When it comes to sports stories, I have what I call ‘the wife test.’ The ‘wife test’ is when a sports story gets so big and so surreal that I think it would be interesting enough to explain it to my wife…who really isn’t that interested in sports that don’t involve our favorite member of “The Blue Kitties.”
To pass the ‘wife test’ a story has to transcend sports, it has to connect with the basic themes of what it means to be human.
A few things have passed the wife test…Shilling’s bloody sock …Armstrong’s cycling ban…it’s not a long list...but last year was expanded to include Tim Tebow.
For those of you who don’t follow sports, here’s the ‘wife version.’ Tim Tebow, was one of the most outspoken Christian college athletes in recent memory. He used to write verses on his eye black...
...and entertainers made a living out of his admission that he was a virgin.
But most experts thought that even though he had won the Heisman trophy for the best player in college football, he simply didn’t have the skills necessary to succeed in professional football…In particular, they argued that professional quarterbacks routinely find it useful to say be able to throw a football, which he was famously bad at.
But despite his weaknesses, around the middle of last season he ended up starting for the Denver Broncos who were terrible and everyone had counted out…and then something weird happened…the team started to win. But not just win…they reeled of a sting of an improbable last second come from behind wins...It was so dramatic that week after week literally seemed like was scripted…like every week was the last 3 minutes of a Disney sports movie. It was uncanny.
I remember watching the end of one of these games in the gym…and the Broncos were badly behind when I got on the treadmill, and I thought, well this is the week it finally ends and we don’t have to hear it any more…and when I got off the treadmill there was Tebow and his team celebrating yet another win as time expired.
And no one really knew what to make of it. I was talking about this with a friend of mine this week and he told a story about how one of his skeptical friends sent him a text after one of these wins that read “OK, I believe in God now.”
It was weird. Listen to how Chuck Klosterman (who would not self identify as a person of faith) described his experience of watching one of these games:
The score was deadlocked at 32 and the Broncos were kicking off with 1:33 remaining…Did I believe Denver would win? I shouldn't have. Minnesota was getting the ball with multiple timeouts. It'd been the better team for most of the afternoon…Yet I believed Denver would win.
My reasoning?
I had no reasoning. And I did not like how that felt, even though I'm trying to convince myself that it felt good
The story culminated with the Broncos improbably making the playoffs where Tebow threw an 80 yard touchdown (that, in fairness, he only threw about 20 yards) on the first play of overtime to beat heavily favored Pittsburgh team.
But after the game, the Twitter started buzzing because it turns out that Tebow (the guy who regularly wrote John 3:16 on his face during games in college) threw for a season-high 316 yards and set an NFL record with 31.6 yards per completion.
Now, here’s my question. Was any of this miraculous? Was God a Denver Bronco’s fan…and if so, is he cheering for Paton Manning now, or is he a Jet’s fan this year (…and wouldn’t that be a fundamental problematic for a good God). I think Klosterman got to the heart of this…
I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West...However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume (that the belief that God is making him win) infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he's so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to.
But I think this all gets at an important misunderstanding between Christians and skeptics…as well as a fundamental misunderstanding among Christians…what the heck is a miracle anyway?
What are our criteria to declare something a miracle? If something improbable happens to a Christian, is that automatically a miracle? How improbable does it have to be before we get to call it a miracle? Or does it have to be impossible before we call it a miracle? What if something improbably bad happens to a Christian…is that a miracle? And then there is the question of importance? Can something as trivial as football be the arena God’s miraculous intervention, regardless of the probability?
I think most of us are pretty confused about what miracles are and how they are supposed to function. But as I studied the book of John this summer, while many of us in this room tonight were asking God for some pretty big stuff, it became clear to me that I knew one person who is not confused about what Miracles are or how they are supposed to function…the author of the book of John.
So tonight, I just want to do a little sequel to my John 2 talk, and briefly pose one question to our text…
What’s the deal with miracles?
What is a miracle, and what is it for? And how does that affect how we ask for or expect them?
