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The Other Miracle
A sermon by Dr. Jesse Fletcher
First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Liturgically these times of the
year are called "Ordinary Time." You're familiar, of course, with Lent and
Pentecost and the Advent season and the celebrations that come there. But the
liturgical year goes twelve months and it's full of various saints days and
feasts days and other emphases. But generally speaking, the time between
Pentecost and Advent is called "Ordinary Time."
Have you ever thought how hard it
is to come up with 'ordinary time?' Something always extraordinary seems to
happen in my life. For instance, as I get on that plane every Saturday and make
my way up here it's hard to think of it as ordinary time. Last week we
commemorated the sixth anniversary of 9/11. It's been hard to think of the time
since then as "Ordinary Time." Every time I fly through Dallas, I see all over
the terminal, desert fatigue uniforms, as I watch young men and women going to
and from the battle zone in the Middle East. For them, it's not ordinary time.
And yet, ordinary time is where
we try to live. Hopefully this day will have some familiarity to yesterday,
minus a few things we just as soon not happen, and plus a few things we're
hoping for. But in this passage, Luke, the writer of Acts, is suggesting it was
ordinary time.
They were going to the temple
regularly, they were meeting together and sharing their meals and sharing their
excitement in Christ and sharing the insights that the indwelling spirit was
beginning to show them.
Let me read the passage found in
the third chapter of Acts, and again I would like to read from the translation,
The Message. "One day at three o'clock in the afternoon, Peter and John were on
their way into the temple for prayer meeting. At the same time there was a man
crippled from birth being carried up."
The same time they were heading
for the temple this man and whoever was carrying him, family or friends were
heading also for the temple. They converged at the gate, Beautiful. "Everyday
he was set down at the temple gate he was set down at the temple gate, the one
named Beautiful, to beg from those going into the temple. When he saw Peter and
John about to enter the temple, he asked for a handout." Or, 'alms' as we have
heard it termed so many years.
"Peter, with John at his side,
looked him straight in the eye and said, 'Look here.' He looked up expecting to
get something from them.
Peter said, 'I don't have a
nickel to my name, but what I do have, I give you.'" Now that is language you
will remember more clearly as, "silver and gold have I none, but such as I have,
give I unto thee."
"In the name of Jesus Christ of
Nazareth, walk. He grabbed him by the right hand and pulled him up. In an
instant, his feet and ankles became firm. He jumped to his feet and walked.
The man went into the temple with them, walking back and forth dancing and
praising God. Everyone there saw him walking around and praising God. They
recognized him as the one who sat begging at the temple's gate Beautiful and
rubbed their eyes, astonished, scarcely believing what they were seeing. The
man threw his arms around Peter and John, ecstatic. All the people ran up where
they were at Solomon Porch to see it for themselves. It issued in a chance for
Peter to preach, a chance for the people to respond to the hope that he declared
in Jesus Christ and a chance for the temple guards to arrest them."
I think Luke, who wrote the
gospel of Luke and then this his history of the early church that we call the
Book of Acts, ran into this story when he came back to Jerusalem as a
companion of Paul. A gentile, a physician by trade, Luke, the writer began to
look for and research the things he wanted to include in his history of the
early church. He came to this story and felt it would just fit, not because of
Peter or John's ability, not because of the temple experience or the follow-up
or the preaching or the people who were converted or the arrest, but I think he
wanted to include this miracle.
But the Bible is full of
miracles. The problem is we sometimes struggle with how we want to define a
miracle. Miracles are something we use in so many different ways from the very
light hearted version to something that is almost too holy to talk about. On
the one scale, we use it a lot on the golf course. When somebody hits the ball
thin and it skips across the water, the foursome says, "It's a miracle."
Somebody else shanks one into a tree, and it bounces back on the green, "It's a
miracle." Or, I happen to hit one straight, "It's a miracle." Well, obviously
there are better, more accurate ways to use that term. More often we use it in a
way that says this is something you couldn't expect and this is not something
this man would have had a right to expect. What he went to temple each day, to
the gate Beautiful and was laid there, it was because he hoped to collect
enough alms to keep body and soul together.
And I've traveled around the
world t enough to realize this is still a ubiquitous experience. You see people
in all kinds of straits, with all kinds of infirmities, the halt and the lame,
carried to places where they can beg. For much of the world there's no welfare
system, there's no social services system like we have in our country where we
try to design things and fund things that will reach out and help the less
fortunate, the unfortunate.
In most parts of the world, they
depend on begging, they depend on alms and people are used to it. For some of
them it's part of their faith to give alms and for others it's part of their
experience to ignore the situation. But, I understand how "regular" this looks
and how dramatic it becomes when a man whose ankles and feet evidently had not
served him since birth, suddenly finding them strong and whole. I asked an
orthopedic surgeon friend of my, about a month ago, about this. He just laughed
and said, "We surgeons don't touch things like that." And I said, "What do you
mean, can't you explain just how it could have happened?" He said, "No, why
explain it, it was a miracle." I said, "I'm supposed to say that, you're
supposed to tell me how it happened." Miracles are like that.
