Tag

miracles

Enormous Roommates

June 20, 2021

Second Corinthians 4:14-17; Mark 4:35-41

I want to ask a blessing on all fathers today. Ours is a vocation as solemn and important as any other. Through us our children get their first experience of who God the Father is, and that’s an awesome responsibility, at which we often fail. May God forgive us our failures and give us the grace to keep doing the best we can.

Years ago Barb and I spent a weekend on the coast. Our room jutted out over a deep, rocky cove, and there, underneath us and in front of us and all around us, gray whales were rising and diving. We could look down and see them swimming underwater, and from the kitchen table we’d see tail flukes flipping up and over as a whale surfaced and then curved back down.

They were huge. They were whales. And yet this was all very peaceful. Very quiet. It was like the whales were just staying with us. It was like we had these enormous roommates.

You know, some people argue that the miracles described in the gospels are just metaphors, just symbols, and other people argue no, they really happened, and the Church teaches both things are true and yet there’s a deeper mystery still. The people saw what they saw and they believed, they were changed, and these stories were then handed down, and a generation later the gospel writers wove them together with great literary skill to help us experience this mystery, too, a mystery greater than the merely symbolic and greater than the merely physical.

But what has always struck me is that within these stories Jesus really walks on water, he really calms the storm, he really blesses and heals, and the people are impressed, they’re amazed, and in the end they kill him anyway. They kill him. The miracles don’t settle anything, the miracles don’t prove anything, except that something remarkable is going on. The miracles don’t persuade even the eye witnesses that Jesus is the Son of God.

“Who is this?” the disciples say today. Jesus stills the wind itself and all that does is confuse the disciples, is frighten them, because they’re too thickheaded and full of doubt to surrender to the moment. And we are, too. If we could go back in time, if we could see for ourselves what the Gospel describes today, I don’t think it would really change us for very long. I think we’d be amazed for a while, we’d be impressed, and then we’d go back to our ordinary, workaday lives. We’d forget.

I lived for a weekend with whales, I knew them, and I hadn’t remembered that weekend at all, for years, until I started reflecting on this gospel.

The gospel brought it back. The gospel triggered the memory. I felt the joy again.

I’m still struggling with this, with this paradox. I touched on it the last time I preached. I don’t know if it bothers you at all but it’s really bugging me.

OK, so Christ was present from the beginning of time, is the force, as Colossians tells us, through which all things were created and all things continue in being. So. The Cosmic Christ. Christ in the storm itself and in the waves. In the whales outside the window.

So far so good. As 21^st century Christians we can sort of handle that.

But then there’s the historical Jesus, the Jesus in a particular place in time, a human being in whom the Spirit was so strong, who was so open to the miraculous, that he could perform miracles, who was the miracle, and that, I think is harder for us. That arouses our skepticism.

How do we put these two things together, how do we understand both the horizontal and the vertical, the cosmic Christ and the historical Jesus?

I don’t know, except maybe to realize that God transcends all time, that God isn’t trapped in linear time as we are, that all kinds of things are true in God at once, simultaneously?

Or as Paul says today, the people of his time knew Jesus “in the flesh,” but now that he has died and risen, we can’t know him that way anymore. We only know him through the Spirit, at work in the world.

Or is it that God is present in nature and through the laws of nature but sometimes violates those laws—does something new? Or is he giving us in those moments a glimpse into the still deeper laws of nature, the laws of his love, of his heart?

I don’t know.

Everything is true. All of it. Continuously.

Here’s how the great Catholic biblical scholar Luke Timothy Johnson puts it.

For believers the truth is that the living God will continue to manifest his presence and his power within creation. The issue is not that truth. The issue is whether humans will have ears to hear the word that God seeks to express or eyes to perceive the signs and wonders that God uses to draw attention to the truth about humans and their world.

We can’t drain the miracle stories of their power by being all intellectual and literary about them. We need to get beyond all these questions and just surrender to the stories, just believe in them. But at the same time we can’t let ourselves think about them as just things that happened in the past in this one miraculous age through the powers of one miraculous man. That man has risen and that man is here and now and has always been here and now, and the point is to see him, to know him for ourselves.

The roses blooming on the deck. The baby sleeping in our arms. The passage in a book that just stays with us, that won’t go away, or the scene in a movie, or the conversation with a friend.

Or the way sometimes when we’re thinking or praying something will come into our heads, like a sentence almost, and it seems to be in quotation marks, it seems to have an extra resonance or power, as if it’s not just our own thought, not just our own voice, because it isn’t. That’s the Spirit, in us. That’s the miracle now, whatever happened long ago, as something assuredly did.

We all have enormous roommates, rising and submerging all around us. We can all glimpse them from the couch, see the great flukes over the rims of our coffee cups, and we can all be moved, if we let ourselves be, we can all learn to remember these moments, through grace, not to doubt them, not to let them go.

God is with us. He is always rising up before us, then diving back down again.

June 16, 2021

Prose

Miracles: An Appreciation of Yehuda Amichai

I can’t get over this beautiful poem by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, or many, many of his poems.

Amichai died in 2000 but his collected poems have just come out this year, edited by Robert Alter and translated by Alter and many others.

That’s part of what I like about Amichai’s poetry, how though something is lost in translation, of course, something is gained, too, a strangeness and a directness, a wonderful awkwardness almost, as in, too, the English translations of the Polish of Czeslaw Milosz.

I love the way Amichai writes about the shadows of flowers against a wall or the smell of sage or a lovely woman in the midst of all the great conflicts and violence and complicated politics of Israel, acknowledging the large but focusing on the human and small, where we can identify with him, and enter in, and learn to see our own details and facts.

I love the way his lines seem so straightforward, and are, and yet at the same time shift and open up and take us somewhere we didn’t expect and don’t quite understand.

And in this particular poem, I love the idea of it, the idea of what a miracle is.

Just lovely. And profound.

Miracles

From a distance everything looks like a miracle

but up close even a miracle doesn’t look like that.

Even someone who crossed the Red Sea when it split

saw only the sweating back

of the man in front of him

and the swaying of his big thighs,

or at best, in a hasty glance to one side,

fish in a riot of colors inside the wall of water,

as in a marine observatory behind panels of glass.

The real miracles happen at the next table

of a restaurant in Albuquerque:

two women sat there, one with a diagonal

zipper, altogether lovely,

and the other said, “I kept it together

and didn’t cry.”

And after in the red corridors

of the foreign hotel I saw

boys and girls who held in their arms

tiny children born of them,

and they held

sweet little dolls.

translated by Robert Alter

December 29, 2016

Prose

Any Increase We Can Bring

   Every day water and matter and light come together and become food.
   Every day we take food into our bodies and it becomes energy. It becomes thought and language and action.
   Every day we turn fabric into clothes and trees into buildings and sounds into songs.
   Every day morning becomes afternoon and afternoon becomes evening.
   And this is all miracle. This is all the work of God.

What could be more ordinary than wedding feast? What could be more ordinary than sitting together and drinking wine? Most of the people at the wedding in Cana, in the second chapter in John, don’t know a miracle has occurred at all.

   I know we all feel small and insignificant. I know we all feel invisible.
   But what could be more ordinary than wedding feast? What could be more ordinary than sitting together and drinking wine? Most of the people at the wedding in Cana, in the second chapter in John, don’t know a miracle has occurred at all.
   But it has. The wine has run out, and Mary has spoken, and Jesus has turned the great jars of water into great jars of wine, and only the servants know he has, and they don’t understand, and this is always going on, this is always happening, in some profound and invisible way, and it can happen through us.

August 29, 2016