Month: May 2021

I am

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Jesus had fed the 5000. It was probably more like 15,000 or 20,000 if you counted women and children.

John 6 tells how Jesus came walking to the disciples who were struggling to row across the lake in a storm. Walking, not struggling, against the wind and waves.

When the disciples saw him, they were terrified.

But it was what he said next that really scared them.

“It is I; don’t be afraid.”

It sounds comforting, but I wonder. What Jesus literally said, was, “I am; don’t fear.” In trying to give us smooth sounding English, the translators glossed over the staggering claim Jesus was making about himself.

“I am” was the name God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. “I am” is how the almighty and eternal God chose to identify himself.

“I am” without beginning and without end.

“I am” means that everything that exists or ever will exist has its beginning in God. All life and truth, energy and power, are derived from “I am.”

We live in a time when people say something is true “if it works for you.” We’re encouraged to “find ourselves.” We insist on defining ourselves based things like feelings, gender, occupation, wealth and more.

If Jesus is the Lord over nature, the one whom wind and waves obey, you have to allow him to be Lord of your life. All of it. You can’t pick and choose the parts of his teaching that you’ll follow and ignore the rest. You can’t tame “I am.” He won’t settle for being your helper.

It turns out there was another miracle within the miracle of Jesus walking on the water. John 6 says that when Jesus got into the boat with the disciples, “immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.” In an instant, they’d cross the remaining miles of lake.

“I am” is our destination.

God’s healing power

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Fifteen months ago, as I prayed about what the Christian response to the pandemic ought to be, my thoughts went to a book by sociologist Rodney Stark: The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. From a historical perspective, there was nothing inevitable about the rise of Christianity. As Stark pointed out, paganism had been a vital part of the Greco-Roman world for centuries, and therefore “must have had the capacity to fulfill basic religious impulses.”

But then the plagues struck.

Stark said, “In a sense paganism did indeed ‘topple over dead’ or at least acquire it’s fatal illness during these epidemics.”

Why?

From the beginning of the Jesus movement, Christian values of love and charity had translated into social services and community solidarity.

When disasters struck, Christians were better able to cope.

As the pagans fled the cities, Christians went in.

They provided food and basic provisions for the sick, even for the pagans, even at the cost of their own lives. It turned out that just seeing to the basic needs of people dramatically increased the survival rate. When the crisis subsided, pagans wondered why the Christians had stayed.

Of course they had stayed because they had experienced the selfless love of Jesus Christ and the power of the resurrection.

So if the response of the early church was to go into the city, how does that inform the Christian response in our time?

By 2020, we knew more about how viruses spread, though not nearly as much as we needed to know. The faithful response of 2020 was still to see to basic human needs, but also to limit our exposure in order to limit the spread of the virus.

In 2020, part of the faithful response meant staying away instead of going in.

But what about today, now that vaccines are available?

The faithful response today is not dying, but living. It’s about going into a clinic and getting a shot.

But now it seems that the folks most reluctant to get the shot are evangelical Christians.

Friends, for every objection you have to getting the shot, I can name five more. I agree with you on most of them.

The collective response to the pandemic reflects our nature as fallen human beings. Our government wasn’t ready for the pandemic. Officials have been inconsistent, reluctant to admit mistakes, and sometimes flat wrong. Some said vaccines would take years to develop and might never come. Some probably should be prosecuted.

But it was fallen people like that that the early Christians died to save.

Today, God is working a miracle through his fallen creatures. Through vaccines, God’s healing power is once more going out into the world.

But first it has to go into our arms.

Almost nothing

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I miss talking to my father-in-law, Lonnie.

Lonnie could fix anything, and if there was anything he loved more than fixing things, it was helping you fix them. He devoted much of his retirement to serving churches and going on mission trips to help others fix things.

I would call Lonnie when I’d get stuck with something I was working on. Say, I was trying to replace a starter motor on an old car, and there was a bolt that I couldn’t get the wrench around.

“Did you pray about it?” Lonnie would ask.

Of course I hadn’t.

Outside of the resurrection, the only miracle mentioned in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is the feeding of the 5000. In the Gospel of John, Jesus asked for Philip’s advice on what to do.

Philip had nothing.

Then Andrew spoke up. Andrew had found a boy with five small barley loaves and two fish. Think dinner rolls and sardines.

Almost nothing.

But with Jesus it was enough.

In his first miracle, Jesus involved some servants by telling them to fill some stone jars with water before turning the water into wine.

His last miracle in John 21 involved the disciples in a miraculous catch. “Bring some of the fish you caught,” he told them. But Jesus didn’t need their fish. He already had breakfast cooking. And wasn’t he the one who caught the fish?

There is a line in the great hymn, “A Mighty Fortress,” which goes, “We will not fear for God has willed his truth to triumph through us.”

Jesus doesn’t need us to do the miracle, but he chooses to work his power through us.

I wonder. Maybe my father-in-law was so good at fixing things because he was always aware of God’s presence, always willing to be the channel of God’s power.

What is more amazing, that Jesus can do miracles?

Or that Jesus chooses to perform his miracles through us, even if we bring almost nothing?

With Jesus, “almost nothing” can be quite enough.