For some people, however, a
miracle has to be verified in ways that no other explanation would fit. In
Roman Catholicism, for instance, when they elevate someone to sainthood, they go
through a rather extensive effort to verify certain miracles. You can't make a
saint without some miracles in their life and the miracles are challenged by
somebody called the "devils advocate." Well, devils advocates are everywhere.
I find them all the time, worse, I find myself being one, now and then. Do you
ever do that? Doubting and questioning and explaining otherwise. On one hand,
we're open to miracles; on the other hand we're so resistant to them.
I mentioned last week a man who's
very antagonistic toward the faith, Christianity in particular. He attacks us
along three fronts. One is regarding the skeletons in our historical closet
with things like the Crusades and the Inquisition and the persecution of people
that we didn't agree with. He also attacks along the lines of revelation and
its credibility, its accuracy and using mostly scholarship that Christians
themselves have developed, its legitimacy. But he reserves his real ire for
miracles. There's a true resistance to those.
Folks, I believe in miracles. I
believe things happen - that for whatever other reason you can give to explain
it- as the work of God in our lives. And I don't believe that it always needs
to be something that is just so totally out of the blue there's no other way to
handle it. Let me give you an illustration.
My wife is a life-long diabetic.
When we lived here in Richmond she had begun to loose sight in her eyes. At
that point in time, diabetic retinopathy, as they called it, was the number one
cause of blindness in the world. There was a doctor here named DuPont Gerry, who
had an office right here on Monument Avenue, who began treating her problems
with a laser. He'd go in and burn the little blood vessels that would get
traction on the retina and pull it loose which caused the blindness. He began
treating it, but it got ahead of him and she lost the sight in one eye and the
other one was threatened. We knew too many people who were already blind from
the problem to not to feel devastated. One day at DuPont's office he said, "You
know, my son is an intern in the Bascom- Palmer Eye Clinic in Miami. And they
have a man down there who's doing an experimental surgery on diabetic
retinopathy.
We were soon down there.
Dorothy's prayer had been that she would not only be healed from the threat of
blindness but that it would come in such a way as that it would benefit
everybody else who was threatened with this because she was in a community,
through her treatment, of people suffering like this. We went to Bascom-Palmer
and she was one of the first 100 people in the world to have what was called a
Vitrectomy and her sight was saved. Later, after we had moved to Texas, she had
to go back to do the other eye. By that time, that surgery was done all over
the world. She sees clearly, she drives, she can read, she's a computer wiz and
it was a miracle, as far as I'm concerned. And it's a miracle that's happening
to people everywhere and diabetic retinopathy is no longer a dead-end to sight.
That's a miracle you can explain, you can explain it by a man's efforts to
pioneer ways to solve what before had been an intractable problem. But friend,
that's the stuff of miracles.
Now that's not like the ultimate
miracle of God raising Christ from the dead. But I believe God did this one
also..
God is involved in the people who
are putting their hands to it, whether they know they are part of His hands or
not. I believe in miracles. A little later, within the last ten years, I made
another trip to a hospital in Dallas. Dorothy had been told that she had
ovarian cancer and it had metastasized. The numbers were pretty severe,
suggesting widely metastasized. She went through surgery, what they called
'stage surgery.' It was supposed to make sure they could get it all and when it
was all over the Doctor came back, looked at me, he said, "I can't explain it,
but we have no cancer. We couldn't find anything malignant." I said, "What did
those numbers mean?" He said, "I can't tell you, there was just no
malignancy." When she awoke and I told her, she said, simply, "Thank you,
Jesus." It was a miracle.
Sure you can say it wasn't
cancer. For me, it was a miracle! Folks, if you're not open to miracles,
you're not open to the fact that there is a God who is over, under and in
everything that we believe and that our faith starts with an ultimate miracle.
Now, having said all that, I’ve used up most of my time and that's not what I
came to talk about.
I want to talk about the other
miracle. You say, "Well, what other miracle?" I'm talking about the miracle
that happened when Peter reached down and lifted the man up. You see, that
didn't happen. And I've watched enough of these street scenes in enough parts
of the world to know it doesn't happen. People will do one of two things-
they'll drop something in the man's little receptacle or the women's little
receptacle or often (unfortunately) the child's little cup and move on, thinking
that they've taken care of their faith needs for the day. Or, more often, they
will look the other way, become involved in a conversation and just pass by.
