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Signs and wonders: Faithful still looking for modern miracles Bill Fentum, Dec 11, 2009
By Bill Fentum Staff Writer
When a U.S. Airways jet plunged into New York’s Hudson River on Jan. 15—and 155 passengers and crew survived with mostly minor injuries—people called the outcome a miracle.
That’s certainly how it seemed to Dave Sanderson, a member of Providence UMC in Charlotte, N.C., who was on the plane, returning home from a business trip. “I sensed God’s presence the whole time,” he said recently. “I also felt that my mother, who has passed on, was my guardian angel.”
Mr. Sanderson remained on board for several minutes after the crash, helping others escape before being pulled onto a rescue boat. He now travels around the world, sharing his story as an inspirational speaker.
The incident also brought him closer to his oldest daughter, who had been estranged from him since 2007.
“That’s probably been the biggest blessing out of this,” said Mr. Sanderson. “It’s been a year of miracles for me.”
Talk of wondrous events abounds in December, as churches revisit the Nativity story and read the gospel accounts of the Virgin Birth. Many in mainline congregations, however, sometimes struggle to believe because they don’t often see holy mysteries in their own lives.
It hasn’t always been that way.
Belief in miracles thrived in the church for several centuries, according to the Rev. Mark Teasdale, a United Methodist elder and professor at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. As late as 1701, he says, “[English philosopher] John Locke said miracles existed as a form of evidence to prove someone was sent by God as a messenger, and we should hear what they have to say.”
Then in 1758, Scotland’s David Hume declared that miracles, by definition, were “transgression(s) of the laws of nature,” accepted only in “ignorant and barbarous” cultures. Empiricism—the idea that all knowledge comes from sensory experience—began to dominate and later influenced 20th-century modernists.
Some scholars argue that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism who was himself a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment era, wasn’t convinced of modern miracles. In at least one sermon, Wesley implied that some gifts of the Holy Spirit were no longer present in the physical world.
But in a 1749 letter to Anglican priest Conyers Middleton, Wesley defended a wide range of miracles—from casting out demons and healing the sick, to visions and escaping great dangers.
“He fell into the middle ground,” said the Rev. Daniel Jennings, an Independent Methodist pastor who compiled Wesley’s journal writings on miracles in The Supernatural Occurrences of John Wesley (Sean Multimedia, 2005).
“He was careful to not get swept up in charismatic emotionalism, but he wasn’t closed to the possibility that God might still act in our world in a miraculous way.”
Sharing stories
The Rev. John Sumwalt, pastor of Our Lord’s UMC in New Berlin, Wis., tells a story of a miracle in his book How to Preach the Miracles (CSS Publishing, 2007):
In bed one night, Mr. Sumwalt looked up and saw a light above his head, “a bright, luxurious purple, then deep azure blue, radiant, dynamic, pulsating: a spirit of light and energy moving slowly closer. . . . Then the spirit touched me, more like flowed into my being. I felt warmly loved.”
The vision lasted only a few minutes. But the memory “with the holy still warms my heart,” he writes. “I am healthier physically, emotionally and spiritually than I was before I opened my eyes that night.”
Mr. Sumwalt shares that story in sermons, and lectures at seminars on visions and unexpected healings from illnesses. “Nearly always,” he said in an interview, “someone tells me afterward, ‘A thing like that happened to me, but I’ve never talked about it.’”
Keeping a miracle to oneself, he noted, dilutes its power. “The sad thing is that other people don’t hear about it,” he said, “and don’t feel the encouragement that comes from knowing these things do happen.”
He cautions, though, against spreading false hope.
“There are people who tell someone who has cancer, ‘All you need is enough faith and you’ll be healed.’ That kind of attitude is hurtful. We don’t know in whose life a miracle will happen or why. We can only receive what God gives, be thankful and give witness to it.”
