Miracles in the Meantime

"...."And they listened eagerly to him because, for a long time, he had amazed them with
his magic. But when they believed Philip, who was proclaiming the good news about
the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women."

This quiet little story of Simon and Philip and the folks of Samaria is a story as contemporary to our times as any I can imagine. For it tells the tale of a town unable to discern the difference between truth and lie; it tells an episode about a crowd whose gullibility is exceeded only by its fickleness; it tells a story about you and about me. Our sophistication notwithstanding, we live in a time and a culture which is as taken in by magic as those ancient, dusty characters; we participate in a society which is as unable to discern the difference between truth-telling and fabrication as the Samaritan neighbors of the woman at the well. So when I read this story in the Book of Acts, it seems to me a tale told for such a time as this, a story designed to wake us up and send us to our knees if we would be those who, in Christ, have an eye for the slight of hand and the heart for a greater mystery.

First, a word about magic in our time. Magic is that which keeps people in the dark; magic is that which diverts our attention from what is really happening; magic is that which maintains its power to amaze by keeping secrets; magic is that which begins and ends with the one who makes it. Now if you apply those statements to something other than a man in a tux who pulls rabbits out of hats, you begin to see how pervasive the power of magic is in our day. Fix in your mind, for a moment, the arenas of politics and power; the hold of advertising and the media; the personalities which dominate our common life; the people who can, in intimate zones, take from you your self; the hucksters that pass for holy men on any given channel. Listen again: magic is that which keeps in the dark, diverts attention from the real, maintains power by secrets, centers in the charisma of another. What Luke said of the Samaritans could be said of us too: "they gave heed to the magician because for a long time he had amazed them...."

Then along comes Philip, whose equally incredible deeds had the same folks amazed, but for quite different reasons. Unclean spirits came out of many who were possessed; others who were paralyzed or lame were cured. Magic or miracle? Consider instead, for a moment, the miracle. Miracles are those events which bring people from darkness into the light; miracles turn our attention to what really matters in life and in death; miracles claim no power but reveal a power who wills to be known; miracles point beyond the one before us to the One who made us for love's sake. When the people of Samaria saw the magic, they were amazed at the magician; when they beheld the miracle, they believed and were baptized.

Now I must confess to you that I have problems with miracles, and my problems are not of the intellectual variety, not "How can a reasonable, rational person in the twentieth century entertain such primitive thoughts...." No, my problems are problems of the heart. As a dear friend of mine once asked, a friend whose husband, by that time, was more dying of cancer than living with it, my friend asked, "How do you respond to your seven year old when he comes home from Sunday school, with the story of Jesus' miraculous healing of the paralytic, and logically asks you, `Why won't Jesus heal my daddy too?'" It is not that I doubt Jesus healed those folks back then...nor is it that I question the healing hand of God in the lives of so many since then. It is that I ache at the seemingly arbitrary nature of this revelation. It is that I cry out for what seemed so available when he tangibly dwelt among us. It is, I think, that I have been led by the telling of the Bible's miracle stories to desire a magician whose bag of tricks can be bought for a prayer...rather than trusting a God whose providence is, at once, much more than my eye can see or my heart contain.

"Miracle, as such," writes Rudolf Bultmann, "means the activity of God." What he meant was that miracle refers not to some event outside the laws of nature which we can identify and ascribe to a supernatural power, but miracle has to do with a God who comes close to our human condition day by day. If you think about it, the incarnation was the miracle--the incredible nearness of God, the activity of God made known in the life and death and resurrection of this Jesus of Nazareth whom we call the Christ. Language cannot contain what must have been revealed in Him as he walked and talked and ate and slept. We latch onto the incredible events herein reported while, I suspect, the ones who wandered the hillsides and the ones who set down on papyrus a proclamation that mere memory could not master were amazed at it all. As they looked back and tried to tell the world who he was, it must have been the ordinary which was so extraordinary. He ate with sinners(!), they scribbled. How unremarkable? How amazing! He calmed us in a storm(!), they proclaimed in pen. How natural. How incredible! He broke bread at our table(!), they wrote with awe. How human. How divine!

