Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 18, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

There has been a great deal of ink spilled in recent years over the question: Who was Jesus really? Well, one thing seems clear. Whatever else he may have been, Jesus was a miracle worker. The Gospels are full of stories of actions by Jesus that people considered, and consider, to be miracles. Our Gospel lesson this morning recounts one of the most famous of Jesus’ miracles. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus turned water into wine (and very good wine at that) at a wedding in the town of Cana. You all know a lot of the other miracle stories: calming the storm, walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead, and lots of healings and exorcisms. Indeed, miracle worker is one of the most powerful images of Jesus that emerges from the four canonical Gospels.

Now, if you’re like me, that fact gives you a lot of trouble. My immediate reaction is: "Yeah, right. I don’t believe in miracles." Of course, that statement doesn’t mean anything unless we know what we mean by the word "miracle." Most people today take it to mean something that happens against the laws of nature. That’s what I take it to mean when I say I don’t believe in miracles. That, however, isn’t really what a miracle is. Today by a miracle I mean simply that a miracle is something that provokes wonder and awe in those who observe it. It is something people don’t think is possible. We use the word this way all the time. When someone recovers from a life-threatening illness, we may call it a miracle. When some has some remarkable stroke of good luck, we may call it a miracle. We talk about "miracle catches" in football or "miracle comebacks" in basketball. A miracle is something that leaves you saying: "Wow! I sure didn’t think that was possible!" When someone does the impossible, we call it a miracle.

And here’s the problem: We have such puny, pathetic little ideas of what is possible! We’ve lost our vision of all that is possible for human beings! Just think about it. Take a little child. Ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, and she doesn’t think about what might seem possible. Take one young person I know who says: I want to be an artist and a dancer and a writer. Does she stop to think: It isn’t possible to be all three at once, or: A person can’t possibly make a living doing those things. Not while she’s still a child she doesn’t. Children aren’t limited by petty considerations of what’s possible.

But then they start to grow up; and the world tells them they have to be reasonable, they have to be realistic. And so they start to consider, to calculate difficulties, to doubt their possibilities, to contemplate all the reasons.. It happened to all of us. We lost our belief that anything is possible. We lost our willingness to be unreasonable, to refuse to let the world’s reasons why we can’t, or why it won’t work, stop us from doing great things. We learned to be "responsible," which often means no more than we learned to be timid and limited in our hopes, our dreams, our aspirations, in short, in our lives.

Friends, I know whereof I speak. For years I told myself that I couldn’t possibly leave the practice of law and do with my life what I felt called to do. Staying in the practice of law was the only reasonable thing for me to do. I had responsibilities. I had obligations. I was too old to change careers. I couldn’t afford to go back to school. People wouldn’t understand. They might think I was nuts for wanting out of such a prestigious and (in popular myth anyway) lucrative profession. Just about every reason you could bring forward on the subject said: It’s impossible. It can’t be done. You can’t do it. It doesn’t make any sense. And the thing of it is, all of those reasons were perfectly correct. There isn’t a one of them that I could honestly say was false.

There was, however, just one little problem. Staying in the practice of law, denying the call I felt, denying who I really was—all of which was the only reasonable thing to do—was almost literally killing me. The only reasonable thing to do was to stay where I was. The problem was, that way lay death. And so I did the totally unreasonable thing. I closed my law office and entered seminary. And here I am, doing what I love and actually having a life, being alive in a way I never was when I was a lawyer. It’s a miracle in my life. I don’t know if it’s one in yours. That’s for you to say; but I sure know it’s one in mine. I created a miracle. I made something utterly impossible happen.

