Sermon Cloud

DIVINE BUSKER

When we lived in Texas, we almost never missed going to the Texas State Fair, and we especially liked to go see the buskers like the one-man band who played 12 instruments at once, or the midway barker who used mirrors to create the effect that he was only half a man – he had no lower body, he was just there from the waist up.  There are buskers all over the world – street performers who do just about anything that people find entertaining, like juggling and magic, fire-eating and sword swallowing, snake charming and card tricks.  Busy people will stop on street corners to watch buskers do their tricks, and if it’s a good one, they’ll toss some money into his hat.  If the busker is moving around from place to place, he might attract a crowd that follows after him to see what wonder he’s going to do next.    

 The crowds had been following Jesus around for days, as though he was some kind of busker passing through Galilee.  They weren’t there on that hillside because they thought he was the Messiah, but because they wanted to see what he was going to do next.  There were thousands of eyes on the hillside staring at Christ expectantly.  They wanted a miracle – or at least a good trick - and certainly would have been satisfied, with one; but in the words of the late Billy Mays:  “But wait, there’s more!”  Today’s text offers us not just one, but two miracle stories!  Not only do we have the multiplication of loaves and fishes, but there’s an encore of walking on the water!  It’s a preaching nightmare – what’s a preacher to do with this embarrassment of riches in only a few minutes on Sunday morning?

 How am I supposed to deal with such spectacular miracles of nature in this modern age of science, when all things can be explained and quantified, almost everything can be duplicated (including cloning human life), and even children expect special effects, not just at the movies, but in our sanctuaries during vacation Bible School?

 First we need to start with the foundational truth that “all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness…”[1]  “All scripture” – not just the promises of God that we like so much – it includes, the hard stuff that we skip over, and the adventure stories, and the long, unpronounceable genealogies, and these miracle stories. 

 Second, we need to remember that we don’t judge scripture – we don’t measure it – by scientific standards.  Every quantity and quality has its own measuring standard.   We don’t measure length with a bucket, and we don’t measure volume by pouring water on the floor and using a ruler.  We don’t evaluate the taste of food with a thermometer.  And we don’t measure the value of scripture by the standards of the science of the day, because science is limited and God is not; and because that kind of false analysis distracts us from mystery and holiness, and hides the lesson that God is trying to teach through the miracle

Third, these miracles were intended to be signs to Jews living in the first century pointing to Jesus as Messiah.  The Jews all knew that the prophet Isaiah had written that the coming Messiah would have the Spirit of the Lord, would preach good news to the poor and heal the blind.”[2]  That’s why, when John the Baptist sent his friends to ask Jesus if he was really the Messiah, “Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, [and] the lame walk…[3]  In effect, he was saying, “these miraculous things identify me as the Messiah that Isaiah prophesied.”

 But since we’re not first century Jews, these miracles don’t have the same effect on us; we’re less impressed, less persuaded.  The great 20^th century theologian Shirley Guthrie suggested that to overcome this resistance, we approach miracles in a different way – from behind, so to speak.  He said that the more we come to know about Jesus – how he acted and the things he said; and how he’s at work in our own lives – that’s what causes us to believe that he is God.  And once we believe that Jesus is God, it is simple and reasonable to accept that miracles are an ordinary phenomenon that occur wherever he is.   

 Christians are a people of miracles – that God came down from heaven to live among us is a miracle; that he was conceived by the holy spirit is a miracle; that his death on the cross atoned for the sins of the world is a miracle.   So why do we get all squirmy just hearing about a few fish sandwiches?

 These miracle-signs are important today, especially because they are miracles of nature, because we know that the forces of nature are bigger and more powerful than our puny efforts at religion.  We can pray and sing all day, but there’s no matter how “spirit filled” our worship is, there’s nothing we can do that can compare with taking a little boy’s lunch and multiplying it into three tons of fish sandwiches (I did the math) is a BIG miracle.  Walking on the water is a BIG miracle.  Nothing we can do can approach the power of thunderstorms, earthquakes, winds – even mosquitoes and hummingbirds.  Large or small, these are God-sized miracles.  But they are only miracles, if when we see them, we see God at work in them. 

