Do you want a miracle?
Photograph by Alistair MacRobert via Unsplash
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf
This past Sunday, a small miracle happened at the church I pastor. We had filled up the baptistry the night before for a baptism during the service, since it normally takes about five hours to fill it. When we showed up that Sunday, all the water had drained, and we only had an hour and a half before service began. With pots, buckets, and pitchers, within an hour we filled the baptistry enough to have that baptism, even though it seemed like an impossible task when we started.
It was not a Biblical-style flashy miracle. Instead, it was made of teamwork and effort from about a dozen church members, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of the awe that must have attended the miracles in Scripture. Really, when you get down to it, miracles are supposed to make you feel wonder, and I felt plenty of wonder on that Sunday afternoon.
One of my favorite miracles doesn’t come from the Bible at all – it comes from a Jewish wonderworker in Palestine who lived about a century before Jesus. Honi the Circle Maker had a schtick, and as you probably guessed from his title, it was drawing circles. During a particularly bad drought in Palestine, he drew a circle and told God that he we would not move from inside it until a rain came, and shortly thereafter God sent rain.
What I admire most about the story is that Honi expected awe. He imagined a world in which God could intervene, and God did. I will confess that I have my doubts about miracles – I don’t look for God to suspend the laws of physics. But I am a big fan of awe. Wonder is what makes us human, and in Honi we get an invitation to wonder in a way that we seldom encounter in our modern world.
The truth is that we all want to be a part of a miracle, but that doesn’t mean sitting around and waiting for God to act. Sometimes God is waiting for us to act.
It’s a very human thing to want a miracle. If anything, though, my engagement with science is what has taught me that we are living in an abundance of miracles, such as the marvel of our circulatory system or how life evolved here on earth, I am filled with the same sense of religious awe that I see bleed out on the pages of the Bible. I am awed by the fact that we are even here to begin with, awed that we haven’t annihilated ourselves yet, awed that we ever managed to form societies and do what we’ve done. Awed that we have art and literature. I feel lucky indeed to live in this time.
I felt like I drew a circle in the sanctuary that Sunday and said I wouldn’t leave it until the baptismal was full. Just when I thought the task was impossible, my fellow worshippers showed up and made it possible. We need more of that in our world – more drawing circles of intention and more coming together to make the impossible happen. If we do that, then God just might show up in the same way that Honi experienced.
The truth is that we all want to be a part of a miracle, but that doesn’t mean sitting around and waiting for God to act. Sometimes God is waiting for us to act. Oftentimes, we have all we need right there in front of us to build something beautiful, but either fear, or expectations, or even our own theologies can keep us from being a part of a miracle coming into being in our daily lives.
If we want to experience God’s power in the world, maybe that means doing the work to make God’s love felt. Whether that is something big, like standing up for our neighbors in the midst of ICE’s campaign of dehumanization, or something small like working together to fill a baptistry in record time, makes little difference. Either way, God will be sure to show up, and God’s hands will meet our hands in the labor that we undertake.
If you want a miracle, you might have to work at it, but it will always be worth it.
Rev. Dr. Michael Woolf is senior minister, Lake Street Church of Evanston, Illinois. He currently serves as the co-associate regional minister with the American Baptist Churches Metro Chicago. His most recent book, co-authored with Anna Piela, Confronting Islamophobia in the Church: Liturgical Tools for Justice (Judson Press 2026) offers a theology of interfaith engagement with Muslims. Woolf is also a co-founder of Challenging Islamophobia Together Chicagoland, an initiative that brings together people of all faiths to counter Islamophobia from a religious perspective.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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