Many of you know that I did my undergraduate study at Oral Roberts University .  I have always been thankful for my four years there, because it was a place where a solid 80% of the students were there to find God’s call on their lives.  There also was also a strong emphasis on miracles.  Oral Roberts taught an evening course on his book, The Daily Guide to Miracles.  For President Roberts, the two keys to experiencing miracles in your life was believing in the power of God in prayer and planting seed, being in an open giving and receiving relationship with Christ.  And Oral would say often, “Miracles are either coming toward you or going past you.”  Our faith and our giving were the things that put in the path of those miracles.  That was all well and good, until at the age of 23, I befriended a church member by the name of Red O’dell.  He was my senior pastor’s best friend and he and his wife Dottie were quite supportive to the new person on staff.  Red developed pancreatic cancer, a cancer which in that part of the United States is three times the national average (medical professionals wonder in private about atomic energy testing as one of the causes).  His condition deteriorated quickly as often happens with pancreatic cancer.  As I prayed for him, I felt the assurance that Red was going to be healed.  So many people in the church were praying for him.  Three weeks later, Red died at the age of 63, spending the last week of his life gasping for every breath.  My easy answers thinking on miracles took a real shaking.

Today’s scripture lesson invites us to look at three miracles of Jesus – the healing of a leper, the healing of a centurion’s servant, and the deliverance of a demon-possessed man.  We could easily spend a Sunday on each of these miracles, but what I want us to feel from the scriptures is the sense that at least for a while in Jesus’ ministry, miracles were happening rapid fire.  The people were coming from all around to experience the touch of Jesus of Nazareth.  There are about thirty accounts of miracles by Jesus in the New Testament, most of them occurring in the early part of his ministry, which leads me to two quick questions.  What is a miracle?  And why did they happen mainly in the early parts of his ministry?  Webster’s defines a miracle as

 “an event that appears unexplainable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God.”

That’s certainly how we understand that word today.  But the language of origin (if we were in the national spelling bee) is Latin.  The word miraculum is literally something “to wonder at.”  However, the New Testament was not written in Latin, but rather in Greek.  And the word for miracle in Greek is semeios, which literally means “sign.”  This is one place where the King James Bible has it right and our newer translations have it wrong.  No doubt, these were extraordinary signs, but the important that was a great concern for Jesus was that they were signs, and they did what signs were supposed to do.  They pointed to something.  We would say they pointed to Jesus, but Jesus would be quick to correct us.  He would say to us, as he did in the gospels, that these were signs of the kingdom of God , God’s way of doing things that was breaking in on the world.  If I were to put it in modern lingo, the miracles of Jesus were “attention getters”, letting people know that God was doing something big in their midst – bigger than the miracles.  The great frustration for Jesus was that the people made the signs ends in themselves.  Eventually Jesus would say, “Cursed is the generation that seeks a sign.”  They were “miracle junkies” who quit following Jesus when the miracles quit.  I know people who jump from church to church when they don’t get their prayers answered the way they like.  That’s because we hurt with those we love and we want the miracle.  But the miracle is not what God’s big agenda is.  His agenda is how he can make God’s way of doing things known throughout the world through you and me.  Many people have told me testimonies of how God has done miracles in their lives.  And I rejoice in each one.  But if you have received a miracle and others have been touched by it, then you are not free to just glory that you got one.  It was the first sign of a greater work to be done in and through you, in the process of making you a greater ambassador of his kingdom.  I am often asked, “Do you believe in miracles?”  I certainly believe in the power of Christ to do miracles, but I do not believe in them.  I believe in Christ and his mission, to which the miracles point.

Now to the second question, which I can answer more quickly.  Miracles happened more early in his ministry because they were “attention getters” for his bigger agenda.  They were part of the launch of his ministry.  Did he do miracles late in his ministry?  Yes, he did (even re-attaching the ear of the soldier Malchus, went Peter got a little carried away).  As Jesus became more centered on the cross, the miracles happened less and so did the crowds.  But there is a further reduction of miracles, when Jesus transferred authority and power to his disciples, which the disciples noticed.  The whole rest of the New Testament contains only a little more than a handful of miracles.   How many times have you seen 5,000 families fed by the contents of a lunch bag?  How many times have you witnessed a life-long paraplegic rise up and walk?  How many times have you seen a resurrection from the dead?  Honesty requires that we admit that there is a gap between the way Jesus did things and the way we do them.  I know this will come as a shock to you, but when Matt, Don and I go to the hospitals to visit folks they don’t just immediately get up and walk or become whole.  If they did immediately get up and become whole, we would have to hold services in United Spirit arena four times a day for the crowds that would be following us.  And the hospitals would be forced to close, leaving several of you unemployed.  But that’s not what happens.  And even when some of our giants of faith like Bill Cox , Bill Manney, Elton and Sherilyn Pharr, Iza Reynolds, and the host of United Methodist Men who sit with Pat Donley go to the hospital, your results are only a little better than ours.  For me, miracles are a gift in that they really do happen, even though they are not meant as ends in themselves.  They are also a problem, because they don’t happen often or consistently.