Lessons to learn
The “whys” of miracles don’t usually interest David Otto, a religion professor at United Methodist-related Centenary College in Shreveport, La. He’s more intrigued by how people react to them.
In The Miracles of Jesus (Abingdon Press, 2000), Dr. Otto suggests ways that Christians can still respond today to biblical signs and wonders, including the Nativity. “We should strive to create a world in which all births become sacred proclamations of God’s historical presence in the world,” he writes, adding that working for the wellbeing of children “serves as testimony that the birth of Jesus still makes a tangible difference in our lives.”
Many of the miracles Christ performed in his ministry—from healings to exorcism—showed God weeding out evil, Dr. Otto said in an interview.
“We see narrative evidence in Scripture that the world God intends isn’t the world we actually live in,” he said, “and through salvation in Christ we will return to a pristine state, the world where we were one with the holy before sin caused separation.”
Christ’s death and resurrection, Dr. Otto believes, created a “fountain of grace” that will last to the end of time and will make other miracles possible. “It made the spread of Christ’s spirit available to all persons throughout the world,” he said. “The cross is the mechanism by which miracles can occur anywhere.”
A few years ago, he recalled, a woman near Shreveport claimed to see Jesus in a shadow on her refrigerator door, each day before dusk. Visitors flocked to the home, and several felt spiritually moved. The shadow disappeared, however, as soon as neighbors cut down a tree outside the kitchen window.
So it wasn’t a miracle, right? According to Dr. Otto, that’s a matter of perception.
“To this woman,” he said, “the shadow looked like the portrait of Jesus in her Sunday school class. Her claim testified to the work of Jesus in her life, and then people gathered and talked about their own relationships with Jesus. The experience increased their faith, and in that sense, it was a miracle.” Healing ministry
The same litmus test holds true for healing miracles, says the Rev. Walter Shropshire, a retired United Methodist elder and former research physicist for the Smithsonian Institution.
For years, he led weekly healing services at Foundry UMC in Washington, D.C., inviting persons with ailments to come for prayer, Holy Communion, laying on of hands and anointing with oil. In Dr. Shropshire’s words, most of them were “healed but not cured.”
“We made a distinction between a cure where all physical symptoms disappear, versus healing where a person feels assured of God’s love and gains strength from that assurance,” he said.
But it’s not unheard of for someone to pray over a fractured bone and then discover in X-rays that the break has vanished, added Dr. Shropshire: “If we believe this is a world that God cares for, then sure, normal physical laws can be set aside.”
He isn’t a fan of scientific studies into the effectiveness of prayer, including one from the National Institutes of Health in 2006 that showed intercessory prayer had no effect on cardiac patients at six U.S. hospitals. He believes those kinds of studies are really an attempt to prove whether or not God exists—something theologians insist is impossible.
“How do you get controls for the study?” he asked. “How do you account for a religious group in Calcutta that prays for the whole world? It’s a waste of money.”
Postmodern hope
Dr. Teasdale at Garrett-Evangelical sees some hope that postmodern thinkers—those open to ideas beyond the hard-and-fast truths of modernism—may welcome the idea of new miracles. But he wonders if the emerging church is the place for it to happen.
“The focus [in the emerging church] is on simply participating in the Christian journey, here and now, and if something unexplainable happens, they accept it and keep moving,” Dr. Teasdale said. “But there isn’t always a well-developed theology of the Holy Spirit, so they may just call it a mystery instead of a miracle.”
Whatever it’s named, Dr. Otto at Centenary says a miracle takes place any time the Spirit moves people toward acts of public service and working for the welfare of others.
“In that sense, you might include care of the planet as a miraculous act. It’s a willingness to radically alter our behaviors,” he said, as part of restoring the world to God’s perfect plan.
“God isn’t sitting on a cloud being a passive observer, waiting for us to get our act together,” said Dr. Otto. “God is ever-present and if we allow it, will prod us to move toward the life of the sacred.”
Sharing stories 
