"Of course," I replied, and thus commenced a summer with events that would have a profound impact on my life. I was all of 21 years of age – a function of the fact that I had graduated from University at 20. I had completed my Old Testament basic course in Seminary; I had not yet studied the New Testament, at all, and certainly knew nothing of pastoral care.

Throughout that summer, five times a week, I made my way to Ross’ bedside. We talked baseball, movies, school, and family life. I learned he had been hospitalized for lung cancer. He desperately wanted to go home.

Two months into the summer, I also learned that Ross was going to die … one of the young physicians on staff gave me that news and asked that I carry that message to his parents. I did. And I sat with them in their grief. And I prayed. Lord, how I prayed. I make no excuses, I prayed unashamedly for a miracle.

In late August, mother and father and Ross and I sat together through one long night at the hospital. There were tears and prayers. Shortly before dawn – the sky was just beginning to turn pink – Ross died.

On the Saturday before Labor Day, we buried my little buddy. It was the first funeral at which I served as the minister. On Monday, Labor Day, I drove back to Boston and the start of my second year in seminary.

I had prayed time and again for a miracle, that summer, all summer. No miracle had been granted. I doubted my effectiveness as a clergyman; and I doubted the efficacy of prayer – at least my prayers. Back at Andover Newton Theological School, two professors listened to me, talked with me, helped me cope with my Ross experience.

Our Gospel reading this morning is about a miracle – a healing that was granted … a man blind from birth was, by Jesus’ healing touch, made to see. The Gospel writer has Jesus say, "I am the light of the world" and reported how Jesus contended with those who wanted to place the blame for the man’s blindness on the supposed sins of his parents or perhaps his sins.

I’m going to talk with you this morning about miracles. What I have to say is not so much a sermon as it is a series of ruminations, reflections on the subject of miracle and, as you have already noted, my words will have a personal dimension.

Miracle may be defined as an event or a deed which defies one’s expectations given the normal course of natural events. In a thousand cases, ten thousand cases like this, X will happen, but in this one case, it is Y that happened. Miracle is usually, though not always, related to a religious act – prayer, touching, cradling the head, celebrating the sacrament. And it is often, though not always, presided over by a clergyman or clergywoman.

Some of the accounts of miracles from ancient times – and there were such accounts in every one of the cultures of long ago – may be explained by the fact that knowledge of the natural world in a pre-scientific era was limited in the extreme, so that unusual or unexplained events were often depicted as miracles.

To be sure, some ancient accounts of miracles may be explained by ignorance, but not all of them. I share with you my belief that throughout history, and today, miraculous events do occur. And I venture to say that there are some in the congregation this morning who share my belief that miracles sometimes happen.

But having said that, it must be admitted that some desperate cries for divine intervention on behalf of someone in need are not answered in the affirmative – as my experience with Ross demonstrates. In short, miracle is not man’s manipulation of the laws of nature; only God, who is above and beyond nature, can initiate or cause a miracle.

Not everyone sees miracle only as a once-in-a-lifetime event; for some, a simple, natural occurring event may, under some circumstances, appear to be miraculous. The first year in the home that Charmaine and I bought most recently provided us with a series of disastrous and semi-disastrous events. It was the year of the big rains and we spent every weekend drying out our basement. The cry, "What are we doing here?" became our mantra. And then, we awoke one April morn to hundreds and hundreds of daffodils in full bloom, on our hill. And it was … miraculous.

Dr. John Polkinghorn, an Anglican priest who is also one of the world’s most respected quantum physicists, has written, "(Miracle) is a question of divine consistency. God is not condemned never to do anything different, but when God does something different it must be in a consonant, fitting relationship to things God has done before."

C.S. Lewis, the great English scholar and author and, by the way, a first-rate, highly regarded theologian, observed that many of the miraculous events recorded in Scripture seem to be associated with what one might call nodal (or exceptional) events … exceptional times call for exceptional forms of divine self disclosure, thus the occasional miracle.

We will do well to remember that Jesus is characteristically seen healing. In the synoptic gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there are thirteen narratives in which Jesus is depicted healing: Fever, leprosy, paralysis, dropsy, blindness, etc. Without straining at the issue of the historicity of the Gospels, it is important to recall that in the Gospels’ accounts of these events we are in touch with how Jesus’ earliest followers saw and understood his work.

