Saint Mark 5:21–43
“The Church & Miracles”
I have never considered myself a prophet. Neither am I a soothsayer who can tell the future. I couldn’t even conjure up a good magic trick for any amount of money. But if six decades of watching the news and reading newspapers and now websites has taught me one thing it has taught me to wait until all the facts are in.
So it was on the emotionally strange Thursday we had in Chicago. In a city where the Chicago Blackhawks seem to be the only team with any kind of recent record for success when they won Lord Stanley’s Cup for the third time in six seasons it was a reason to party.
A million or so people took leave of their senses and went downtown to watch the parade and go to the rally at Soldier Field. They were excited and happy as they should have been. (Though I point out again as I did the last two times the Hawks won – I am sure that some of those in the crowd who were yelling: “We’re Number 1!” and “We did it!” wouldn’t know icing the puck from icing the cake.)
But some of us, as we watched the celebration, couldn’t erase from our minds the events of the night before when a young man came to a bible study, was welcomed warmly, sat and listened to scripture, and talk of scripture for an hour, and then proceeded to shoot up the place.
It was an act of pure evil.
That Thursday night I had an event where I knew some pastors would be present. One in particular is a woman with a newly minted Masters of Divinity degree and ordination papers where the ink is barely dry.
She was upset over the shooting. Only a heartless stone would not have been. And she worried about what she was going to preach about on Sunday. “I’ve been immersed in the news all day and I don’t know what I am going to say about this.”
I could guess what she was going to say because she had preached after a national tragedy before and shed more heat than light on the issue blaming all the usual societal culprits.
My prophetic words of wisdom were “It is usually a few days before I even attempt to write anything,” I said, “I like to wait and see how the whole story unfolds.”
The facts usually get uglier but clearer as they did this time.
The murder was a “white supremacist” with writing and plans clearly posted a website for all the world to see. His parents had long since separated so his home life was unstable. However a friend, who has been interviewed countless times, seemed to know everything he was planning. Yet nobody did anything to stop him.
And I am not talking about governmental authorities! I am talking about a responsible mom or dad. I’m talking about his friends who might have told somebody, “Did you know that my friend is ‘looking to kill a lot of people.’”
We can’t ask government to monitor every website, nor should they. We can’t ask government to infiltrate every deranged plot. We can’t ask government to be the parent of every kid who comes from a broken home.
It takes individual responsibility. It takes parents, neighbours, girl friends, and boyfriends to act responsibly. It takes people to take initiative to, when they notice that their white-supremacist friend friend named Dylann now has a gun to go along with his hate filled website and his desire to start a civil war, tell the police.
We can’t just stand around waiting for God to work a miracle. Somebody has to take the incitive. Miracles just don’t happen they are made.
Episcopal priest and professor, Barbara Brown Taylor, said “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 could use a miracle, but miracles are hard to come by.”[1]
That is what today’s gospel tells us.
The two recipients have to work to even get to Jesus. Like the people who last Thursday jostled and endured shoving and pushing and pulling in order to see their favourite Blackhawk the crowd pressed in on Jesus.
One figure emerges from that crowd: Jaris, the leader of the synagogue makes his way through and literally throws himself at Jesus feet begging him to come and lay hands on his dear daughter who is at death’s door.
And without any fanfare Jesus just goes with him. And they crowds follow to see what Jesus is up to next.
In that crowd is another desperate person. Her bleeding disorder is apparently incurable. We are told that she has spent all she has – money couldn’t help her. She has been to countless physicians and so science and countless physicians couldn’t help her. The two powers that figure so predominantly then and now, money and science, are of no help at all.
Both turn to Jesus. And Jesus, he reaches across social and religious barriers to marginalised, rejected outcasts and restores them and the ones they love to wholeness welcoming them into the kingdom of God where there are no outcasts.
Professor Taylor suggests that miracles occur when “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.”
Those who were looking for miracles or answers in the Charlestown tragedy found them in the strangest of places last Thursday. It happened in the courtroom of Chief Magistrate Judge James Gosnell who with wisdom beyond measure asked a representative of every person who was killed to speak to Roof. Who could have predicted what happened next.
What was heard was not the irrational anger that have heard before which incites people to riot but honest expressions of hurt, pain and grief.
Two quotes will be more than enough.
The first from Nadine Collier, daughter of Ethel Lance: “I forgive you. You took something really precious away from me. I will never talk to her ever again. I will never be able to hold her again. But I forgive you and have mercy on your soul. It hurts me, it hurts a lot of people but God forgive you and I forgive you.”
And this from Alana Simmons, granddaughter of Daniel Simmons: “Although my grandfather and the other victims died at the hands of hate, this is proof – everyone’s plea for your soul is proof they lived in love and their legacies will live in love, so hate won’t win.”[2]
“I forgive you.” Did they really say that?