To tackle this question, I want to look at how John uses stories of miraculous intervention throughout his book to tell the story of Jesus…
So let’s start by looking back at the water to wine passage in chapter 2 that I talked about a couple weeks ago. If you recall, Jesus was at a small town wedding…and his mom comes to him and tells him the hosts have run out of wine. Now, the exchange between Jesus and his mom is a little cryptic and a lot hilarious. I mean, why does Mary come to Jesus with this problem…and why does she have so much confidence that he has the resources to fix it. You have got to figure that even if she doesn’t fully understand who her son is, living with him for a few decades has made her confident in his resourcefulness.
And so even though Jesus expresses respectful hesitance she acts like she doesn’t even hear him…and tells the caterers to ‘do whatever he tells you.’
And…Jesus rolls with it…he tells them to fill some big jars with water and, before anyone knew it, those jars contained about 4.5 kegs of really good wine. But if you think much about it, this is kind of weird, for a number of reasons…but here’s the one that I thought about all summer:
Running out of wine would have been embarrassing…it would have brought shame on the family…the situation was sub-optimal…but surely it was not the most desperate situation in Israel or even Cana that day. It defies our miracle math…IF the purpose of miracles is to make things better.
Or take another of the signs that shows up a little later in John…the feeding of the 5,000. I mean you are trying to tell me that in Roman occupied Palestine the best use of Jesus’ magic talents at that moment was to host a big seafood picnic. Surely the grumbling tummies of a crowd that had skipped out in work to go see the crazy preacher (which is what passed for entertainment in an age before youtube or hulu) was not as pressing as the horrific oppression or illness that ravaged the ancient world. It defies our miracle math…IF the purpose of miracles is to make things better.
You hear this all the time…why would God care about your petty crap when there are other things he’d certainly be more interested in. Like why would you pray about your test you have understudied for when dozens of people died this week in escalating Gaza violence. And that is a reasonable question…if the purpose of miracles is to make things better.
But miracles are not meant to make everything better…they are signposts of reality…they are signposts that point our attention to a parallel, truer reality...that is in the process of breaking through. They don’t tend to fix terrible situations…they tend to remind us of God’s presence and care in the midst of those situations…and remind us that the dark details of the world we see around may seem like the final reality...it may seem like darkness wins…but it isn’t and it won’t.
To understand the impact of the water-to-wine event you have to realize that even though the wedding in John 2 was a celebration…it is a celebration under duress…it was a wedding occurring on the backdrop of Roman oppression. So in that way, the wedding in Cana in John 2 is kind of like the wedding scene in Braveheart.
People were dancing and enjoying themselves… forgetting for a day that they were ruthlessly owned by the most powerful empire the world had ever known before rulers tended to debate abstract ideas like ‘inalienable human rights’…they drank and laughed, but at any minute the stark reality of their Roman overlords could break through and remind everyone, that everything is NOT ok.
This miracle wasn’t fundamentally about running out of wine…it was a sign to those who were trying to celebrate under a shroud of fear that Rome might own you now…but liberation beyond your wildest hopes is coming…and its coming through Jesus.
And this turns out to be the basic argument of John’s whole book. Now, I know that John who wrote the story of Jesus we are working through this year, and other beloved sections of the new testament…sometimes can just seems kind of adorable. He talks pretty but can seem simple…even naïve.
Sometimes you just want to pat his little head when he starts rambling on about love and love overcoming the world and flowery stuff like that.
John is like someone you meet at a party who is affable, likeable and kind…and you thoroughly enjoy the conversation, but leave feeling like “that guy is adorable…but I’m not sure he gets how the world works.” And then the next day you go to an lecture on campus on string theory by a Nobel Laurite and when the speaker steps to the podium you realize…it’s the guy you met at the party. And you realize not only does he understand ‘how the world works’ better than you do…he got really unique insight on how the world works…and yet, he still says stuff like ‘love overcomes the world.’ That is the experience I had studying this book. John isn’t some back woods yokel who got his hands on a crayon and started scribbling a quaint story…he is a theologian and artist.
Let me try to lay out some of what he does for you. You might have noticed a few weeks ago that John starts out this book with an oddly familiar sentence. Listen to how he opens the book:
“In the beginning was the Word …All things were made through him...”
