Do you believe in miracles?

Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe the impossible can peek its head out from an invisible hole in the ground or through the clouds so we can glimpse perfection amid the imperfect haze in which we find ourselves shrouded?

Well if you include improbable Olympic hockey upsets in your definition of miracle, you pretty much have to answer yes.

It’s funny how sports and faith wind around each other like the double helix of my DNA. Miracle endings, Hail Mary passes for touchdowns (He throws up a prayer. . . .), the Wrigley faithful, Ted Lasso and his Believe sign. How often do you hear a sports story described as inspirational?

I realize especially pointedly how shallow it can be to use the easily understood world of athletic competition to illustrate the unknowable infinity of faith—this habit certainly does more to glamorize sports in our minds than it does to make the mysteries of the universe understandable. But I do believe it has its purpose, and a strong one.

Sports as a metaphor for life is deconstruction in a nutshell. The breakdown of what makes a sporting event or pastime interesting and meaningful is easy to see with minimal mental effort. Capturing the intricacies of life, however, is a neverending existential pursuit that artists, authors, philosophers, and scientists with generations upon generations of contributions can only begin to undertake. Sports is like the LEGO rendition of life. It captures the gist, the essential building blocks, even if it leaves out crucial details, context, and depth.

With this in mind, miracles in sports give us a solid picture of what we typically mean when we talk about miracles in life: something we desperately want to happen that experience has taught us will never happen.

This week I want to deconstruct the idea of prayer, but rather than one giant exploration of our innermost thoughts and the attempt to commune beyond the confines of our bodies, species, and plane of existence, I want to look at the concepts involved in prayer, and I want to do it gradually and individually.

So today I want to look just outside of prayer itself at the concept of miracles, and I want to do it in rather simplified, sports-world, LEGO fashion to avoid getting too deep in the evangelical minutia.

First, I want to look at two Bible passages that express important Christian teachings about everyday existence and miraculous occurrences.

Let’s start with everyday existence. Hebrews 1 provides a subtle point that makes its way into countless systematic theology books:

Everybody knows the Bible says God created the world, and it’s also pretty common knowledge the spoken word (aka the Son) played a central role in that process. But the deep track on this album is the idea that the Son of God not only was God’s vehicle for creating the universe but sustaining its very existence.

This notion is a major biblical takedown of the concept of God as a clockmaker—He created the universe and then stepped away to let it work on its own. If the Son sustains the existence of the universe and everything in it by the power of his word, then every detail is held together and supported not by natural rule but by sustained divine force.

For the miraculous side of things, we turn to John 20. The Gospel of John is filled with major miracles, signs, and wonders performed by Jesus (or at least recorded by John) for this purpose:

Before I go any further, I’ll clarify that I’m not suggesting the Bible or biblical scholars teach that the purpose of every miracle is to prove the miracle worker is God or acts on His behalf. My point in singling out this passage as a core LEGO brick in our understanding of miracles is the idea that God plays the central role in making a miracle happen.

Do you see where I’m going with this? If the everyday world is sustained by the Son of God, and the Son of God proved His identity by performing miraculous exceptions to the very everyday world He sustains . . . what exactly is a miracle? When we plead with God for divine intervention, against what or whom are we asking Him to intervene?

If we return to the rudimentary LEGO world of the sports analogy, doesn’t God become both the inspiring force behind the young American upstarts with no chance whatsoever AND the source of the professional Soviet team’s brute strength and domination?

It just becomes a little too hard to understand what a miracle really is. A miracle is when God changes how he works, and we finally like the results? A miracle is when God reminds us who is in control? A miracle is when we ask God for something and He says yes?

The first poll I found online said that 80% of us believe in miracles, and I’m pretty sure I’m in that camp. But I have to confess, I don’t really know what a miracle is other than a reminder that a) we’re wrong about how the universe works, and b) that’s probably a really good thing.