By definition, a miracle is a rare thing. Were it common, were it the domain of most, miracles would cease to be remarkable. If everyone or anyone could amend or veto the laws by which the material world governs itself there would be a chaotic mess. Imagine, if you can, overriding the law of gravity, or Newton’s third law of motion.

I have great respect for Dr. Polkinghorn and for C.S. Lewis and their respective conclusions that miracles tend to cluster about the extraordinary.

But I know that healings do occur sometimes even among the most ordinary folk in our age, the apparently unexceptional, the unremarkable.

I have been witness to a miracle – more than one, but not many. The events in question might be called "spontaneous cures" today and be identified as such by physicians and others but that designation in no way diminishes the healings that are otherwise unexplained.

I don’t know, nor do I pretend to know why some worthy souls experience healing and others do not.

History and the events of history are in God’s hands. It is in God’s providence that we humans live, and move, a have our being. When an unexplained cure, or a failure to cure is set before us, the only explanation – a metaphysical one – is that such was/is God’s will for the person or persons involved.

The issue of who deserves to be healed and who does not is simply beyond human understanding – at least beyond my capacity to understand.

I have not talked of miracles today to criticize the practices of those who parade miracles in their ministries. But as I watch on television those who gladly accept the designation "Faith Healer," or who promote such a self-designation, I see men and women who, too often, seem to claim to be the initiator of the divine healing – the main actor in the drama, as it were. Without reference to the legitimacy of their claimed healings, their emphasis seems to me to be sacrilegious and, by the way, has nothing to do with what we do here at Messiah Church in our healing services. Miracle, here, preserves the centrality of the Almighty and Merciful God.

When I was 29 – eights years after Ross – my mother and I sat in a waiting room in Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit for word of my father’s surgery. After a long wait, I was called to report to a certain office. When I arrived I found I was in the pathologist’s office; with him was our long-time family doctor. It was he who spoke, "Duane, your father has a rare and always fatal form of cancer. It is in his right shoulder. We think you are the one to tell your mother. He is going to die. He has, at most, 6 months to live."

And so I did tell my mother and, that same afternoon, I made arrangements to transfer my father to the University of Michigan Medical Center. The next day we met with Dr. Carl Badgely, an orthopedic surgeon whose reputation for excellence placed him in the highest ranks of orthopedists, world-wide.

Over the course of the next 3 years Dr. Badgely performed nine surgeries on my dad and prescribed a lengthy and debilitating course of radiation therapy. Let it be noted that my father was a good and gentle man.

And, as the family doctor and pathologist predicted, my dad did, indeed, die … 30 years later, of a heart attack. There was virtually no doubt in the minds of those who knew him, and none in those of us who loved him, that his was a case of miracle, that what had happened to him had a supernatural origin.

I said that God is the initiator of a miracle – and I know that to be the case. But in the course of coping with his illness, my father intentionally set out a course of behavior for himself that, as he said, "May not keep me alive but will, at least, keep me from sitting here waiting to die." I would like to share the behavior to which my dad committed himself:

He found and turned his case over to the very best doctor we could find and he listened to that doctor.

-- When he learned that Dr. Badgely intended to amputate his right arm, my father immediately set to work to teach himself to write with his left hand. The amputation never took place.

He prayed and he encouraged friends and family to pray for him, of course, but also for those in greater need than he.

He continued to work; his employer of many years fired him because of his illness so he went out and found another job at which he worked successfully for nearly 20 years.

6. He made it a point to do things for others – on the day he died my dad planted a tree for the generations to follow.

Doing any – or all – of those things will not assure that you will conquer illness; will not provoke a miracle. They will, I suggest, help bring purpose and meaning to the one who suffers. With that, the believer may rest in the sure and certain hope that God, who set the planets in the orbits, will love and care for His children all the days of their lives.

Remember: Our faith owes its origin to the ultimate miracle; Christ was raised from the dead!

Let us pray. Merciful God, be with those who despair; be with those who are in pain; be with the lost and the lonely. Provide them, and us, with the assurance of your care. Confirm for all, the ultimate miracle: That we are in the circle of your love. We pray in the spirit of our risen Savior. Amen.