Is that familiar? Does that remind you of any other famous opening sentences? How about:
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
His opening words are an exact match of the opening words of Genesis. John starts out the story of Jesus in a way that parallels the beginning of the story of everything.
But that turns out to be really important key to understanding the whole the book…starting in chapter 2. Look with me at verse 11:
2:11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.
You see, in the story of the miracle in John chapter 2 John doesn’t exist by itself. John initiates the sign counter…he starts up a kind of miracle odometer…which ticks again in chapter 4 (which Peter will walk us through in a couple weeks). Look with me at 4:54:
4:54 This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.
then he stops counting…but we’re not supposed to. By initiating the sign counter he is letting us know that we might want to just go ahead and keep on counting. And how many signs do you think there are àSeven!
Do you follow this. John opens with a verse that parallels the opening of Genesis, and then tells the story of Jesus around the framework of seven signs which most commentators agree are John’s way of arguing theologically and artistically, that there is a parallel between what God did in creation and what is unfolding in Jesus…
…the way John tells the story, Jesus has come to do more than say a few wise things, or to start a rebellion, or even to just to die for sins…he has come to re-order reality… turning creation itself upside down…he is setting a trajectory that will undo everything terrible, unjust and sad… and it begins with seven acts of RE-creation…that culminate in Resurrection…
…and in that context, it begins to become clear, this miracle is not about wine, it’s not about refilling the glasses of some wedding guests who have already drained the host’s kegs…it is about the dramatic act of cosmic remaking that is just getting started at this little wedding in an unremarkable town…
It is a signpost of a truer reality…And John underlines this perspective with the language he uses to describe these seven startling acts that Jesus performs. I took the time to count, categorize and plot the words he uses throughout his book to talk about these things, and found something kind of surprising.
He doesn’t even use the word miracle…he prefers the words like work and, especially - sign. Because both of those words have the connotation of being about something bigger than the acts themselves…signs point to something beyond themselves. A sign is never there to direct attention to itself. That would be stupid… and a waste of tax money. A sign that attracts attention to itself is characterized by dysfunction.
And this makes more sense of the way John wraps up the story of the water to wine.
2:11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.
Glory is funny word that doesn’t carry the juice in our culture that it used to…partially because we have subjected the word to abuse…we have treated the word badly…
...but I think that in part, we are all culturally just too ironic and clever to care about or even believe in anything as substantive and grand as glory or duty or honor or holiness…but all that verse is saying is at this moment, Jesus tipped his hand…and we see, he’s holding aces…like seven of them…he’s foreshadowing what this whole thing is about and where it is going.
___
Now those of you who have been part of this community for a while know that we have had a pretty dark few months.
Sarah Johnson mentioned it a few weeks ago, but at the beginning of the summer one of our friends suffered a sudden bout with severe mental illness and then one day in June she walked away from the clinic she was being treated at and didn’t come back…she just disappeared.
In the weeks that followed, members of this community spent countless hours, sacrificing sleep, grades, time with family and taking some non-trivial safety risks handing out flyers in tough neighborhoods, walking into homeless camps in the woods and trudging through the American River Parkway in the middle of the night.
Now we have not talked about this much up here since school started, I think, in part because we want to move forward and I think in part because we want to be hospitable to new students who aren’t carrying these events around with them.’ But this was our life for weeks. And I know that for some of you Linnea and the horror of the search and the hurt of her absence are still very much part of your daily existence. I know I still think about Linnea every day, and I had exactly one conversation with her.
We looked and prayed and asked God for a miracle. Some of you prayed harder than you have ever prayed…and literally never wanted God to do something more. And then, near the end of the summer, during a large search effort, her mom found her body in the Sacramento green belt. And that…that sucked. And then, it got worse…and more confusing…the next day we learned that her mental illness had grown so severe that she had actually taken her own life. We had asked for a miracle and it felt like what we got was worse than we had feared.
But at the memorial service Linnea’s mom said something really wise and lucid and, in my opinion, was a succinct, poignant summary of John’s theology of miracles. At one point in her words to the hundreds of people who had gathered she said something like this:
“We didn’t get our big miracle…but all along the way there were signs, signs that we were not alone”
What’s the deal with miracles…THAT is the deal with miracles!
