Give Me a Sign

"Now this was the second sign that Jesus did after coming from Judea to Galilee." So ends today's gospel reading.  This sign was the healing of a boy near death. The first sign was the turning of water into wine at a wedding in Cana. A sign of prodigious abundance followed by a sign of healing. Signs play a curious role in John's gospel with a complicated relationship to believing. But regardless of the complex nature of signs in John, I am struck by their concrete substance - abundance and healing.

Such signs surely reveal a God concerned with human life; not merely with some life to come, but with the lives we are living now. Jesus is in some way is about God's concern and care for us, God's desire that we live life in the fullness that God intends for us.

By nature I am a somewhat restless and impatient person, sometimes unhelpful traits for a pastor. I desperately want the church to live into the fullness shown to us and offered to us in Jesus. And I can too easily grow frustrated at the ways church sometimes prefers to be a conventional, religious institution rather than experience the new life Jesus offers. In that frustration, I can become shrill and harsh, focused mostly on our failings, with little sense of a hope or promise for something new and better, without any invitation to healing and abundance.

Sometimes I suspect that it becomes difficult for me to see signs of God's healing and abundance breaking into my life and the church's life because I am looking too much at myself and too little at Jesus. When my frustration is at its highest, it is usually related to worries that I do not have what it takes, that I do not have the requisite abilities or gifts to renew and transform those things in the church that need renewal and transformation. But of course I have no real ability to grant true healing and abundance. Such things come from God in Jesus. They come in the work of the Spirit.

Those pastors like myself, who can get frustrated with the stodginess of a Mainline Church that seems trapped in its past, sometimes betray a remarkable lack of faith in one of our own core beliefs of resurrection. We can speak of decline as inevitable and hopeless, a hurtling unto death that not even God cannot undo.

I do not suggest that God must resuscitate the Oldline/Mainline Church. But neither is it for me to declare dead what God would give life. And so perhaps the task for me, and for others who love the Church, is to look for signs. Perhaps more than needing to improve our skills or develop our leadership abilities, we need to look for what Jesus is doing, to acknowledge that that the Church does not ultimately rise of fall on our efforts, but on the life giving presence of the one who comes with signs of abundance and healing.

What signs do you see? Lord, show us clear signs that you are at work in us.

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