Emmaus Fire (Luke 24:13-35)
“Why can’t you simply believe all that the prophets said?” because our hearts and minds are too full or distracted. I really struggle to pay attention to what matters—I suffer from ADD—perhaps not the medical condition, but I have been indeed conditioned, as many of us have, to pay attention to many things that, in the grand scheme of things really don’t matter. And this leads to the challenge that faces these two disciples on the road. By extension their problem is our problem, too: How do we recognize Christ? How do we know when we’re in the presence of Jesus?
We hear these resurrection accounts—of Mary in the garden, not recognizing Jesus, and these two on the road, and part of me wants to really know how it is that they do not recognize Jesus?
The writer Kathleen Norris and many others remind us that “to believe” is not a matter of the mind, but a matter of the heart. For what we “believe” is what we “give our heart to.” In other words, merely having knowledge or memorizing scripture does not make one a disciple of Jesus—it is in the way we choose to live each moment of our lives that defines us as a follower of Jesus—with every beat of our hearts, we seek to become more Christ-like. With every breath we take, we desire to be filled with the breath of life called the Holy Spirit. This life-change does not happen automatically or come easily to us—it certainly did not come all at once to the disciples of Jesus, and they even had the advantage of knowing and walking with Jesus personally.
It is in the scene we witness, as two of the disciples are on the road to Emmaus that we get a glimpse into the promise and possibility of a new life in Christ. It is nearly evening on the day of the resurrection and the sun is setting. I imagine that the approaching darkness matched the mood of the two travelers. Jesus’ resurrection, at this point, is nothing more than a rumor, a curiosity, an improbable hope. They had walked with Jesus, had heard his teaching, and had even witnessed first hand Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Now, they have to wonder: had that all been a dream, a fantasy? It certainly must have seemed so now. From the excitement and enthusiasm of being caught up in the movement that was building around Jesus, they had to watch in horror as Jesus was betrayed by one of their own, beaten, humiliated and tortured to death. It seemed that their hope died and was buried along with Jesus’ battered body.
And yet when the disciples meet a stranger on the road, it seems that the early reports of a resurrection have intrigued them. They have been talking about it for hours, rehearsing the possibilities, arguing about the details, and wrestling with one another about the meanings of an empty tomb. Buried beneath their wrestling with all of these questions, there seems to be a deep yearning and a holy hunger. How they wished the reports of the resurrection were true! Within that wishful desire is a glimmer of hope – that hope speaks of their need for God to be alive and present. But the weight of their doubt and their fresh memories of seeing Jesus die on the cross get in the way of their faith. And so when the risen Jesus joins them on the road, they cannot see him–their grief and pain seemingly blind them to the truth that Jesus was right beside them.
On Sunday morning in contemporary America, and around the world for that matter, we modern disciples come straggling through the church door weighed down by our own burdens of cynicism, stress, doubts, fears, and I am sure more than a few battered or broken hearts. We are a people who live in the midst of profound paradox. We are sophisticated and educated 21st century citizens of the world—we have nearly instantaneous access to more information and knowledge than is imaginable—with a few clicks of our keyboards we can witness world-changing events as they happen—we can read the online journals of our troops on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we can read the online journals of the Taliban, automatically translated for us. Our technologies allow us to manipulate our DNA to cure diseases; we have two little robot vehicles still rolling around on the surface of Mars, we can do all sorts of wondrous and incredible things, and yet the paradox is that while we live with all these amazing things, we also live in a world that is filled with chaos and violence and all kinds of turmoil—will we run out of oil, will the world’s economies collapse? Will our collective greed result in the death of the environment—which would mean the death of us all?
We are very skilled at navigating the complexities of the world, but when it comes to the realm of the Spirit, too often we seem lost. We are realists—we are rationalists, and the world of the spirit seems too unreal, too irrational, but the hunger is still there: We are just like the first disciples: we yearn for the living presence of God. But we are too preoccupied, suspicious, and too busy to actually recognize God. In our objective world of fact and matter and money, the church’s world of mystery and meaning and risk and relationship seems silly and well, quaint. And so we will often be eager to discuss and debate the idea of God, even talk at great length about law and morality, but that still leaves us unprepared to experience or recognize the presence of the living God.
As a young man, Mahatma Gandhi studied in London. After learning about Christianity, and after reading the Sermon on the Mount, Gandhi decided that Christianity was the most complete religion in the world. It was only later, when he lived with a Christian family in East India, that he changed his mind. In that household he discovered that the Word rarely became alive — that the teachings of Jesus rarely became the reality of knowing Jesus. It seems that we do not yet realize that it will only be through pounding hearts and burning hearts that we will come to believe — that we will come to recognize Jesus.
I think that we continue to struggle with the lack of redemption in our world and its challenge to our faith and hope. We are witnesses to too many awful things for our hope to remain unshaken. How do we reconcile genocide in Rwanda and Darfur, how do we make sense of the sexual exploitation of women and children—right here in our county. Do you ever find yourself in tears and asking THE question—how can humans do these things to one another? What kind of evil is this? And then the real hard question: Where is God in all of this? Where is our hope? Is it even possible to talk about redemption and new life in the midst of the mass murder of 800,000 of our fellow children of God? How do we keep hope alive when peace seems to be an impossible goal for our planet? Did Jesus’ coming make any difference?
In the midst of our grieving and hopelessness — or of our wealth and prosperity, it can be difficult to recognize the risen Jesus in our midst. But thanks be to God, Jesus doesn’t give up on disciples like us who are ” “So thick-headed! So slow-hearted! ” And so we have heard the teaching and we know all the right words about the resurrection, but those words haven’t always produced life-changing faith in our lives. As rational people, we have stressed the power of the story of Jesus to produce faith—and what we mean by that is we act as if hearing the story and knowing the story are enough to get ourselves to somehow come to “believe”. I believe that this is partly the way—Jesus does come to us in the Word, but something more is needed to make our hearts burn with passion for Christ…
What is needed is the same thing that was needed for the two disciples on the road to Emmaus—an encounter with the living Christ, made known in the gathering together, hearing the story and in the breaking of the bread—remember how this happens—Jesus helps these two disciples remember and understand the story of what happened and why it happened—he reminds them of the Words of the prophets and of Jesus’ own words, and in doing this, Jesus makes these words come alive. And then Jesus sits down with them at the table and breaks bread—in that instant, they recognize Jesus for who he is, and in that moment, their hope returns, their hearts are set on fire and they go and do the only thing they can—they gather with others who had lost hope and they tell the story as Jesus told it to them, and they come to believe.
And so it goes—2000 years later, we are called to do just these things that the two disciples did—we tell the story to others, we gather with them and we break bread. It is these simple acts of telling and listening, in gathering and eating, in the act of sharing our fears and anxieties in speaking of hope lost and found that we come to know the risen Christ who lives with and in us. And so we are left with questions: How much do our hearts burn within us when the scriptures are opened to us? And how often do we recognize the stranger as the living Christ in our midst? Amen.
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