Miracles

Sunday’s lectionary reading was the story of the wedding feast at Cana in John’s gospel.  Jesus turns water into wine: the first of the seven signs John recounts.  All over the world, folks, like me, whose pastors’ follow the Revised Common Lectionary heard mediations on miracles.  Here’s another sort of mediation on miracles, based on a different story.

This week’s parsha for Jews around the world was בְּשַׁלַּח , Beshalach, “when let go”.  The passage tells the story of the Great Escape—the time when God saved His people from slavery.  It is the story we tell at our Passover Seder each year.  It is the story that Jesus retells at His final Seder in Jerusalem on the night before He died.

The details of the story are worth attention. The parsha begins just after the instructions about how to celebrate the events that the instructions interrupt: “And it came to pass, when Pharaoh let the people go, that God led them not by way of the land of the Philistines [the short direct way to Canaan] . . .But God led the people about, by way of the wilderness by the Red Sea,” (Exodus 13: 17-18).  When the text says “God led the people”, the writers are not kidding around, “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, . . . and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light;” (13:21).  You want to talk your fodder for sermons on miracles—here it is.  You want your “sign from God” to insure this gamble we call faith pays off here it is. Clear as a bell day or night—the visible presence of the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Redeemer from the slave pits of Egypt—right there before your eyes directing your steps.  How’s that for miracle.

Then Chapter 14, the cinematic highlight scene, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are “led” to camp at Pi-hahiroth hard on the sea.  The mighty Pharaoh, heart hardened, welshes on the deal to let the Israelites go and puts 600 chariots worth of hard men in motion to get them back.

“When Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out to the Lord. And they said unto Moses: ‘Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?’ (14:10-11) Moses shouts, “Fear not”, and assures them that the Lord will fight for them and they have nothing to fear.

And then the miracle.  The movie makers, and the way we tell the story to our children around the Seder table, would have you believe that the parting of the sea is the miracle: ‘and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided [think about the creation story in Genesis]. 

But I think the miracle is somewhere else.  Somewhere a little quieter. Somewhere a little more human.  Note the crucial details: “And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”  But how can they go forward?  Just when they need reassurance and direction most, “the angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them, and stood behind them; (v. 19).  Just at the crucial moment, one set of miracles ceased.  The signposts pointing the way disappear. Disaster looms on all sides, and then the real miracle occurs.  Someone, unnamed in the story, a real nobody, follows the command God gives: “go forward”.  One heart answered the call of God to ‘fear not’.  One heart moved one step and 620,000 slaves walked to freedom. One heart, an uncertain and frightening future, and one miracle: dayenu; it is enough.

Buen Camino. 

Psalm 40* is a Gospel psalm—a psalm of good news.  What is that Good News?  Simply put, it is: the Lord can and does save.  The most basic accusation of the faithless is, “Your God cannot save.”  In Psalm 40, the writer says he was in a “pit of destruction (v.2).  Later we find some of that may have been a pit of his own making (v. 12) and some came from enemies around him (v. 14).  In the midst of that pit, he cries to the Lord (v. 13—make haste to help me).  His enemies then make the most basic attack possible, they go for the jugular of faith—they see his trouble and cry “Aha” your god cannot save.  This sneering finger pointing is one of the most basic themes of all the scriptures.  The great Pharoh would not let a motley host of slaves go free and dared God (in the person Moses) to make them free.  On the run in the wilderness, as the water ran short and the food ran out, the people cry again to Moses.  The substance of their cry, “it would be better if we had never left”, is the accusers cry—God cannot save.   Over and over again in the history of Israel, those who resist the instruction of the Lord, the Torah, accuse God.   At the most basic level, they shout “You cannot save”.  The priests of Baal surround Elijah and laugh that YaWeH can do nothing to them.  When the kings of Israel think that the armies of Egypt look like a better bet to resist the armies of Assyria and keep Israel free and independent, Isaiah tells the faithful that the accuser has won; his charge “Your God cannot save” has been vindicated.  When Herod’s terrorist death squad sweeps into Bethlehem and starts slaughtering children, the cry on their lips may as well have been “Your God cannot save.”  Even today, believers here and all over the world are challenged to vindicate their God.  “Your God cannot save” is the most basic accusation that anyone can level at a believer. 

How are we to respond?

