Miracles

I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a hotbed of evangelical conservatism.  There was T. L. Osborne, Kenneth Hagey and Oral Roberts to name only three of the more well known.  The dad of close family friends was the editor of Abundant Life, Roberts’ ministry magazine.  When I was in junior high our family even attended a church for a time that Oral Roberts was trying to start.  His son, Richard, was in my Sunday school class. So in addition to being in a denomination that had pentecostal roots, I was exposed to a steady diet of similar ‘name it-claim it’ preaching and teaching of all sorts.

One of Oral Roberts key phrases was ‘expect a miracle’ and he encouraged everyone to always be looking out for one.  Do any of us really need any encouragement in craving one?  Even if it is just a miracle delivering me from the grind of daily living…I’ve prayed a prayer for that multiple times. 

Many years ago when we were a twenty-something young couple among other twenty-somethings, everyone was on schedule having babies at the same time (drinking the same ‘water’).  We had friends, Joanie and Bob, who had a son Chris within a few months of the birth of our own daughter, Jennifer..  Chris and Jennifer could have been twins.  Both had bright blond hair (when she finally got some) and bright blue eyes.  a few years later, we drove across Nashville for both the girls to take piano from Joanie.  

It was on a day a few weeks before Thanksgiving that as a young pre-schooler, Chris asked to go play outside.  Within minutes, tragedy struck and Chris was hit by a car.  He lingered at Vanderbilt Hospital for several days as our band of young couples tried to support Bob and Joanie in the halls of the hospital.  But shortly before the holiday, Chris passed away.  It is the ultimate fear of any parent, certainly young parents, to lose a child.  As I was standing in the hallway with Joanie a woman came up and said something to the effect, if we’d prayed harder, had more faith, Chris would still be alive.

I was young and spiritually naïve but all I wanted to do was rear back and slap the ‘comforter’ to the floor.  I knew even back then deep in my being that she did not speak the truth.

The Prayer Tower at ORU, built when I was in high school

Fast forward to May of 1998.  Again, we were at Vanderbilt hospital, but this time with my not quite forty, friend Jeff.  Again a vigil of friends were there and some guy (I conveniently forget names in situations like this, probably again trying to keep me from committing homicide) came into Jeff’s hospital room and started trying to rally everyone for Jeff’s recovery.  I wanted to scream at him, “Where have you been the last several years as Jeff has battled this cancer at different treatment centers and sought  healing through medicines and cures of all sorts?  Where were you two weeks ago when Jeff and I sat in his living room, his feet numb and painful from neuropathy due to all the killer drugs he’d taken?”, sitting there a mere shadow of himself from the massive amount of weight he’d lost.  Jeff rarely ever complained but he shared at that moment that he was tired and was ready for something else, to die.  That is never easy to hear from a dear friend or family member that you love.  The thought ran through my mind, is he just giving up?  But I knew different.  I’d watched and observed for several years.  I’ve been on his journey with him trying to desperately stay here for his two daughters and son.  I’d even tried drinking some of the hideous homeopathic cures he had tried.  And here comes ‘Johnny come lately’ trying to rally our ‘oh, ye of little faith crowd’.   Again, I want to knock him from the fifth floor window.  Jeff did die that evening.

Tulsa was titled The Oil Capitol of the World when I was growing up. The Golden Driller was the symbol of the international oil exposition…and still stands on the fair grounds.

These experiences and others have taught me that everyone on the planet longs for miracles… deliverance from what is at the moment…or what we know is coming.  Whether we think a tribal dance or root cure will conjure it up, or we think that praying more, fasting more, doing more good works will do the same.  These moments have taught me that these experiences called miracles are not connected to what I do.  Back in December of 2001 when five days before Christmas I got the call from my urologist that we all fear, ‘you’ve got cancer’, I prayed for a miracle.  I told God I had read enough of those Guidepost stories or seen the interviews from those that had got to the hospital for surgery and the last x-ray or MRI shockingly revealed the tumor, the cancer was gone.  I promised that I would do the interviews with Oprah and the Guideposts stories should that happen for me. But no such miracle came.  There was another miracle at the hands of a good doctor and medical community that did save my life.