Appreciating the miracles that occur all around us requires developing the practice of reverence.  And reverence moves at its own pace – we must cultivate the practice of really looking for God as we go about our days, and when we catch a glimpse, we have to stop and wonder about it, because God is using it to communicate with us.  And just like we care when people in our families don’t listen to us, God cares when we don’t hear him.

 Shug Avery, a character in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, said “I think it [ticks God off] when you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”[4]

 What if Moses, in the wilderness of Horeb, the mountain of God, when he saw the bush burning in the distance, had not stopped what he was doing, and said, “I must turn aside and look at this bush that does not burn up.”[5]  What if he kept hurrying along behind his sheep, and just glanced over and said, “Oh, how pretty.  I must remember to come back tomorrow and look at it”[6]?

Like a woman with a new dress that goes unnoticed by her husband, God is always after us to pay attention to him and really see him, but we move too fast.  We are all too busy – but God understands our lives – he wants them to change, but he does understand – and I believe that God is pleased when we do notice.

  I have a book of stories of the Hasidim.[7]   The Hasidim are a Jewish piety movement  - a sect - that began in the 17^th century.  The book is a collection of the oral traditions of these Jewish masters – most are just a paragraph long - and there is one I like a lot called “Busy Prayers.”  Here is how it goes:

“Imagine a man whose business hounds him through many streets and across the marketplace all the livelong day.  He almost forgets there is a Maker of the world.  Only when the time for the afternoon prayers come does he remember, “I must pray.”  And then, from the bottom of his heart, he heaves a sigh of regret that he has spent his day on vain and idle matters, and he steps into [an alley],  and stands there and prays.  God holds him dear, very dear, and his prayer pierces [heaven].”

 God is pleased when we remember to notice the things that matter to God.  But we are a people who are all about “speedometers, wristwatches, cell phones and lists of things to do, all of which feed our illusion that life is manageable.”[8]  We know that it can’t be done, but we continue to rush around in denial about it until we break down, realizing that we no longer able to deceive ourselves as to the true state of affairs, and especially our own weakness. 

The thing is, is that we have the wrong idea about miracles:  that they are things of the past, that they are not for today, that they are just illusions.  That’s our error, our misunderstanding:  The illusion is not the miracle.  The illusion is our belief that we can manage our own lives, without God.  And the only way to see through this illusion is to get close enough to Jesus to be able to really see the Holy Spirit at work in the world around us and in our own lives. 

 In this age when any TV preacher who can bop a guy on crutches in the head to “cure” him, can get people to send in money, (“The Miracle of the Tens and Twenties”), miracles are a harder sell.  We want to tell people about the miracles of Jesus because we think they’re wonderful and he’s wonderful, but sometimes skeptics and unbelievers think they’re both beyond belief.

 But I one more story from the Hasidim masters that I think tells about a good way to explain to people how miracles work in a life of faith:  One of the rabbis was telling about his grandfather, and he wrote,

  “My grandfather was lame [he had severe arthritis and walked with a limp].  Once [he was asked] to tell a story about his teacher.  And he related how [his teacher] used to hop and dance [around] while he prayed.  [As he was telling about this] my grandfather rose up out of his chair [while he was speaking] and became so caught up by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done.  And from that hour on, [my grandfather] was cured of his lameness.  That’s the way to tell a story!”[9]

 And that’s the way we tell people about Jesus – we can tell them about the miracles in the gospels and find ourselves getting into endless circular arguments with unbelieving skeptics – or instead, we can get up out of our chairs  and go out and move among them – like our mission team did when they went to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild houses, and like we do when we work at Loaves and Fishes, and like Bryana and Avenlee did when they gave their hair to Locks of Love, and the other things we’re going to do wherever God leads. 

 When we do things like that, it’s as though we’re dancing around, showing the world how Jesus danced when he was in the world among us – and in the process, we just might find out that we’ve been cured of our own lameness. 

What a miracle!

    ©2009 Deborah Hollifield

[1] 2 Tim 3:16

[2] Isaiah 61:1-2

[3] Matt. 11:4-5

[4]Quoted in Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, (New York: Harper Collins) 2009, 26.

[5] Exodus 3:3

[6] Taylor, 24.

[7] Martin Buber, Tales of the Hassidim Early Masters  (New York: Shochen) 1975, 69

[8] Taylor, 24.

[9] Buber, vi.