Now, although it may not be obvious yet, my point here this morning is not to talk about me. It is, rather, to talk about us, about our church and our future. What is the reasonable way to look at us? We are a small congregation. Most of us are getting on in years. We’re tired. We have limited resources of time, talent, energy, and money. We’re out of step with our culture and the culture churches that thrive in it. We preach liberal theology in a conservative era and community. We do traditional worship in a time when everyone seems to want contemporary praise worship. We don’t have very many young people. We don’t have much of a Sunday School, and we have no youth programs at all. We’re running a budget deficit that we can sustain at the present rate for no more than a couple of more years. There are lots and lots of reasons why this church should have no future. Given all the obstacles, it simply isn’t possible for us to grow and flourish. Every reasonable consideration you can come up with says so.

But once again there’s a problem, or rather several of them, with that eminently reasonable thing to do. We love this church, and we want it to flourish. Even more importantly, we bring a Christian witness to this community that the community desperately needs. We speak the truth in a culture that hates the truth but needs it now more than ever. We stand for inclusion in a world of exclusion. We stand for the integration of the entire person—mind, body, and spirit—in a world that thinks faith means compartmentalizing the mind from the spirit. In other words, we witness to a truth that this community simply cannot do without.

And so today I’m here to recruit you for a miracle. I’m here to ask you to take all of those reasonable reasons why we can’t do it and throw them out. Get them out of your mind, out of your thinking. True: Renewing this church isn’t possible. Doing it would be a miracle. All of those reasons why we can’t do it are absolutely true. I can’t tell you that they aren’t. I can, and I do, tell you this: They don’t matter! You don’t create miracles by focusing on all the reasons why what you want is impossible. You create miracles by focusing on why what you want has to happen. You create what you want as a possibility, not an impossibility. Then, you set out to make it real.

And you’re all asking: How do you do that? You just said it isn’t possible, and now you tell us to create it as a possibility and to make it real. Well, if you’re saying that, thank you for listening. That’s exactly what I’m saying. And here’s how you do it: You start by looking at all the ways in which we are not being true to ourselves, all the ways in which we are not being authentic. Let me give you some of my thoughts on the subject: We have a wonderful Mission Statement that sets out our vision of the faith and of our life. How many people have you shared it with in the last year? We have taken a stand as Open and Affirming. How many discussions have you had with your friends about that stance? We say that we accept all people. We say we love this church and its fellowship. How many people have you invited to church recently? We say we stand for justice and for peace. How many letters have you written to the editor of the local papers taking a stand for peace and justice and identifying this church as the source of your convictions? Some of you can answer at least some of those questions in some way other than “I haven’t,” but I bet most of you can’t. I can’t answer all of them any other way.

Friends, we say we are witnesses to the Gospel, that we offer an alternative Christian vision, an alternative both to the secularism of our society and the rigid, ossified views of so many Christian churches; but we are hiding our light under a bushel! Not as much as we were a year ago, true, but still. Can we honestly say that we are burning as brightly in this community as we might? Can we honestly say that we don’t let our fears--our fear of rejection, our fear that people won’t like us and our stands, our fear of being different and of standing out--stop us from shining our light brightly and boldly? I don’t think we can. I don’t think I can.

We are eminently reasonable people, and the problem with that is that we let our reasons stop us. That’s why we think miracles are impossible. Every reason in the world said Jesus couldn’t turn water into wine at the wedding at Cana, but he did. The learning for us is: When you ignore the reasons why you can’t, you can. You’ve seen it work here in this church. When I started here in March, 2002, I repeatedly said I wanted to start an adult education program, and I got reason after reason why I couldn’t. People won’t come, I heard. There’s no good time, I heard. People aren’t interested, I heard. And for a few months I let all those reasons stop me. Then, I decided to ignore those reasons, and I just did it. That was 18 months ago, and the adult education forum is still going strong. When I started here I inquired about our Open and Affirming status. I was told: You can’t push that. It will split the church. Then, the Renewal Taskforce just did it, and we haven’t lost a single person over it.

So let’s forget all the reasons why we can’t renew this church. We can. Only our own reasonableness can stop us. I’m here today to recruit every one of you into a miracle, and miracles aren’t reasonable. Let’s be unreasonable. Let’s create a miracle!