Electric Circuit Rider

Just as I was beginning pastoral ministry, the winds of the charismatic movement began to blow through mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches bringing with it Pentacostalism’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its miracles. Although I never signed on as a card-carrying charismatic, I admit that my initial skepticism was overcome by the sincerity of friends, fellow seminary students and pastors who were charismatic. I liked them and [usually] believed their remarkable stories.

I also admit that I was intrigued by the possibilty of working miracles. I was feeling pretty inadequate as a 23-year-old student pastor who, as one aged saint said of a similar young preacher, “He hasn’t sinned enough to have repented enough to have been forgiven enough to know what he is talking about.”

I thought it might give me a kind of authority if it got around that I was known to have performed a miraculous healing or two. So, I prayed extra hard at the bedsides of my hospitalized parishioners. One did, in fact, experience a miraculous healing, but the event was so strange that no one would think that I had healed him – in fact, I was sure that I hadn’t. It was just God working the way God does in ways too subtle and wonderful to trace back to any particular source.

I smile, now, at that ambition I had to work miracles when I was young. I smile even though I know that I’ve taken on a job that would require a miracle for me to claim anything resembling success.

I wondered if Jesus smiled at Satan when he proposed that Jesus grab the world’s attention by tossing himself off the top of the temple. Jesus knew that he would perform miracles that Satan couldn’t even imagine, but they would all be God’s miracles, done God’s way in God’s time for God’s purposes.

One of the temptations that afflict relgious people is the longing for spectacular religion – a religion that puts the spotlight on us and not on God. When we give in to that temptation, we often fall on our heads.

Roger Talbott