It’s a Miracle?
June 10, 2007
June 10, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: 1 Kings 17:8-16; Luke 7:11-17
Great. Miracle stories. Not only Jesus, but Elijah. Miraculous food. Miraculous healings. We know Jesus healed people, LOTS of people – but we don’t have to hear each story. I don’t know about you, but I find that the healing stories tend to make me feel left out.
The problem is – who do you know who has been healed?? How often does this happen?? And to my mind, this is a problem. We have frequent stories of Jesus healing people, and a few of the disciples healing people. And yet, honestly, this is not something that falls within the mainstream of our experience. So what are we to make of it??
I think sometimes these stories make us feel inadequate – are we not worth healing? Or are we not approaching Jesus right?? It’s like when Jesus says, “If you had faith as little as a mustard seed, you could command this mountain to move….” And I think, well I must have almost no faith at all then, because I’m not having that kind of response to my prayers. Or what about when Jesus says, “Ask and you shall receive….” As the Rev. Jana Childers once said in a sermon I heard: if it were that easy, all the 10-year-old girls would be braiding ribbons into the manes of their very own ponies right now. Obviously, there’s more to it than this.
I want us to realize that our experience with this is actually more in line with most of the Biblical folks than we may have realized. King David had sons who died. Paul had some physical ailment that he repeatedly asked God to heal, without success. Jesus asked that the cross be taken from him. Even during the ministry of Jesus, many people were sent away without being healed. He healed many, but not everyone was healed. Israel ended up in exile for a long time…. These were all God’s people, some of them remarkably faithful people, and yet they experienced times when the deepest desires of their hearts went unfulfilled. So while we can be amazed at these miracles of healing: all the people Jesus healed – still if we’re taking our faith seriously, we have to be a little bothered by it all. How do we make peace with this? Even when folks are faithful, it is apparently not any guarantee that circumstances will go well.
And we want guarantees – we want safety. We want to know that this all-powerful God will not allow our loved ones to suffer or die, that the God who loves us will not let our finances fail, we want to know that the Creator of the Universe can and will protect us. But that’s not the way it works.
In recent years, the world has experienced September 11, the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the worsening of the AIDS pandemic, Darfur, Rwanda, global climate chaos, and 30,000 people dying every day of starvation. Are the people who have been dying in these events not loved by God?? Doesn’t God care about them and their families?
And we all know people who experience suffering and loss. In the past couple of months, several young people in town have died – a SPASH student died during track practice, a UWSP student drowned. Wouldn’t their families have liked God to bring them back to life? A week ago, Liz Jesko died suddenly. Others of our members have died, or had serious health problems, or financial problems. We have several members with cancer, some are finding aging to be more challenging than expected. Some have had family or job challenges. And none of it was sent by God. Good, faithful people are having significant problems and God isn’t fixing them. In the world, there are wars. In Africa, some children have been kidnapped and forced to be soldiers. Throughout the world, slavery is still an issue. Young girls are being forced into sexual slavery. In many places, children are hungry. People are hungry and there are no miracles for them. So how do we deal with this when we read these passages about healing??
I think we come to a point where we say we don’t have the answers. We don’t stop seeking the answers, but we come to a point of saying we may not get the answers. Earlier in my life, I worked as a maintenance electrician and a CPA. And in those jobs, I solved problems. I was good at that and I loved solving problems. Eventually I came to understand that many of the really interesting problems are theological, and they don’t all have answers.
We don’t have answers to all the questions. We especially don’t have answers to the really tough questions. And we’re not alone in that either. Some of you may remember the book of Job – where Job is a righteous man, a good man, a faithful man. And all sorts of bad things happen to Job – he suffers the loss of his children, his business and his health. And Job has these wonderful friends who stick by him, asking him what in the world he did to bring this trouble on himself. They assure him that he must have done something bad. They also warn him to be patient, to trust God. When you hear people talk about the patience of Job, that’s a funny thing, because Job isn’t fully patient. And finally Job blows up – he gets angry at God. He shakes his fist at God and he asks for answers. And what does God say? God says, Job needs better friends – some who can honestly face the truth as Job does. It turns out that God can handle our anger and deal with our questions. It also turns out God doesn’t always answer our questions. But God is in the painful place with us and if we are able to open ourselves to a wordless reality, we find that, as Richard Rohr says, God is near, God is now, and God is enough.
