Who Makes Much of a Miracle? ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
December 4, 2022
“As for me, I know of nothing else but miracles,” wrote Walt Whitman.
We have entered the season of miracles, of enduring stories, tales of events that we cannot explain, ever. There’s the ancient story of one day’s worth of sanctified oil that burned in the temple for eight days. There are stories of God coming to live among us in the most vulnerable and humble way: as a newborn baby born in a stable, lowly and poor. We learn of a night full of wonder: angel song, a star fixed above that stable that drew wise men from the East. Flying reindeer convey a benevolent saint around the world in one night, delivering gifts. Here in the northern hemisphere, we wait, daily, for the days to begin growing longer again. It must have seemed miraculous to our ancestors to sense the light returning.
Our theme for this month of miracle stories is Wonder. And wonder, of course, is both a noun and a verb: we experience wonder as an emotion, a sense of awe or amazement. Who saw that amazing sunset the other evening, when a shaft of red light appeared vertically among the clouds? That event caused us both to feel wonder and awe, and also to wonder what we saw. And of course, we wonder about things every day; from where we put the car keys to whether these ancient stories that we’ve heard since childhood are true, to why I told the story I did earlier.
I’ve been wondering in recent days; and asking myself whether I believe in miracles. It’s an interesting question. At one point I flashed back to the final seconds of the famous gold medal game between the USA and the Soviet Union back in 1980, with the US about to win in an upset, when announcer Al Michaels shouted, “Do you believe in miracles? YESSSS!”
Do you believe in miracles? The Miracle on Ice, they called that game. But was it really a miracle?
Walt Whitman would have said ‘yes’. I would say ‘no’.
My curiosity set me to wondering exactly what we mean by the word ‘miracle’. As we have already seen, we apply that description to everything from ancient birth narratives to a hockey puck going into a net.
So I offer this fairly common definition of a miracle, to the extent that a miracle can be defined. A miracle is a phenomenon, an extraordinary event that cannot be explained. And it is always seen as a good thing, an act or event that saves people, that benefits people. The Bible, of course, is full of these: Jesus walking on water, for example, calming a storm on the Sea of Galilee, or feeding thousands of people with five loaves of bread, and two fish, and having baskets of food left over. Try and explain that.
Over the years people have hotly debated the importance and the truth of the miracle stories. This debate proved to be important in our own Unitarian history as well. In the early 1800’s, trying to explain and to prove the truth of Biblical miracles was an important practice of the early Unitarians. Biblical criticism, a scholarly examination of the events of the Bible, was a new discipline and became an important field of study at Harvard University.
Less than 20 years after those early Unitarians adopted their new name and began claiming their place as a separate denomination, in the 1830’s, they began tearing themselves apart over their belief in Biblical miracles. The question that divided them was whether one could be considered a Christian if they didn’t accept the truth of the miracle stories. That’s how important the miracles were considered. The two sides dove deeper and deeper into arguments over whether Christianity was based on belief in supernatural events, such as God’s sending of his son, Jesus to earth, or whether Christianity was more an acceptance of a set of ethical principles. Name-calling, such as ‘atheist’, ‘infidel’, and ‘heretic’ resulted. Of course.
Regardless of our own positions on this subject, it’s clear that miracle stories took on critical importance in people’s belief systems. We can see why this emphasis would result in belief that nothing short of the Biblical stories could be considered miracles. Since we are typically taught these stories as children, often we think that a miracle can only be an event of such magnitude; something supernatural that cannot ever be explained, that can only accepted by belief, something that happened thousands of years ago. But perhaps it is simply an event that defies the odds, such as that 1980 gold medal hockey game. How often do we hear each other say, “What are the odds of that happening?”
“To me, wrote Walt Whitman, “every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.”
For Whitman, the miraculous is in the ordinary, in the everyday. Is this possible?
In our story earlier, Shiva, a Hindu god, dropped a bag of gold in the path of a destitute man who was so consumed with worry about where his next meal was coming from that he failed to see it for what it was. Let’s think about that: a god provides a bag of gold. By most definitions, that would certainly be miraculous.
However, the person did not receive a miracle. He thought the bag was a rock, and carefully stepped over it so as not to further damage his broken sandals. A miracle took place, yet the person did not receive it.
In the Gospel of Luke (Lk. 17:12-19), Jesus entered a village and was immediately approached by 10 people with leprosy. They begged him for mercy, and he responded by telling them to go and to show themselves to the priests. As they turned away, they realized that they had been healed. The passage continues, “Then one of them, when he saw that he had been healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him…Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not 10 made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God?’”
There is a lot to wonder about here.
Were not 10 people made whole?
The Reverend Kate Braestrup, in her book Here if You Need Me, has this to say about miracles: “A miracle cannot simply be an event that is unlikely, for that would include the unlikely evil as well as the unlikely good. It cannot simply be an event inexplicable by natural law, for that would restrict use of the word to events that (only occur in) stories.” *
The threshold, the bar that we set for defining miracles, is lower than we might have thought. For one thing, miracles such as healing are not permanent. The lepers in the story were cured, but eventually they would have died in the normal course of events. They would have experienced illness, injury, grief and loss, and death. The miracle they received then, the healing, was only temporary.
Kate Braestrup tells us that of the 10 lepers, only one received a miracle. Ten were healed, yes. And nine went on their way, according to the story, but only one understood the impact of what had happened to him, and returned and offered his thanks.
I’m thinking again of the poor man stepping around the bag of gold in the path. He was offered a miracle, but he did not receive one. He was unable to notice, to see what had been offered to him, unable to be grateful.
“A miracle,” wrote Kate Braestrup, “is not defined by an event. A miracle is defined by gratitude…Anything can happen,” she said, “but only one thing will. If it is what we desire, what we long for so badly we feel it burning in our bones, if by chance this is given, we will fall on our grateful knees, praise God, and call it a miracle. And we will not be wrong.”
Perhaps Walt Whitman was right, then. For if he spent his life awakened and aware, noticing all the mundane events taking place around him, and appreciating them and being thankful for them, then perhaps he was receiving miracles.
What happens if we define miracles by our awareness? Might we receive more miracles than we ever would have thought possible? What happens if we put down the notion of miracles as purely supernatural, unexplainable events, and think of them as gifts?
This is the season of miracles, yes, but it is also the season of gift-giving. How do you receive any gifts that you are given? Are all the gifts wrapped up in pretty packages, or might they be things that we cannot touch or hold?
My friends, our lives are full of events that we will never understand. We suffer tragedy, inexplicable losses, pain and suffering. And we also are granted wonders: help when we weren’t expecting it, financial windfalls, and moments of awe-inspiring beauty. Sometimes a wonder is as simple as the light in the sky turning lemon yellow or pink, or a full red moon arising out of the ocean. Are these miracles? Yes, if we notice them, if we are able to say ‘thank you’ for the gift.
May we remain aware of all that takes place around us, and may we remember to give thanks for even the most ordinary goodness that comes to us. Then we will know what it means to have received a miracle.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
*Braestrup, Kate. Here if You Need Me. Little, Brown and Company, New York. 2007. Pp 170-182.