But the daily routines of our lives seem so removed from that miracle, so remote from that nearness. Most of the time ordinary events veil God from us and, most of the time, that doesn't seem to matter much. Because most of the time we do well to say our prayers, though we hear no answer in particular; most of the time we do well to do our duty, though we have no evidence that we are seen; most of the time we do well to trust the given goodness of our lives as God's goodness toward us, though there is little conscious correlation made from day to day.

But it is in those extreme times when silence is not enough and only a sign will do...those times when we are most vulnerable to the town's magician, the culture's current best-selling cure, the religious media's slight of hand...it is in those times when we cannot help but pray for what would seem to us a miracle. We pray that this God who is ordinarily remote will now be revealed in a very particular way: in disease cured, in disaster averted, in life saved, in daddy healed. Because, you see, we have been led by our attention to the extraordinary miracles to expect that God participates in human history in just this way, albeit a bit sporadically...that the God whose general absence might seem to will disease and disaster and death, now and again can be prevailed upon to will health and wholeness and life.

So we cry out for a magician when, what Jesus in fact revealed in the so-called "miracles" was but a foretaste of the eternal promises of a gracious God. When he healed the lame, gave sight to the blind, cured the sick, set captives free, he revealed for a moment the final intention of God's salvation...he shed light on the concrete content of God's saving promises to all people. What we have instead concluded from the miracles is that this final intention ought to be available to us here and now. What we cry, out of our very human condition, is "If God were God, then God must have the power to preserve our lives indefinitely or at least in this or that instance. If God were God then God must act as One who intervenes in historical existence and stops accidents from happening, averts tragedy, arrests cancer cells from wild growth, keeps us safe from harm." If, in these miracles, Jesus gave us a glimpse of God's salvation, we took it to be rather what we had a right to expect of God in the meantime.

But it was in the meantime and for the meantime that Christ came to reveal to us--in flesh and blood--the abiding miracle of God's care for us day by day. For precisely the miracle revealed in the incarnation is a God whose activity is not just any activity, but a God who is unceasingly for life and not death, for health and not disease, for hunger assuaged and sight restored. He proclaimed, by way of the extraordinary and the ordinary, the fact that, in the meantime, in the time of God's provisional care, in this time between our births and our uncertain deaths, the activity of God is always revealed and, by ordinary means made known, in whatever upholds us in health and wholeness and freedom and fullness...though still we must endure a world where chance and accident and illness and death would seem to hold sway.

Curiously where Jesus points our eyes and our hearts, for evidence of God's provisional care, is more to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, more to the seeds growing secretly and the leaven in the loaf, more in a father's open arms and a woman's incessant sweeping. In the ordinary, taken-for-granted moments of our existence--bread broken, wine poured, taxes paid, invitations accepted, children included, dogs walked--Jesus claimed for us a miracle, a God acting to make and keep human life human. While in the extraordinary events, in the lame who walked, the blind who saw, in the demons dispossessed and the loaves multiplied, he claimed little. Rather he cautioned all recipients of such unexpected grace to thank God in private lest, by misunderstanding, God be made into a magician, whose secret powers and slight of hand caused people's attention to be diverted from God's steady providence day by day.

If the extraordinary miracles are to have anything to do with our ordinary lives, it is as they help us recognize the constant activity of God, which upholds us until that final day when "God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away."

Therefore no magician was he...no man with tricks up his cloak nor rabbits in his bag. And yet those who were by his side knew that there was something miraculous about his presence which went beyond the merely human; those who were with him day by day believed baptism more than amazement was the grateful response.

The people in Samaria, after they perceived the activity of God to be revealed in the words and actions of Philip, were baptized. With ordinary water surrounding their dusty, dirty heads, they confessed that their God was ever near them; they acknowledged that their lives were in God's hands; they proclaimed that neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor any other creature could separate them from the love of this God; they promised, in this confidence, to follow God's leading, even unto the cross. Such was the quiet miracle which held them every moment; such was the incredible faith that grasped them day by day.

There are many in our time who would amaze us with their magic: with their power to keep us from aging, with their ability to make us happy by way of some thing, with their pledge to supply our needs given our vote, with their promise to calm our souls by some spiritual slight of hand. There is only One who is for us miracle...who reveals to us the activity of God in the meantime, and claims us for light and not darkness, for what is real and not a sham, for truth-telling and not secret-keeping, for life and not death. "But when they believed Philip, who was proclaiming the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized." Thanks be to God! May it be so in these times for you and for me.

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