Did they really say that to a young thug, who came into a church, a house of God, and for an hour was welcomed by these people of God, and then, after that hour was over opened fire on those same people and killed them?
Did the loved ones of the dead really say to the killer, “I forgive you.”
Did they really say that? I heard them. And when I heard them expressing forgiveness in the midst of all they had been through.
“Whew!” I thought. Now that’s a miracle. Thanks for listening
Endnotes:
1. Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowan and Little field Publishing Group, 1997), p. 139–140.
2. The Associated Press, “Representatives of Charleston Shooting Victims Forgive Dylan Roof.” The Guardian. June, 19, 2015.
Friday, June 26, 2015
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
"The Church & Vision" - June 21, 2015
1 Samuel 17:[1a, 4–11, 19–23] 32–49 and Saint Mark 4:35–41
Prudential Insurance has a wonderful commercial in which Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert asks people to write "life events" on blue and yellow magnets and stick them on a giant wall. The good things are written on yellow magnets and the bad ones on blue. "The results showed that the past was a pretty even mix of good and bad. Yet the future was almost all good things."
The group is asked what they make of the results. One man says, "We all want to think about positive stuff." But, a woman adds, "Realistically there will be down times."
Dr. Gilbert’s one sentence summation: "It’s great to think optimistically, but’s lets plan for whatever the future might bring."1
We spend a lot of time planning. Our whole lives, at whatever age we are, may be spent in planning.
Parents start planning for their children’s futures before they are born. Children, willingly or (my guess is) mostly unwillingly are enrolled in all kinds of classes and sports leagues, hoping they will be the next Bryce Harper, Jonathan Toews, or Itzhak Perlman.
Then they start to plan for the future. What high school? What college? What field of study? What job? Where and how they will retire? Life can turn into one big strategy session.
The problem is that even Harvard professors and Prudential Insurance can’t plan for everything. They can’t plan for the unexpected storms that blow in while we are not looking. They can’t plan for the giant problems that may show up in our lives.
Few nations then, few nations now, are better at planning for war than Israel. They had to and have to be. Not much has changed since biblical times when "the Philistines – that warring, marauding people who lived on the coast land we now call Gaza, regularly invaded Israel to plunder and enslave it."2
To answer this threat Saul raised up quite an army. The problem was that the Philistines had an "unknown unknown" in their ranks. His name was Goliath and he was a giant.
For you Harry Potter fans think Rubeus Hagrid but with a bad attitude. For you sports fans, think an NFL linesmen times ten.
Not only was Goliath big he was massively armed. A biblical times equivalent of a nuclear weapon. But, most important of all, he was frightening.
Being afraid can stop even the best of us in our tracks. If we see or experience something that really scares us, fear is a perfectly reasonable response. But, fear can cloud our vision. It can make our thinking fuzzy. In can even freeze us in our tracks and cause us to do nothing.
That is exactly what the army of Saul did. They did nothing.
"For forty days Goliath walks down the mountain and shouts challenges and insults. And for forty days the soldiers of Israel quake in fear, wringing their hands, talking among themselves about how terrible and hopeless this all is, amplifying the fear by their talk, which has now immobilized them."3
They could not see a way around their problem. The only thing they could see was the giant. He clouded their vision. They couldn’t see past him so they thought there was no way around him.
Now here is the one thing I want you to take away from this message. I really do want you to store it in the back of your mind because someday you will need it. I hope you here will go home and watch this on YouTube so that is forever listed in your watch history. I hope our YouTube viewers will earmark this post because it has one thing in it that is very important. David was able to beat Goliath because he didn’t know any better.
He was absolutely untrained in his use of conventional warfare. In fact, the moment Saul gets the young man all armoured up he discovers that it won’t work. He can’t move. Armour limits not only his vision but his movement. If he is going to defeat the giant it is going to have to be by unconventional means.
There is New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called: "How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules." In it he says that David broke the rhythm of the of the encounter. We pay most of our attention to David’s great aim with the slingshot and forget the two things he did before.
First, says Gladwell, he sped up the encounter. He rushes his opponent. "The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,"4
When David didn’t approach his target slowly but ran at him, unencumbered by conventional armour and weapons he became quicker and more nimble than his opponent.
Second, and most important of all, after Goliath makes fun of him David reveals his most important asset: "You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts ... whom you have defied."5
What is important here is that this is the first time in a very long story anybody thought of calling on the LORD’s name. Read the whole 17th chapter of first Samuel and you’ll see it. The first and only time the LORD’s name is invoked in power is here. Right before his charge David shouts these words not only at the giant but for himself. He is reminding us who is on his side and it is nothing other than the LORD God of Hosts.
