Be the Miracle
Acts 9:36-43
April 25, 2010
Two elderly women were out driving in a Lincoln Continental, big car, they could
barely see over the dashboard. As they were cruising along, they came to an intersection.
The stoplight was red, but they just went on through.
Edna, who was in the passenger seat, thought to herself, “I must be losing it. I
could have sworn we just went through a red light.” After a few more minutes, they came
to another intersection and the light was red again. Again, they went right through.
Edna fidgeted in her passenger seat. She was almost sure that the light had been
red, and she was getting nervous. At the next intersection, sure enough, the light was red
and they went on through.
Edna turned to her friend and said, “Mildred, did you know that we just ran
through three red lights in a row? You could have killed us both!”
Mildred looked at her and said, “Oh, dear, am I driving?”
***
Who’s at the wheel of your life? You see sometimes those bumper stickers that
say, “God Is My Co-Pilot.” I’ve also heard it said, if God is your co-pilot, switch seats.
The idea is that if we turn the management of our lives over to God, everything will be
hunky-dory forever.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never quite figured out how that’s supposed to
work. Is God going to fetch the quart of milk and the loaf of bread? Is God going to type
up the expense report or go get the brakes fixed? Seems to me we’re responsible for a
certain level of input into our own lives. God is not pulling the strings on marionettes
here.
The Gospel accounts of what Jesus did in his earthly life come with a danger, and
that is the risk that we will see Jesus healing sick people and restoring sight to blind
people and even bringing dead people back to life, we’ll look at those accounts and think,
Wow, that Jesus had some wonder-working power. But I’m going to let him drive. That
sure isn’t me. The time for miracles like that has come and gone; Jesus, because he had
unique access to the power of God, could do those things, but it’ll never happen again.
And then we come to the Book of Acts.
Acts holds our feet to the fire. It’s the story of the early Christian church, and the
things that the disciples did as they tried to figure out what the church of Jesus Christ
would look like, how it would be organized, how they would spread the Good News of
Christ’s Resurrection. It pins us to the wall because for the disciples, just like us, Jesus in
the flesh was no longer there. And yet there were miracles among them – honest-togoodness miracles, as amazing as anything Jesus ever did. Including the hardest one of all
to pull off, the raising of a person from death just as Jesus raised people from death
during his public work.
Peter does that. When Peter says, “Tabitha, get up,” his words echo Jesus’ when
he raises the 12-year-old daughter of Jairus. “Child, get up!” he says to her. That word
“get up” is also translated as “rise up”; it’s the same word associated often in the New
Testament with Christ’s Resurrection. The power of God that lifted Jesus from the tomb
is the same power that Peter calls upon here, and the result is the same: new life where
before there was only death. It’s the same power that the Old Testament prophets Elijah
and Elisha called upon to perform their own healings. Peter stands in a long line of
prophets, including Jesus, who the Bible tells us were miracle workers.
Stories like this in the Book of Acts are convicting for us. They won’t let us off
the hook, won’t let us point the finger and say, well, Jesus could live in the fullness of
God’s love and God’s power, but that’s because he was the Son of God. I’ll just keep all
that at arm’s length, thank you. Let Jesus work all the miracles.
But then there’s Peter – a disciple like you and me, with ordinary parents, lucky to
have found himself in Jesus’ presence for a time, but otherwise just an unremarkable
person trying to do what’s right. And here he is, working a miracle just like Jesus did.
Convicting. If you and I call ourselves disciples, we should be able to share in that power.
We can’t just pawn it off on Jesus.
And so this scripture is telling us something about what it means to live within the
reality of the Resurrection. The central miracle of our Christian faith – the miracle of
Jesus rising from death into new life, and by extension the promise for all who believe
that our lives, too, are eternal –that promise is real not just after we die, but here in life as
well. Resurrection living means recognizing and participating in God’s ongoing creative
work in the world, the way God is continually re-creating the world and calling it closer
to Godself. This is miraculous work, and we are a part of it.
I hesitate to look to Hollywood for lessons in theology, but I need to quote here
from Bruce Almighty. Do you know this movie? Let me just recap it a little bit. It stars
Jim Carrey as a guy named Bruce Nolan, who lives in Buffalo and works as a features
reporter for local TV news. He does stories like reporting on the biggest cookie in
Buffalo. Plus his girlfriend is Jennifer Aniston. What more could a guy want?
A lot, apparently. Bruce is miserable, and one day he complains so much that God
– played by Morgan Freeman, who makes a great God, in my opinion – God says in
effect, OK, you think you can do a better job, here’s your shot. And so Bruce does God’s
job for a while. He can do whatever he wants! He is omnipotent! And he starts messing
things up.
There are two parts of Bruce Almighty that have stuck with me. One is a scene
when Bruce and his girlfriend are on the outs; they’re breaking up, a terrible emotional
scene. And Bruce lifts his arms, summons all his godlike powers and commands her,
“Love me!” “I did,” she says, and walks away. Later on Bruce tells God about it, and
God says, “Welcome to my world.” That rang true for me, both in human terms and in
faith life. You can’t compel someone to love you; you can’t even earn love. Real love is
always a gift, given freely and undeservedly. Not for nothing is Bruce’s girlfriend named
Grace.
And that’s the situation God finds Godself in, too. God could, I suppose, compel
human beings to offer their love. But how meaningful would that be? Is it really love if
it’s forced, if we’re marionettes dancing on strings? God gives us free will, gives us
choice in what and whom we love. God hopes we love God.
The other piece of Bruce Almighty that is important today is a kind of tagline to
the movie. Be the miracle, Bruce finally concludes. You want to work miracles, be the
miracle you seek. Which is a paraphrase, really, of Mahatma Gandhi’s famous advice,
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Morgan Freeman as God says it this way: “Parting your soup is not a miracle,
Bruce, it’s a magic trick. (Bruce has parted his soup like the Red Sea, to test his godly
powers.) A single mom who’s working two jobs and still finds time to take her son to
soccer practice, that’s a miracle. A teenager who says no to drugs and yes to an
education, that’s a miracle. People want me to do everything for them. What they don’t
realize is, they have the power. You want to see a miracle, son? Be the miracle.”
St. Luke, the writer of the Book of Acts, would agree – at least in part. Be the
miracle – but know that it’s only through God’s Spirit moving in our lives, the power of
God underlying every act of creative problem-solving and peace-making and artistic
expression, that miracles happen at all.
These may not be showy miracles like Peter’s raising Tabitha from her deathbed.
But when you wake up in the morning, just take a moment and smell the spring air
outside, listen to the noise of birds and kids, really taste that first sip of good strong
coffee, feel your heart beating and your nervous system humming, think how amazing it
is that you have a brain and a soul and you can think and pray and move at all. Life itself
is a miracle – that’s why it’s so precious. That’s why we grieve when it ends.
God’s power and God’s presence are all around us and deep inside us. And that
makes us part of God’s activity in the world, a continually unfolding miracle. C.S. Lewis
puts it this way: “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is
written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”
Expect miracles and you’ll start seeing them. Be the miracle and you’ll start living
them. God is good, beyond reason and beyond explanation. Imagine how Tabitha felt,
rising from the netherworld of death to sweet, unexpected, miraculous new life. We need
to live that way. Because every day, along with Christ, we are rising to new life all
around us. Be that miracle.
Amen.