When somebody stops and speaks,
it already had this man's attention, that was different. Something different
was taking place. Now when he said, "You're healed, rise up and walk," or "in
the name of Jesus rise up and walk," I wonder if the man thought Peter was
crazy, 'jerking his chain,' as the kids say. Sure, up like a bunny, right? But
at the same time Peter reached down, reached his strong right fisherman's hand
down and whether a reflex action, or what, the man took it and then the miracle
happened- according to the scripture. Then he felt the strength, then he felt
the ability to walk. The other miracle was Peter’s reaching out. This is a
miracle that any one of us can be a part of.
Your morning worship response had
you say, "Come, O Lord, and work a miracle in me." What I'm asking you to do is
say, "Come, O Lord, work a miracle through me." You're not the miracle
worker, but you work for one. There is One who can work a miracle, but He may
be waiting on your hand, your voice, your word, your presence, your awareness.
Dr. Spencer, in the summer, preached a beautiful sermon here in which he talked
about having the eyes to see. When you become a part of what God's about, the
miracle working of what faith can do and mean in this world, you become those
hands. And you can be a part of that. That's the miracle I'm interested in.
Do you realize that Jesus did all kinds of miracles, but he didn't talk about
any? What he did talk about, in ways that we're still galvanized by it, is the
man who didn't pass by on the other side, who stopped and went to the man who
had been robbed and severely hurt and thrown on the side of the road and helped
him. We call him the Good Samaritan. You remember that man?
He reached out and did something
about it. We all get this opportunity everyday, if we have the eyes to see.
Maybe we're not reaching down to someone whose ankles and feet don't work. Maybe
we are reaching out to somebody whose heart's broken. We may be reaching out to
somebody for whom life is just so flat they can't get themselves up to do
anything and you're giving them that word of encouragement- that word of
recognition. Maybe it's a child to whom no one is paying attention and you stop
and give that recognition and encouragement.
In Abilene, there's a man named
James Parker, who grew up poor as dirt in a town called Sweetwater. There was a
grocer there who hired him to be a sacker. That man began to treat James like a
father. Later he brought James into the business and still later he sold the
business to James and still later James took that business, by then multiplied
all over that area, and sold it for millions of dollars and became one of the
areas top philanthropists. I didn't know that original grocer, but he worked a
miracle in James. There's all kinds of miracles that can be worked this way in
the spirit of the great Samaritan. This is the other miracle.
There was an interesting little
story on the internet. I've had it in my files for several weeks, it could be an
urban legend, as they sometimes say about these things, but I tried to do a
little follow-up on it and it seemed to fit. It was a story of an African
American woman who was stranded on a California freeway one night during a rain
storm. Her car had broken down, she was well-dressed, she got out, soon she was
soaked trying to wave somebody down because she was in a terrible hurry to get
somewhere. But, people just kept whizzing on by. Everybody had to go
someplace, but surely there'd be somebody who pays attention to that kind of
thing who would come and help her, a policeman or someone designated to do
that. Finally, a young white man pulled over and asked if he could help her.
He took her somewhere where she could be dry and called a cab and he arranged
for her car to be taken care of. She said, "Give me your name and address." He
said, "No, you don't need to do that, this is just something I could do." She
said, "Please!" And he did. And a few days later a beautiful color television
set was delivered to his house and a note which said, "Thank you so much for
stopping during my terrible need. I was on the way to the hospital to see my
husband who was dying. Had you not stopped, had you not helped me, I would
never have made it and I would not have had those last few moments with him.
Thank you again. Mrs. Nat King Cole.
I went back and checked out the
bio of Nat King Cole and it could fit and I like to think it does. But it also
said this to me, not just be sure and stop on the next rainy freeway you see
when somebody's in distress, but it said to me, "Wait a minute. You don't
need an expensive gift or even the gratitude of a famous person, to get in this
spirit."
I have a friend of mine who's
just come through a very difficult illness and I asked him how he felt about it
and he said, "Well, I've made two resolves. One is, I'm going to play golf every
chance I get." I said, "What's the second one?" And I really expected
something profound and it was. He said, "And I'm going to eat dessert
everyday."
Let me tell you about dessert.
It won't do nearly as much for you as reaching out and lifting somebody up.
We're talking about doing yourself a favor. We're talking about finding out who
you really were meant to be. We're talking about having the eyes to see people
all around you in terms of the way your Lord and Savior sees them and then
reaching out however you can, to let him make whatever miracle needs to be made
in that situation. This is something we call all do. We can become ‘the other
miracle’ workers. You remember that movie they made so many years ago about the
lady that helped Helen Keller get in touch with the world. They called her the
Miracle Worker.
Any time we help somebody find
their way, it can seem small to us but to them it can be a real miracle. The
other kind of miracle may be the one we see the most of and it may be the one we
need the most.
Would you bow your heads please?
Our Father, thank you for the
word, thank you for this story, thank you for opportunity to try to bring it
into our lives in terms of the presence of Christ in our lives and the
leadership of the spirit. Grant that we might have eyes to see, that we might
have the heart to care and the ability to reach out, in Jesus name. Amen.
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