Sooner or later, every single one of us will get to a place where life isn’t working as we’d hoped – there is a loss of control, a place of pain, a place where all we have is God, and our desperate hopes for healing, or at least for peace and understanding, and this is the place of transformation. Jesus didn’t want to go to the cross but he did and it was awful, and he suffered, and he really died. And in that place of death was resurrection. God transformed all that Jesus had been through and gave him new life. It’s important to remember that it was new life. Even his friends didn’t recognize him. Things were never the same again. He was not the same, and they were not the same. When Job had come through the worst of his hard times, his business came back, and he had more children. But I can guarantee you that not a day went by that Job didn’t grieve for the children he and his wife had lost. It was not OK. But they had found the presence of God.
Any of us who have been through the pain of divorce, or other traumas, know that we can be whole again, but it’s hell getting there, and when we do, we’re not the same as we were before.
Healing would be good. We want it. We really want it. But in those moments where we are finally willing to let go of our own being in charge, our own dignity, our politeness….we find God there. And if we don’t, sometimes we can trust that God is working in this place of hardship -- Israel was lost for 40 years in the wilderness, Jesus allowed to die, Job…. And perhaps we can find our way to trusting that even though circumstances are bad, even though health or job or relationships may be very bad, we can find our way to affirming that God is good.
We still want the answers. I still want the answers. But I have come to a place of knowing that not all the answers come through the mind – some come through experiences of the heart. And through some of those heart-experiences, whether they come through prayer, through a sense of the holy in nature, through caring for others, or through surviving another day, we can know that God is, and God is good, and God is enough.
This is not to say that we Presbyterians don’t believe in trying to learn and understand. We believe in education –we have an educated clergy – we have some of the highest educational standards of any denomination. That’s a good thing. We have 10 Presbyterian seminaries, educating faithful people who want to serve God. One of our members, Brita Knippel Hansen, will enter one of those seminaries in the fall to begin studying for the ministry. And while she’s there, she’ll encounter a lot of interesting questions. I know you’re not afraid of asking questions – and not afraid of thinking. Our denomination also has 66 colleges and universities. We think education is a good thing, and something that can help us to draw closer to God as we seek to serve and follow the Creator of this marvelous and complicated universe. Some people are afraid of education, and afraid of science and even, God help us, afraid of theology. Perhaps they are worried that God can’t handle the hard questions. I don’t know – the God I worship welcomes our questions, our challenges, our anger, because that’s what life leads us, if we are really grappling with it. I have a Bible that a colleague in Indiana gave me, and on the front cover, it says, THINK. The Creator of the Universe wants us to explore and think about the wonders of creation. The God of the Bible says “Come, let us reason together.”
I don’t have the answers. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. I don’t know why good things happen to bad people. I don’t know why some people are healed and others are not. I know that the questions are worth asking, and that God is in it all, that God deeply desires our honesty, including our frustration and anger. God is not a larger version of the drive through window where we cry out our desires, get an unintelligible response and perhaps nothing like what we asked for; although it seems that way sometimes. The difference is that God isn’t someplace else, God is with us. God is big enough to handle our pain, our anger, our questions, our anguish.
Before Jesus raised that young man, Luke tells us that when Jesus saw the mother of the dead young man, he had compassion for her, and said “Do not weep.” And then he brought the young man back to life. The Greek word for compassion suggests that it is a feeling experienced in the bowels – not exactly our concept, but it tells us that the care Jesus felt was something he allowed to move him to the deepest part of his being. And it was out of this compassion that new life came. It’s not only our own suffering that can transform us – when we allow ourselves to really feel the pain of others, this also changes us.
When Jesus encountered the widow, he knew that she was not only alone, but she was socially and economically vulnerable – she was not only grieving but economically stranded. In that time, widows in such circumstances often died. So the compassion of Jesus not only gave her back her son’s life, but her own as well.
In our world, increasingly people are alone – even within families, more people spend more time by themselves and less time with each other. The interdependent families and communities of our nation’s beginnings, where a community together would build a barn, where families knew other families, where people shared their lives with each other – this kind of community has given way to a culture where we spend increasing amounts of time on our own. Historically, Christianity has spoken a great deal about sin – I think we will get closer to understanding our real predicament if we think in terms of brokenness instead – the brokenness of soul that prevents real intimacy is a far greater barrier to knowing God and experiencing joy than any misdeed might be.
Allowing ourselves to experience compassion is one more way of entering the experience of God – for this is one of the distinctives of the Jewish tradition and the Christian understanding of God – that God enters our experience, cares deeply about us, is with us and for us. And when we are able to experience that deep solidarity with another person, when we are able to make ourselves vulnerable to another person – to experience their pain, or allow them into ours – we find ourselves transformed as well, for God is the intimate One, and opening ourselves that fully allows us to experience the largeness of being, the spacious love that is love shared, that is God. I still don’t know about healing, but I am making peace with some of the not-knowing, and I am beginning to see that even when healing doesn’t happen, transformation can, and in it, we can find a different kind of wholeness. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: 1 Kings 17:8-16; Luke 7:11-17
Great. Miracle stories. Not only Jesus, but Elijah. Miraculous food. Miraculous healings. We know Jesus healed people, LOTS of people – but we don’t have to hear each story. I don’t know about you, but I find that the healing stories tend to make me feel left out.