For the last 100 years or so one common place in North American Protestant Christianity is to retreat and narrow the field of God’s saving activity.   In hope that God won’t be made a fool of Christians retreat and say, “well, God really only means to save souls”, and souls are conceived of in a sense that has no connection with life as any of us know it  – workplaces, scientific endeavors, political institutions, creative expression, educational institutions, virtually the sum of life are declared secular or neutral and thus not in need of God’s saving Grace and Power. Only souls are in need of grace, not really the world that God so loved.  Another tactic so that God won’t be made a fool is to merely baptize the present with the piety of Christian terminology.  Practices born out of religions that worship false gods are “Christianized”—music born in rebellion against God gets allegedly Christian lyrics and God is supposed to be vindicated.  Sentimental prosody pap that makes a mockery of the fullness of our emotional lives has a few words from carefully selected scripture inserted, and now it’s supposed to be fit for the refrigerator magnet treatment as “inspiring”.  Economic practices that grind down on the poor and make their lives misery are baptized with terms like Christian freedom and vocation and “see our God can save”, well at least those of us lucky enough to have been born in the US, Canada, or Europe. 

But the Good New of Psalm 40 and the story of God’s salvation from Genesis to Revelation is that God offers us a different way:  If we truly remember what God has done for us, saving us from Egyptian slavers, keeping us through the dark nights of Exile in Babylon, nurturing us even when the King’s terrorist death squads tried to take away our only hope, building us up when all of Rome was against us, protecting our Scriptures and our traditions when the supposed keepers of the faith wanted us far away from the Scriptures as possible, --if we remember all those things.  If we celebrate them year after year, holy liturgical season after season, like the Psalmist does when he proclaims “Many, O LORD my God, are (11) the wonders which You have done,

          And Your (12) thoughts toward us;

          There is none to compare with You.

          If I would declare and speak of them,

          They (13) would be too numerous to count.”

Then we will slowly, and sometimes painfully, build up a trust in the God who has saved in the past and when crunch time comes for us, when jobs choke the God given creativity out of us, when our politicians want to wage death in our names and everybody around us wants us to sign off on it, even when death strikes those close to our hearts, in those times then we will be ready for blessing for we will believe God can save, indeed “How  blessed is the man who has made the LORD his trust, And  has not turned to the proud, nor to those who  lapse into falsehood.”   We will even enter into the history of God’s saving works by writing our own scrolls of testimony of the great things God has done for us, we’ll bring them to the temple and proclaim them for all to hear.  We’ll let our neighbors know that while all others might shout “he cannot save”—we will offer our story that indeed he does save.  We will not hide his righteousness (his faithful promise keeping) in our hearts.  We will not be silent about his faithfulness and salvation.  We will not conceal his loving kindness.

In the Matthew’s account of the Passion week, the soldiers executing Jesus shout at him, “Save yourself, If you’re really God’s Son, come down off that cross.”  The accusers basic charge is shouted for all to hear.  And for a time even the disciples believed that charge.  Peter with the last bit of hope in his heart sprints back to the tomb when Mary Magdelene reports that it’s empty.  There he finds a few clothes and again believes the accusers charge—he walks away shaking his head.  Later, when he really meets the risen Lord, face to face, he like the Psalmist now believes that God can save—that the world can be set to rights. Now like the psalmist he’s got a testimony to bring to the temple, he cannot restrain his lips—God has kept his promise. He has brought back Israel, paid for her in blood coin, and through Israel, all of us.  God had promised a world so transformed that the faithful dead would rise from the dust and a new king would take the throne.   And there at an empty tomb was the down payment, the first fruits of that promise that God made to Abraham so long ago, I will bless you and through you I will bless all the nations.  So

Let all who seek You rejoice and be glad in You;

          Let those who love Your salvation (34) say continually,

          "The LORD be magnified!"

God can save. He’s saved before.  He’ll save again.  He’ll save all who are afflicted and needy.

*The painting is by contemporary American artist Phillip Ratner.  It is located in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, MD.

A Meditation on Encountering a Dangerous God
[This is actually several years old, but somehow these 12 days of the Christmas season brought back the notion that God, as one of Lewis' Narnia characters says, "is not a tame lion."]

I come to Stony Creek on Sunday mornings expecting to meet the risen Christ. Sunday after Sunday I am not disappointed.   I hear Jesus speak in the beautiful singing of familiar songs, in the written Scriptures, and in the preaching.  I see His hands at work in the announcements about mission activities, fellowship opportunities, and joyous news of answered prayers. Most profoundly, I meet Him soul to soul when I kneel with fellow worshippers and commemorate His death and resurrection with bread and wine.  All in all, the time I spend at Stony Creek comforts and enriches me beyond measure.  Recently, however, my comfortable expectations about encountering God have been turned about.  Sunday morning is no longer quite so comfortable; indeed, its beginning to feel downright dangerous to me. 

