through the wonders of media. As I listened, I came to appreciate the effect this moment in history had on people.
And I would argue that many rational people believed it was a miracle. I’m sure there was language floating about like, “the miracle of modern technology”. In the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death, they were replaying some of his most momentous broadcasts. One, of course, was the moon landing and first step by Neal Armstrong. When Cronkite was interviewed later about it, he described that moment as a two-fold miracle: The miracle of figuring out how to get to the moon and spend time outside the spacecraft; and the miracle of being able to watch it all live on TV. These were things many would not have thought possible when John Kennedy announced in 1962 that we would put a man on the moon within 10 years.
We learn that miracle can have meaning for our enlightened world because we can see that a miracle can in part be the science that allowed for something like the televised moon landing. It was science that emerged that earlier had not seemed possible. And it matters that miracles have meaning for us. Miracles evoke in people a sense of awe about what is possible. They connect people to their better selves, and connect communities to visions of a brighter future. Miracles are powerful. They change people by their sheer happening.
But it seems like the effect of miracles is destine to wane, even disappear. I wasn’t there when Neal Armstrong uttered those famous words. It just doesn’t affect me the same way. The technology no longer seems miraculous, it just seems like a given. And it seems that even for those alive at that moment, the feeling has diminished.
There was an article this week about the space program that quickly became an analogy for me of the contemporary Christian reality. The article was written by Tom Wolfe and appeared in the New York Times. He was writing about why the space program lost its emotional power with people and thus lost momentum. Wolfe argues that we have lost our connection to that moment in history and with that we lost the belief in other miraculous possibilities in the realm of space exploration.
I don’t know if Wolfe is right or not, but I would argue that Christians may have lost our connection to the events in the bible which has a similar effect…at times we lack motivation to continue the program. We lack belief in other miraculous possibilities.
Wolfe goes on to identify the reason the connection was lost. He says the space program lacked the necessary Word, with a capital “w” – the “word” being the spoken philosophy that would carry forward the power of the event through generations. NASA, he said, had neglected to build a core of philosophers who were affected in the moment and could keep reminding people that what happened in the past could inform the next thing that currently seems out of reach. Instead, the message that took hold after the landing was about the realities of the costs. Or the message became, “we won!”, instead of “what’s next?” The wonder, the awe, the sense of miracle lost out to practical and political considerations.
We Christians also need that core of philosophers – those who believe in the power of the miracles of Jesus and can ask, “what’s next?” Of course, all Christians are meant to be these philosophers for our faith – evangelists, to use another word. We must carry the Word, with a capital “W”, in our time, enlivening people with possibilities of healing and feeding and freeing people, even if these possibilities seem out of reach. We must carry to the world the possibility of miracles. But for most of us this is difficult if not impossible because, in our disbelief, we have reduced the miracles in the bible to quaint stories.
We affirm over and over again in the Christian faith that there is a living Word. The gospel of John is entirely based on this truth. He is the one who begins his gospel not with Jesus’ birth, but like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Jesus for him is the living word. And the resurrection and sending of the Holy Spirit is the guarantee that the Word lives eternally – the Word lives today.
Out of our need to be practical and rational and scientific, might we be poor messengers of this living word? Can we re-connect with the wonder of the miracles we have in the bible? We don’t have the benefit of a live TV stream or tweets from the apostles. But is there a living word, begun in the work of Jesus and carried by the faithful to our time and place that can affect us deeply and emotionally in our post-Enlightenment world?
Remember, this is not the same thing as believing God regularly intervenes to make things happen that are not possible by scientific standards. Rather a miracle can be the revelation of possibilities already present in our midst that we did not know were there before. The miracles may exist in technology not yet invented. They may exist in the hearts and minds of the most unexpected people. We can fully accept the enlightenment and still believe that miracles are possible: that 5,000 people today could be fed by one boy with what look like inadequate resources. I can’t help but think about kids against hunger – started by kids, now feeding millions.
We have the Word. And we have the holy spirit – the living word connecting us to those miracles of Jesus – with the potential to change us through the power of what happened to the people that day. We just don’t always listen. And we don’t always believe. Things get in the way: busyness, cynicism, despair. In addition practicality and the primacy we give to efficacy drain the power of unknown possibilities.
I don’t know where I stand on what the space program should be doing. What I do know is that the question of what Christianity should be doing is far more important. And it’s a program that must continue and continue to be as miraculous as the day Jesus fed those 5,000 hungry and sick people on the hillside. The sick and hungry need us now as much as they needed Jesus then.
Our faith and its miraculous purpose shouldn’t be compromised for seemingly practical reasons. Just because people say it’s unrealistic to believe that war will ever end doesn’t mean Christians can afford to stop believing in that possibility – miracle though it might seem. Just because people think it’s naïve to believe we can have an economy that places people, not capital, at the center doesn’t mean Christians can stop working to make it so. Just because starvation seems inevitable in many parts of our world doesn’t mean we should stop dreaming up ways we can feed everyone with the abundance of food God has already provided us in creation. And just because the systems in this world seem forever entrenched doesn’t mean we should stop trying to build the kingdom of God here and now. We, like the boy, inadequate though we feel, when we are filled with the power of the living word we can confidently do our small part, believing and trusting that when joined with the gifts of everyone else, a miracle will happen.
If we can accept the miraculous nature of the feeding of the 5,000 for those who were there, then we can be the powerful word carried forward proclaiming the possibility of miracles today. So what do you say? Can we believe in miracles? Amen.