The problem is – who do you know who has been healed?? How often does this happen?? And to my mind, this is a problem. We have frequent stories of Jesus healing people, and a few of the disciples healing people. And yet, honestly, this is not something that falls within the mainstream of our experience. So what are we to make of it??
I think sometimes these stories make us feel inadequate – are we not worth healing? Or are we not approaching Jesus right?? It’s like when Jesus says, “If you had faith as little as a mustard seed, you could command this mountain to move….” And I think, well I must have almost no faith at all then, because I’m not having that kind of response to my prayers. Or what about when Jesus says, “Ask and you shall receive….” As the Rev. Jana Childers once said in a sermon I heard: if it were that easy, all the 10-year-old girls would be braiding ribbons into the manes of their very own ponies right now. Obviously, there’s more to it than this.
I want us to realize that our experience with this is actually more in line with most of the Biblical folks than we may have realized. King David had sons who died. Paul had some physical ailment that he repeatedly asked God to heal, without success. Jesus asked that the cross be taken from him. Even during the ministry of Jesus, many people were sent away without being healed. He healed many, but not everyone was healed. Israel ended up in exile for a long time…. These were all God’s people, some of them remarkably faithful people, and yet they experienced times when the deepest desires of their hearts went unfulfilled. So while we can be amazed at these miracles of healing: all the people Jesus healed – still if we’re taking our faith seriously, we have to be a little bothered by it all. How do we make peace with this? Even when folks are faithful, it is apparently not any guarantee that circumstances will go well.
And we want guarantees – we want safety. We want to know that this all-powerful God will not allow our loved ones to suffer or die, that the God who loves us will not let our finances fail, we want to know that the Creator of the Universe can and will protect us. But that’s not the way it works.
In recent years, the world has experienced September 11, the wars in Afganistan and Iraq, the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the worsening of the AIDS pandemic, Darfur, Rwanda, global climate chaos, and 30,000 people dying every day of starvation. Are the people who have been dying in these events not loved by God?? Doesn’t God care about them and their families?
And we all know people who experience suffering and loss. In the past couple of months, several young people in town have died – a SPASH student died during track practice, a UWSP student drowned. Wouldn’t their families have liked God to bring them back to life? A week ago, Liz Jesko died suddenly. Others of our members have died, or had serious health problems, or financial problems. We have several members with cancer, some are finding aging to be more challenging than expected. Some have had family or job challenges. And none of it was sent by God. Good, faithful people are having significant problems and God isn’t fixing them. In the world, there are wars. In Africa, some children have been kidnapped and forced to be soldiers. Throughout the world, slavery is still an issue. Young girls are being forced into sexual slavery. In many places, children are hungry. People are hungry and there are no miracles for them. So how do we deal with this when we read these passages about healing??
I think we come to a point where we say we don’t have the answers. We don’t stop seeking the answers, but we come to a point of saying we may not get the answers. Earlier in my life, I worked as a maintenance electrician and a CPA. And in those jobs, I solved problems. I was good at that and I loved solving problems. Eventually I came to understand that many of the really interesting problems are theological, and they don’t all have answers.
We don’t have answers to all the questions. We especially don’t have answers to the really tough questions. And we’re not alone in that either. Some of you may remember the book of Job – where Job is a righteous man, a good man, a faithful man. And all sorts of bad things happen to Job – he suffers the loss of his children, his business and his health. And Job has these wonderful friends who stick by him, asking him what in the world he did to bring this trouble on himself. They assure him that he must have done something bad. They also warn him to be patient, to trust God. When you hear people talk about the patience of Job, that’s a funny thing, because Job isn’t fully patient. And finally Job blows up – he gets angry at God. He shakes his fist at God and he asks for answers. And what does God say? God says, Job needs better friends – some who can honestly face the truth as Job does. It turns out that God can handle our anger and deal with our questions. It also turns out God doesn’t always answer our questions. But God is in the painful place with us and if we are able to open ourselves to a wordless reality, we find that, as Richard Rohr says, God is near, God is now, and God is enough.
Sooner or later, every single one of us will get to a place where life isn’t working as we’d hoped – there is a loss of control, a place of pain, a place where all we have is God, and our desperate hopes for healing, or at least for peace and understanding, and this is the place of transformation. Jesus didn’t want to go to the cross but he did and it was awful, and he suffered, and he really died. And in that place of death was resurrection. God transformed all that Jesus had been through and gave him new life. It’s important to remember that it was new life. Even his friends didn’t recognize him. Things were never the same again. He was not the same, and they were not the same. When Job had come through the worst of his hard times, his business came back, and he had more children. But I can guarantee you that not a day went by that Job didn’t grieve for the children he and his wife had lost. It was not OK. But they had found the presence of God.
