Today's Sermon

 

“God at Work: Miracles 1"

 

            What do we do with miracles? It’s one of those nagging questions for the modern Christian. They’re all over the Bible; you can’t hardly turn a page without landing on one, but where do you land on them? Some say it’s simple. They happen. They’re true, from parting the Red Sea (which is likely a mistranslation of what should be “Sea of Reeds”) to Jesus walking on water. Others can’t square that with a modern scientific worldview, and they find talk of miracles primitive, even embarrassing. Biblical literalism is a fairly new phenomenon, not arising until the 19^th century, so maybe miracles were intended to be mere metaphors all along.

            I find those answers wanting. Strict literalism feels ignorant and pure symbolism feels impotent. We don’t think someone can magically multiply food, but if the feeding of the 5,000 was just a crowd sharing food they already brought, it a story with a nice moral, but not much else, hardly worth elevating to scriptural immortality. We can take the Thomas Jefferson approach: cut out anything supernatural (he literally did this), and reduce the text to purely moral teachings, but that robs the sacred writing of its depth, texture, and power.

            What if rather than blindly accepting them, crossing our fingers, or casually discarding them, we could open up talk of miracles in a way that could meaningfully shape us, which is precisely what we will do in a sermon series from now until Easter, the greatest of miracles?

            There is another way to read the miracles of scripture, and, by extension, the miracles of life, one that does not require a binary choice. This way is articulated by biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Johnson, with his book on miracles, will be our companion on this journey with miracles from here until Easter, and I think you’ll find him an illuminating teacher.

            Johnson shifts our focus. He isn’t interested in doing biblical forensics, trying to figure out “what really happened.” Rather, Johnson starts with the conviction that something happened. Miracles are experiential realities. Maybe the church would eventually have incentive to fabricate miracles, but early it might have only have put them at risk. These stories were the only way to adequately express what they experienced, and it’s undeniable that miracles were central to early Christians. Johnson opens his book with the statement, “From the very first, Christians based their religious claims on the evidence provided by miracles—that is, experiences that could not be ascribed to merely human agency.”[1]

            Put simply, our ancestors understood God to be moving through the world, and that movement moved them. The question was then not if you believed in miracles, but rather given the miraculous experience of God’s movement, how do you see the world. To follow, given how you see the world, what world do you work to create? Johnson says we don’t discover the world so much as we make it. You could take this right out of secular poststructuralist thought (if you’re into that). He writes, “together we construct worlds on the basis of shared imagination, and we engage in shared practices that serve to make what we imagine as both real and ‘natural.’”[2] Johnson asks us to approach the Bible and the world “imaginally.”

            “Imaginary” has a negative connotation in our context, but Johnson extols our use of imagination to partner with God to bring about the very kingdom Jesus and the faithful have always pointed to. The Bible is not surveillance footage of what happened—though it does contain history in it—the Bible is a joint project of God and humanity, one of both documentation and imagination, that is inviting us into a worldview rooted in honoring the holy of it all. Accordingly, Johnson suggests we read the bible not

for the accuracy of its description but for the power of its vision, seeking in its compositions not information about the world that produced Scripture, but the way in which Scripture itself creates, through imagination, a world that might be inhabited. It means approaching Scripture not as an anthology of accidentally gathered compositions locked in the past, but as a set of compositions that individually and as a collection speaks a word that unlocks every present; not as an inadequate collection of historical sources that poorly describe reality, but as a set of witness that powerfully prescribe reality; not as an assortment of propositions about the world, but as an imaginative construction of a world within which humans can choose to live, a world they can embody through practices consistent with that vision.[3]

            Now, do you need me to shorten and restate that more simply? Johnson is a former Benedictine monk and ordained priest. Clergymen can be longwinded. There’s an old saying I first heard attributed to an anonymous nun that gets right to the point: The Bible is the way it never was, but always is. Or, more to Johnson’s point, the Bible points us to how it could be. The Bible presents to us a tacit invitation to imagine a world that steps into God’s justice and God’s peace, giving us a set of images and teachings from which to begin. Do you see how different that is from the way we often approach it? We’re not merely trying to figure out what “really” happened so we can apply it to daily life, we’re trying to push on what we think real could be, who we could become, and how we can be in relationship with God, one another, and all creation. Miracles’ unbelievability is their gift. Their reality-defying character is not a problem to be solved, but an invitation to be accepted, one that pushes on the bounds of what we think is possible.

            With that framework in mind, let’s get to today’s text, our first miracle in the series, to see what it has to teach us and to set us off on our Lenten journey toward the miracle of all miracles, the empty tomb.

Exodus 3:1-15a
            3 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. 3 Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” 4 When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” 5 Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 6 He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

            7 Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” 12 He said, “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

            13 But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” 15 God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’:

            We could probably do an entire series on that passage, so let’s at least touch on a few of its lessons, its imaginal power:

1. God is. Quite literally, when asked what God’s name is, God replies with a form of the verb, “to be.” It’s usually translated “I am who I am,” but the Hebrew tense isn’t present. It can be more expansively translated “I am who I am, I was who I was, I will be who I will be.” God exists, God is ultimate reality, God is active, and as Johnson puts it, God “resists human definition and control.”[4] This is the understanding our ancestors brought to the world and their lives. They’re not beliefs; they’re presumptions, which is a far better understanding of many who came before us. God is and therefore this is, we are.
2. God’s presence is a burning. We know this. We can talk about times when we have this gut feeling, this burning inside. In fact, in the Emmaus Road story we read at 8:30 just two weeks ago, what do the travelers say about the risen Jesus who they didn’t recognize, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking with us on the road and explaining the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32). In Exodus, God is found in a burning bush that doesn’t consume the bush, much like in the New Testament Pentecost story it was said flames descended upon the gathered’s heads as the Spirit was upon them allowing them to understand each other across linguistic lines. Do you see how the New Testament writers imagined a world in light of the Old Testament witness? God’s fire enables, but it does not consume. It does not burn up. That’s how we know it’s close.
3. God not only is but is active in the world, and God’s activity has a certain vocation or focus—liberation. The Exodus is the defining narrative of the Old Testament, which, remember, is between 75-80% of the Bible, depending on which tradition’s Bible you’re using. God is interested in freeing members of God’s creation that are held captive. God aches when what God has made is oppressed, controlled, and exploited. This means bodily, materially, economically, through tradition or culture and the roles assigned. Jesus clearly lives into this imaginal reality and continues it. Look how often he breaks through the constructed walls around acceptable roles and behavior. He’s constantly freeing people from their bondage to constructs that confine them. He’s not an anarchist, but one who steps into a prophetic vision of human relationship that is built around mutual thriving, compassion. Made public, that’s called justice. To be a person of faith in his image makes no sense, then, unless it likewise imagines and enacts liberation.
4. As we see in the final line of the passage, God is the God of those who came before, the ancestors. We are not adrift in some abyss. Francis Weller, grief expert, talks about how today it’s easy to feel lost because we feel disconnected from our surroundings. In the faith, we have a lineage, a trajectory, a community, and a home in God.

            So, we don’t go round and around about how a bush could burn and not burn up; rather, we ask how we shall live in a world where bushes burn with the liberating love of God. We ask what world the miracle prompts us to imagine, and if imagine then see and if see then step into and if step into then create with the living and moving God. What do we do when we come upon the miracles, we don’t cross our fingers, we let them cross our hearts, cross our minds, and then we use them shape our lives.

            Amen.

[1] Luke Timothy Johnson, Miracles: God’s Presence and Power in Creation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2018), 3.

[2] Ibid., 50.

[3] Ibid., 50-51.

[4] Ibid., 96.