Hear this sermon from Barbara Brown Taylor, The Problem with Miracles (Chapter 25), in it’s entirity:

Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death.  Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live”.                                                                                       Mark 5:22-23

Sometimes I wonder if the miracle stories in the Bible do more harm than good.  They are spectacular stories, most of them, and there is a lot of comfort to be had from watching Jesus still the storm, heal the sick, and raise the dead.  His miracles remind us that the way things are is not the way they will always be, and that there is great power available to us through our kinship with him.  He is living proof that God’s will for us is not chaos but wholeness, and every miracle proclaims that truth.  Every healing, every revival, every banishment of evil is like a hole poked in the opaque fabric of time and space.  The kingdom breaks through and for a moment or two we see how things will be---or how they really are right now in the mind of God---and then it is over.  The disciples go back to their rowing, the once-blind beggar walks off to look for work, the little girl stretches her arms above her head and takes the bread her stunned mother holds out to her.

The problem with miracles is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of your own.  Every one of us knows someone who is suffering.  Every one of us  knows someone who could use a miracle, but miracles are hard to come by.  Not everyone who prays for one gets one, not by a long shot, and meanwhile there are people who get them without asking for them at all.  On the whole, religious people cannot stand this apparent randomness, so we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the formula.  Surely there is a formula!  Two parts prayer, three parts faith, and one part good works.  We comb the miracle stories to find out who did what right and who did what wrong so that we can learn from their experience.  We imitate their virtues and avoid their faults in hopes of becoming irresistible to God.

Only most of the time that is hard to do, because God rarely does anything the same way twice.  For instance, in the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel, we get two miracle stories layered together.  First, the story of Jarius and his daughter---one of the three resurrection stories in the gospels, not counting Christ’s own.  It is the bread of a larger sandwich Mark has prepared for us.  The inside of the sandwich is the story of the woman who has bled for twelve years, before she touches the hem of Jesus’ garment and is healed.

Mark inserted the second story inside the first one for a reason, because bleeding women and dead little girls were both taboo in Judaism.  By having anything to do with either one of them, Jesus rendered himself unclean.  That was no sin in itself, since people could not have babies, care for the sick, or bury the dead without becoming unclean, only Jesus was not a midwife or a nurse.  He was a holy man, who was expected to steer clear of defilement.  If it happened to him by mistake, as it did the moment the bleeding woman touched him, then according to the law he should have gone off to purify himself.  Until he did, he was contagious and unfit for holy duty.

But Jesus did not go off to purify himself.  He simply sent the healed woman on her way and turned around to follow Jairus again---causing quite a scandal, I imagine, when he stepped inside the man’s house.  Jairus was a leader of the synagogue, remember, a respected elder in the community whose obedience to the law was matter of record.  For someone like him to seek help from someone like Jesus must have caused a whole lot of talk.  It would be like one of us driving right past the medical center to go see a root doctor way out in the country who held tent revivals on the weekends.

So this is not just a story about Jesus or even about the little girl he raised from the dead.  It is also a story about Jairus, who broke every rule he knew in order to save his daughter’s life.  Can you imagine what it must have been like for him, to fall at Jesus’ feet in front of a big crowd?  And then to lead him through that crowd, only to be stopped short by the woman with the hemorrhage---whose condition was not life-threatening, after all, while his own child’s life seeped away---and then to be told that it was too late, that the child was dead and there was no reason to trouble Jesus any further.

This is as bad as it gets.  You beg on your knees for help and it comes too late.  You give up all your cherished beliefs in order to grab at one last wild straw and it comes off in your hand.  The ground rushes up to meet you and just before the sun goes out for good you hear a voice: “Do not fear, only believe.”  It sounds like a formula, doesn’t it?  If you will just believe hard enough, your prayers will be answered.  If you just have enough faith, things will turn out right.  That is how it worked for Jairus, anyhow.  His daughter was saved.  The kingdom broke through right there in her bedroom and all the angels sang “amen”, but it simply does not happen that way every time.

