I don't believe in miracles

Confession: I don't believe in miracles.

This is something that I have been wrestling with lately in my work at the trauma center.

I have seen enough tough reality to recognize that miracles don't happen just because you might want them.  I have sat with people who DESERVE a miracle.  Who pray unceasingly for a miracle.  Who don't get that miracle.

I think culturally we buy into some sort of mythology around miracles that implies that if we "believe" hard enough or pray hard enough we will get what we want. I have seen too many people die and too many families hurting.

It's not the job of the chaplain to believe in miracles.  I think its damaging. I have no doubt that God is capable of miracles, and I am not so cynical that I wouldn't shout from the rooftops if I happened to witness one, but its not my job to hold out hope for the impossible.  Or worse yet, tell patients that.  I don't believe in miracles.  At least not the kind where you want something and pray for it and get exactly what you want.

Because sometimes, miracles are not healing or curing.  Sometimes a miracle is a peaceful death. Or what seems like an impossible reconciliation between family members.  Or sitting with a hurting person whose spouse is suffering cardiac arrest in the ICU and feeling the power of the Holy Spirit flooding over the room in a flickering moment of calm amidst chaos.

I believe in a God who shows up.  I believe in a God of accompaniment, not a God who dispenses good or bad things according to a quantifiable amount of belief.

Your sighs and groans and mumbled prayers are heard by God in heaven…a sermon on Romans 8:26-39

A. Hanson, NYC 2014

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from the Triune God who promises to hear our prayers.  Amen. 

Let’s listen one more time to today’s reading from Romans, chapter 8, verses 26-39:

 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

 We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.

 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
   we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’ 
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

            This portion of Paul’s Letter to the Romans was written as a sort of encouragement to followers of Jesus. Paul is acknowledging that the road that believers walk is difficult, and that even in their present suffering, God bears with them. Paul is NOT equating suffering with what it means to be a Christian or saying that suffering now will pay off with salvation in the future.  Paul is saying that suffering is part of what it means to live in a broken world.

            While we do not live under the oppression of the Roman Empire, we certainly know what it means to live in a broken world.  And while we are eavesdropping on a letter written to another people in another time and place, Paul’s letter to the Romans provides hope for us even now. We need to hear that in the midst of what feels like a broken God-forsaken world, with immigrant and refugee children being detained in unimaginable and inhuman conditions in our own country, passenger planes being shot out of the sky in Ukraine, and land strikes on children and families in Gaza, we need to hear that God is present and knows that our weeping and our groans and our sighs are prayers. 

It is easy to become discouraged with all the suffering in the world.  It is understandable to ask, “where is God in all this mess?” and believe that suffering points to God’s absence rather than God’s presence.  I don’t have some theological rationale for why suffering exists.  I don’t have a neat answer for you.  It would be a mistake to look at this text from Romans and parse out sound bites that would attempt to explain suffering in this broken world, such as, “ We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  This sounds suspiciously like it could be manipulated into the baseless platitudes of “Everything happens for a reason” or “God never gives you more than you can handle.”  Sometimes suffering is just suffering.  Life is hard.  Suffering is not part of the roadmap of how to be a Christian, but unfortunately, it is part of what it means to be human.

So is there any good news? It’s good news to me that the Holy Spirit helps us pray when we are too weak to do so on our own.  When we cannot even form words, just sighs. And that same Spirit intercedes for us with God who promises to hear our prayers. Somewhere along the line, maybe in Sunday School, maybe as a result of memorized prayers before going to bed or table graces, many of us got the idea that a prayer is only a prayer if it makes sense and sounds good.  Anne Lamott writes in her book, Help, Thanks, Wow, “Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.” So your sighs and groans and tears and mumbled prayers are heard by God in heaven. 

I remember how liberated I felt when I learned that I could actually shout at God when I was angry because God can take it.  God does not want or need us to kneel quietly, fold our hands neatly and pray with the eloquence of Jesus himself.  God loves us just as we are and wants us to bring our whole selves to our prayers. God does not love us any less if we are not blessed with the gift of words or if we shout “God, where are you?!” or even if our prayer is something along the lines of “Whoever you are, I hope you are listening.” 

