More than Meets the Eye

I have never seen anyone walk on water. Have you? I haven’t seen the movie Bruce Almighty, but haven’t I seen ads that show Jim Carey and Morgan Freeman standing on top of a sheet of water? But that wouldn’t really count of course. Special effects are not reality; everybody knows that. Thinking of this morning’s Old Testament reading, I have seen the River Jordan. But when I saw it, it was flowing normally. Now I’ll admit no one in our group took a mantle and struck the water. Maybe if they had, the waters would have parted???

Miracles again. Last week Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread and two fish. This week he strolls across the water of the Sea of Galilee (making better time into the headwind, evidently, than the disciples’ boat). And we think of summer as the slow season in the church!

But I ask the same question I asked last week: What are we to make of these miracle stories… these stories that appear to defy the laws of nature? The laws of nature… The laws of physics… Jesus’ miracles defy the "laws" of nature. Thinking about these miracle stories, especially this morning’s Gospel story about Jesus walking on water, got me thinking about "laws"… "laws of nature." What are laws? Where do they come from? What do they tell us? What don’t they tell us?

The first point I want to make is a distinction. A distinction between what I think of as prescriptive laws and descriptive laws. I expect other people before I have made this same distinction, but when we talk about laws, we are talking about at least two very different sorts of things. Prescriptive laws are injunctions or commands. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Thou shalt not drive over 25 miles an hour on Parkway South. Thou shalt pay thy income taxes. Thou shalt load the dishwasher after dinner. Thou shalt not eat meat on Fridays during Lent. Thou shalt take this antibiotic four times a day on an empty stomach.

These are laws that direct our human behavior; they prescribe certain ways of living. They are prescriptive.

We have a choice whether or not to obey these sorts of prescriptive laws. We have a choice. And generally we do choose to follow their prescriptions. We may chafe a bit, especially on taxes and speed limits, but ultimately we acknowledge that following these laws is for our own good, our benefit. We choose to conform our actions, our behavior, to these prescriptive laws.

You see that this is a very different sort of law than the laws we generally refer to as "laws of nature." The laws of nature, the laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics… these laws don’t prescribe behavior; these laws describe the world we see around us. The laws of nature are not laws that some one or some representative body devised for some greater benefit; they are not commands or injunctions for a certain sort of behavior. No option or choice exists for whether or not these laws may be followed. The so-called "laws of nature" simply describe the world we live in. They are our generalizations about how the world around us seems to work. They are descriptive. And they are based entirely, 100% on our observation of our world.

For centuries, it was a universally accepted law of nature that the sun revolved around the earth. You can see it do so. Similarly, no one questioned that the world was flat. That is an obvious description of the world we can observe around us. My point is a simple, but very important one. The "laws of nature" are based upon our observation of nature, and our observation is inevitably limited and incomplete. Even today, the laws of nature may describe what we see, and we may see a lot more than people did hundreds of years ago, but we still see only a very limited view of God’s creation.

There’s a wonderful old prayer that is sometimes read at funerals. It says in part, "Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight." There is much that exists beyond the limit of our sight. That’s what these miracle stories are about. There is much—in life, in death, in nature, in creation—that exists beyond the limit of our sight… Beyond anything science or human observation will ever see. No matter how many or how sophisticated our descriptive "laws of nature" may become, they will never tell the most important parts of the story of human life.

And that is one of the fundamental, core convictions of my own faith. That the most important things in life are things that lie beyond the limit of my sight, lie beyond the laws of nature. "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." [Hebrews 11:1-2]

I’m not sure exactly how God brought me to this conviction. It wasn’t by walking on water. Perhaps that was the best way to help the disciples grow in their faith, to help them understand the limits of their sight, and the wonder of what lay beyond the limits of their sight. I’ve tried to imagine how I would react if I were to see someone walking across the surface of Green Lake. Would it be a deep religious conversion experience for me? I really don’t think so. I don’t think walking on water would be God’s best teaching or evangelism tool today. God converts our hearts in other ways these days, subtler perhaps, but ways that are powerful and meaningful for us.

But the message is the same: The important things in life lie beyond the horizon of our sight. There is more to life than meets the eye. You may not have considered that particular phrase a tenet of Christian faith, but it is. There is more to life than meets the eye. That’s an easy phrase for most of us to agree with, I think, at least on the surface. Everybody knows there’s more to life than meets the eye. We may say we agree with the sentiment of that statement, but most of the time we don’t seem to live as though we really believed it.

For example, death is only a horizon. Death is the end of what we can see of life, but it is not the end of life. How differently most of us would live if we could really hang on to that conviction. Life is eternal, beyond the limits of our sight.

There is more than meets the eye in the world around us, in other human beings. Peace is possible in the Middle East. Redemption is possible for the most hardened criminal. Regeneration and renewal are possible in the midst of environmental degradation. What we have seen in the past does not determine what can be in the future. God’s reconciling love offers us and the world things we have never seen before.

And within us, too, there is more than meets the eye. We are more than our DNA, more than the inevitable product of a certain family or social system. In fact, we are more than just human beings. Yes, there is more within us than meets the eye. "The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ." All of us may come to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. That is what is within us—the full stature of Christ. It can’t be seen or measured in any quantitative or scientific way, but it is there. The full stature of Christ.

You. Me. St. Patrick’s. We have within us the potential, the power, to bring God’s love, God’s reconciliation, God’s hope into the world. We are invited and encouraged to live into the full stature of Christ. Oh, yes, there is more in life than meets the eye.

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