Do you believe in miracles? It’s easier to believe in miracles on a day as beautiful as this one, isn’t it? Easier than when the sky is gray and cloudy, say like in the early February.

 

I find this an interesting story from the gospel of Matthew. This morning I think it’s a story about a miracle. Admittedly, I’m drawn, at least this week in my life, to the end of the story. To the story about the hook being cast into the sea. It’s the fishing story that hooks me. And the big snook that he pulls out of the lake. Well, maybe not a snook out of a lake, but the big fish he pulls out of the lake with a coin in its mouth.

 

When the Church, across the centuries, has looked at this part of Matthew’s gospel, it’s actually been other things that the church has focused on with more clarity, with more time. The Church has looked, at least to judge from the written materials we have, at least to judge from the things that commentators have said over the ages, the Church has looked with more attention on the discussion about whether or not Jesus had to pay taxes. What is it about human nature, Judge Timmerman, that that is what it is we want to debate: Whether or not Jesus and Christians around him should have to pay taxes. But that’s where there’s been a lot of writing over time.

 

And, the story is spoken to the Church about that. Both of the freedom of the Christian community and yet also to the privilege of the Christian community to be good citizens in whatever government they were living with. But to remember always that their citizenship ultimately belongs to a higher allegiance. The story has blessed the community that way.

 

Even more than the fish bit at the end, the community has looked over time at this account at not giving offense. Where Jesus says, and it almost seems almost flippant at first, so as not to give offense, go throw a hook into the sea and pull forward a fish. And the Church has found in that guidance for living with others in such a way that though some things may be permitted for us, it should not be a burden for the others around us when we can forebear it. It has been helpful guidance for the Church. But this way, it’s the fish that’s hooked me. It’s the sea at the end.

 

I want to ask you a question. What does Jesus know about fishing? He’s a carpenter. Peter. Peter is a fisherman. Now he knows something about fishing. Don’t you think it’s odd that Jesus would be telling Peter, the fisherman, how he ought to be able to catch this fish in the lake? I find myself imagining what it was like. Was it early in the day, maybe the morning? Did Peter then walk down to the lake? Was it an evening, when the fish are supposed to bite, right after sunset? Did he take with him a net as well? Because most of the time he would have fished with a net. I don’t remember another account of a line and a hook in the Bible. But here it is.

 

He threw a line with a hook, maybe not a Zebco or a big fancy pole like you might get at the sports store here. But a line, at least, with a hook on the end of it, we judge from the text.

 

Was he embarrassed when he threw it in? Did he think it was a silly thing to do? How many other times had he caught a fish with a coin in its mouth? Did he even know that that’s what he would be looking for, for sure? And when they hooked it, when he threw the hook in and it bit, and there was that pull on the end of the rope, what did he think? And to pull up the big fish and to open its mouth, and to see the coin inside. It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle.

 

The image so fascinated me, I’ve been looking for pictures of it. I could only find one, an image by an African-American artist that shows actually Peter’s hands reaching in and grabbing the fish in the water. But Geoff is a better fisherman than me, and he found about six different paintings of it across time. One, in the Mount Lebanon Presbyterian Church stained glass window, where the artist showed Jesus himself taking the coin out of the mouth of the fish in order to pay the tribute.

 

What did it look like? Did he feel foolish going to the lake? Sometimes (and Bill Wallof has helped me with this interpretation this week), sometimes I think maybe this passage has spoken to the Christian community as a way of saying, The Spirit of the Living God may prompt you to do things that may seem foolish at times. But if you are obedient in following them, miracles can happen. The power of God can be known through them.

 

You know what that feels like. A baby is burned and brought to a very primitive clinic in rural Haiti. The mother, in desperation, says in broken Creole, “For the pity of God, help me.” It’s a foolish thing to think we could get a burned baby to a hospital in Tampa. It’s a foolish thing to think that could happen. You can’t provide health care to a baby that way. But the next thing you know, a helicopter is coming from the United Nations, and a burned baby is being treated at Tampa General.

 

A young woman has a vision for starting a preschool, believing that early intervention with special needs children can help. Maybe that was a foolish idea. But today, they’re doing it all over. In part because of our example.

