Believing Miracles

Next week I am going to Chautauqua Institution with my in-laws and sundry family members -- 9 people to a jointly rented house for a time of fun, food and learning. We did this last year too, and I still marvel over some of the incredible lectures we heard. The speakers provided me new ideas and food for thought to last the whole year, and I am expecting/hoping for a repeat performance.

I want to tell one favorite story from last year: One of the most eloquent and moving of the many excellent speakers had just finished his lecture, having had the audience of hundreds eating out of his hand for the entire time. An elderly gentleman stood to complement the speaker and ask a question. The speaker seemed a little startled at first, and then became extremely deferential. He explained to the audience that this was one of his most dearly loved and respected mentors and he showed, through gestures and in the tone of his voice, his delight in the complement and the great reverence for the man. It was clear that the honor he'd received he wanted to give back tenfold. In fact, it seemed to me that the collective aura of the whole audience, which the speaker had so deftly owned and manipulated during his lecture, was now effectively turned by his hands to bow at the feet of the august mentor. There was a hush that went over the crowd like a collective holding of breath. The crown of the speaker's accomplishment had been laid at the mentor's feet, and we hundreds were participants in the nevertheless quite intimate ceremony. It was one of those rare sacred moments that I will remember for a lifetime.

This story is entirely true. However, I think when you read about my "incredible" speakers you heard, as I meant you to, that I heard "really memorable, out-of-the-ordinary, amazing" people whose words I have thought of again and again during the year and who I learned much from. I doubt that you heard "incredible" as "not believable," even though that is the literal meaning of the word. And I doubt that anyone really believed I was part of an entire audience that literally ate food given out by the speakers hands, or took me to mean that my two eyes saw (as opposed to my inner eye) an aura that became a physical figure that then bowed at someone's feet, or that there was a real crown taken from the speaker's head and laid at the elderly man's feet. I used metaphorical language that is common enough to all of us that I would be surprised if anyone thought much about it at all. Most readers would have an easy time separating the inner meaning I was trying to convey from the physical description of the setting.

But, think how the above passage might read to someone in a few hundred years from now, or even translated literally from English into another language where the culture might not use the same common expressions and imagery. My story would seem in(not)credible indeed! If I insisted, as I also did above, that it was a true story, you would assume that I must be talking about miracles.

This morning in Sunday service we heard about some "miracles" that Jesus performed during his ministry in Galilee, and our minister asked us if we were ready to jump out of a boat on the St. Lawrence River (nearby) and walk across the water. Did we have enough faith, if we thought God asked us to? Doing so sounds pretty incredible to me -- the impossible kind of incredible. No, I am not ready. But, I forget that stories of miracle workers and supernatural occurrences were commonplace in first century Jewish life. The audience for this gospel story would have been used to hearing of special, memorable, amazing people doing in(not)credible things and, I'm sure, believed them to be true -- just as I assert that my story is true -- without a thought that, in the literal sense, the "facts" just don't line up with the world as we experience it.

I cannot be the type of Alice in Wonderland Christian who forces herself to believe "six impossible things before breakfast" in order to assert my credentials as a "believer." But I think that the authors of these miracle stories encountered someone really memorable, out-of-the-ordinary, amazing, and incredible who, just possibly, introduced them to something life-changing and precious beyond the ability of ordinary language to express. Not because I believe the impossible, but because I recognize the extraordinary, I believe that it is instructive and will be worth my while to take a closer look at these stories and "see what the Spirit is saying to the Church."