YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A SANDWICH TO BE MIRACLE-WHIPPED

You may not have noticed but my personality leans toward the skewed side of life. When I was young I played a little too much above-the-neck touch football with my brother’s friends who had sausage for brains. As a result, whenever I see offbeat religious articles they always catch my eye. Fortunately they throw it back so I can use it again.

A few years ago, I read about a “Laughing Revival” that broke out in a church in Toronto.  People were rolling in the aisles laughing hysterically. It was considered a miracle. If I did that this Sunday, miracle would not be your first thought. You would think the peanut butter didn’t completely cover my cracker.

In another instance, two women were disrupting a worship service in Pennsylvania because they would, at inappropriate times, begin howling their prayers. Then again, there really is no appropriate time to howl in church, unless you are booing the preacher.

Another such article concerned an 18-inch statue of the Madonna (the Virgin Mary one, not the singer) in a small town in Italy. According to the paper, this statue began crying tears of blood for no apparent reason, unless the preacher kept on preaching even after the booing. I can’t imagine anything that would cause a statue to cry tears of blood, unless it was forced to organize a garage sale. Townspeople saw this as a genuine miracle, the bleeding statue . . . not booing the preacher.

In 1978, someone claimed to see Christ’s image on a tortilla in Mexico. I have seen many questionable things on a tortilla but never anything religious. People visited an auto parts store in Progresso, Texas, to see a floor stain that resembled Mary. When I think of miracles, I do not immediately envision tortillas and auto parts stores. The real miracle would be knowing what Christ and Mary looked like in the first place.

What is it about the miraculous that only draws people to it but also whips them into a frenzy usually reserved for World Cup Soccer? Have we become so immune to ordinary Christianity that it takes a bleeding Madonna to remind us God is alive and working in the world today? Are we so miracle-whipped we fail to see God in the leaves changing in autumn, in the beauty of s sunset, or in the birth of a baby?

There are hundreds of people in our community who, believe it or not, do not need a miracle. What they do need is for a group of ordinary Christians to love them, minister to them, and point them to Jesus, the real thing, not a cloud formation or a tortilla. Mark 16:15 says, “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone” (NIV).

In God we find the greatest miracle of all, that he could love us so much He sent his Son to die for us. We are not miracle-whipped but we are miraculously loved. The key to consistent Christian living is knowing the difference.