Sermon 3: "Praying for a Miracle"
Text: Mark 13:32-42

Read Mark 13:32-42

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The passage we just read from Mark is one of the most poignant scenes in the whole Bible. All the forces are now in motion to carry Jesus step by step to an agonizing death on a Roman cross. And there will be nobody to carry on what Jesus has started in three whirlwind years but a band of dense, cowardly disciples.

Jesus knows he has been faithful at every turn. This is a bitter, bitter way for it to end. So Jesus goes off by himself, throws himself on the ground, and prays, "Abba, Father, for you all things are possible. Remove this cup from me." Jesus was praying that the hard, cold reality that confronted him would be changed. Jesus was praying for a miracle.

Have you ever been on the ground or on your knees like that, praying for a different reality than the one that you were in! I have been these past few weeks, praying for a miracle with Judy H’s family, praying for a different prognosis, a different reality, a different outcome than the one that was inexorably bearing down on us.

It does something to you to stand face to face with a reality that you’re afraid you can’t bear and that you are powerless to change. You ask questions like, "Is there really a God? Why is God doing this to me? How can I find any meaning in a world that is so painful and unfair?"

And if the thing that we most dread does come to pass, we naturally feel angry at God and betrayed by God. Isn’t God in charge of the world? Aren’t all things possible with God? Couldn’t God have prevented this if God really cared?

These questions leave us feeling very alienated from God and mistrustful of God when we live in a hierarchical paradigm that envisions God as dwelling above us on his throne (A) in heaven. When we feel so powerless, we see God as all-powerful, as the one who controls everything that happens. Some of our names for God reinforce this view: Almighty King, Sovereign Lord, omnipotent Supreme Being. These names for God all derive from ancient and medieval political systems, where the king held absolute power over his subjects. Of course, normally we don’t want any tyrants controlling our lives, thank you very much. We would rather have the freedom to make our own mistakes than made to be good like an automaton, or be driven purely by instinct like a reptile. But when we get into big enough trouble, or when cancer cells or viruses or destructive forces exercise their free will and threaten us, then we want an Almighty King to step in and change reality on our behalf. So we get on our knees (B) and beg God for what we want. Or we try to bargain with God (C), like offering to give up something we know is bad, or to do something we know is good, if that will help make a deal with God.

We shouldn’t feel ashamed of this, or stop praying our desperate prayers, or even stop shaking our fist at heaven when we don’t get what we ask for. That’s all part of what we go through when we are scared and powerless, and God understands that.

But our praying will be greatly helped if we can move into an enlarged understanding of God and faith. The Samaritan woman at the well was trying to figure out if the one true God should be worshiped on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria, as the Samaritans claimed, or if God really dwelled in the Temple in Jerusalem, as the Jews claimed. Jesus didn’t side with either, or even give her a third location by saying, "God’s throne is up in heaven." Instead, he told her, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth" (John 4:24).

"God is spirit" (D). God’s nature is not material, so it is not bound by place and time. Yet God is in every place and time. 13-Century mystic Meister Eckhart tried to explain the mystery of God in this way:

Meister Eckhart’s insight into God reveals that God is not distant from us or from what happens to us at all. God touches everything--and God is touched by everything. God is continually available to us, and is continually aware of everything that happens to us. So why doesn’t God automatically jump in to rescue us when we’re in trouble, or at least respond more consistently to our SOS calls for divine intervention?!

The answer has to do with the nature of God and of reality. This is what I believe. God created the universe as a dynamic, changing, evolving system with all the limitations of time and space. Each part of this system it true to its own qualities and characteristics. Free hydrogen and oxygen atoms will "be attracted to" each other and form H20, water. A bacteria cell will reproduce itself whenever conditions permit. A cornered rat will bite. But scientists have also discovered to their astonishment that what we might call "free will" is built into the universe right down to the atomic level. Even individual atoms don’t always do what natural law predicts they should do. Everything is not mechanistically determined. Natural laws are more accurately "natural strong tendencies."

It is out of this creative tension between each thing being true to its nature and each thing also acting in freedom that our universe has progressed from the formlessness and void of pre-creation, as the Bible describes it, or the cosmic soup just after the Big Bang, as scientists describe it, to the earth with its communities and cultures, and you and I here today contemplating the mysteries of the universe.

Where is God in all of this? God’s Spirit is present in every place and every time, every particle, and every person, gently guiding, organizing, calling all things into greater and greater harmony, to be more in tune with God’s own nature of unity and love. God is patient. God doesn’t just skip all the steps and force the world and us into the final shape God wants us in. Without freedom, there can be no creativity, no love, no true communion.

In her illuminating book In God’s Presence, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki explains the process this way.

So God works within the reality that is, gently guiding it towards what it can become. For me, then, worshiping God "in spirit and in truth" means opening my spirit (E) to God’s creative, loving, guiding Spirit that is in me and in all things, as I also open to the truth. Opening to the truth means facing the truth of the way things are–not denying it or avoiding it, but dealing with reality, even when it hurts. And it means being open to the deeper, fuller truth of the way things can be, if God’s will is done.

This is how Jesus ended his prayer of anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Yet not what I want, but what you want." "Thy will be done." He was saying, "I will face into and deal with this bitter reality that is before me. My will is to remain faithful to your will and to your Spirit as I walk through this hell."

But notice this. When Jesus entered that hard, cruel reality obedient to God’s Spirit, that reality began to crack and change. At the point of Jesus’ death (F) and apparent defeat, God’s vulnerable presence, God’s sacrificial love, God’s forgiving grace, was revealed as never before. And even today, 2000 years later, whenever "we survey the wondrous cross," the hard, cruel places in us become open to that same loving, forgiving presence, and our suffering and sin are redeemed, and transformed into occasions for grace.

And so a miracle did happen after Jesus prayed in the garden. It wasn’t a miracle that replaced the reality at hand, but a miracle that worked with that reality to shine God’s light into it, and open the way for us to create a reality based on love instead of hate, eternal life instead of the fear of death.

This is how miracles happen. Miracles, as I see them, do not entail a new "super-natural" reality being forced onto the world from a distant heavenly realm. A miracle is a redeeming and moving of the reality that is towards the possibility that God desires. Sometimes it’s a physical shift, like a malignant tumor being destroyed much more quickly than expected. But also sometimes it’s a spiritual shift, like the fear of death shifting into a savoring of the life one still has, or an unshakeable peace in the face of what once brought dread, or a tender shoot of hope springing up in an aching emptiness of loss, or forgiveness breaking the dam of longstanding resentment.

What prayer does is to make more of ourselves available to God as God seeks to draw reality closer to God’s will. To be truly available to God, we have to start where we are and honestly tell God what we want, like Jesus did when he said, "Remove this cup from me." Then we need to let go of what we want so we can become open to what God wants: "Not my will but thine be done." Because God can see more of the truth--more of the limitations and more of the possibilities--than we can.

But whenever we truly pray "Thy will be done in me and through me," we change reality. We change what God has available to work with. A world in which we and others are praying, are making ourselves available to God, and creating new openings for God, is different from the same world without us praying. We don’t pray to get this aloof Almighty King to do what He otherwise wouldn’t be inclined to do. We pray to open up new ways for God to lift reality towards the highest good. God needs us to pray as much as we need God to work the miracles. Through prayer God and we become co-creators of a new reality.

So let us pray. And let us pray for miracles! Maybe you’d like to pray for a miracle right now. Is there a situation in your life or in the world that needs redeeming? Can you tell God what you want. And then can you release what you want, and make of yourself an opening for God to bring into your reality what God most wants?

(Organ quietly plays "What a Friend We Have in Jesus.")