So what do we do with these miracles of Jesus?  We allow them to communicate to us who Jesus is and how what he did points to the kingdom.  The story of the leper tells us first of all that Jesus is for us when disease and tragedy are against us.  He tells the man he is willing and heals him.  But before that, he does something that in his day was blatantly illegal and practically foolish.  He touches the man.  Touching the man risked Jesus contracting leprosy for himself.  Jesus touched lots of “untouchable” people and it was healing, empowering and life-giving to them.  For awhile, out of our fears, we refused to touch people who had AIDS.  We learned later that was an over-reaction and that we had forgotten that healthy touch is one of the great healing forces in the world.  It is a sign of the kingdom when we touch untouchable people and call them to healing, dignity and new life.  Two things about the kingdom: God is for us in difficult times and he touches the untouchable through people like you and me.

The second story about the healing of the centurion’s servant catches us by surprise.  Every Jew knows that Romans were awful.  Yet, here is one who supervised 100 soldiers who is the example of kingdom compassion and kingdom faith.  The man compares Jesus’ authority to his own.  He says it and it happens.  Otherwise heads roll.  But he couldn’t make things happen for the servant he cared for so much.  So Jesus leveraged his compassion and his faith and healed the man.  And Jesus says, “I haven’t seen such faith in Israel like this,” an obvious shot at the Jewish leaders who where discrediting him.  Faith does seem to be the language of the miraculous.  While I am not willing to say that the reason people don’t get the miracles they pray for is because of their faith (I’ve known too many examples to the contrary.), I do believe that compassionate faith is what links our hurting lives with the love and healing of God.  So my question is, “How is your compassion and faith being leveraged for the healing and wholeness of people in your daily life?”

The third story in which Jesus delivers the demon-possessed is one from which the movies have made a field day.  Each generation has had the diseases it considered demonic.  In Jesus day, demonic forces gave people speech defects, epilepsy, and caused people to do horrible crimes.  Today, we treat speech defects with therapy and epilepsy with medication.  But, in every community we have served, law enforcement has told us the connection between violent crime and drug trafficking with demonic activity.  Many counselors are now applying prayers of deliverance for people in compulsive and addictive behavior, with some moderate success.  Jesus embraced the practices of his day and the difference for Jesus was that his techniques actually worked.  He met people with his power and grace, who were helpless against evil forces.  As people who serve God’s kingdom on earth, we, too, must be willing to offer God-guided help against the forces of evil, exploitation and addiction in our world.  Are we willing to see in both ourselves as Americans and in our enemies the forces for violence, greed and exploitation and then pray for deliverance?  What if the church prayed for such things and declared authority over those forces and motivations in the name of Jesus?  We would if we were demonstrating the kingdom in our real world.

Since my experience with Red O’dell, I have seen his situation repeated hundreds of times, in people ages newborn to teenagers, to young adults, to senior citizens.  I have seen dozens and perhaps hundred of miracles of which many are you.  I have seen many more for whom the miracle was either the ability to adapt and witness in ongoing affliction or in resurrection.  But the signs of the kingdom happened anyhow: teenagers  who, in a fight with cancer, found faith in Christ and cleaned up their lives and inspired other youth to do the same; the woman who after losing her husband of nearly 50 years took on a whole new role in life and affected hundreds; the one who took a horrible political loss and used it do draw many to Christ and new hope when they saw the hope of Christ in him in defeat; and the list goes on.  Someone please tell me the greater miracle, the one that was prayed for or the one that occurred in loss and pain.

And as we find God for us in our diseases and tragedies and as we follow him in touching the untouchable, as God leverages our compassion and faith for those around us, and as we take authority in the name of Jesus over the forces of addiction, power and evil around us, we actually become signs of the kingdom.  Dare I say that we become, in God’s eyes, living breathing miracles.  At that point, I can hear Jesus say, “They’re finally beginning to get it.”

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