Often that is the last place we turn when a giant or a storm comes into our lives. We fail to remind ourselves to whom we belong – the LORD God of Hosts and the power that belonging entails.
The last thing the disciples do in today’s gospel, after battling the storm that has suddenly come into their lives, is look to Jesus. Waves are crashing in. The boat is being swamped and Jesus seems to be below deck, asleep, oblivious to it all.
They wake him and he does something just as audacious as David did. Instead of trying to sail the boat in a conventional way through the storm. Instead of taking command of the boat, Jesus wipes the sleep from his eyes and takes command of the situation. He sees more than just the storm. He sees an opportunity to put the power of God to work.
"Awake now, he told the wind to pipe down and said to the sea, ‘Quiet! Settle down!’ The wind ran out of breath; the sea became smooth as glass."6
That is the power of God we are tied too.
he story of David and Goliath and the story of Jesus stilling the storm are important to us because there will be times in all of our lives when we will feel like we are a very small boat on a very bring and rough sea. There will be times in our lives when we are feeling like we are surrounded by mountainous waves, or a problem so big it looks like Goliath, and we won’t know what to do. There will be times when all we have in our hand are the blue magnets of bad times.
It is then we must look for the new vision that God has given us in both of these stories. Sometimes we are just not going to be able to rely on all the technology or physical advantages that science has given us. Sometimes, we are going to have to act like we don’t know any better and like David rely on the power of the LORD God of hosts.
The new vision we receive in this place is unlike any we can receive anywhere else. Here we are given eyes to see the presence and power of God working in real life, to save and sustain real people. It comes when we trust ourselves to the LORD God of hosts and his new vision for our lives that comes, more often than not, in unexpected ways.
Nobody expected David to best Goliath but he did. Nobody expected Jesus’ voice really have an effect on the winds and waves when he told them to "put a muzzle on it" but it did.
We’re plugged into the power of God. And just a glimpse of that power, let alone a full-blown vision, will be enough to sustain you, and me, and the entire church against any giants or storms that may fill our lives and frighten us to death.
You and I will be able to defeat any force that comes our way when we, like David, admit that we really don’t know any better but to trust God and then listen to God say to our rushing hearts, and confused thoughts, what he said to the storm, "Peace, be still."
And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts, and minds, and thoughts in the power of the living God who revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Thanks for listening.
June 21, 2015
Endnotes
1. From the transcript of the Prudential commercial, "The Magnet Experiment."
2. Dr. Fred R. Anderson, "The Slingshot Gospel." The Madison Avenue Pulpit. June 24, 2014.
3. Walter Bruggemann, David’s Truth. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), p. 35.
4. Malcolm Gladwell, "How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules." The New Yorker. May 11, 2009.
5. 1 Samuel 17:45. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
6. St. Mark 4:39-40. (MSG) [MSG=The Message]
Prudential Insurance has a wonderful commercial in which Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert asks people to write "life events" on blue and yellow magnets and stick them on a giant wall. The good things are written on yellow magnets and the bad ones on blue. "The results showed that the past was a pretty even mix of good and bad. Yet the future was almost all good things."
The group is asked what they make of the results. One man says, "We all want to think about positive stuff." But, a woman adds, "Realistically there will be down times."
Dr. Gilbert’s one sentence summation: "It’s great to think optimistically, but’s lets plan for whatever the future might bring."1
We spend a lot of time planning. Our whole lives, at whatever age we are, may be spent in planning.
Parents start planning for their children’s futures before they are born. Children, willingly or (my guess is) mostly unwillingly are enrolled in all kinds of classes and sports leagues, hoping they will be the next Bryce Harper, Jonathan Toews, or Itzhak Perlman.
Then they start to plan for the future. What high school? What college? What field of study? What job? Where and how they will retire? Life can turn into one big strategy session.
The problem is that even Harvard professors and Prudential Insurance can’t plan for everything. They can’t plan for the unexpected storms that blow in while we are not looking. They can’t plan for the giant problems that may show up in our lives.
Few nations then, few nations now, are better at planning for war than Israel. They had to and have to be. Not much has changed since biblical times when "the Philistines – that warring, marauding people who lived on the coast land we now call Gaza, regularly invaded Israel to plunder and enslave it."2
To answer this threat Saul raised up quite an army. The problem was that the Philistines had an "unknown unknown" in their ranks. His name was Goliath and he was a giant.
For you Harry Potter fans think Rubeus Hagrid but with a bad attitude. For you sports fans, think an NFL linesmen times ten.
Not only was Goliath big he was massively armed. A biblical times equivalent of a nuclear weapon. But, most important of all, he was frightening.
Being afraid can stop even the best of us in our tracks. If we see or experience something that really scares us, fear is a perfectly reasonable response. But, fear can cloud our vision. It can make our thinking fuzzy. In can even freeze us in our tracks and cause us to do nothing.