And while it is good news that the Spirit intercedes for us, the even better news is that nothing can separate us from the love of God.  Suffering is real.  Pain is real.  Sin is real. It can feel like God is absent from our lives, and yet, God became human and lived among us and lives in us, so we never have to be apart from God again.  Nothing will separate us from God.  Not hardship, distress, addiction, mental illness, divorce, abuse, persecution, famine, nakedness, poverty, wealth, peril, fear, doubt, certainty, sword, war, politics, violence or even we ourselves.  Nothing in all of creation, in this broken world, can separate us from God. Sin still exists in the world.  Brokenness still exists in the world.  But the hold that sin, death, and evil has on God’s beloved people, which is ALL people, has forever been broken.  Thanks be to God.

Death is an inevitability...but it does not have the final word (Luke 7:11-17)

From a sermon preached at Humble Walk Lutheran Church, St Paul, MN on June 9, 2013. 

Luke 7:11-17

Grace, peace, and mercy are yours from the Triune God.  Amen

I struggled with this week’s text because it leaves me with more questions than answers. Luke’s Gospel provides story after story to illustrate why Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God and how God is doing a new thing in the world.  This story is included for a reason, and it has all the right components:  a grieving widowed mother, a dead man, a wailing crowd, and a miraculous healing.   

So why this particular man?  Surely on this very same day other sons and daughters in the same city died leaving behind widowed mothers.  Where were their miracles?  And any one of us who has ever prayed for a miraculous healing of a loved one and ended up planning a funeral instead or tried to find meaning in a life smothered by depression, knows that miracles don’t happen just because we want them. 

I have absolutely no doubt that miracles happen every single day, just look at an infant discovering the world for the first time or getting the test result that the cancer has gone into remission.  But we want miracles to come on our terms and when they don’t, we often feel like it is a reflection of our faithfulness or quality of character.  If we would have prayed more or tried harder or were a better person, we like to think that we might deserve a miracle more than the person down the street.  In a life that seems way too painful and out of control, we need to feel like we can grasp onto something.

It is tempting to read this text as a story of miraculous healing and the power of God that comes through our actions of faith.  A healing does take place and it is because of the power of God.  But this text, and other texts like it, which we will read over the next couple months, in which Jesus performs miracles and brings hope to impossible situations are twisted around by our human need to control the outcome of things around us, particularly those things that have the potential to cause us pain.  We hear that Jesus performs miracles, and we try to influence those miracles through our own actions.  There is an entire ministry enterprise built on this, just turn on any Christian television station.  You declare your need for healing, and “prayer teams are standing by” and in the midst of all this praying, there are testimonials from those who have been healed.  And stories like the widow at Nain that we hear about in today’s Gospel are cited as evidence for the miraculous work of Christ, you just have to want it enough to pray for it in the right way. I think we sometimes want to read healing stories through this lens, but that is not what is going on in this text. 

Jesus and his disciples and a large crowd are moving throughout the country.  The disciples and the crowd had already witnessed the miraculous work of Jesus.  This group came to Nain, a small city near Nazareth.  Before they even enter the gates of the city, this crowd meets another large crowd.  This group was carrying the body of a man, the “bier” that we hear referenced in the text is a sort of rack for carrying a body wrapped in a shroud, and they are headed out of the city for burial.  This man is described as “his mother’s only son” and his mother was a widow.  At the time, this woman would very likely become destitute without a spouse or children to care for her, as there were no viable ways for a single woman to support herself.  This woman was in the most desperate situation imaginable.  She had lost her husband, lost her only child, and now she was likely to lose her home and her entire way of life. 

But when we look at the text, REALLY look at the text, the grieving widow is not asking Jesus to bring her son back to life.   The group carrying the body has no expectation of healing.   We do not hear about the widowed mother begging and pleading for God to bring her son back to life.  She has no idea who this Jesus character is.  She is just trying to summon all her energy to get through this burial so she can go home and pull the shades and finally sob in peace without being stared at by the neighbors.  She is weighed down by death.

