A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, April 12, 2009
Luke 24:13-35
I’ve been to Emmaus. You have too. I’ve never met anyone who hasn’t been there. Emmaus is the name of the place we go when the world has collapsed, the tossing and turning of the night has left us exhausted and fragile, our dreams are shattered, and our hope is gone.
Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian pastor and author, put it like this:
Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred… where we spend much of our lives, you and I, the place that we go to in order to escape – a bar, a movie, wherever it is that we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” But there are some things that even in Emmaus we cannot escape. We can escape our troubles, at least for a while. We can escape the job we did not get or the friend we hurt. We can even escape for a while the awful suspicion that life makes no sense and that the religion of Jesus is just a lot of wishful thinking. But the one thing we cannot escape is life itself… [The Magnificent Defeat, Seabury Press, 1966; pg. 85-86]
It was a Sunday afternoon on the day we now call Easter, as two disciples walked the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Cleopas and another were leaving everything behind them, and walking some seven miles northwest into the setting sun.
They went with a sense of confusion and defeat, something like heading home at sundown with nothing to show for the day’s labors; maybe crawling toward home to share the news that your boss had told you to clean out your desk and leave… only ten times worse.
Remember this story stands in parallel to the scene just before it at the beginning of Luke 24. Those verses are filled with the thrilling news that came at dawn the same day. First some women disciples, then others including Peter, went to the garden tomb and found it empty! The story began to spread.
So these two disciples, like the other eleven, had been trying to make sense of what had happened over the past week since Jesus had ridden into the holy city on a donkey. Like the other disciples. They surely had prayed that everything would work out – that God would make the pieces come together.
But bone-weary and spiritually-exhausted they walked away. Even the rumors of the empty tomb weren’t enough to kindle their hope. They wouldn’t be easy to persuade. They knew their history and their scripture. Messiah, whenever he really came, would not die the death of a criminal at the hands of the occupying army. Messiah would be a liberator, a freedom fighter, and a conqueror; not a victim.
This Jesus, son of Joseph, had held great promise. The disciples had followed, waiting for him to reveal his power and to rally the troops. But then the Romans had nailed him to a cross. Their dreams were dashed. That seemed to be the end of the story. So it was time to get back to their work-a-day world.
Up and down, back and forth went the roller coaster. First opinion, second opinion. Good news, bad news. So there they were, walking and talking and trying to make sense out of it all.
When they met a stranger walking toward them with his back to the sun, they didn’t have any idea who he was. He asked what they’d been discussing and they showed their amazement that he must have been the only person in the region who hadn’t heard the rumors.
They told this stranger what had happened and then speak a most memorable line: “We had hoped that he would be the one to save Israel.” That could be the Chamber of Commerce slogan for this little town of Emmaus where you and I have often gone: “Welcome to Emmaus – the little town where our hope is in the past.” Like the sign at the portals of hell in Dante’s Inferno, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
“We had hoped that Jesus would be the one to save us…” Isn’t that the fellowship we all belong to, we who have walked our Emmaus roads? Maybe there’s a Facebook Group where we can tell our stories:
• We’d hoped the shadow on the CAT scan was just a false alarm…
• We’d hoped when the plane hit the tower that the damage would be limited…
• We’d hoped the first signs of forgetfulness were nothing to worry about…
• We’d hoped the company would rebound before there had to be lay-offs…
“We had hoped,” of course, is only the first part of the sentence. You know what comes next. “We had hoped… but we don’t any more.” That’s the way it is when we walk along this particular road. This Emmaus we’re talking about isn’t so much a place. It’s our spiritual condition. It’s where we stand when we’ve reached the end of our rope.
Perhaps these disciples had been cowering in the bushes near Golgotha when Jesus had breathed his last and called “it is finished!” What the disciples saw certainly did look like the end… the absolute final word. So they decided to take the road out of town and head back to the place where people go when they’ve faced the bitter truth: life is difficult and will do everything it can to break our hearts. But then Hope shows its face.
There was a time when I somehow thought hope was based on knowledge — on finding answers to life’s most persistent questions; and that if you kept at it long enough you’d finally push back the veil and everything would make sense.
I know that’s what Christian faith means to many people. But that doesn’t work for me. Maybe it’s because I’ve sat too many times with too many people who’ve had every reason to cry out “why?” And I’ve dried my own tears and swallowed around the lump in my throat and simply said” “I don’t know…that’s a question no one has ever answered.”
Still, what I know for sure is that walking the path with Jesus means I can embrace the unknown and can live hopefully in the face of anything life throws at me.
And I know this is the faith to which I gladly give my life.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t experience the Risen Christ through knowledge or information, but through the opening of their hearts to the One who met them. In the breaking of the bread and the opening of the scriptures, they embraced the Unknown, and they got it, and they returned to Jerusalem as witnesses.
That conviction has been deepened by a little book I read recently, kindness of Elinor Redmond. She read an opening reflection at our Spiritual Life and Worship Team meeting from the book, Learning to Fall, the Blessings of an Imperfect Life, by Phillip Simmons. He wrote the book in 2000, just after he was diagnosed with ALS, “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” He died, as expected, a few years later.
I can’t do it justice in a few quotes but want to whet your appetite with the opening lines from the Foreword:
This book is for everyone who has lived long enough to discover that life is both more and less than we had hoped for. We’ve known Earth’s pleasures: sunlight on a freshly mowed lawn, leaves trembling with rain, a child’s laugh, the sight of a lover stepping from the bath. We’ve also seen marriages and careers crash, we’ve seen children lost to illness and accident. But beyond the dualities of feast and famine we’ve glimpsed something else: the blessings of an imperfect life like fruit from a blighted tree. We’ve known the dark woods but also the moon. (Bantam Books, 2000), page ix
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery and a joy to be lived.
Life will never be perfect but it can be oh, so beautiful and good.
Our faith in God, embodied in Jesus Christ, is not really an answer to life’s most persistent questions. There will always be questions that defy answers. Rather, our faith is the assurance that we can find meaning in simply embracing the unknown, the mysteries of this rich, good, heart-breaking and joy-making life.
And it’s all the richer because we walk this road together, with the One who comes to us sometimes as a stranger, whose love for us is so strong that he would even lay down his life for us all.
Jesus Christ lives beyond death and darkness… and so do we.