By Reverend Laurie DeMott

"Your family is alright?" the reporter asked with almost a sense of desperate longing in his voice. He, like all of the journalists sent to Haiti this week, had seen too much devastation, too many lives torn apart, to be able to remain journalistically objective. In his raw humanness, he wanted a miracle to report.

The woman wept into the microphone, "Yes," she said in her halting English. "My children are all safe. God has kept them safe today, and I am so thankful to God."

These are the words that express the depth of our longing, our fears, and our hopes -- "God has kept me safe." When we escape what should have been certain death, our joy and relief is so overwhelming that it lies beyond normal language. To say, "Gee, we were lucky" doesn't express that deep sense that our entire world was remade in that moment and so we reach out to the one power we know that is greater than any human experience and we praise God for our salvation. The prayers of thanksgiving uttered by the survivors of the earthquake this week are prayers that arise from the heart not from the head, and they are not intended to be theological statements but instead are words that try to capture the experience of being born again out of the rubble that has left so much else in ruin. Nevertheless, those prayers attributing safekeeping to God must still fall harshly upon the hearts of others whose loved ones God has not kept safe but are buried instead beneath tons of concrete, victims of tectonic plates sliding deep within the earth. "If your survival was a miracle ordained by God," they must think, "then is my grief likewise sanctioned by God? Why did God choose to let your child live while snatching mine away?"

The news has been full of talk of miracles these past few days. "They are hoping for a miracle," the reporter says, watching the rescuers digging through the debris, and for some, the word probably means nothing more than a lucky unlikely outcome, but to most of us, the word miracle carries more weight than that. When a Hebrew child stumbled on the way out of Egypt and avoided nothing worse than a skinned knee, she was lucky, but when that same child escaped Pharaoh's chariots because Moses parted the Red Sea, the Bible calls that a miracle. God had decided to free the Hebrew people from their enslavement and their liberation required divine intervention to accomplish, and so, the Bible says, God sent them a miracle. For those of us steeped in the Christian tradition, a miracle is something more than luck; it is the deliberate working and intentional working of God in our world.

In the face of such overwhelming suffering as we see this week in Haiti, it is important for us to understand the nature of a miracle, not so that we can contradict the person who chooses to praise God for her child's salvation but so that we can stand up against those who assert the corallary argument: namely that if some were saved by God's hand, than all who were not saved must have likewise died by God's hand.

I am sure that most of you by now have heard the evangelist Pat Robertson's comment that he made following the earthquake. Robertson said that the earthquake was God's retribution against the people of Haiti for making a pact with the devil two hundred years ago in their revolution against slavery. Legend says that one of the leaders of the revolt used voodoo to make a deal with the devil, and so, Robertson explained to his listeners, "... the Haitians revolted and got themselves free but ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another." Pat Robertson wanted his listeners to see the earthquake as a great moral lesson -- namely, make sure you never live in a country where any leader in the past two hundred years has been unfaithful to God because God might wake up one day and decide to annihilate everyone in a fit of delayed anger against that person. I truly hope that the vengeful and capricious God worshiped by Pat Robertson and others -- the God who kills innocent children in earthquakes because of an ancient feud, or who knocks down the Twin Towers because there are too many liberals living in its shadows, or who drowns an entire city in a hurricane because he wants us to overturn Roe versus Wade -- I hope that that God is not your God. But as I read about Robertson's remarks on ABC's website, what made me really take notice was the article's summary statement which said: "Some members of the Christian community said they were stunned by Robertson's words, which they suggested may be un-Christian."

Suggested? Suggested feels like a very mild word to use in arguing against a theology of divine impulsive vengefulness. I would hope that in fact the members of the Christian community would resoundingly condemn such thinking as having nothing of Christ about it, but the reality is that most of us, while abhorring the heartless comments of Robertson and others, back off from the theological arguments that his comment evoke because we are not sure ourselves how God fits into earthquakes, floods, and terrorist attacks. If we are willing to point to our salvation from disaster as a miracle, then how do we really argue against the opposite -- that God chooses to let the others die?