Most people do not get a miracle like that, and one of the meanest things religious people do is to blame it on a lack of faith.  I remember when I was a chaplain on the cancer ward at Georgia Baptist Hospital and we finally had to start frisking visitors at the door.  A couple of patients had complained that perfect strangers were coming into their rooms, holding hands around their beds and praying for an increase in their clearly inadequate faith.  It turned out that a local church was doing this---uninvited---as a part of their healing ministry, only it did not have a healing effect.  It has a bludgeoning effect, as people who were already sick got a strong dose of guilt and shame to go along with their chemotherapy.  

I believe that the church people where will-intentioned.  I also believe they had gotten mixed up about what causes miracle.  They thought faith made miracles happen.  They thought miracles worked along the same lines as those strength tests you used to see at county fairs, the ones that looked like big thermometers with red ringers at the top.  It was all a matter of how hard you could hit the ting with the sledgehammer.  It you were really strong, you could ring the bell and win the prize.  And if you were not, well, try, try again and better luck next time.

In other words, they thought miracles were something they could control.  If you are sick and getter sicker, it must be your own fault.  You must try harder.  Pump up your faith and ring the bell.  Impress God with the power of your belief and claim your miracle as a reward.  Only this is idolatry, do you see?  This is one more of our pitiful efforts to work things around so that we seem to be in charge of our lives, instead of owning up to the truth that every single breath we take is a free surprise from God.  Faith does not work miracles.  God does.  To concentrate on the strength of our own belief is to practice magic.  To concentrate on the strength of God is to practice faith.  This is not just semantics.  This is the difference between believing our lives are in our own hands and believing they are in God’s.  God, not faith, works miracles.

Did Jairus’ daughter have faith?  I do not think so.  She was on her way out of the world.  Did Jairus have faith?  Mark never said so. Jairus just followed Jesus home and watched that unclean holy man do his work.  Either way, the high point was not then but earlier, when Jesus told him, “Do not fear, only believe.”  If Jairus was able to do that, then he would have survived whatever happened next, even if Jesus had walked into his daughter’s room, closed her eyes with his fingertips, and pulled the sheet over her head.  Her father’s belief would have become the miracle at that point, his willingness to believe that she was still in God’s good hands even though she had slipped out of his.

It helps me to remember that Jesus prayed for a miracle on the night before he died.  “For you all things are possible,” he prayed to his abba.  “Remove this cup from me.”  Only when he opened his eyes the cup was still there.  Did he lack faith?  I do not think so.  The miracle was that he drank the cup, believing in the power of God more than he believed in his own.  It is always a miracle, isn’t it, when we understand that God is God and we are not?

I do not expect any of us will stop praying for miracles.  I hope not, because the world needs all the miracles it can get.  Every time you hear about one, remember that you are getting a preview of the kingdom.  There is simply no formula for success, which is a real relief for those of us who cannot seem to ring the bell.  Maybe we cannot do it because it is not our job.  “Do not fear; only believe.”  That is our job.  The rest is up to God.

Chapter 25, Bread of Angels, by Barbara Brown Taylor

I sometimes feel we’ve created a Disney religion by soaking our kids in the stories of wizards, fairy godmothers and white knights that make all things well at the end of every story.  Life is simply not that way.  But, like Barbara, I will not quit praying for miracle or stop pulling out Disney’s movie Enchanted when my grandkids come for a visit.  I will just also teach them that it is still a miracle of sorts when life goes on each day…even when you don’t win the emotional lottery.  That it is about taking note when fear has her icy fingers on your shoulders and in that moment, exercise what belief you have.  It doesn’t take much at all.  In another place, he talks about tiny little mustard seeds.

It comes down to the final cry of Job as well as my good friend Barbara Johnson who said, “whatever Lord”.  It is in my concession of “God, You are God and I am not” that miracles begin to happen….one way or another.  Letting Him be, and resting in just that.

Post script:  If you’ve never read Barbara Brown Taylor, do yourself a big favor and buy one of her books.  I have almost all of them. This book, Bread of Angels, Leaving Church, Holy Envy or Learning to Walk in the Dark, are great starters.  She is a wordsmith, a phenomenal writer.  You will not regret the purchase.

Edit 3/2021