 

An unusually competent and capable local leader chooses to spend her life mentoring and building character in teenage women as a softball coach. In a miracle of what may have looked like a foolish initiative. To spend her life as a softball coach. The miracle is the generosity of her leadership, of her character.

 

Calvin says it’s a miracle. That’s what the text is about. It’s a miracle. Throw a hook into the sea, and I quote him here, “Throw a hook into the sea. Though I acknowledge that Christ had not always full coffers,” (don’t you like that line?), “though I acknowledge that Christ had not always full coffers, that he didn’t always have a lot of money,” (there’s something to hearing it, that Calvin’s notion of Jesus that way, to think that sometimes he didn’t have a lot of money in his pocket.) Though I acknowledge that Christ had not always full coffers, yet I think that he was not compelled by poverty to give this order to Peter, but that he did so in order to prove by a miracle that he had a more extensive dominion than all earthly kings, since even the fish were his tributaries.

 

So that’s what I find in the story this week, a miracle. Do you believe in miracles? The really big question is, can we ask for a miracle?

 

Well, it’s true. We need to remember that every fish does not have a coin in its mouth. Just ask TJ. Every fish you catch is not going to have a coin in its mouth. God has created the world in such a way that there are certain natural orders and systems, both biological and physical around us, that the world operates the universe with certain laws and physical characteristics that are a sign of God’s goodness. And our working within those systems is a means of God’s blessing us. Those systems exist for a reason and a rationale.

 

The world is not defined in such a way that miracles would be the means by which God solves the world’s ills or extinguishes every source of human suffering. That is not what’s happening. There are many people with great needs today.

 

We may ask for a miracle, but God has designed the world in such a way that we should not be so naïve to think that every fish is going to have a coin in its mouth. The natural order is a good thing. But may we ask? Jesus said yes. He said ask for whatever you will in my name. The Father seeks to know your hearts and your minds and what it is that prayer is bringing within you.

 

We can ask. But we cannot require a miracle. We cannot compel a miracle. And we should be careful not to miss the showers of blessings that are always falling regularly around us. So, like the psalmist, we should recognize that the very movement of the sun across the sky from morning to night is a sign, a miraculous sign of the power of God amongst us. That children come forward and want to speak about the Trinity, or to hear the stories of Jesus. That’s a sign. A miraculous sign of the presence of God amongst us. The care of a friend, reaching out to touch you or support you when you’re not expecting it. That’s a sign of the presence of God amongst us.

 

We can ask for miracles, but we ought not to try and require them, or compel them. And we should remember that there is a regular shower of blessings amongst us. We should be careful not to miss those.

 

What is a miracle? This week I’m defining it as a strong sign of the reality of the presence of God. A strong sign of the reality of the presence of God, whether it’s a coin in a fish’s mouth, or a sunset on the Gulf, or a note from a caring friend.

 

No, you may reply, a note’s not a miracle. Miracles require the breaking of the natural order. Well, I understand what you’re saying. But then again, go to an Internet search engine and type in “shark” and “fish” and “stomach” and see the long list of things that people have found in their bellies over time. I suppose that could be an astonishing thing, too. Is it a violation of the natural order? I mean, it’s a miracle to find a gold coin in a fish’s mouth. But then again, how miraculous is it to find a license plate from West Virginia in the mouth of a fish?

 

We live within the natural order, and yet again and again we see things within the natural order that mystify us. A miracle is a sign of a strong reality of the presence of God.

 

William Sloan Kaufman talks about taking a taxi at LaGuardia Airport, and as he rode to Manhattan, breaking into a conversation with the taxi driver who, when he heard that he was a pastor, wanted to talk with him about faith and why more people didn’t believe. Kaufman said, “What do you think it would take for people to believe? What would make faith occur in people?” The taxi driver said, “Well, some miracle. That God would just do something once that everybody could see and would know that that was a sign of God’s presence.” “Like what?” said Kaufman. “What would it be?”

 

“Well, what if,” said the taxi driver, “what if one night God made it snow in New York? Twelve inches of snow, and it was light blue. Carolina blue all over the city, the snow. That would be a miracle.” Kaufman said, “Uhhh. By six o’clock that night we’d be listening to meteorologists and scientists explain to us how it was that snow could fall blue. Looking for explanations within the natural order of what had first seemed astonishing within us.”

