Miracles
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 18, 2009
Some years ago as Easter approached Time magazine ran a cover story with the title "Can We Still Believe in Miracles?" Since it was the pre-Easter issue the hook had to do with how believable or not the New Testament accounts of the bodily resurrection of Jesus are today. The authors rounded up the usual suspects of conservative to liberal theologians to weigh in. It was all quite predictable.
The conservatives insisted that the entire validity of Christianity rested on a literal acceptance of Jesus' bodily resurrection as well as an acceptance of his supernatural feats of healing, casting out demons, and raising the dead just as they are recorded. The liberals weighed in saying that these accounts are human constructs that represent the mindset of the 1st and 2nd century and are not to be taken literally at all. Rather they should be read as symbolic accounts of Jesus' bringing new life and hope and healing to the people of his day - and in the ages that have come after. It was well written enough, and even though I clearly came down on the side of the liberal theologians it hardly broke any new ground for me.
But there was a side bar story in this piece that did get and hold my attention. It was about a young girl (who would now be a young woman) named Elizabeth Jernigan. Very early on her parents noticed that she had a droopy eyelid. Her grandfather, who was a Harvard trained surgeon, urged the parents to take their daughter to a neurologist. The neurologist discovered a brain tumor in the young girl. An operation followed in which the part of the tumor that was causing the droopy eyelid was removed. But the tumor itself was discovered to be malignant and progressive to the point of being eventually fatal.
Elizabeth's parents, as I'm sure you can imagine, were devastated. Their religion was mainline Episcopalian - which is not exactly a faith-healing cult that substitutes God for medical intervention. Still, the Jernigans and their friends prayed for her recovery against seemingly impossible odds, and their priest anointed Elizabeth with oil especially consecrated - according to the dictates of their faith - for the purpose of healing.
A second operation was scheduled, not to get at the tumor which, as all the tests showed, was too far advanced, but to drain fluid from the young girl's brain to alleviate some of her pain. A few hours before this operation was to take place, however, very little fluid could be detected and the operation was suspended. The fluid ceased to accumulate. A month later the eye nerve that had been damaged by the cancer was removed, costing Elizabeth the use of her right eye, but the tumor that had damaged the nerve itself had receded and eventually disappeared. A CAT scan couldn't find a thing.
The side-bar article concluded with these words from her father: "If you happen to see a young girl walking down the street with her eye permanently closed, please do not think some tragedy has befallen her...Instead have cheerful thoughts...knowing that our God is powerful, benevolent, and magnificent." When I looked, this past week, for some follow-up to this piece I found a wedding picture of Elizabeth Jernigan on Facebook. There's a miracle for you - I was able to access Facebook!
Well, it was a very powerful and moving story in the midst of what was for me an otherwise rather boring article. I wonder what to make of it. If a team of neurosurgeons and physicians could not explain the disappearance of a supposedly malignant tumor I know I can't. The Jernigans, as noted, were hardly devotees of the kind of faith healing that shuns medical intervention. They placed their daughter in the best medical hands of they could find and then prayed for a miracle, which, as far as they were concerned, is just what they got.
I certainly have no desire to demean or diminish Mr. Jernigan's faith in a "powerful, benevolent, and magnificent God" who - as he saw and believed it - caused his daughter's tumor to go away. Furthermore I could not, in Mr. Jernigan's eyes, do that even if I wanted to. The story stands on its own, and I'm fine leaving it that way; leaving it that way for now, anyway. I'll move away from it and then come back.
This is the second in the continuing series I plan to do over the course of this year on the general topic - which I introduced two Sundays ago - on "Belief for Non-Believers." I'm hoping this will also be a book project if I can make myself stay with it.
To pick up today's topic then, I do not belittle the religious faith of the Jernigans, and others like them, who have experienced similar apparently "miraculous" events. I do have another perspective, another way of looking at things, however, within which I try to place such events as those in this story. I make no claim that my perspective is superior to that of the Jernigans, only that mine works for me just as theirs worked for them.
To give us a working handle here let's say that there are two categories of miracles - the natural and the supernatural. The supernatural holds that a Supreme Being can and does intervene on occasion in the workings of the natural world to gain some willful outcome. This is a God who can cause a dead body to come back to life, alter the chemical content of water so that it becomes wine, or cause a malignant tumor to disappear.
The naturalist position is that no event, however "miraculous" it may seem to human beings, takes place outside the workings of the laws of nature. What may seem to be "supernatural" is really a natural event whose cause has not yet been discovered. Early human beings, for example, believed eclipses of the sun or moon were caused by the god or goddesses they worshipped and were taken as a sign from them. They knew nothing of the rotations of the earth and the moon and how, at certain times, those rotations cause eclipses.
