Sermon April 6, 2008

Easter 3, Year A

Acts 2: 14a, 36-47; Psalm 116: 10-17; 1 Peter 1: 17-23; Luke 24: 13-35

We have some wonderful Easter stories today - in Acts we hear part of Peter's great Pentecost Day sermon, and then in his first letter, words about the new life in Christ that the resurrection has ushered in.

And then there's the gospel passage, from Luke.

As with so many stories in the gospels, the story we hear today is layered. Each of the gospel writers has his own agenda:

• Matthew wishes us to see in Jesus the Second Moses - the Second Law Giver - whose coming was foretold in significant parts of the Hebrew scriptures;
• Mark wishes us to see Jesus as the Law Breaker, re-telling the story of Jesus from Peter's perspective, repeating for us much of what Peter remembers of his time with Jesus, while also adding additional pieces where Mark feels there are gaps;
• John is intent for us to see how Jesus replaces the Temple's filtered, expensive, hierarchical access to God with the unfettered and egalitarian access that he brings through his resurrection;
• And then there's Luke. Luke who we hear today. Luke who wishes us to know that Jesus calls for and embodies the replacement of the purity code of the Torah with a compassion code based on servanthood and sacrifice, expressed in love of God, self, and each other.

Now you should all be able to say that you understand the four gospels!

The contemporary struggle for all of the Christian community - a struggle that's been going on in earnest for several hundred years - is to seek to answer this tantalizing question: can we see the real Jesus beneath the layers of interpretation that began the day after the day of resurrection?

It's as if scholars are asking: "Will the real Jesus please stand up!"

And the Church asking for the same thing, though for entirely different reasons, because we share the same, ultimate goal: we all seek the truth.

Which brings us to this wonderful story of the journey to Emmaus. This is, I think, the most beloved of all the resurrection stories. There is something about it that resonates with us in a very profound way.

Can we find the bottom layer in this story? Can we cut through Luke's interpretation and find the truth there, the real Jesus?

I sure hope so! I think we can say that there is a core to this story that resonates with truth - of the journey away from community, of the redemption of loss, of the re-discovery of faith, and, perhaps most powerfully, of an encounter with the Sacred that transformed two individuals' lives.

I don't think the core is the content of the teaching on the road - that part of the story sounds a little too much like the least helpful and most inaccurate of the meanings of the word "prophesy" - that of "foretelling the future". Which is not to say that the recounting of Hebraic traditions around the coming of a messiah isn't both interesting and important, but it isn't, in itself, really interesting and important here.

No, the connectedness with the Hebrew scriptures is not what really grabs us - what grabs me.

I think the power of this story is probably in the part that's most likely to be original to it: About two disciples who decide to walk away from it all and go home, and what happens to them.

When the story begins they've just become former disciples. Having experienced the highs and lows of the Last Week, having discovered to their horror that their teacher has been crucified, having even heard stories about his re-appearing, they have, nevertheless, decided to leave it all behind them. Their anguish and sense of loss will not allow them to hope. They choose to classify the re-appearance stories as tall-tales, too fantastic to be real, and they opt, instead, to become former disciples. They simply go home.

And that's when we come to the place where the power in this story really lies: in how they stop being former disciples.

Notice, they don't stop being former disciples as a result of any exposition of the Hebrew scriptures, no matter how germane those scriptures might appear. Sure, their "hearts burned within [them]", we're told - but they didn't realize that until later. Hearing the Hebrew scriptures on the road wasn't the place or the moment when they dropped the "former" from their discipleship.

Whatever the experience of these two former disciples was on their journey the few miles home - whether or not Luke's narrative is literally truthful - isn't central the change that overcame them, so let's not worry about whether it was original to the story or not.

What is central in this story is an action. The transformation of these two disciples occurred when bread was taken and broken, and shared.

All the meals they had shared with Jesus must have come back to them in that moment - all the meals that were so inclusive of everyone that his table fellowship continually got him into trouble. All the meals that offered a vision of a new community where all were welcome, all were equal, all were free.

How could Jesus not be present with them?!

It is around the experience of the breaking of the bread that this story takes on its power.

On either side of that moment - in the two directions of the Emmaus road - we find the story of our lives.

And we know both of those directions ourselves, of doubt and despair, and of hope and joy. There will be those times of sadness and loss, or of depression or despondency, or of pain, when we wonder and we doubt, and our lives seem unconnected with this improbable story so long ago and so far away, except, perhaps, that with these two disciples we walk outside of faith in the long and lonely dusk of the soul. AND there will be the times when we see and share in the sudden, quiet joy and the gently-revealed glory so vividly encapsulated in this wonderful picture of realization and celebration. There will be times when we want to run back to Jerusalem in the middle of the night to share so wonderful a thing as the knowledge that if love has been crushed, if joy has been set aside, if peace has been surrendered to agony, all of these things have been redeemed, not just for Jesus and his disciples, but for us too.

And here's the genius of Luke at work on this story, and why what he does with it not only resonates with a profound truth but also points us back to its original form: It's no accident that, in Luke's version of this story, disciples who have made the decision to walk away from Jesus and the other disciples are brought back into the community of faith through scripture and meal, through word and sacrament.

And perhaps this is why this story resonates so much for us: Luke has seen the truth in the original story of the transformation of these two former disciples, and seen, too, its connection with what had already become the central act of worship for Jesus followers. And he points us to that connection: in Luke's mind, it is now primarily through the liturgical celebration of resurrection in Eucharist that the presence of the risen Christ is again revealed to us and to the ages of ages.

And so, let us now journey to that place of encounter again.