“Miracles Happen”

I Kings 17:8-16

A sermon preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley

November 12, 2006

University Baptist Church

Minneapolis, MN

 

            When people look at the title to today’s sermon, some of you might think I am referring to something that happened on Tuesday.  While I agree that something unexpected happened, I’m not willing to call it a miracle.  I also picked the title to this sermon long before the election was even held.

            The best evidence if a miracle is hope.  God is in the hope business.  As followers of God, we’re in the hope business, too.

            I want to talk about miracles today. 

            18^th century writer David Hume put it this way: “The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.  Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by faith to assent to ut, is conscious of a continued miracle in his (or her) own person, which subverts all the principles of his (or her) understanding, and gives him (or her) a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”

            I want to talk about miracles today.

            I want us to look at those unexpected places in our lives when hope happens in the midst of despair.  Who’s to say that this isn’t God’s handiwork?

In today’s scripture we meet the great prophet Elijah.   Elijah was a prophet of God—one of the earliest and one of the most influential.  At every Seder meal, a place is set for Elijah in hopes that he will return and herald the way for the Messiah.  John the Baptist looked and acted a lot like Elijah.  They both wore leather and hung out in the woods calling upon the people to repent. 

Elijah’s big beef was with the Jewish leadership who couldn’t figure out which god to worship.  It came to a head on Mount Carmel one day when Elijah out-holied the prophets of Baal.  But before he became a vengeful prophet, Elijah was a miracle worker. 

            Here we have him at the beginning of his ministry.  He has been called by God and begins his work.  In the land there has been a famine and a drought.  No one has any food.  Rivers are drying up.  The people prayed to the god Baal to provide rain, but to no avail.  I think of the Sudan and Darfur—places where drought compounds people’s desperation and gets played out in brutal ways.

Elijah begins his ministry by saying that the God of Israel, YHWH, controls the rain.  He tells the great King Ahab that he ought to get on YHWH’s side. 

While the drought rages on, Elijah goes deep into Baal territory to a Phoenician town called Zarephath.  There he meets a widow, a foreigner, a pagan, a poor desperate woman.  She was out of water and down to her last little bit of oil.  She was resigned to die of hunger and thirst along with her son.  Elijah, however, said that his God, YHWH is a loving God and that God will provide a way for her and her son to live. 

It would take a miracle and that’s what God provided for the widow of Zarephath, Elijah and her son.  Enough oil to last until the rain finally came.

            The Bible is full of miracle stories. 

We remember how a ram was in the thicket so that Abraham would not have to sacrifice his son.

We remember the manna in the wilderness that gave food to the Hebrew people. 

We remember how Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls came a tumbling because someone blew their trumpet.

            We remember how Jesus turned water into wine, walked on the water, healed lepers, fed 5000 people and spoke the uncomfortable truth to the forces of domination.

            We remember how both Elijah and Jesus even brought people back from the dead.

            But do we really believe in miracles?

            We think they’re interesting illustrative devices in the story to show how holy a person is or how holy God is. 

            But do they really happen?

            I’m as skeptical as all of you.  I don’t want to be duped and so I am suspicious of people who claim to have received miraculous healings or miraculous experiences.  And yet, miracles happen.  Sincere people speak of miracles occurring all the time. 

            Twenty-something years ago, I decided to do some backpacking in southern Ohio during spring break.  I was a poor college student so I stuck out my thumb and trusted my luck in finding a ride.  I got one outside of Lancaster, Ohio from a woman who was an evangelist.  My buddy and I in the back seat were a captive audience.  She began to tell the story about how she had died in a car wreck and had that experience of coming out of her body toward a bright light.  She had a conversation with God at the light and God told her to go back to earth and spread the Gospel.  She told God how she was unworthy and simply and uneducated woman.  God told her that everyone was worthy and that God loved her.  She told us this story and said that her life was God’s miracle.  Her picking us up on that day was an opportunity for her to share her miracle story with two more people. 

            Walt Whitman spoke of miracles in the following way:

            “Why, who makes much of miracles?

            As to me I know nothing else but miracles—

            To me every hour of night and day is a miracle,

            Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.”

            A miracle is an unexpected surprise that brings hope. 

            As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of miracles.  There are miracles that happen to individuals and to a community.  When I think of individual miracles, I think of healings.  I think of unexpected relief-filled surprises—not necessarily winning the lottery, but rather getting that job that seemed impossible to get or finding a medication or a treatment that finally got you out of a deep depression.

            Then there are the community miracles.  These miracles are when a community gets so focused upon their Godly purpose that they make incredible things happen.  Some say the feeding of the 5000 was a community miracle initiated by Jesus—people saw the need and how someone with just few loaves and fishes had such a large task like feeding a small army.  Might the people have pooled their resources and shared their own food, taking the example of the one with the loaves and the fishes?

So there are miracles that happen to individuals and there are miracles that happen to and within communities.

But who initiates the miracles?  This is what makes them miracles.  They are always initiated by God.

Now, God may manifest the Divine self in the guise of the community.  I know God does this.  God does this every year when the people of UBC adopt godchildren in Nicaragua by giving these poor children the funds they need to pay for a year of school at our sister church Second Baptist Church in Leon. 

            Every year at Christmas time, our sister Chea makes miracles happen for folk.  She puts out an appeal to all of us and then all but single-handedly purchases hundreds of gifts for poor and needy people in battered women’s shelters.  She doesn’t have the money to do this, but she has the savvy and knows how to get the best deals and even sweet-talk store owners into giving extra to help out the neediest.

            Sisters and brothers, miracles happen when we take God seriously enough to imagine a new and better world.

            Miracles happen when we take that step and stand for and with the outcast.  That stance offers hope to a person in need.

            Miracles happen when we care for one another, like we are doing in our new share the care program.

            Miracles happen when we live by the great commandment that we love our neighbors as ourselves

            Miracles happen when we live by the great criteria that all of the poor and the hungry and the blind and the naked and those in prison need our presence.

            Miracles happen when we realize we are not alone.

            Miracles happen when people take their first tentative steps toward recovery.

            My sense is that we need less skepticism about miracles and more celebration of the miracles that happen all around us at all times.

            Believing in miracles is believing that God is active and not simply a passive observer.  We pray for miracles all the time.  Very often they happen, not necessarily by God intervening in our lives above someone else’s, but by sending all of that positive healing energy to the person or situation, good things happen.  Healing happens, not always of the body, but almost always of Spirit.  The conjoined spirits of a caring community is always a healing, Godly force.

            Each time we take a breath, we are living the miracle of life.  A miracle, remember, is an unexpected surprise that brings hope.

            Miracles happen every time people come together with the power of God.  They have the capacity—we have the capacity to do the miraculous.

            So go into the world today expecting a miracle.

            Go into today committed to finding the hope that God grants with each breath and with each encounter.  Go into today focusing on the power of God to wash over all of us, so that we might have a sense of the miraculous in our lives.

            Sisters and brothers, miracles happen.  Each one of us is a miracle.  Together, under-girded by God’s Spirit, we can do even more miraculous things.

            Let me close with the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, a subversive prayer that calls for us all to give attention to the power of the miraculous in our lives.

 

            “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
            Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
            where there is injury, pardon;
            where there is doubt, faith;
            where there is despair, hope;
            where there is darkness, light;
            where there is sadness, joy;

            O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
            to be understood as to understand;
            to be loved as to love.

            For it is in giving that we receive;
I           t is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
            and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

            May we recognize and celebrate the miracles all around us.

            May we also grant surprising miraculous hope to a world in need.