We have all been in this place.  The steely determination of gathering all your energy reserves to get through one more day, one more hour, one more minute, before you can collapse on the floor at home and cry.  Maybe you have had to gather your own emotions to be able to “hold it together” and put yourself on autopilot to plan the funeral of a family member.  Maybe you are surviving a divorce or the grief of a broken relationship and it takes everything you have to make it through a day of work.  Maybe you are suffering in silence with addiction or depression and feel like you are dead, yet you keep waking up everyday anyway.  Loneliness is death.   Fear is death.  Sin is death.  We are all weighed down by death and cannot save ourselves.   What are you carrying that is causing you to die slowly?   What do you need Jesus to heal today?  

Yet in this widow’s unimaginable grief, in the dark tunnel that leads only to the grave where she will bury her only son, Jesus notices her.  Out of the crowd he picks her out, feels his heart break for her, and says, “do not weep.”  And he touches the shroud that covers the body of her only son, and commands the man to rise.  For this community, death was terribly taboo and against religious purity laws.  By physically touching death, Jesus is indicating that he is doing a new thing on earth.  Walls will be broken down and change is coming. 

The promise that we hear in today’s text is not that the sick and the dead will be restored to their lives here on earth, and will be able to testify about it on the stage of a low-rent televangelist on late night television, but that Jesus came to earth, both fully human and fully divine, and knows the depth of human suffering and promises to move towards us and be present in it.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we are capable of doing or praying or being.  We are all going to die.  The man in today’s text will die again.  His mother will die.  All of the disciples and the people in the crowd will die.  Even Jesus himself is going to die.  And while death is an inevitability for all of us, it does not have the final word. 

This is the promise of the Gospel in today’s reading.  We have Jesus, God incarnate, who came to earth to dwell among us so that we might never have to be apart from God again, not in sin and not in death.  We have a God who KNOWS suffering and who endures with us in our present suffering.  We have a God who notices the grief of widowed mothers and dares to comfort and heal in the midst of such grief and suffering.   We have a God who holds us in the midst of our grief and dares to touch the parts of our lives that are dying.  And above all, we have a God who has conquered death on our behalf.  Death happens, even in the midst of life, but it is not the end and we are not defined by it.  Amen.  

How long O Lord, how long?

Kyrie Eleison.  Evil came to an elementary school today in Newtown, CT.  Preliminary news reports indicate that a shooter came to an elementary school, focusing most of his attention on a single Kindergarten classroom.  A Kindergarten classroom.  My mother is a Kindergarten teacher and a ton of my relatives and friends are teachers as well.  If this can happen in an elementary school, it can truly happen anywhere. And it needs to stop.  Right now.

Reports indicate that there are about 26 people who lost their lives, as well as it is reported the shooter's mother was a teacher at the school, and reports indicate that she was a Kindergarten teacher.

How long O Lord, how long?

How many more times does this have to happen before we really and seriously talk about gun control?  There is no argument that can justify the fact that someone who is crazy enough to shoot up an elementary school should be able to get within 100 miles of a gun.  The gun rights lobby opposes all efforts to regulate gun usage, saying, "people kill people, guns don't kill people." Crazy people who have no business getting their hands on guns use guns to kill people.  No, you cannot legislate crazy, but you can make it harder to get guns.

This is the second shooting this week.  Sunday there was a shooting in a mall in Portland, OR where two people were killed while Christmas shopping.  It is time to have this conversation.  Those of us who live in communities that have been ripped apart by gun violence, and who know people whose lives have been changed forever by these public acts of terror, know that it is too late for this to be a conversation.  We need action.  I have yet to set foot in a movie theater since the shooting this summer.  And now, thousands and thousands of children are going to be afraid to go to school.  It is not okay.  Something needs to give and I think it is access to guns.  This is the final straw.  Below is a portion of a friend's facebook status, who was in the Aurora movie theaters this summer during the shootings:

"None of you know what it's like to see the devastation of a crazy person with a gun. None of you know what it's like to be covered in the blood of a strangers body that's been ripped apart by bullets."

Kyrie Eleison.  Hug your families a little closer today.