Hilton Head Island, SC – July 7, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Exodus 10:12-27; Acts 20:7-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But Paul went down and bent over him, and embracing him said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.” – Acts 20:10
Last week I preached a sermon entitled Our Ambivalence About Mysticism. Today’s sermon is called Our Ambivalence About Miracles.
Both mysticism and miracles create problems for many people of faith. Few of us have ever had a full-blown mystical experience, and as for miracles, we may believe we encounter them even less frequently, whether in the lives of others, or in our own lives.
Then again, there are people of faith who strongly believe in miracles. They further believe that they often occur. For example, suppose the daughter of such people was going to get married. And suppose that on a scale of 1 to 10, “1” being a complete loser and “10” being a spectacular catch, her fiancé was, in their minds, a minus-7. At the last minute the poor girl came to her senses, threw over the Minus 7, found a 9+, and was married six months later. “It is a miracle!” say the parents. Well, perhaps.
Or suppose someone out of work for two years is about to lose his home. The day before the bank is to foreclose his mortgage on him, he finds a job. Not only a job, but a great job. It’s a miracle. Well, maybe.
But it is a fact that many believers would consider both those events to be miracles, whether or not you or I do.
The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume was fascinated by miracles. But, as they would say in the sunny South, he was “agin ‘em.” Essentially Hume claimed that a miracle is something that cannot happen. He defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” In other words, if there were such phenomena as miracles, they would be due solely to the action of God or some other unseen and probably unknown agent.
David Hume was convinced that discernible evidence alone could authenticate miracles to be miracles. However, he also declared that there is no possible intellectually valid evidence to prove that miracles happen. He said that it is no miracle if a person in perfect health dies suddenly, because we know that, over time, that happens to many people. But if someone died and was brought back from the dead, that would be a miracle. But it has never happened, said the Scots philosopher. If the resurrection of Jesus comes to your mind, he did not believe it happened. He was not only not a Christian, but a confirmed, happy, and proud atheist.
Whatever you may think of David Hume, there is one observation he made about miracles that I strongly affirm. It is that if and when miracles occur, they do so directly as a result of the will of God. Physicians can’t perform miracles, “miracle workers” can’t, you or I can’t. God may use doctors or so-called miracle workers, or even the likes of ordinary people to assist in miracles, but in the final analysis, only God can cause a miracle to occur. I can’t prove that assertion, either to your satisfaction or mine, but I firmly believe it.
Does God perform miracles? That is the real question behind this sermon, and that is a question with which people of faith have always wrestled.
Lewis Smedes was a renowned theologian and ethicist who taught for many years at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. This is the institution where our own John McCreight earned his Doctor of Ministry degree. Prof. Smedes, like Prof. Hume, had a particular interest in miracles, but he came at the topic from quite a different angle. Referring to miracles of healing, he said this: “My problem was a nagging anxiety I felt about touting miraculous healings as signals of God’s power and God’s desire to heal our suffering in a world chock-full of suffering that never comes close to getting healed. It was a feeling I could not shake – a stubborn, uneasy feeling about the fittingness, even the decency, of celebrating far and wide the miraculous healing of a relatively few ailments within a world endemically infected by enormous, intractable, unalleviated suffering. It felt to me like proclaiming that God is alive and well in the world because you survived an airplane crash in which everyone else perished, and proclaiming your personal joy to those who mourn their dead…. I think we should see miraculous healings not as a way of solving human suffering, but as whimsical signals – that God is alive, that Christ is Lord, and that suffering is not the last word about human existence.”
Personally, I like what Lewis Smedes said. It seems unusually sensible. It is not wise to focus too heavily on miracles, because to do so raises all kinds of ethical problems. Why is Ms. Jones healed of a terminal illness, but Mr. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mr. Johnson, etc. are not? How can God choose a few to be healed miraculously, but so many die in pain and anguish?
There is something whimsical about miracles. That doesn’t mean they are funny, or humorous, but rather that there is inevitably an inexplicable factor in all of them.
The story from the Book of Acts is an example of divine whimsy. Acts presumably was written by Luke, the so-called beloved physician, who also wrote the third Gospel. In the 20th chapter, he tells us he was with Paul and some of the other early Christians in the city of Troas, which is likely a variant spelling for ancient Troy. It is located in modern Turkey or in biblical Asia Minor, just south of the entrance to the Dardanelles Strait.
In the 20th chapter of Acts, vs. 7-12, we are told that Paul was preaching on the third floor of a large three-story house. Paul was like a communist commissar when it came to public speaking. He figured if 500 words were sufficient for getting the message across, 5000 must be infinitely better. Luke tells us they all were planning to leave for Jerusalem early the next day, but Paul kept on blathering until midnight. There was a young man named Eutychus perched in an open window sill who was listening to this long sermon. Not unlike many other people throughout history, perhaps including some of you, he fell asleep during Paul’s lengthy homily. That in itself was no sin, but Eutychus also managed to fall out the window, landing with a resounding thud three stories below. It looked to everyone like he had died as a result of his unplanned plunge. Then Luke tells us, “But Paul went down and bent over him, and embracing him said, ‘Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him’” (Acts 20:10).
So what happened? Because Eutychus was asleep as he plummeted from the third floor, did he land lightly in a crumpled heap, having only the breath, and not the life, knocked out of him? Or did Paul miraculously revive the unfortunate chap? Luke doesn’t specify. But because he bothered to include this bizarre episode at all, we might fairly deduce that poor Eutychus was surely a goner. And if so, that is somewhat whimsical in the Smedian sense. It probably would have been considered bad form to fall asleep in one of Paul’s orations, but it all ended well when Paul brought the young man back to life.
