There is a time-honored story about a skeptic who was continually harassing the local pastor. His one delight in life seemed to be making the pastor appear inadequate intellectually. The pastor bore these challenges to his theology and faith with great restraint.
One day the skeptic was heckling the pastor about his views on miracles. "Give me one concrete example of a miracle," the skeptic taunted. "One concrete example." Whereupon the pastor hauled off and kicked the skeptic furiously on the shin.
The skeptic couldn't believe it!
The pastor asked, "Did you feel that?"
"Yes," the man said as he nursed his sore leg.
"If you had not," said the pastor, "it would have been a miracle!"
Jesus and his mother were attending a wedding feast in Cana when the wine ran out. Mary turned to her son. "They have no wine," she said. There was something in her voice that told Jesus she expected him to do something.
Jesus' response in the original Aramaic is not nearly as abrupt or disrespectful as it may sound. It is evident, though, that he had something else on his mind. "Dear woman, why do you involve me?" Jesus replied. "My time has not yet come."
Still, Jesus' heart went out to his hosts. He felt their embarrassment. He cared about their predicament. He wanted to do something to help. That is the first lesson we learn from this story. PEOPLE MATTER.
G. A. Studdert-Kennedy was an English chaplain in World War I. He believed life's basic question is, "What is God like?"
He visited a wounded soldier in a hospital. "What I want to know," said the officer, "is what is God like? I never thought about it much before the war," he continued. "I took it for granted. But now it is different. When I'm transferred into a new battalion, I want to know what the Colonel is like. He bosses the show, and it makes a lot of difference to me what sort of chap he is. Now I'm in the battalion of humanity. I want to know what the Colonel of this world is like."
Jesus settled for us once and for all the question, what is God like. God is like a loving Parent. People matter to God.
In COME SHARE THE BEING, Bob Benson writes of sending a son off to college. "Nearly a year ago Peg and I had a very hard week," Benson writes. "Sunday night we were home and (our son Mike) was 700 miles away...Now we have been through this before. Bob, Jr. had gone away to college and we had gathered ourselves together until we had gotten over it...So we thought we knew how to handle separation pretty well, but we came away lonely and blue.
"Oh, our hearts were filled with pride at a fine young man and our minds were filled with memories from tricycles to commencements, but deep down inside somewhere we just ached with loneliness and pain.
"Somebody said you still have three at home ” three fine kids and there is still plenty of noise, plenty of ball games to go to, plenty of responsibilities, plenty of laughter, plenty of everything...EXCEPT MIKE. And in parental math five minus one just doesn't equal plenty."
Then Bob Benson turns to the reader: "And I was thinking about God. He sure has plenty of children ” plenty of artists, plenty of singers, and carpenters, and candlestick makers, and preachers, plenty of everybody ...EXCEPT YOU and all of them together can never take your place.
"And there will always be an empty spot in His heart ” and a vacant chair at His table when you're not home. And if once in a while it seems He's crowding you a bit ” try to forgive Him. It may be one of those nights when He misses you so much He can hardly stand it." *
People matter. You matter. I matter. The people at this wedding feast in Cana of Galilee mattered. Jesus cared that his hosts were in this predicament. Thus he went into action. You know the story. Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water to the brim." Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet." They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. Then he called the bridegroom aside. "Everyone brings out the choice wine first," he said. "Then they bring out the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now." This, John tells us, was the first of Jesus' miracles. Why did he perform it? Because people matter.
This brings us to the second lesson from this story. MIRACLES HAPPEN.
There's been a tendency over the last century or so to make miracles acceptable to the modern scientific mind and in doing so to soften them a bit. For example, the Children of Israel didn't go through the Red Sea according to this approach. They went through the Sea of Reeds, a shallow swamp-like area. It was no big deal, then, when the wind came and parted the waters.
Jesus didn't feed the 5000 by some mysterious divine activity. He simply encouraged a young boy to share his fishes and loaves. The crowd was so inspired by this boy's example that everybody shared what they had brought with them. Like a covered dish supper, there was more than enough to feed them all. You've probably heard such explanations before. These attempts to explain the miracles scientifically are not a conspiracy to undermine our faith, as some may believe. They are merely an effort on the part of scholars to accommodate the Word to the mindset of our time.