That is exactly what the army of Saul did. They did nothing.
"For forty days Goliath walks down the mountain and shouts challenges and insults. And for forty days the soldiers of Israel quake in fear, wringing their hands, talking among themselves about how terrible and hopeless this all is, amplifying the fear by their talk, which has now immobilized them."3
They could not see a way around their problem. The only thing they could see was the giant. He clouded their vision. They couldn’t see past him so they thought there was no way around him.
Now here is the one thing I want you to take away from this message. I really do want you to store it in the back of your mind because someday you will need it. I hope you here will go home and watch this on YouTube so that is forever listed in your watch history. I hope our YouTube viewers will earmark this post because it has one thing in it that is very important. David was able to beat Goliath because he didn’t know any better.
He was absolutely untrained in his use of conventional warfare. In fact, the moment Saul gets the young man all armoured up he discovers that it won’t work. He can’t move. Armour limits not only his vision but his movement. If he is going to defeat the giant it is going to have to be by unconventional means.
There is New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell called: "How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules." In it he says that David broke the rhythm of the of the encounter. We pay most of our attention to David’s great aim with the slingshot and forget the two things he did before.
First, says Gladwell, he sped up the encounter. He rushes his opponent. "The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target,"4
When David didn’t approach his target slowly but ran at him, unencumbered by conventional armour and weapons he became quicker and more nimble than his opponent.
Second, and most important of all, after Goliath makes fun of him David reveals his most important asset: "You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts ... whom you have defied."5
What is important here is that this is the first time in a very long story anybody thought of calling on the LORD’s name. Read the whole 17th chapter of first Samuel and you’ll see it. The first and only time the LORD’s name is invoked in power is here. Right before his charge David shouts these words not only at the giant but for himself. He is reminding us who is on his side and it is nothing other than the LORD God of Hosts.
Often that is the last place we turn when a giant or a storm comes into our lives. We fail to remind ourselves to whom we belong – the LORD God of Hosts and the power that belonging entails.
The last thing the disciples do in today’s gospel, after battling the storm that has suddenly come into their lives, is look to Jesus. Waves are crashing in. The boat is being swamped and Jesus seems to be below deck, asleep, oblivious to it all.
They wake him and he does something just as audacious as David did. Instead of trying to sail the boat in a conventional way through the storm. Instead of taking command of the boat, Jesus wipes the sleep from his eyes and takes command of the situation. He sees more than just the storm. He sees an opportunity to put the power of God to work.
"Awake now, he told the wind to pipe down and said to the sea, ‘Quiet! Settle down!’ The wind ran out of breath; the sea became smooth as glass."6
That is the power of God we are tied too.
he story of David and Goliath and the story of Jesus stilling the storm are important to us because there will be times in all of our lives when we will feel like we are a very small boat on a very bring and rough sea. There will be times in our lives when we are feeling like we are surrounded by mountainous waves, or a problem so big it looks like Goliath, and we won’t know what to do. There will be times when all we have in our hand are the blue magnets of bad times.
It is then we must look for the new vision that God has given us in both of these stories. Sometimes we are just not going to be able to rely on all the technology or physical advantages that science has given us. Sometimes, we are going to have to act like we don’t know any better and like David rely on the power of the LORD God of hosts.
The new vision we receive in this place is unlike any we can receive anywhere else. Here we are given eyes to see the presence and power of God working in real life, to save and sustain real people. It comes when we trust ourselves to the LORD God of hosts and his new vision for our lives that comes, more often than not, in unexpected ways.
Nobody expected David to best Goliath but he did. Nobody expected Jesus’ voice really have an effect on the winds and waves when he told them to "put a muzzle on it" but it did.
We’re plugged into the power of God. And just a glimpse of that power, let alone a full-blown vision, will be enough to sustain you, and me, and the entire church against any giants or storms that may fill our lives and frighten us to death.
You and I will be able to defeat any force that comes our way when we, like David, admit that we really don’t know any better but to trust God and then listen to God say to our rushing hearts, and confused thoughts, what he said to the storm, "Peace, be still."
And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts, and minds, and thoughts in the power of the living God who revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Thanks for listening.
June 21, 2015
Endnotes
1. From the transcript of the Prudential commercial, "The Magnet Experiment."
2. Dr. Fred R. Anderson, "The Slingshot Gospel." The Madison Avenue Pulpit. June 24, 2014.
3. Walter Bruggemann, David’s Truth. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), p. 35.
4. Malcolm Gladwell, "How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules." The New Yorker. May 11, 2009.
5. 1 Samuel 17:45. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
6. St. Mark 4:39-40. (MSG) [MSG=The Message]
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