February 8, 2004                                                                  Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

IF THERE IS A GOD – WHERE ARE THE MIRACLES?                            Scriptures

It’s such a pleasure to be able to speak about miracles. For one thing, I know that I am again standing on holy ground when do so and I know that I am speaking from within a miracle to miracles hopefully miraculously, quite a daunting task. The root word of miracle comes from Latin miraculum and it has to do with wonder. Something that is miraculous is wonderful. It is full of wonder and I recognize that we in our lives sometimes feel a little bit like those pinball machines, that we’re kind of whacked around from pillar to post and stressed and exhausted and we come to church on Sunday morning or at least I do hoping to hear words that encourage us and that give us strength to go on for another week and tell us what the purpose of our lives is and give us some wonderful moments.

I used to have a Prof at University, a philosophy Prof, who started every lecture with a magic trick. His lectures were on Friday and the reason he started with a magic trick is because most of us were hung over and hadn’t done the reading and were thinking in our heads of what we were going to do on Friday night, so he figured he’d catch our attention with a magic trick – we would wake up a little bit and then perhaps pay attention to the words that he was about to say, which were if I remember correctly, wonderful words. And I think of this scriptural passage of Jesus you know, he does a magic trick, really that’s what he does. He gets people to shift from one side to the other and let down their nets and hawl up this incredible load of fish. And maybe then they’ll listen to the words of God. Maybe then they’ll hear, now that he’s got their attention.

There’s wonderful symbolism in this passage, the net goes down into the deeps. Fish, of course, a symbol of Christians everywhere. The symbol of God’s loving abundance, this teaming love – that’s the symbol that fish represent. And yet you don’t see them if you just look over the lake or sea, you don’t see them, they’re underneath, you have to look for them. Also, of course, a symbol of the unconscious, our own unconscious, you just dig a little bit down and maybe there you’ll find the answers. You’ll find what you’re looking for. Beautiful symbolism in this passage and all it takes is just a little shift, just a shift from one side to the other – just a new way of looking at something and look what happens, look what changes.

We who are parents have all the experience on Christmas of buying that incredible gift for our children. You know that toy that we really want to play with and giving it to our toddler and then, of course, they open the box and put the toy to one side and play with the box. And that’s because children, like Jesus, knew this, know what is wonderful. They know that there’s really no difference between the box and the toy in it in terms of God’s great world. Jesus always said “become like little children” and this is one of those moments because as we mature and age, we lose touch with wonder. Babies can find wonder in their fingers and toes. When was the last time we sort of looked at our fingers or toes with wonder as the miracles that they are.

Usually this question you know, “if there is a God, where are the miracles?” is asked by someone because of science. You know miracles tend to be contrasted with science. There’s a scientific way of looking at the world and then there’s the miraculous faith-based way of looking at the world. I want to say that that is ridiculous, that one of the greatest miracles of the world is science. In fact, and I’m a Grade 10 drop out from science, science taught me to doubt my common sense. That science teaches us, that what looks solid like this is really not solid at all. It is really moving, it’s really in action all the time, it’s really moving energy. You know science teaches us that sound that we think we hear is not the way we hear it at all. It’s really waves doing something to our eardrums. It teaches us to doubt our common sense and the greatest scientists teach us to even doubt the results of science. That even the results of science are always in questions. That’s what science teaches us and science, of course itself, human reason and all that goes with us, this in itself is a miracle. This is wonderful. I mean I who know very little about the way things work find it a miracle that my car starts in the morning. I have no idea why you know. I’m technically inept. I don’t know why blenders work, I don’t know why toasters work, I’m just so thrilled that they do. I have great faith in science. We have faith in science in a way that we don’t in God because very few of us really know and can prove that the earth is round, but we have faith that someone can. We have faith that a plane will fly even though we don’t quite know how that happens. We have faith in that. The world is miraculous to us all.

The other thing I was thinking about in terms of magic acts and miracles and the difference between them is how paltry so called miracles seem when contrasted with what is truly miraculous. You know we’ve all heard the newspaper accounts of the crucifixes that are bleeding from their hands or the statues of Mary that are tearing up, or the images or visions that people have. They may be true, who knows. They may have happened, but what a magic act in comparison with what is truly miraculous. You know I was thinking that in this story of Jesus with the fish, what is so startling to us in reading these words that have been passed down a miracle in itself for two thousand years is, who cares about the fish? Who cares about the fish? Really, Jesus Christ was standing there with them. He was standing there before they caught the fish, after they caught the fish. This image of the true human and the truly divine was standing right there next to them. They could reach out and touch him in a way that Christians for generations have been dying to do. He was there for them, wholly there for them and all they cared about was how many fish they could catch and the magic act of that. Isn’t that ridiculous? Isn’t that bizarre?

Now usually miracles are seen as those instances in the world that happen, that have a very low probability of happening. And we have had some amazing miracles in this community just like that. For example, I know of two cases of remission from cancer due to prayer. I think we should claim that as a community. I know of one instance that happened last year where a young man was really given a death sentence. He was only kept alive by machines in a hospital. They removed all the tubes and instead of dying, he is alive today. Through prayer, that happened. I know of thousands of people that have been fed in this very place. With no money, it costs us nothing to feed them every week. That’s a miracle. That’s like loaves of fishes. That’s happened right here, all of those things have happened right here. But if you really want to talk about the low probability miracle, you have to look in the mirror because you know no one in the history of the world shares your unique DNA. Isn’t that amazing? You know that’s better than the Super 7 lottery. It really is. The chances of your existence, that’s billions and billions to one. I mean the population of the world now is about eight billion, and that’s just now. From the beginning of time, there has been no one like you, you are by any definition an absolute and complete miracle. This is wonderful. This being that is you. And this moment that we’re experiencing together, this moment, none like it ever before or after. There it goes, will never come again. A miracle, a miracle, in fact we’re like those fish. We swim in an ocean of miracle. We can’t see miracles because there are so many that we don’t notice them anymore. That’s the answer to that question, we swim in an ocean of miracle and we can’t see it because it’s so plentiful. It is so abundant this miracle of our universe that we all experience in every moment is so miraculous, we don’t even see it, hear it, touch it or taste it anymore. That’s how miraculous it is.

We just need to become like little children again to figure that one out. And so it was that after the magic act of the fish, they started to listen to the words that he spoke and he spoke to them of miracles.

Let us pray together:

Dearest God,

All we need to do is just shift our perception a few feet.

All we need to do is cast our net in a new place to discover what you have known all along, that our very existence and everything in your universe is truly miraculous.

We ask that we be given the eye, ears, the voice of a child so that we might express our glee in it all. We might see it as miraculous, we might hear it as miraculous. We might experience it so. We might see that you have been standing there all along and that you are here with us. We might even see that.

In the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

/sermons/Feb804