Sermon

St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Durham, NC

3/26/06 - 4 Lent

The Rev. Scott A. Benhase

God wants to create miracle in your life. All you have to do is send me $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) then wait for the miracle to occur!!! I know for many of us that's what we expect when we hear the word "miracle." We expect it will be used by a huckster to make a quick buck at the expense of the naïve. But what if we reconsidered how we define a miracle? Miracles are not always the flashy, headline-grabbing kind where the blind receive sight or the lame walk. Those miracles occur by God's grace and power, but that's for another sermon.

The miracle that concerns me this morning is a more subtle one, the kind of miracle that occurs between people when barriers between them are broken down and love rushes in where walls of hatred used to be. This is the miracle of love between people. It's not the romantic kind, but rather the kind of love that bonds people together in spite of their differences. It's the miracle that's shown in the capacity to forgive; the kind Jesus spoke about when he said: "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." This kind of miracle may be the most amazing kind of all. It may be easier to make the deaf hear than to get Palestinians and Israelis to love one another. It may be easier to make the blind see than to heal the racial divisions of this country. It's obvious that we live in a hostile and fragmented world where people don't practice the discipline of forgiveness, the discipline of hospitality to the stranger, and the discipline of loving one's enemies. We only have to look at the blood in the ink of the headlines to confirm the human capacity to exercise extreme hostility, to refuse to forgive or be forgiven, and to hate one's enemies rather than love them. And this hostility and hatred is not just somewhere overseas. It's here in our city as well. Rarely does a day go by when someone isn't the victim of another's hostility and hatred in our own city. This is both visible and invisible - it's both physical and spiritual. Many of us have become so accepting of such hostility that we've have lost the capacity to be shocked by it. We have come to accept it as just the way things are. Some things, we believe, will never change.

Now, what do you suppose God thinks of all this? After all, God's perspective should be central to how we think about this. Do you think God grieves for the way we treat one another? God, in fact, has dropped the biggest miracle of all right into our laps, not because we deserved it or earned it, but because of God's great love for us. St. Paul tells us in today's epistle that "God is rich in mercy even though we were dead due to our sins." God has "made us alive together with Christ" because of God's great love for us. St. Paul goes on to say that our only possible response to such a love as great as this is to live out that love in our lives. This is God's miraculous good news. As St. Paul says: it's not our own doing. It's a gift from God. It comes to you and me, not because we earned it, but because God loves us that much. We are mere recipients of such a miraculous gift of love.

So, what are we to do with this miracle God has dropped in our laps? Should we hoard it for ourselves? Should we keep it safely in our families and mete it out only to those who look like us and agree with us and share our perspectives on things? Or, is this miracle too big to contain? Are we so humbled by God's gift that we feel constrained to share it with others? If we remain restrained by the hostility and hatred in the human race, then we will never become constrained to live out this miracle in our lives. Why do we allow ourselves to live by the restraint of hatred rather than by the constraint of God's miraculous grace? My hunch is the answer to that question lies with our fears. It's always easier to live by our fears than by our faith. And we live in a time when our leaders seem driven to exploit our deepest fears and even to create new fears we never knew we had.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we ignore the violence and hatred that's present in our world. Nor should we blame others. We can't hide behind Jesus. You and I are culpable as well. We've not fully put into practice the miracle of God's grace. To do that, we must practice love for our enemies, because God has loved us. We must practice radical hospitality to the stranger, because God has welcomed us. We must practice the discipline of forgiveness, because God has forgiven us. It's not enough for us to say at the Sunday Eucharist that we claim God's reconciling love. We must make it central to our practice of faith in the world. We must remember what God has given us and the life to which we've been called. God's reconciling love is the only weapon that God has given us to bring an end to the hostility and hatred we see all around us.  It's a daunting task, isn't it? How can we possibly do that? How can we put into practice the reconciling love of God and bring about an end to this violence and hatred? I mean it would take a miracle to do that, wouldn't it? Well, yes it would. But guess what? God wants to create such a miracle in our lives.

Now before you think I'm hopelessly naïve or out of touch with reality, let me tell you that I've seen first-hand some of the worst we humans have done. In 1980, I stood in a refugee camp in Honduras near the Salvadoran border. I saw there the results of helicopter attacks on women and children who had fled the civil war in El Salvador. The Salvadoran military crossed the border and slaughtered thousands. It was justified because these women and children were branded "Communists." So, I'm not naïve. But I'll tell you what is naïve. It's naïve to think that we can end violence with more violence. It's naïve to think that we can wipe out all the evildoers and not have all that hatred, violence, and hostility consume us as well. God has given us a more excellent way. But we must believe in miracles.

In today's Gospel lesson, Jesus fed 5000 people. To do that, he simply asked for a little help. He sent the disciples out to find some food. When they returned they said they only could find 5 loaves and 2 fish. They asked him how he could feed so many with so little. You see, they didn't believe in miracles yet. They were operating by the world's logic of fear; fear that if someone else receives something then there won't be enough for me. But Jesus wanted them to know that God isn't a god of fear. The Bible is full of stories where people are convinced that nothing could be done, that fear was the name of the game, and then God drops grace all over them. Likewise, Jesus replies to the disciple's logic of fear with his own logic of faith. Jesus took what the disciples brought him, blessed it, and multiplied it. Through that small offering, God made possible the impossible.

We do not need to bring loaves and fishes to God when we consider the fate of our city or of this world. What we do need to bring is ourselves, full of our own fears and concerns about the hostility and hatred. If we offer our fears and concerns to God, God will take them and break them open just as Jesus broke open the loaves that were brought to him.  God will use us to reconcile the world. The impossible will be made possible. That's the wonderful mystery of God; that God takes our lives and breaks them open so we can serve his reconciling purpose. Is that not what the Holy Communion is all about? In the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus offers us his own body as the spiritual food that feeds us and gives us the courage to "go in peace to love and serve the Lord."

The gift of ourselves is a ridiculous gift to offer God, is it not? But then again so were only 5 loaves and 2 fish.  No one would have thought that 5 loaves and 2 fish could feed 5000 people, but it did!  In the same way, God will take what we have to offer, bless it, multiply it, and then use our offering and each one of us to end the hostility and hatred around us.  Such an offering of ourselves must first begin in our own lives; in our homes, at our workplaces, and in our city. We need not wait until we have our act together; until we become perfect disciples. We must offer ourselves to God where we are and just the way we are. If we do, God will use us to create a miracle. The question is: Will we trust God enough to offer ourselves to such discipleship? Do we have enough faith in a God who can feed 5000 people from a few loaves and fish? I think we do. After all, truth be told. It seems plain to me. God wants to create miracle in our lives. Amen.

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