May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.
I am not sure of the Episcopal Church’s doctrinal stance on karma, but having spent a dozen years of Catholic school quietly dozing through sermons, it seems only just that I will soon spend the rest of my life preaching them.
What does not seem just – or right – or believable – is that in order to do this, I have to leave this community behind. It’s hard for me to accept that today is the last time, at least for a while, that I will worship in this space. I moved to Portland at age 21 and found my way to Ss. Peter & Paul not long after. In every way, this church has helped me grow up.
Now, my wife and I are spending our last few days in our empty apartment before we leave for Boston, where I will begin divinity school in a few weeks. I don’t know the next time I will nap in the youth loft between services, fix a bookshelf with Kurt’s Swiss Army knife, or ask Tracy to solve all my problems on a Sunday morning at 9:58.
My life at this church has been about transformation in the midst of the mundane – about finding the Holy in between vestry meetings, or while mopping up spills behind the altar. To me, it seems a little incongruous to be leaving on the day when we celebrate two of the biggest, flashiest, showiest miracles in the New Testament. The “loaves and fishes” story is a staple of our culture. Maybe the only miracle that’s better known is the one John tells us about just afterwards: Jesus walking on water.
And you can make whatever you want of these beautiful, impossible stories, just as you can do with all the other miracles we profess every time we gather – from the virgin birth to the resurrection of the dead. No matter how deep and original our thinking, there are only so many ways to make sense of them. We can take it on faith: believe that it’s all true, that God works impossible miracles all the time. We can rationalize: In 2006, a researcher at Florida State published a paper on the “unusual freezing processes” in freshwater Galilee, positing that Jesus was actually walking on ice. We can bite our lips and believe that, no matter what kernels of truth might be found in the Bible, these stories are mostly made up.
Or maybe, we think: Sure, I can believe that all of it happened. But that was the age of miracles. Jesus was walking on the earth then. Things like that don’t happen anymore.
And to me, this option is the smoothest, the easiest, and the most dangerous, because it allows me just the right amount of belief: I can trust in God, but not too much. I can proclaim my faith, but not so loudly that it gets weird.
The feeding of the five thousand captures my imagination as much as the next person’s, as does the classic picture of Jesus walking on the stormy sea. But I wonder if these stories have ruined us for miracles.
The Gospels are so short, compared to the fullness of the life of Jesus; they’re not a biography so much as an album of greatest hits. If we believe that the age of miracles is over, I wonder if it’s because we keep on looking for those hit singles. In the workings of God, we expect dazzle and flash. We want healing to be spontaneous, not slow and steady. We want change to be glorious, not gradual.
We want the feeding of the five thousand. Not the feeding of the five.
But think about the miracle stories that never made it into the Gospel canon – not because they were too controversial, but because they seemed too small.
Think of what we might find if we went looking for the miracles Jesus worked in the lives of his disciples: the transformation in the midst of the mundane.
Maybe we would hear about Philip’s slow recovery from an old injury that caused him chronic pain.
Maybe we would hear the miracle of Mary Magdalene’s first thirty days of sobriety.
The miracle of Andrew and Peter healing old scars from sibling turf wars, and finally becoming friends.
Maybe we would hear a story about the feeding of the five.
Believing that the age of miracles is happening right now, that the Spirit moves within us and Jesus walks beside us and that these things can change our lives, is terrifying.
It reeks of trusting God too much.
But if I think about my own life and then my life at Ss. Peter & Paul, the people I have met here and the stories I have heard, I know I have been a witness to miracles.
And if we don’t look for miracles, think of all that we miss.
No matter how strong our imagination, how broad our knowledge, and how deep our faith, it’s a struggle even to begin imagining “the breadth and length and height and depth … [of] all the fullness of God.” And this is why Paul writes of “him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”
We imagine Jesus on an ice floe because we can’t imagine walking on water.
We imagine the loaves and fishes as an exaggeration, because we can’t imagine feeding five thousand people with a few loaves of bread.
When we try to imagine the workings of God in our own lives, what are we settling for?
In the last two weeks, I’ve quit my job, packed my house, and prepared to rip my life up by the roots, so it could be that I’m more willing than usual to rely on the fullness of God. But even if your own life is relatively stable, I invite you to explore the parts of it that could use a little strengthening from the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
You may want to open your door to miracles. You never know what might come in.
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