So, your naturalistic theology types - like me - hold that creation is of one piece and all that takes place does so within the context of what the natural world naturally does. To be sure, we humans can intervene in those workings. We intervene in the workings of the human body whenever a shot of penicillin is given, to offer but one example. And we can do a little genetic engineering here and there. But this is because our brains have evolved to the point that allows us to do such things. There's nothing supernatural about it. And I'd say that today with many of my UU ministerial colleagues, our theologies, by and large, are a mix of humanism and naturalism.
But it was not always this way. Return with me now to those days of yesteryear in our UU story as we take a quick excursion down an historical side path. The first Unitarians in this country were Christians for whom the teachings of Jesus were central. And while they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, they believed that the evidence of Jesus' "godly authority" was his ability to perform the miracles as the Gospel writers told it. As William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism put it in a lecture he delivered in 1821, "Christianity is not only confirmed by miracles, but is in its very essence a miraculous religion." This line of thought was called "supernatural rationalism," which to us today sounds like a complete oxymoron - one word contracting or negating another. But it worked for the first generation of Unitarians in this country. They drew what they considered to be a rational conclusion about the authority of Jesus based on his apparent ability to perform supernatural acts.
Then along came Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, Massachusetts. He did a pretty good job of upsetting the supernatural rationalists' apple cart. He maintained that the wonders of creation were evidence enough of what he called the miracle of life, and these wonders could be revealed to anyone who would attune their senses to what was going on in the natural world around them. As he put it, "To attempt to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul..." For Emerson the idea of a God who could arbitrarily manipulate the workings of the natural world was "monster", as he put it. And this was the sentiment that did come to prevail within the Unitarian world as the stance of the supernatural rationalists faded out.
As much as I appreciate Emerson, I can find a very good example of what he was talking about by looking, not to philosophy or theology, but to the world of baseball and baseball history. So, let's go there for a bit, and go back to 1969, to the year of the "Miracle Mets." The New York Mets were given that name because they came from out of nowhere - and after nothing, in their early years, but losing seasons - to win both the National League pennant and the World Series. They won it, of course, by playing under the same rules and under the same conditions, as did all the other major league baseball teams.
Now, let's play a little game within the game. Let's say that that year, 1969, the Commissioner of Baseball, who for all intents and purposes is the God of Baseball, decided to change the rules just for the Mets. They would get five outs per inning while their opponents got the usual three. To take this fantasy to even greater heights, let's also say that there was a Supreme Being God who really was a Mets fan; and routine fly balls hit by Mets batters would be blown out of the ballpark by sudden gusts wind, and for-sure home runs by their opponents would be blown back into the ballpark by sudden gusts of wind from the opposite direction, and caught by Mets outfielders for routine outs.
If the Mets had won their championship under these admittedly absurd circumstances then they would not have been the Miracle Mets. They would have been the arbitrarily manipulated Mets and their world championship would have been meaningless. The miracle was that they won within the natural world of baseball.
This was Emerson's point as well - even though I doubt he ever saw a baseball game. He felt that a religion that attempted to validate itself by the supernatural workings of a manipulative Supreme Being - even if those alterations of the natural were for an apparent human good - was a distortion of religion. Religion, he felt, was about the discovery of meaning, depth, purpose and spiritual insight and uplift within the ongoing natural workings of Creation Itself.
Okay, fine, that's how I see it, too. But where does this take on miracles leave people who, like the Jernigans, find themselves in really frightful and desperate circumstances that are far removed from the comparatively trivial matter as the outcome of a baseball season? What this family had to do deal with was a starkly literal case of life and death. They turned instinctively to powers beyond themselves; and who wouldn't if it were their son or daughter under similar circumstances? Far be it from me to fault them for praying for a miracle for a daughter they loved in the way that parents deeply love their children.
So, I don't fault them. I can only point to the problems one comes to in attributing the miracle this family joyously experienced to the workings of a powerful and willful God. To say that such a God can make a malignant brain tumor disappear in a matter of a few weeks is to attribute to that God certain powers that very quickly become problematic.
To do one more quick dip into our history, it's the same problem that the Calvinists faced when they said that an all powerful, omnipotent God alone had the power to save souls from the damnation of original sin. If this were the case, then this same God, so the Calvinists had to acknowledge, also had to also have to power to will other souls to eternal damnation. If the Calvinists were to be theologically consistent, then a God with the power to save also had to be a God with the power to damn; otherwise He was not an all-powerful God. To their credit they were consistent, but it was a very cruel consistency.
