Hi There, I'm Hungry

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/033116.cfm

Acts 3:11-26

Luke 24:35-48

Why do we seem so surprised when we hear an unbelievable story? Probably because the one who told us the story is a believable person. When they report something unbelievable, our truth antennae bleep warning signals. And yet, a story-teller who has never been one to say preposterous things gets our attention. 

Who are believable people? They have a clear head, a solid grip on things, and a keen eye.  They don’t make up make up crazy stuff unless they're fooling around. Certainly, then, we’d be surprised and maybe a little bit shocked to hear something crazy come out of a believable person’s mouth.

“Wow. That’s just crazy,” we may say, a hair's breath from changing our assessment about them.

It’s easy to cast off the nonsense of a liar, or the babbling of a muddled person. They are known fools or understandably medicinally confused. But an upright person, someone with clean sox, a valid drivers license, and who knows the difference between a question and an answer, well, we would expect a punch line after hearing them tell an unbelievable tale. We’re being set up for a joke, right?

When no punch line comes, we have to ask. “Are you pulling my leg?”  

So, when a believable person tells us that a fellow ran in front of his car just as the red light turned green, jogging like nobody’s business, we listen to the story. It’s probably a true story, because this friend tells true stories. We believe him when he tells us that he abruptly stopped the car before taking off into the intersection and barely missed hitting the runner in the crosswalk. 

We’re all ears when the storyteller leans forward a bit, adding that the jogger never realized his gaff, even when the car stopped suddenly right in front of the passing fellow. Besides being quite angry at the jogger our friend was nonetheless relieved, because the dad-blamed fellow could have been killed. “It was unbelievable,” he said.

All this is very believable, so we’re wondering what the unbelievable part is. Then our friend tells us. He looks right at us. “This whole interruption just took a second or so. As the jogger cleared the crosswalk and I was ready to gun it, a little angry, and continue into the intersection, a semi-truck zoomed by right in front of me, seemingly unaware of the intersection. The timing was unbelievable,“ he explained. “He must have been doing 40 miles per hour. There’s only one conclusion. That was a highly orchestrated miracle.” 

A moment earlier, entering the intersection normally, and our friend would’ve been killed. Probably the jogger too. A cataclysmic crashing of glass, steel, and bodies.

We’ve all heard stories like that. Some even more wild-eyed and complicated, but certified true. We’ve even retold the stories ourselves. In fact, we have all been in groups where, with one crazy story after another we share unbelievable things, shaking our heads in disbelief. We eagerly wait our turn to tell our unbelievable tale. It takes our breath away, because our rapid fire unbelievable stories are continually surprising. 

And we all say it. “That was a miracle. There’s no other explanation.” We believe these stories are miracles. They become the stuff that makes us certain of God being the one who does what would normally be unbelievable. These stories create files full of evidence that in a split second, at just the last minute, or right before everything fell apart, God stepped in.

Why does he wait like that?

My youngest daughter called me in the middle of my day here in Colorado a couple of years ago, breathless, shock in her voice. She was in New York City walking down the street, on her way into a building entrance. She put one foot down as she stepped forward a few feet from the door when a window-washing cage slammed to the ground immediately in front of her. The cadence of her walk pushed her forward and she simply bumped into the cage, like she would bump into a person who accidentally stepped in front of her. Not a thread of her coat or a toenail on her foot was damaged. Just a bump. One second not there, and there the next.

“I was less than an inch from death,” she said in a shaky voice, stunned. She called me when she got her wits about her. She knew in that instant, and surely for the rest of the instances of the many hopeful decades left in her life, that God saved her from a crushing end. She wondered why it had happened, but in her heart knew she was totally in God’s hands.

My daughter was telling me the truth. I had already been prepared to believe her. The many miracles that had happened in my life, and all the stories that I’d heard had set me up for her unbelievable believable miracle that day. “Yes,” I agreed with her. “Got saved you from harm.”

Jesus popped into the room of the disciples after his death, and after having left the empty tomb three days later. He said to their perplexed faces, in our vernacular, “Hi there, guys.” The shock must have been nearly overwhelming. But, Jesus’ popping appearance was properly pre-orchestrated with a story about another miracle. A miracle that two of Jesus’ disciples had experienced just the day before. They had seen Jesus, obviously risen from the dead, but only knew it was him after they had walked many miles with him.

After that long trek of talking about the scriptures, unknowingly with very Jesus being talked about, Jesus revealed himself to them when they were sitting down to a meal. Then he disappeared. The two disciples were shocked. They immediately rushed back to Jerusalem, to let the other disciples know that Jesus had miraculously appeared to them. 

Probably still out of breath from rushing all the way back from Emmaus, they told the other disciples and the apostles about recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread. “It was miraculous,” they said. These men were believable men, rational men. But they were telling an unbelievable story. You can imagine the hesitation on the other disciples faces. But, before they could begin questioning the veracity of their report, where one would say, “That sounds crazy,” or, “Are you pulling my beard?” Jesus showed up. Jesus “stood in their midst” and said, “Hello.”

Jesus waited for the very moment when the two disciple’s sanity would come into question and then he appeared. That was planned. He timed both the Emmaus revelation and the appearance with the disciples for dramatic effect. This dramatic pattern has been established by God for thousands of years, and will form the basis for his communication for thousands of more years to come. God steps in, sometimes literally, at just the right moment.

The process works. The entire room had been prepared for Jesus showing up. The two disciples going to Emmaus had done what they were supposed to do. They told the story of Jesus back, alive, and Jesus showed up with the apostles and disciples, right on cue.

“Hi guys. You got something to eat?”

How else could any of us believe? We could spend a lifetime intellectualizing about God’s presence and his love for us, but unless God communicates to us in the most real ways possible, we will still doubt. By influencing the events of history, in unbelievable fashion, God shocks us with a truth we cannot deny. 

How are we going to hear about those interventions, though, unless we tell the miracle stories? How else can anyone be prepared to hear the unbelievable tales of Jesus, unless someone runs all the way back from the miracle, 20 miles, to tell their friends; or, jumps into a conversation in a group to tell the time he was saved by a unaware jogger; or, our daughter rushes to her cell phone to tell her dad that God saved her. How else would I know so viscerally, with such immediacy about my daughter’s visit by the hand of God unless she called me mere moments after God had saved her life?

We require a life of miraculous events, a string of miracles that can only be explained by such a thing as a loving God. God knows this. We need to grasp that the unbelievable is believable as a way to see that God loves us. Our personal miracle reports have piled up for thousands of years, and will continue to convince both small and large pockets of the entire population of the world. Not just about those miracles, but the very next one that will have no other rational explanation.

When we know God loves us in the urgent situations, we can also begin to know he is with us in the moments of calm. We do not hear the still quiet voice, I believe, until he calms the storm, stays the crushing window-washing cage, and appears to the disciples, risen from the dead, and asks for something to eat. It is then that he has our attention. It is then that we are open to hear from him.

And, us, if we’re not liars or adel-brained, meaning that we’re among the believable people, what do we do? Well, we have to tell the stories. Something that cannot be explained as a random, once-in-a-lifetime coincidence, may never be clarified, publicized, and documented as the miraculous event God orchestrated. If the story does not leave our lips, its purpose will not convert even the smallest portion of the world.