There are some of us, though, who have no difficulty with miracles. We see miraculous things all the time. And we conclude if a small wind could part the waters of the Sea of Reeds, why couldn't a funnel cloud come down and part the waters of the Red Sea? Stranger things have happened in this world. Besides, when you understand that the New Testament is founded upon the most awesome miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave, then it becomes very, very difficult to dismiss the other miracles. Miracles happen.
Now I'm not talking about frivolous miracles. A man was dressing to teach a Sunday School class. He was tying his shoestrings and one of them broke. This greatly disturbed him. He said to his wife, "I'll be standing up there in front of that class with one shoe without a string in it."
His wife said, "Well, at least try looking in your top drawer."
"I haven't bought shoe strings in years," he said. "It'll be a miracle if there are any shoe strings in that drawer." Lo and behold, there was a set of brown shoe strings in the top drawer. "It's a miracle!" he says.
A pastor in Tennessee tells about a lady in his small church with a wonderful sense of humor and a marvelous perspective on life. One day, this lady called on the telephone. In a high-pitched voice she said, "Preacher! This is Amy."
He answered, "Well, Amy! How are you?"
She says, "Well, Preacher, I'm at Baptist Hospital."
He said, "Amy, what are you doing at Baptist Hospital?"
She said, "Well, I went out to my mailbox this morning and there was a letter from Oral Roberts. I opened that letter and I was reading it as I walked back up to the house. When I got to the part where it said, `Something good is going to happen to you,' I tripped over a log and broke my leg."
There is a tendency to trivialize miracles. A little boy was telling his Sunday School class about Lot's wife. He said Lot's wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt, by day, and a ball of fire by night.
There is also a tendency to look for miracles everywhere as a validation of our faith. A little boy sent this letter to his pastor: "Dear Pastor, I know God loves me, but I wish he would give me an A on my history test so I can be sure."
Miracles are also a way of manipulating God. In one incident in the movie PATTON, the general was planning an attack on a German stronghold and he needed air support, which required good weather. He commanded his officer, "Get me the chaplain!" We tease about the minister being in charge of the weather at the church picnic, but we are kidding. In a world of devastating droughts and floods, I hope God has something better to do than to hear our prayers for good weather for our golf game. We have a tendency to trivialize miracles, to look to them to validate our faith, to seek to use them to manipulate God. And we miss the real significance of miracles.
Miracles are rare acts of God for His glorification and our edification. Because they are rare and because we do not know all the laws of nature or the mind of God, we must be very careful about labeling anything that happens as a miracle. People have built their lives on events that they believed were miraculous.
Example? A man prays that if God wants him to quit his job and move to a new town, God will provide him with an unmistakable sign. Almost immediately, something quite remarkable happens. A tornado roars through town. His garage is ripped away. His car is left without a scratch. The man takes this as a sign. He quits his job and moves to a new town.
The fact that several people might have lost their homes ” or even their lives ” in that same tornado does not faze the man. God has given him a sign.
Jesus warned against looking for signs and miracles. We cannot avoid the responsibility for making hard decisions by constantly looking to God for divine intervention. Besides, we do not live by knowledge. We live by faith. God does not give us absolute, infallible proof of His existence or His plan. In this world we see through a glass darkly. We can only say two things for certain. People matter. Miracles happen. And one more ” JESUS CAN BE TRUSTED.
By the same power by which he turned water into wine, Jesus can turn our lives ” no matter how disappointing, sordid or desperate ” into something beautiful and good.
During the early hours of the Battle of Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln was pacing up and down, lonely and troubled. Battle reports were coming in. The fate of the Union was in the balance. Later on, he told friends how he went into his room, locked the door, knelt, and prayed. "I told God that I had done all that I could and that now the result was in His hands," Lincoln told his friends. "If this country was to be saved it was because He so willed it!" Then Lincoln added, "The burden rolled off my shoulders. My intense anxiety was relieved, and in its place came a great trustfulness."
That is a trustfulness you and I can have as well. William Barclay once put it like this: "Jesus never met a sick man who asked, but what He performed a miracle and made him well. He never met a yielded sinner, but what He offered Him redeeming grace for his salvation. He never met a funeral, but what He broke it up by raising the dead one to life."
We might add, he never went to a wedding feast that had an insufficient supply of wine that he did not solve the hosts' embarrassment by providing more than enough. People matter. Miracles Happen. Jesus can be trusted ” with your needs and concerns, and with mine.
* from a sermon by Norm Lawson