It was the Unitarians who challenged the Calvinists with what they called "salvation by character," which is the belief that one can effect his or her salvation at least in part on the strength of one's character and good works. But that's how John Calvin and his followers got to the Doctrine of the Elect. If God had the power to elect to save, He also had to have to power to damn, otherwise God wasn't God. Or God as the Calvinist took Him to be. And their God definitely was a "He."
OK, it's time to gather up some of this stuff now. Bring all that Calvinist business I just laid out back to the idea of a God who has the power to pull off supernatural miracles and you run right smack-dab into the same thing the Calvinists ran into. You get a God who can elect to intervene in a healing manner with some persons, but who allows a disease or a malady to run its course with others. I am simply not willing to go for a Calvinist kind of consistency on this one. It makes more sense for me to look at it this way: We are each given a life to live and a Larger Life within which to live it. Sometimes that life blesses us and graces us in inexplicable ways; other times it wounds us and causes us great pain is equally inexplicable ways. In the midst of both the blessings and the pains we have to make choices about how we're going to live and the assumptions we are going to live by.
One of my beliefs is that I have been given a life - from both known and unknown sources - that is worthy of my living and sharing for as long as it is mine to live and share. In truth, I've never had that belief tested to the extent that some people, like the Jernigan's have. I can only hope that I can hold onto it should any truly painful tests come my way. This is a belief that works for me. It does not include a Supreme Being who can alter the processes of the natural world, however much I might desperately want those processes altered at times. It only says instead: "Choose life in the face of all, all that Life chooses for you." This is the faith I strive to live by.
I offer a personal recollection as I start to wind this thing down for today. As I read the story of Elizabeth Jernigan and her family and found it to be very moving; I also found myself thinking about how I lost my father. As I said a few weeks ago, one of the high points of my summer was being with a great many persons in my extended family to celebrate and honor the 100th anniversary of my father's birth in 1909.
In June of 1978 my father was a healthy 69 year old man enjoying his retirement with my mother after a very hard-working life. He and my mother came to our wedding - Michele's and mine - in that month of June, 1978. Later that fall my father started having occasional fainting spells, and he had slight difficulty walking. He was treated for a minor stroke. What he actually had, as was later discovered, was a rare kind of brain tumor that appears very quickly and moves ruthlessly. When the tumor was detected an operation was attempted. My father died in the immediate aftermath of the operation. His physicians were at almost as much of a loss to explain the sudden occurrence and spread of his brain tumor as Elizabeth Jernigan's were to explain the sudden remission of the tumor she had. My father also believed in a benevolent, powerful, and magnificent God.
Please understand what I'm trying to say here. I am not being cynical. I am not pooh-poohing the faith, the hope, and the joy that the Jernigans and others like them have known and I am certainly not belittling the faith of my father. I'm only suggesting we exercise some care in how, and to whom, we attribute both the unexplained blessings and unexplained grief that come into our lives. And I am mostly asking that we be a beloved community for those in our midst to are experiencing either blessings or grief and losses; for this is what we are called to be.
This in closing: I believe the reason that belief in the supernatural is often so attractive and enticing - and I'm talking about persons who are not in crises now - is because the natural has become too mundane. In that same Time magazine article I led off with, Henry David Thoreau is also quoted. (I guess if I'm going to do Emerson, I gotta toss in a little Thoreau as well.) Here's the Thoreau quote: "People talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head."
Thoreau certainly remained true to his New England bluntness with those words; they are a bit harsh. But they contain an important truth as well, which is that not having miracles of the supernatural variety in your world view hardly means losing or giving up on a sense of the miraculous itself. What, for example, is both more natural and more miraculous than the birth of a child? To disavow the supernatural hardly mean giving up one's capacity for wonder, for awe, for astonishment, for still being surprised by the ways in which life can still bless us; and being deeply thankful for those blessings.
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and teacher who has gained a good deal of attention in the West in recent years, expresses Thoreau's sentiments very well and in a much kinder and gentler way. He puts it like this: "I like to walk along on country paths, rice plants and wild grasses on both sides, putting each foot down in mindfulness, knowing that I walk on a wondrous earth. In such moments existence is a miraculous and mysterious reality. People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on the earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child - our own two eyes. All is miracle."
I think it is not so much what we encounter in life that constitutes the miraculous, but how we encounter it instead. It depends upon the lens through we see and engage with the world around us. The capacity to know the miraculous dwells as much within us as it does beyond us. It largely has to do with the ways in which we "touch the earth and reach the sky."
Stephen Edington
October 18, 2009