Any of us who have been through the pain of divorce, or other traumas, know that we can be whole again, but it’s hell getting there, and when we do, we’re not the same as we were before.
Healing would be good. We want it. We really want it. But in those moments where we are finally willing to let go of our own being in charge, our own dignity, our politeness….we find God there. And if we don’t, sometimes we can trust that God is working in this place of hardship -- Israel was lost for 40 years in the wilderness, Jesus allowed to die, Job…. And perhaps we can find our way to trusting that even though circumstances are bad, even though health or job or relationships may be very bad, we can find our way to affirming that God is good.
We still want the answers. I still want the answers. But I have come to a place of knowing that not all the answers come through the mind – some come through experiences of the heart. And through some of those heart-experiences, whether they come through prayer, through a sense of the holy in nature, through caring for others, or through surviving another day, we can know that God is, and God is good, and God is enough.
This is not to say that we Presbyterians don’t believe in trying to learn and understand. We believe in education –we have an educated clergy – we have some of the highest educational standards of any denomination. That’s a good thing. We have 10 Presbyterian seminaries, educating faithful people who want to serve God. One of our members, Brita Knippel Hansen, will enter one of those seminaries in the fall to begin studying for the ministry. And while she’s there, she’ll encounter a lot of interesting questions. I know you’re not afraid of asking questions – and not afraid of thinking. Our denomination also has 66 colleges and universities. We think education is a good thing, and something that can help us to draw closer to God as we seek to serve and follow the Creator of this marvelous and complicated universe. Some people are afraid of education, and afraid of science and even, God help us, afraid of theology. Perhaps they are worried that God can’t handle the hard questions. I don’t know – the God I worship welcomes our questions, our challenges, our anger, because that’s what life leads us, if we are really grappling with it. I have a Bible that a colleague in Indiana gave me, and on the front cover, it says, THINK. The Creator of the Universe wants us to explore and think about the wonders of creation. The God of the Bible says “Come, let us reason together.”
I don’t have the answers. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people. I don’t know why good things happen to bad people. I don’t know why some people are healed and others are not. I know that the questions are worth asking, and that God is in it all, that God deeply desires our honesty, including our frustration and anger. God is not a larger version of the drive through window where we cry out our desires, get an unintelligible response and perhaps nothing like what we asked for; although it seems that way sometimes. The difference is that God isn’t someplace else, God is with us. God is big enough to handle our pain, our anger, our questions, our anguish.
Before Jesus raised that young man, Luke tells us that when Jesus saw the mother of the dead young man, he had compassion for her, and said “Do not weep.” And then he brought the young man back to life. The Greek word for compassion suggests that it is a feeling experienced in the bowels – not exactly our concept, but it tells us that the care Jesus felt was something he allowed to move him to the deepest part of his being. And it was out of this compassion that new life came. It’s not only our own suffering that can transform us – when we allow ourselves to really feel the pain of others, this also changes us.
When Jesus encountered the widow, he knew that she was not only alone, but she was socially and economically vulnerable – she was not only grieving but economically stranded. In that time, widows in such circumstances often died. So the compassion of Jesus not only gave her back her son’s life, but her own as well.
In our world, increasingly people are alone – even within families, more people spend more time by themselves and less time with each other. The interdependent families and communities of our nation’s beginnings, where a community together would build a barn, where families knew other families, where people shared their lives with each other – this kind of community has given way to a culture where we spend increasing amounts of time on our own. Historically, Christianity has spoken a great deal about sin – I think we will get closer to understanding our real predicament if we think in terms of brokenness instead – the brokenness of soul that prevents real intimacy is a far greater barrier to knowing God and experiencing joy than any misdeed might be.
Allowing ourselves to experience compassion is one more way of entering the experience of God – for this is one of the distinctives of the Jewish tradition and the Christian understanding of God – that God enters our experience, cares deeply about us, is with us and for us. And when we are able to experience that deep solidarity with another person, when we are able to make ourselves vulnerable to another person – to experience their pain, or allow them into ours – we find ourselves transformed as well, for God is the intimate One, and opening ourselves that fully allows us to experience the largeness of being, the spacious love that is love shared, that is God. I still don’t know about healing, but I am making peace with some of the not-knowing, and I am beginning to see that even when healing doesn’t happen, transformation can, and in it, we can find a different kind of wholeness. Thanks be to God. Amen.