The Preaching Life

by William H. Willimon

In this issue we have expanded “The Preaching Life” feature in order to bring you the insightful comments of one of North America’s finest preachers. William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University. He is author of over 40 books on pastoral theology, the Christian faith, and church renewal.

Preaching Miracles

(I have been helped in these thoughts by Ronald J. Allen’s Our Eyes Can Be Opened: Preaching the Miracle Stories of the Synoptic Gospels Today, 1982.)

I’m not talking about good preaching being nothing short of miraculous, I’m talking about how we ought to preach the miracles that are reported in the Gospels. This being Year B in the Common Lectionary, you will note that we have had many miracles to preach. Mark majors in a depiction of Jesus as worker of miraculous signs.

Furthermore, for a number of Sundays this summer, we will be in the Gospel of John, which also contains a number of “signs,” which are said to point to the true significance of Jesus.

In his article on miracles and preaching in the Concise Encyclopedia of Preaching, Professor Ron Allen says,

We might define a miracle as an event which manifests power in an extraordinary way. The purpose of the miracle is to effect change (normally positive) in the affairs of the human or cosmic communities and to demonstrate the power of the agent responsible for the miracle. The miracle worker hopes to win or confirm the trust of those who witness the miracle. A miracle story narrates a miracle. The purpose of the miracle story is ordinarily to win or confirm the trust of those who hear or read the story in the power that performs the miracle in the narrative. The miracle story also reveals possibilities for the human and cosmic realms which result from the presence of the power in the world. The miracle story does not present details which explain the miraculous happening as such but simply presumes its occurrence.

We might more simply think of miracles, particularly those of Jesus, as testimony that something is afoot in the affairs of humanity. We live in a world in which we are drawn to the predictable and the certain. When something happens more than once, we assume it to be a pattern, a “law of nature” that is predictable and demystified. Miracles intrude into this settled arrangement and imply that there is, in the words of Hamlet to Horatio, “More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” In Scripture, God is ordinarily the power who performs miracles, but not always. Jesus works miracles as a sign of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God.

However, persons unrelated to God can do miraculous works (Acts 8:9-13; 13:4-12), and even Satan and Satan’s representatives can work miracles that parallel those of God (Revelation 13:11-15).

Miracles and miracle workers appear to have been commonplace in many cultures of antiquity. So the primary New Testament question is not, “Did this miracle really happen?” but the theological, interpretive question: Is this miracle a work of the true and living God, or is it something that detracts us from God? Jesus appears, in many places in Scripture, to be ambivalent about miracles and signs. He seems to have criticized those who clung to the miracles without seeing them as pointing to the presence of God. Apparently, miracles can be an idolatrous substitute for God.

In the European Enlightenment, miracles suddenly became a problem for propagators of the Christian faith in a way that they had not been before. The Enlightenment split of the world into the “natural” world and the “supernatural” world caused problems for the biblical witness to miracles. Furthermore, when the natural world was conceived of as a place of unbreakable “laws,” miracles seemed to be an upsetting disturbance in the way the world was designed.

In the premodern view of the biblical writers, the cosmos is a single sphere in which the divine presence and power is manifested in many ways, of which miracle is one. This suggests that biblical readers did not think of a miracle as an outside intrusion, an overturning of nature, but rather a kind of uncovering, a revelation of what was really going on in the world.

Preachers today ought not to be concerned over the modern quandary of whether or not the biblical miracles occurred as described, for there is no way for contemporary research to confirm or deny the occurrence of such events.

Some people in our congregations, however, are often troubled about these matters. Rather than enter into a dubious debate over whether or not a miracle happened, we ought instead to encourage our hearers to ask, What does this event reveal about the nature of God? Who is the beneficiary of this miracle? Who would be hurt by the miracle? What did this miracle do for the believing community? What does it do for us?

Ronald Allen ponders the dilemma that preachers face in interpreting miracles for contemporary congregations:

For example, a preacher might assert that miracles of the kind depicted in the Bible are outside our normal experience. However, in the context of the ancient worldview, the miracles witness to God’s presence, trustworthiness, and will. Listeners need not accept the historicity of the miracles in order to be conscious of God’s presence, trustworthiness, and will. The congregation can be aware of God’s relationship with the world through means which are as familiar in today’s setting as the miracles were in antiquity.

The preacher who takes this approach must reckon with contemporary reports which sometimes parallel the miracles of the Bible. How does the preacher interpret the case of the terminal patient who is unexpectedly (at least from the standpoint of modernity) restored to health? Can the congregation count on God to act this way for all? If so, does the congregation need to alter its view of how God works in the world? If not, what does the preacher say to those whose illnesses continue their ravaging path? How do we speak of miracles today?

Rather than trouble ourselves over questions of whether or not a miracle happens, we ought to ask, What does a miracle do? What is the function of a reported miracle in Scripture? Once we have answered that question, we preachers can then ponder the ways in which we can effect the same function within the sermon.

Biblical scholar Antoinette Wire identifies four kinds of miracle stories that stress the “political,” power implications of miracle. A miracle is God’s way of opening closed, oppressive systems that dehumanize and degrade people, says Wire. Among the functions of miracle that she identifies are: (1) Provision miracles (e.g., the manna in the wilderness) portray divine provision in the midst of want. A sermon on this type of miracle might ask, How does God provide similarly today? (2) Exorcisms (e.g., the Gerasene demoniac) represent God’s displacement of arbitrary, restrictive, even violent powers with freedom for the possessed. So a sermon on these miracles inquires into the ways that powers bind people today and the ways in which God defeats those oppressive powers. (3) Controversy miracles (e.g., the healing of the withered hand on the Sabbath) picture God’s work in releasing people from a variety of social and moral restrictions. The preacher might ponder ways in which God is releasing today’s society from arbitrary social and moral laws. (4) Request miracles (e.g., the woman with the issue of blood) are initiated at the request of someone who feels bound but who shows faith in Christ by requesting a miracle. When the request is granted, potency is restored.

I am drawn to the insights of contemporary literary criticism that stresses that the miracle stories must be interpreted with reference to the total narrative in which they occur. For instance, the Gospel of Mark certainly enjoys portraying Jesus as a powerful force who works deeds of power for good. When Jesus arrives, the power seems to break forth, there is new possibility for people who are trapped and bound. Literary critics stress that miracle stories create a “world,” a narrative environment in which we come to see our received world in a different way.

Sometimes the miracle story itself can offer a way of presenting our sermon. Into our human “caughtness” and sense of despair, Jesus intrudes and works newness and wonder-evoking power. Miracles are a constant reminder that our world is not closed, fixed. The future of the world, the fate of human life is not all within our hands. Particularly for the impotent and the dispossessed, Jesus offers life and power for God. Every miracle is therefore a sort of Easter, a sign that God is determined to work His will in the world, despite all the forces arrayed against the will of God.