In my sermon I mentioned a unique artistic practice from Japan dealing with broken pottery. The practice is called kintsugi and literally translates to golden joinery in English. Here are some beautiful examples of this technique of repairing broken pieces with gold.

The philosophy behind this is that instead of concealing flaws, working within cracks and gaps can actually make a pot or dish more beautiful in the end result.

This practice reminded me of unique issue in faith. There’s a popular phrase that is nowhere to be found in scripture that Christians sometimes repeat (yes, sometimes Christians struggle with making up bible verses or misinterpreting ideas!). Perhaps you’ve heard of the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.”

Too often we think we need to have our life all together for us to be useful for God’s kingdom. Maybe we even struggle with the false belief that God won’t love us if we aren’t perfect as a result of our own effort. We treat God like a disappointed parent, that God is wishing we would just get our act together.

The truth is that God uses the idea of kintsugi on us. We are like a broken plate or bowl, shattered into several pieces. But instead of throwing us away and trying again to make something better, God picks up the mess in our life and can still use it for the redeeming work of Christ.

The Christmas story highlights this perfectly. Jesus was born in tough circumstances. He had parents who struggled with various shortcomings. He was born into a broken society, oppressed by the evils of colonialism and callousness. Yet God used all these circumstances to give us the gift of Jesus Christ.

The central point of my sermon yesterday was that God’s work in our world–divine miracles–are in fact all around us. We also have the opportunity to “join in” with God’s work by enacting the love of Christ all around us. Here are a few thoughts and perspectives on the issue of miracles and faith…

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Some folks may be curious about a brief point I made yesterday concerning God’s “fingerprint” on the world. Simply put, there is quite a lot of evidence that creation points towards a creator. One popular view of “miracles” is how God is evident in the world itself. Christian thinkers have often used the term fine-tuning to describe our universe. When we examine creation, it is akin to a complicated, well-crafted watch operating smoothly. Everything from our own bodies to the galaxies in the sky, appears as though they are well-designed and finely-tuned.

For instance, if our earth were any closer to the sun, that would put the atmosphere all out of whack. And if we were any further away, we would freeze to death. Various weights and charges of subatomic particles are so finely-tuned, that even the slightest “adjustments” would prevent organic chemicals like carbon or oxygen from forming at all. Our sun in the perfect size. The list goes on and on.

Another technical term for this is the anthropic principle, and you can read about many other fascinating examples of fine-tuning here and here!

I think too many Christians struggle with not valuing God’s creation enough. According to the Genesis account, God entrusted the world to us so that we might act as stewards of it. And tragically, we often fail to see God’s handiwork all around us. God has placed a unique, divine fingerprint across creation. Our universe, world, and even our own bodies reveal the beautiful truth that there is indeed a creator.

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One debate theologians often have has to do with whether so-called “conventional” miraculous acts can still occur today. This has to do with things like gifts of the Holy Spirit. As you are probably aware, some denominations teach things like speaking in tongues and future-oriented prophecy. Other churches may be more nuanced in their believes, arguing that those things don’t happen nowadays as much or often as they used to. Is every “Jesus-type” miracle still a possibility today? Or did something change after the years of the early church?

The fancy theological terms for this debate are continuationism and cessationism (try saying those five times fast!). Continuationism, as the root implies, is the belief that miracle-working akin to healing to healing stories in Jesus’ time continue on for today. This belief is quite common among pentecostal or charismatic churches.

Cessationism, rooted in the word cease, is the opposing belief that shortly after the time of Jesus, miracle-working began to stop. The presence of the Holy Spirit kind of “wears off” the further we historically get away from Jesus.

(As you can probably guess, these are some very complicated issues to dive into for another time, blog post, sermon, or bible study!)

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And one last personal note on miracles…

As I noted on Sunday, I think we often have tunnel vision in regards to this issue. We yearn for a mystical magic-type miracle, yet remain totally unaware to how God can move among our life in other ways.

One thing to keep in mind with all these various views and theological debates is this: The most important thing to our faith is Jesus Christ. The experience of a miracle, regardless of whether it is a “burning bush” or feeling God’s presence, is secondary to this primary purpose of our faith. God’s love ought to be central to our existence. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 apply to this closing thought:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

If you remember history or science class from schooling, you may recall a unique period of human history several hundred years ago. For ages, humans believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Everything else supposedly orbited around the earth. Top thinkers, political elites, and even the religious leaders were convinced of this geocentric model of the cosmos.

Things began to gradually change with people like scientists like Nicolaus Copernicus in the 1500s. He argued for what is known as a heliocentric view of the universe, that the sun is placed at the center, with all planets orbiting around it. As you might recall, this idea was rejected extensively at first. People like Galileo were even challenged by church authorities for teaching such contrary views! But ultimately, the Copernican Revolution changed the way people understood astronomy.

The “earth-centered” view might sound like a goofy sort of thing to believe, but for the longest time, it truly made sense with what people observed here on earth. Nowadays, we send people and objects into space on a regular basis. We can also track various movements not only in our solar system, but even millions of light years away. We take it for grated that we know about our orbit around the sun.

Theologian NT Wright once examined this unique chapter of scientific history and related it to how we formulate our faith life. Wright argues that we still struggle with having a “me-centered” sort of vision in regards to salvation, theology, and the purpose of Jesus Christ. So often we limit Christianity to mean having a personal relationship with God. Jesus cleanses us from our sins. We have a ticket to heaven. (Notice that the focus on the previous few sentences is not God, but rather our own human interests!).

This of course relates to how our culture celebrates the Christmas holiday. Even well-intentioned churches can fall prey to materialism and the belief that physical presents and such will bring about the most happiness. Too often we forget the true celebration and meaning of Christmas by overlooking the humble, revolutionary birth of Christ.

Now don’t get me (or Wright!) wrong. Having a personal encounter with God is incredibly powerful and impactful. But notice that having a personalized, privatized sort of faith places God as second to me. It is tempting to simply treat religion like a personal self-help mechanism instead of truly worshipping God for who God is.

In reality, when we follow Jesus, hopefully we believe him to be the most important thing above all else. Salvation should never be limited to your own enjoyment of things like eternal life and forgiveness. Rather, salvation is a celebration of what God does for us. NT Wright once put it this way in his book Justification:

God made humans for a purpose: not simply for themselves, not simply so that they could be in relationship with him, but so that through them, as his image-bearers, he could bring his wise, glad, fruitful order to the world.

This changes how we envision faith itself. God does not exist to give you first place. God is not an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” kind of transactional deity. Instead, God saves creation to bring about more enjoyment of God’s love. So this Advent season as we prepare for Christmas, instead of being me-centered, let’s be more Son-centered.