Friday, April 16^th, I had the privilege of attending Temple Beth Emeth’s services commemorating the 6 million Jewish deaths in the Shoah -the Holocaust. The highlight of the service was the testimony of a “Righteous Gentile”.  The speaker, Anneke Burke told the assembled worshipers of her meeting with God. 

In 1940 she was a typical four-year-old Dutch girl, happy and carefree.  She lived in Utrecht with her mother, father, a seven-year-old sister and a baby brother. That fall the German Army forever changed her life. Her hometown was captured and put under occupation. Life with German soldiers strutting about was a bit strange, but not burdensome.  Then the identification of the Jews started.  All Jews were required to wear the Star of David sewn on to their clothing.  They were prevented from riding the streetcars.  German soldiers and sympathetic Dutch Nazis violated their shops and homes.  Soon the Germans began to round up Jews for deportation to work camps.  Anneke’s father and mother were God fearing, church going Protestants.  In the faces of their Jewish neighbors they saw the face of their Lord.  Moved by a profound sense of Christian duty, in 1942 Anneke’s father arranged with the Dutch Underground to hide a Jewish man.  When he went to make contact with the man and bring him home, three other Jews were also there.  All four Jews were brought to the safety of Anneke’s house.  Soon they were joined by four more Jews. For the next three years, eight of God’s children spent their days in one small bedroom.  They could go into the living room at night, but no lights were allowed.  The Burke’s even dug a tunnel under the house so that when the German search parties came, the Jews could hide in the tunnel.

Now the story so far sounds like a Hollywood movie - brave Dutch Christian resistance fighters, evil pagan Nazis’, frightened Jews.  You can practically hear the swelling music and feel your tears being jerked as the Allies liberate the town and the Jews walk arm in arm with the brave Christians into the sunlight for the first time in three years. 

But real encounters with God are never quite like Hollywood productions.  Anneke never knew the Jews were in the house all those years until her parents awoke her late one night in April of 1945 and invited her to the living room to celebrate the war’s end with a group of complete strangers.  Her parents simply could not risk telling their children about the human contraband in the front bedroom.  Jews, and those who hid Jews, faced deportation to work camps at best, and on-the-spot execution at worst.  Her parents closed off the bedroom where the Jews were hidden.  Anneke was told that the bedroom was her father’s workroom, and she would be severely punished if she ever entered that room.   The children slept, locked each night, in the attic for three years so their visitors could, with some safety, come out at night.  When wartime food rations for the five members of the Burke family were first divided up to feed 13 people and Anneke ate but still was hungry. Her parents told her all the food was gone. When Anneke heard strange noises in the house, her parents lied to her.  They said she was merely hearing things. When a thump on the wall made her turn her head, her parents sat motionless.  Three years of that sort of deception left Anneke deeply scarred.  She no longer trusted her own senses.  Anneke had to go through years of psychological counseling to heal from the experience.  She still, as a mature woman, experiences moments of doubt about ordinary everyday experiences because for three important years of her life the adults around her told her that noises she heard were not noises at all, that lights she saw under doorways were not real, and  that odors she smelled were just her imagination. 

God came to Anneke’s family in the form of eight Jews on the lam from Nazi death squads.  The Burke’s were obedient to the teachings of Jesus and embraced the desperate ones.  That encounter left Anneke scarred for life.  Her testimony has begun to change my perspective on Sunday worship at Stony Creek.  I still love the comfortable feeling of closeness to my Lord that comes from singing the old hymns, from greeting loving neighbors, and from the rhythms of the familiar liturgy.  But I also have read with new eyes the Biblical stories of encounters with God.  He's mighty, He's loving, but He's also dangerous.  Jacob, the tricky one, was crippled for life after he met God.  Hosea heard the voice of God order him to marry a prostitute and turn his quiet life into a living billboard advertising God’s indignation with a faithless people.  Peter, the cowardly fisherman, was led to death in a Roman prison because he saw and declared, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”.  Oh, I still pray each Sunday for the presence of the Lord, but after hearing Anneke Burke, I pray a bit more warily.  The God we worship didn’t hand over His own Son to torturers so Peter Freedman-Doan could warm the cockles of his heart with familiar Sunday morning rituals shared with good friends. He comes to us so that His will be done.