What is a miracle and can we look for miracles in a place like Haiti this past week?

In the scripture reading from John, Jesus's first act is to change water into wine. Every one of the gospels begins their accounts of Jesus' ministry with miraculous works: In Mark and Luke, he casts out demons, and in Matthew, he heals "all of those afflicted with many diseases and pains." The gospels portray Jesus as a miracle worker from the moment he rises from the baptismal waters of the Jordan, but interestingly, the gospel writers are just as determined to show that while Jesus is doing these miracles, the people are completely missing the point of them. The people see Jesus as a magician, as if Jesus is saying, "Watch closely -- keep your eyes on that leprosy! Abaracadabra and whoosh, it's gone!" Jesus, however, keeps pointing their understanding in a different direction: "I do this to show you that I have the authority to forgive sins," he says. "I do this to enable the outcast to return to your company. I do this so that you will understand that God is a God who cares for the sinner." The gospel of John punches this idea home more than any other gospel because even when Jesus performs the most magical seeming act of all and changes water into wine, John does not tout it as an act to astound and confound but he presents it as a moment in which people can glimpse the strong connection that exists between this man Jesus and God. In fact, the gospel of John doesn't even use the word miracle; John calls them signs, signs that point us to the nature of Christ. For the gospel writers, then, a miracle is not defined as a moment in which God chooses to suspend the laws of physics; a miracle is defined as any event that deepens our understanding of Christ, any event that opens a doorway between our hearts and the deep and saving love of God we experience through Christ.

Let me say that again: a miracle is any event that deepens our understanding of Christ by opening a doorway between our hearts and the deep and saving love of God.

In the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter learns the kinds of tricks we all wish we had at our disposal -- transfiguration, bopping instantaneously here and there, flying on broomsticks -- but at the end of the series, it is not all of the tricks and the magic that defeat the evil Lord Voldemort -- it is the power of sacrificial love that triumphs. Harry willingly goes to his death for the sake of others and in so doing, it is his complete and total love for his friends that brings about their salvation.

Reverend Roy Harrisville says, "Some have come to question the divine response to human suffering and have concluded that [either God is a vengeful God or that] there is no God. But ... Jesus does his work in such a fashion that it is often misunderstood and misrepresented. God has in fact responded to human suffering.... in the suffering and death of his only Son."

For the gospel writers, miracles occurred any time people encountered the depth of God's love for them, a love so deep that it would go all the way to the cross for us and beyond. Have there been miracles in Haiti this week? Every man or woman who put aside their own life to jump on a plane and rush to the sides of victims was a miracle. Every mother who shared the little food she had for her own family with a stranger's child was a miracle. One news report mentioned in passing a man whose entire family had been killed by the quake and yet he chose to put aside his own overwhelming grief to spend his entire day at the hospital holding the hands of the suffering to give them comfort. That is a miracle.

Every time a doorway opens between your heart and the very heart of heaven, you are experiencing a miracle. Maybe the door opens because you or a loved one narrowly escaped disaster and the sudden profound gratitude you have in that instance pulls aside the viel to remind you again of the preciousness of life and love, and so yes, you are experiencing a miracle; but just as much of a miracle is that simple act of kindness that moves you to have faith again in the power of God's compassion. Whenever we have the strength to stand when we thought there was no strength left, whenever we find the will to go on when we thought all was lost, where hope insists on pushing its way through despair, where goodness somehow triumphs over the most insistent evil, where faith gives us the power to believe in compassion, to believe in generosity, to believe in the possibility of forgiveness, and to believe in resurrection beyond the darkness of the tomb, the doorway between earth and heaven opens and a miracle has occurred.

This is my prayer for the people of Haiti and for all of us this day: May we all have faith in the miraculous power of Christ to heal the broken hearted, to free the oppressed, and to bring life out of death through the working of God's great compassion upon the world and upon our own hearts. Amen.

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(Roy Harrisville, Senior Pastor, Our Savior's Lutheran Church, Workingpreacher.org)