Pentecost 4
June 28, 2009
Mark 5: 21-43
I am not always eager to handle healing stories because I am not sure what to do with them. The actual miraculous healing is a problem. What exactly do I believe about the healing stories? What, I wonder, do you believe about these miracle stories. Do I want to try to convince you that you should believe in miracles? That would certainly seem to be a part of the preacher’s job. There seems to be no way forward into these stories without addressing questions of what we believe, what we might believe and do we think we can believe. A part of the problem raised by questions of belief in miracles, especially the healing miracles, has to do with the implications of any answer to such questions.
If we say yes, we believe Jesus healed people by touching them or simply by intending that they be healed, we are brought face to face with the supernatural Jesus. A lot of us are quite comfortable with the wise, prophetic Jesus who challenges the authorities and who calls us to compassion. We may be comfortable with the teacher who causes us to question our assumptions or with the Jesus who walks with us, the Jesus we speak to and whose company we rely on. It is just the Jesus who works miracles that many of us find difficult. Why?
I can think of lots of reasons. You may have some of your own.
Believing in miracles can lead to disappointment. If healing miracles happen, they are rare. We all know too many people who have died untimely deaths or who have suffered illnesses that we would certainly think qualified for a miraculous cure if such things are possible. If miracles like the ones we heard about this morning happen, they don’t happen often enough, so I’m not going to get my hopes up.
And it isn’t just the threat of disappointment. Admitting the possibility of miracles would mean having to adjust our world view to include the supernatural, which is not only beyond our understanding, but has never been proved in a way that can be accepted apart from faith. Because they can’t be discussed rationally in our evidence-dependent world, experiences we have that seem to be some kind of extraordinary event, something not conforming to the laws of nature, we hold close. We have a kind of don’t ask don’t tell approach to brushes with the supernatural.
The truth is that I have thought a time or two that I was the beneficiary of some kind of divine intervention. At seventeen I was at my wits end about the pain my mother was experiencing in the cancer that eventually killed her. I kind of backed God down. At least that’s how I have told the story. I said, “Help me make sense of this or end her pain or I’m through with you.” The next day Mom felt all-of-a-sudden better. Even that event, which marked an impressionable teenager for ever, and of which I did not speak until much later in life, raised more questions than it answered.
Ok, I said. So God does listen. God does act. And that action seems to have something to do with my praying. Well then, maybe if I prayed harder or better there would be more miracles. Somehow, the possibility of miracles puts me under pressure. If miracles are real, and if they happen around faith in Jesus, then then maybe the scarcity of miracles in everyday life is an indictment of my faith. Maybe I’m like Neo in the Matrix jumping off the building and landing on the pavement because I just don’t believe quite enough.
So is it possible to be a Christian and still be skeptical about miracles? Of course it is. We all know good people who, though they have serious questions about miracles, are following Jesus, are being transformed by Jesus. I don’t know if I know any Christians who don’t wonder what is really possible with Jesus. I think this life is about learning just that--what is possible with Jesus. So maybe healings and resuscitations aren’t the place to begin. Maybe it would be better to ask what we can believe, what we do believe. What we would argue for in terms of Jesus.
Maybe I would start with little changes in my life that I don’t think to call miracles. Sometimes prayer does make a difference. Sometimes I discover a new burst of energy or a new resolve when I pray. I find courage to face things I fear, and sometimes more than courage. Sometimes I actually forget fear when I pray for help. I find myself doing what I didn’t think I could do and saying things I didn’t think I could say. Sometimes when I am really concerned about my ability to offer anything to another--to say the right thing, to listen well, to be open to their experience--I find myself able to be there for them in a way that seems better than any skills or abilities I possess.
Sometimes in meditation or in the liturgy, or even out of the blue, I am filled with a sense of God, or what I have come to associate with God (precisely because it happens more often than not when I am intending myself in the direction of God, as in prayer or meditation). I have never really doubted that I am sometimes in the presence of a higher power who is for me. I have, on rare occasions, been filled with a sense of love and goodness and with the conviction that that fullness is a sign of the presence of something greater than myself.
So I seem to believe in a God who does act in the world and in the lives if people. I believe in a God who steps into my consciousness from time to time and turns me in a new direction. I believe strongly in a God who becomes present with people who struggle to open their hearts to each other about truth and goodness and love.
Maybe our wrestling with belief in the big miracles like raising the dead and healing the sick can be helped by the belief we do possess. There seems to be some kind of scale of belief in a God who intervenes in the events of the world. At one end is no belief at all. God doesn’t act/reveal. And at the other end of the scale is a level of belief that says anything is possible for God. That end of the scale, of course, is where Jesus would be found, the Jesus who treated what we call miracles as simple, everyday reality. I don’t think any of us are pegged all the way at the non-believing end of the scale or we wouldn’t be here. I’m pretty sure we are all somewhere along that line between thinking that God may, at times, edge just a little bit into the reality of our lives-somewhere between there and knowing for sure that God moves planets at will. I have lived at different places along that line at different times in my life. I have never found a place along that line that is completely comfortable--not challenged by a desire to be elsewhere on the line or challenged by some inconvenient assumption about some other place along the line. New questions and new moments of blessing move us along that path which deepens as we walk it. I think Jesus was comfortable in his place at the end of that continuum, but Jesus is Jesus and we aren’t.
The players in the gospel reading for today, the folks who share the stage with Jesus in these healing stories, seem to be fairly representative of the Church. Today we hear Jesus is surrounded by crowds. His closest friends aren’t ever real sure what he’s up to. Most of the players have turned out to see what all the fuss is about. Among them are the curious, the mildly skeptical, and even those who laugh out loud at the idea of anyone being able to raise the dead. Only a couple of players in this story are ready to test what might be possible with Jesus. And even when Jesus goes in to heal the little girl, he only takes a few of his disciples with him. We think sometimes about our own questions and say, “If only I could have proof.” Not all of Jesus’ disciples today are ready even to be shown what’s possible with Jesus.
So do you believe in miracles? Big ones? Little bitty ones? There are lots of ways to believe in Jesus.
What I am finding is the more I reflect on what I do believe, the more I think I might someday be able to believe. Maybe that’s the way it's supposed to work. JB