The purpose of signs isn’t to make things all better…we live in a beautiful but broken world…a planet that is full of wonder and terror...and belonging to Jesus is not some sort of force field that will protect you or the people you love from that.
The purpose of miracles isn’t to make things all better…that’s the purpose of resurrection…that’s the purpose of God’s the project of re-creation that he initiated with his covert invasion of our world in Jesus…which he inaugurated by making some wine at a small town wedding and which he assured by defeating death itself.
As John sees it…to the point that he structures his book around this insight…the signs that Jesus did then…and the signs that occasionally and surprisingly punctuate our lives now…are reminders of his intention not only personal salvation…but a total second-creation…to remake the broken world.
The purpose of signs is to redirect our attention on hope that is really hope.
You see, God’s plan of liberation and renewal that breaks through in Jesus is bigger than we often give it credit for…it is not only about saving our souls…or whisking us away to heaven from a doomed world…it is not about God giving up on his creation and just saving us from it…When the reality of God’s kingdom breaks through it will be a total remaking.
The wine is not about wine…the fish is not about fish…for John, each of these are sequential steps pointing to a bigger reality…resurrection…and the breaking through of God’s rule…a reminder that what you see is not all there is…that liberation is coming…and its coming through Jesus.
I feel like when we get a hold of a theology of ‘signs’ closer to that, it changes our expectation of what ‘counts’ and we start to see that God is punctuating our lives with signs declaring a truer reality than our broken world, a text like this starts to make more sense. A sign doesn’t have to dramatically alter the laws of physics it just has to startle us out of the impoverished assumption that this world is the realest reality. I feel like Peter Berger, a professor of sociology at Boston University, kind of gets at this in his book ‘a far glory’.
“Reality is haunted by (an) otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life. Much of the time the otherness is successfully held at bay, seemingly domesticated or even denied, so that we can go about the business of living. From time to time we catch glimpses of transcendent reality as the business of living is interrupted or put in question…” Peter Berger – a far glory
That is what signs are for…they call BS on “the fragile structures of everyday life”…and remind us that reality is haunted by a transcendent otherness…that is breaking through in Jesus.
Signs do not fix things, they remind us that the fix is coming. And even when they do offer a measure of fix…the fix is always temporary. Even the culminating sign in John…the resurrection of Lazarus…wasn’t a solution. Lazarus found himself re-dead again in a couple decades, max. Even the resurrection of Lazarus wasn’t a actually real solution…it was a sign…of something actually real and actually a solution.
Let me wrap up with a little story.
The week my grandmother died, we didn’t pray for a miracle. My grandmother was sick and old and just a few months before she had just lost her only child (my dad) in a car accident that happened while he was driving home from visiting her. She didn’t want more days on this earth and we didn’t ask God to give her more. But as her death followed my dad’s death in close succession, our family was in a dark season where the forces of death and chaos were pressing hard on us. The day of the funeral, I remember I was on a business trip in Jefferson City, Missouri, and I caught a flight to western NY after work, and drove through the night. And it was a standard funeral, though it was smaller than I expected. I remember realizing at that funeral the older you are, the fewer people show up at your funeral. It struck me that the more funerals you attend, the smaller yours will be. But that day, something happened that always dominates my memories of it. My grandfather had given my grandmother a plant many many years earlier…and a close family friend said it hadn’t bloomed in 10 years..but on the day of the funeral it suddenly flowered…for one day.
It was a small thing…easily explained by natural causes. But I have always kind of thought of that flower as an ‘instance of punctuating beauty,’ a sign that the gritty, fallen, broken natural realities of car accidents and old age and mourning lost dads and dead sons are not all there is to this world.
We tend to want Jesus to fix things when we ask him to intervene supernaturally, to alleviate some sort of suffering. But Jesus’ signs are about ‘revealing the glory of God.’ They are instances of punctuating beauty that are symbols of the truth that even though this life is hard and kicks our butts on a regular basis, and that the powers of decay and death will eventually have their victory over all of us and those we love…THAT IS NOT the FINAL reality.
They are a Spoiler Alert.
They remind us how the story ends…
…it ends resurrection and re-creation.
Death and decay lose.
Jesus wins.
