Sermon for Sunday, November 13, 2005MIRACLESbyRev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz |
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Scripture: Mark: 1-6 He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2 On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, "Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary F42 and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense F43 at him. 4 Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house." 5 And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6 And he was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about among the villages teaching. I sent an e-mail last Wednesday to all of you who are on our e-mail list telling about the change in direction in today’s sermon and asked if you would send me your stories and your experiences about miracles. I received back more e-mails than I ever have received with your stories and your experiences. People wrote about coincidences where you saw God at work. You wrote about seeing people with medical problems get better when no one expected that. You wrote about a family where a member was waiting for a liver transplant and another family member was being prepped to donate part of his liver and all of a sudden there was a match available from a cadaver that no one expected, and it succeeded, and two months later the recipient is healthy and hearty. A teacher wrote about seeing children at the beginning of the year who are so challenged in their reading ability and behind in other skills and told about the satisfaction of seeing miraculous progress so that at the end of the year the child is reading at grade level. One person wrote about the miracle of being freed from an obsession to abuse alcohol and drugs and how that miracle of freedom happened through participation in twelve step programs, several of which meet in our building every week. One person reminded us that there are every day miracles that we just over look and said that they are like grace notes – that our lives would be so much less without. Several parents wrote about the miracle of being parents and looking at a one year old, for instance who did not exist a while ago and now is so full of life and joy. And while I was receiving these e-mails I saw another miracle story from a place on our planet where God knows we need as many miracles as we can get: the opening sentence of the news story said, “The parents of a Palestinian boy shot by Israeli soldiers donated the boy’s organs to three Israeli children waiting for organ transplants.” The twelve year old boy, Ahmed, was shot by Israeli soldiers a week ago while they were conducting a raid in the West bank town of Jenin. He was carrying a toy rifle and they mistook him for a militant. The boy’s father said the decision to donate the boy’s organs was rooted in his own memory of another family member who died at the age of 24 while waiting for a liver transplant. He said he hoped the donation of his son’s lungs, heart and liver to three Israeli children would send a message of peace. In the Bible, miracles abound. They are called signs and wonders. In the Bible a miracle is any experience, supernatural or natural, where we see God at work -- any experience, natural or supernatural! In Psalm 8, one of the familiar praise psalms, the writer is looking at God’s creation and marveling at it and saying, when I see the sun and moon and stars, I am in awe, Lord, and I wonder who I am and who these little creatures like me are, and yet, the writer says, you have made us humans just a little lower than yourselves. And in Psalm 29 the writer is describing a thunderstorm off the coast of Israel over the Mediterranean Sea and marveling at the power and wonder of God. And in the New Testament we saw in reading together through the Gospel of Mark a few weeks ago how many times Jesus heals people and praises them for their faith and touches lepers and other untouchables who, I am sure felt it was a miracle just to be noticed and affirmed by this healer and teacher and prophet. There are dangers in talking about miracles and those dangers are why in my 35 years of ministry I have never, until today, devoted a whole sermon to the topic. We can use term miracle so loosely sometimes; it would have been a miracle for the Broncos to beat the Giants a few weeks ago. It would have be a miracle, some people said over a year ago for the Red Sox to win the World Series. We throw the term around loosely. And we have used the term miracle to mean only those instances when something supernatural happens instead of also including the times when God is at work through the natural world also. Albert Einstein said, there are two ways to look at life: one is as if nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is a miracle. There can be a danger in thinking that the world is magical and that the normal processes are constantly being interrupted by interventions from God. The quote on your bulletin from the Italian scientist says some of that. He sees as his mission to look behind some claims about why some things happen. He has exposed the manipulation behind statues that were said to weep blood. He has done research as a chemist on the shroud of Turin and shown why the outline of a face would look really different from what the shroud looks like if it had really been wrapped over a person (the details are in the article on the foyer table). And a prime danger of talking about miracles is that all of us would like to see miraculous recoveries when a loved one is ill or when we are ill, and finally something is going to take the life of everyone here. Despite the advances in medical science, someone said, the death rate remains at 100%. So when we pray over a sick person for a healing miracle, sometimes that happens – I don’t want to discount that and our family can tell our own story in a moment-but finally death awaits each of us. There is so much I do not understand about miracles. I do believe that Jesus was a healer and that he was able to make people better by means that we are still discovering. I do believe in the power of faith as one of the factors in healing and health and we talked about this three months ago when we looked at all of the healing stories in the first few chapters of the gospel of Mark (those sermons are on our web site). And we talked then about the ongoing phenomenon of the placebo effect that says even in clinical trials of a new drug, when