There is only one Eutychus in all of holy writ, and this Eutychus is that Eutychus. How would you like to be the person forever enshrined in scripture for sleeping during a long sermon, falling out a third-story window, and being brought back to life by the apostle Paul? Well, at least Eutychus made it into the Bible. Many years ago the church historian and theologian Martin Marty wrote a weekly column for the magazine Christian Century. He never identified himself; he was always “St. Eutychus,” and he wrote the kind of off-beat, fascinating pieces Martin Marty has always written. Only during the last twenty years or so did he write “M.E.M.O,” Martin E. Marty Memo, and sign his John Hancock to it. It was whimsical in the best Smedes sense.
Was Eutychus saved by a miracle? We can be ambivalent about that, both in its historicity and in its physical realities. Maybe he did only have the wind knocked out of him; far stranger things have happened. But what about other alleged miracles?
The plagues visited by Moses upon the Egyptian pharaoh and his beleaguered subjects prior to the Exodus seem like miracles. The Egyptian king would agree to let the Israelites leave their slavery in Egypt, and then he would capriciously change his mind. So Moses would cause another plague to smite the Egyptians: frogs, gnats, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of the Egyptian first-born sons. Whenever the pharaoh said the Hebrews could depart for Sinai and then changed his mind, the text says that “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let them go.” We may assume this meant it provided yet another means for God to illustrate the fact that He can perform miracles. But aren’t these miracles somewhat in the “whimsical” category? Are they necessary? Did God have to use the divine shazamm on a menacing monarch?
There is a story in the Second Book of Kings (6:1-7) which details a really strange miracle. It says a group of prophets were cutting down trees by the Jordan River to build themselves a dwelling. The axe of one of them fell into the river, and the man was greatly distressed, because it was a borrowed axe. So the prophet Elisha cut a stick and threw it on the water where the axe head had sunk, and it floated miraculously to the surface. What kind of business is this? Elisha, would you get serious? You’re just horsing around, showing off!
Are certain people able to perform miracles? Yes; despite the naysayers, yes, there are individuals who do have the gift to cause miracles to occur. There are many such people mentioned in the Bible, supremely among them Jesus. And there are also people today who can overcome the laws of nature to bring astonishing results out of seemingly hopeless situations.
However, a miracle, like beauty, is in the minds of its beholders. In other words, what to one person is clearly a miracle is to another simply an unexplained and unexplainable situation. The one calls it a miracle, while the other refuses to do so. Many if not most people are ambivalent about miracles. They think they may or may not occur: period, end of story.
And that shall always be the case regarding miracles. No one can prove God performs miracles, or that He grants some people the gift to perform them on behalf of others. Either we believe this, or we don’t, but there is no way to verify the claim. And it isn’t just a matter of gullibility or skepticism. Some people seem to believe everything, and others believe nothing. But even among believers there is ambivalence about miracles, because it is always impossible to declare definitively that something or other in fact is miraculous.
In the first church I served as pastor, there was a couple with one daughter who were members of the congregation. The daughter was a teenager. She and her mother were regulars in worship, and they could always be counted on to help with all sorts of activities. But the father was as ornery a cuss as ever drew breath. He was at best a “C&E Christian,” a Christmas and Easter church attendant, and even then he came grudgingly. He was the grinch who stole both Christmas and Easter. I was pastor of that church for three years, and for two of those years George was one of the town ogres. (We had more than one.) Then he contracted a particularly aggressive form of cancer, and within six months he was dead. The transformation which came over George in those last months was astonishing. He became gentle and kind to everyone, but especially to his wife and daughter, whom theretofore he always seemed to treat like dirt. He came to church every Sunday. Cancer was the best thing that ever happened to George. It enabled him to die as what he described as a “born-again Christian,” and so he appeared to be.
Was that a miracle? If so, it was unlike most episodes we would describe as miracles. But was it actually miraculous? His wife and daughter and many others thought so. What do you think?
Sometimes, stage-4 cancer totally disappears in a few individuals afflicted by it. Is that a miracle? Those to whom it happens usually believe so, as do the members of their families. But what do we think? When we are not emotionally involved in such situations, how do we objectively assess such phenomena? And can anyone truly be objective about it? How ambivalent are we?
I believe miracles happen. Not often, not usually, ordinarily not when we most want them to occur. Why they happen in rare cases but not in all cases I cannot say. God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform. If it were all easily explained, I guess it wouldn’t be God doing it, because God is anything but The Easily Explained. Why Person A is miraculously cured but not Person B I don’t know. How cancer or heart disease or severe internal trauma spontaneously disappear I don’t know, but I believe it sometimes happens.
I am quite certain of this: It is not spiritually or psychologically wise to expect miracles, even though there are many Christians who insist we should always anticipate the miraculous. In my judgment, it is far better to expect nature to take its course than to expect God to overturn the laws of nature, because we shall then not be disappointed when miracles don’t occur, and we can make our peace with nature, whether or not we believe it is “red in tooth and claw.”
When miracles do appear in our lives or in the lives of those we most love, we should rejoice, for such rejoicing in itself is a miracle. Ultimately, to be infused with the power of God is a miracle --- nothing more, and nothing less.