St. Martha
1 John 4:7-16 | Psalm 33:2-11 | John 11:19-27
Yesterday, I received a WhatsApp message from a friend.
It starts with ANOTHER SIGN THAT THE END IS NEAR, which immediately raised my suspicions – no one who’s begun their spiel with “The End Is Nigh” has ever been proven right.
It goes on to describe a baby girl in Nigeria who was born last weekend in a general hospital with hands joined together in a praying fashion. When her hands were separated during surgery, the words JESUS IS COMING BACK! were found written on them.
You may have received a copy yourself, and you may not be surprised to hear that I’ve found at least one other edition of this story…with the girl born almost a decade ago, in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Everything else is the same, and there are probably other almost identical respins of the same story out there on the Internet.
More significantly, despite the fact that all these births were said to have taken place in public hospitals, not a single news report on these miraculous events can be found anywhere. The only mentions are sharings on Facebook, evangelical websites and personal websites.
This message has HOAX written all over it…which is doubly sad, because we really do believe that Jesus will come again in glory. We didn’t have to cook up a story about it!
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Now, I’m sure the original author had the best of intentions, and subsequent retellings and embellishments meant no harm, but I firmly believe that such untruths actually do great harm to the cause of Christian evangelism, precisely because they’re lies.
If we claim Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth and the Life, yet find ourselves concocting and spreading fanciful stories of Godly miracles, what does that say about our belief in what we proclaim? “Eh, you really believe, or just say-say only?”
And in this technological age, the people we’re trying to proselytize can trivially poke holes in our stories with judicious Google searches. When we’re caught looking gullible at best, and deceitful at worst, why would anyone trust the Word of God that we share with them? “Eh, people bluff you also you don’t know, how you know you never kena bluff about God hah?”
Worse, when these people convert in the expectation of miraculous happenings that never materialize, how will they sustain their faith? “Eh, you tell me God is great, how come He can’t cure my cancer?”
Indeed, might we not also inadvertently delude ourselves into secret and shameful disbelief in our God? “Oh yah hor, I still have my cancer!”
Talk about shooting ourselves in both feet!
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In today’s Gospel, Martha saw no need to embellish the truth: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.” Likewise, we should not need to embellish our faith with tall tales of improbable happenings that can be disproved with a little research.
Instead, we are called to bear witness to what God has done in our lives, not the lives of some faceless and probably apocryphal unfortunates halfway around the world. If we can’t find anything to say about God on the home front, that just means we haven’t examined ourselves deeply enough.
Brothers and sisters, we believe God is great, not because He does a SHAZAM! for someone out there, but because He touches our lives in small but significant ways every single day. If our incurable condition suddenly disappears one day, that’s a bonus; our entitlement is the daily peace of mind that our faith in Christ brings, and the quiet guidance that the Holy Spirit provides to steer us from harmful words and actions – if we pay attention.
So let’s spend less time talking about the-Almighty-as-David-Copperfield, and more time revealing His magic wrought in our daily existence.
Amen.