 

A miracle is a strong sign of the reality of the presence of God. And it’s appropriated through faith. Faith is the lens by which we look at the reality of the presence of God, and see the miraculous amongst us.

 

Tuesday, I had pneumonia. Today, here I am.

 

Carl Rowan, the national columnist, talked about how, as a high school student, he wanted very badly to go to college, but he didn’t have the money. He says he lived in rural Illinois, and his teacher had said to him one spring day in his senior year, “Carl, they’re going to give an examination in Chicago for the Coast Guard Academy, and I think you should take it. I think it could be a way for you to get into college.” But it was a fifty-dollar bus ticket to Chicago from where he lived, and not only did he not have fifty dollars, but his family did not have fifty dollars, and there wasn’t anybody within his family system or his neighborhood who had fifty dollars to lend him. In discouragement, he said, he walked out the front door of the high school and looked at holly bush next to the entrance. And there, down inside the top amongst the leaves, was a fifty-dollar bill, which he pulled out and used to buy a bus ticket. He went to college and became the famous, nationally syndicated columnist.

 

When I heard him tell the story, he said, “As far as I’m concerned, it was a miracle. For somebody else, it was a lost fifty bucks.” Through the lens of faith, in his eyes, God himself was present.

 

Can we ask God for a miracle? Yes. But we should not expect to coerce or compel a miracle from God. Yes. But we should not miss the showers of blessings, miraculous, that are often around us, real and true.

 

May we ask God for a miracle? Yes. But notice that is not what happens here. Peter doesn’t ask for a miracle. Peter is worried, and shares with Christ this worry. No, no indeed. Jesus himself, without Peter’s mentioning it, before he had spoken of it, says the text, elicited the worry from Peter’s heart and mind. God ordains what God will. And sometimes those answers, those gifts, those events and realities that nurture our faith, come even before our prayers can seek them.

 

What is a miracle? A strong sign of the reality of the presence of God which convicts and nurtures one’s faith.

 

May we ask God for a miracle? Yes. But we should not ask God to play parlor games. We should not be capricious with asking God to work miracles. An old theology professor of mine used to say that praying for a parking place while you were driving amongst the mall parking lot at Christmas time, looking for a parking spot, was capricious and trivial. But praying for a parking space when you were racing to the emergency room with a sick child was a faithful act of righteousness.

 

How much trouble was Jesus in with his not paying taxes? Jesus doesn’t seem to be worried about it. But Peter. He’s the one who was worried. And maybe because lightly it’s his home that Jesus was staying in. So, perhaps in care, so as not to give offense, Jesus says, “Peter, go and cast a hook into the sea and draw forth a fish with a gold coin in its mouth.”

 

May we ask for a miracle? Yes. But we cannot compel or coerce a miracle. Yes. But we should not ask God to play parlor tricks. We should not be capricious or trivial. Yes. But we should not miss the fact that we live in the natural order that God has designed with purposes and intentions. And this is a part of God’s expression, too. Yes, we should not miss the showers of blessings that fall amongst us every day, that are strong signs of the reality and presence of God to convict and nurture our faith.

 

But today, this story… this one about Peter and the line and the hook and the fish he pulled forward from the lake. It’s one of my favorite miracles. With the feeding of the five thousand, some can argue that Jesus encouraged them to share. And it was his example that suddenly perpetuated amongst them. Or with the healing of the epileptic boy, you could say that maybe he was particularly gifted and he knew things about healing that others didn’t know at that time. Or with the wind and the sea, being still on the boat, maybe you could say it was coincidence he spoke and the storm stopped at that moment.

 

But not with this one. With this one, throw a hook into the sea and pull forward a fish with the tax in its mouth. That’s a miracle. And I think when the Church heard it, like the community gathered around Jesus there, they must have said, Who is this? Who is this, that even the wind and seas obey him? Who is this that even the very fish in the lake bring forward tribute? This is not like a man. This is like God! Indeed.

 

 

©John T. DeBevoise 2006