It may seem ludicrous for this “progressive preacher” to find herself tempted to pray for a miracle. But the region in which I live has been under a strict stay-at-home order since Boxing Day. So, right about now I sure could use some sort of miracle to occur which would release us all from this COVID enforced lockdown. As we approach the one-year mark of worshipping online, I find myself dreaming about sharing in-person worship with 3-dimensional humans. My dreams of COVID-free life are magnified by today’s gospel story of Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law.

I love the story of Peter’s mother-in-law, because I can easily relate to it. I remember back when I was about 17 years old and I was suffering from a terrible cold. I had a raging fever, and I was as sick as a dog. I also had tickets to an Elton John concert. Even though I could barely breathe, when the time came, I got myself up out of my bed, and it was as if I had been blessed with a miracle because the power of Elton John’s name cured me and I was able to follow that Yellow Brick road all the way to the Coliseum where, with my friends, I was hoppin an boppin to the Crocodile Rock . So, I have no difficulty believing that when Simon Peter finally brought Jesus around to visit his mother-in-law, the sheer power of all the rumors which she’d been hearing about this man Jesus, would have been enough motivation for this Jewish mother-in-law to rise up out of her sickbed to see who this fellow was who had enticed her son-in-law away from his nets. That Jesus could have harnessed the healing power which lies within our grasp as he traveled from town to town and cured the sick and drove out daemons, is not difficult for me to believe. Let’s face it, first century daemons sound a lot like mental or emotional issues, so Jesus’ ability to cure people who were disturbed by daemons really isn’t much of a stretch.

But after centuries of interpretation and proclamation, we tend to hear these stories in ways which portray Jesus as some sort of super-human, miracle-worker, or dare I say it as some sort of god. Because after all, our image of God depicts God as some sort of super-human miracle-worker. For generations we’ve been looking to Jesus in the same way as we looked to God to cure all that ails us. So, we are just as likely to appeal to Jesus in prayer, as we are to appeal to God to heal us. 

But, as our notions about God change, our notions about Jesus change as well. When we begin to see the DIVINE MYSTERY which we call, “God,” not as some super-hero, some super-human who lives up in the sky, the way in which we see Jesus must change as well.  As our view of the MYSTERY expands, our view of Jesus becomes more human. It is not an easy transition to live through, because most of us have grown to like having Jesus the super-human-miracle-worker available to us for those really tough situations when we need to call out a really big name to help us to convince the super-human God to heal someone, or something in our lives. We’ve become so accustomed to dropping Jesus’ name to curry favour with the “Big Guy Upstairs.” So, we scarcely know what else to do when we are faced with the power of illness to drive us to our knees. Far too many Christians, myself included, we have been trained to understand prayer as a transactional enterprise. Trained in the art of transactional prayer, we pray: “I believe, so do this, help me, save me, help them, save them.”  But what if prayer is not transactional but transformative? Continue reading →