some people are given a placebo, a sugar pill, a certain percentage of those folks get better. I do not know why some people recover when we pray and others don’t. And the danger is that when people don’t, some people have said, that it is your fault. You didn’t pray enough or hard enough or the right way, or you did not have enough faith on behalf of your loved one, or the patient themselves did not have enough faith. So not only are you sick or terminally ill, it is your own fault because your faith is faulty. Those are some of the horrible things that have been connected to miracle talk and part of the reason why I have approached the discussion with trepidation. Nevertheless, I think miracles happen, and I think that some of them are just natural phenomena that we do not yet understand or know how to explain yet scientifically. And when we pray, our clergy or Stephen ministers, with a person in the hospital, we pray for God to bring about the best possible outcome, the best possible result, with this person in their illness, and we trust God to know what that result is. A miracle is a place where we can see God at work – by natural or “supernatural” means to bring that best result. Let me share three stories from our own family. When our son Todd was born he showed up with a genetic anomaly called Down syndrome. We were not expecting that and in the days after we learned of this, we were making the adjustments that any parents go through in letting go of one set of dreams they have had for a child and beginning to build a new set of dreams. And as many of you know, Todd’s life has become full of possibilities and has been a role model and example of integration and acceptance for many other persons in this country with all kinds of disabilities. But in the days immediately following his birth, there was a prayer group in the church where I was the associate minister then – Littleton United Methodist Church — and the prayer group was praying earnestly for God to remove every extra 21st chromosome in Todd’s body and to make him a typical person. When I learned of that, I got angry because that is not how God works. The senior minister of the church got angry also and said they were praying for something as unlikely as the amputated arm of one of our members who was a WWII veteran to miraculously grow back. But there were miracles happening in those few days: people were surrounding us in prayer and praying for new possibilities and new dreams for us and our family and for God’s best possible results. And we felt that. And that continues to happen as the story of Todd’s involvement and activity the past few years in his college fraternity has grown into a national news story that is a symbol of hospitality and welcoming and belonging for every person; every person. We can talk about the miracle of our daughter Meredith’s adoption as well. That happened after we had spent four years on the adoption waiting list and had about given up and Judy was ready to go back to teaching high school English and then two weeks after she did go back we got a call from the social worker in Durango telling us that this new baby girl was waiting for us and that our family had seemed just like the right match. We can talk about our family’s experience last July when Judy’s father was critically ill from a staph infection and we drove to Texas having packed our funeral clothes and found him so weak in the hospital that we were having to feed him each day, but he had a strong will to live and good medical care and today he has just celebrated his 89th birthday and is back to driving his car and we will be with him over Thanksgiving. I think all of those instances are miraculous –that is they are events in which I see God at work mostly through some natural processes. Your e-mails told those stories as well and I encourage each of you today with friends and family to keep talking about miracles, to pray for God to bring the best possible outcome for whatever challenge you are facing and to know that God is already at work in your life to help that happen. And I invite you to join some miracles and to let God involve you in some miracles God is doing. We will celebrate next Sunday our 45th birthday as a congregation. We began because some Methodist people had a dream for a new congregation in the south metro area and a dedicated lay woman named Rachel Low began to knock on some doors every day inviting people to consider being in a new church she was helping to get started. The beginning group met in a school for a couple of years and then built a small building and outgrew it and kept inviting people and kept growing because they kept God’s vision and dream in front of them and our decision to honor God first with our PRAYERS AND PRESENCE AND GIFTS AND SERVICE have led us here to this place where 15-20 new families are showing up with us every week and over 200 new members have joined us already this year! Next Sunday, on Miracle Sunday, we will be receiving a special offering that we hope will be one of the largest offerings we have ever received as people join the miracle and join in continuing the miracle this church has become. We will be doing that day what we have encouraged people to do for several years: we give out some cards with a four part formula for how to face challenges in life. The four parts are: FACE THE WORST, BELIEVE THE BEST, DO THE MOST YOU CAN, LEAVE THE REST-TO GOD. It is important when we need a miracle to act on that third part: to do the most we can instead of sitting back and asking for God to do it all. It may only be that when we have done the most we can that God is best able to respond and bring about the miraculous result that God brings. Part of doing the most we can is the part of prayer. We would not have succeeded these 45 years as a congregation if we had not prayed. We will not experience future achievements individually or together unless we pray – prayers of thanksgiving and prayers that ask for God to use us in God’s miracle and to let us join this miracle. God we thank you for the everyday miracles we take for granted: the miracle of love, the miracle of belonging, the miracle of seeing how we have made a difference. You know the miracles we need and the miracles we long for. We lift those up to you. We ask you to work in us and for us and with us as we offer ourselves again to you for you to bring about the miracles and even the surprises that only you can bring. Amen. |
