“Returning”

Luke 24:13-35

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

May 8, 2011

Easter 3

One of the oddities of the English language is that sometimes the same word can stand for different things. Like the word glasses. One can put a pair of glasses on one’s face in order to see better. Or we can drink from glasses we store in our kitchen cupboards. A carrot can be a little orange vegetable or it can be an enticement we use to lure someone into doing something we want them to do. Pants can be an article of clothing we wear or it can describe what a dog does when she is overheated. Speaking of dogs, a hot dog is both food we offer to our neighbors on our piazza on Thursdays in the summer and an athlete who showboats during the game. A train can be a mode of transportation or a part of a wedding dress. We can table a motion in a meeting while sitting at a table. And we use compasses for drawing circles or for finding our way.

Our gospel story today is about two disciples finding their way again, courtesy of Christ the compass. But not before losing their way. Discouraged and disillusioned after the death of Jesus in whom they had put so much stock and hope, their expectations concerning Jesus now in tatters, Cleopas and the unnamed follower set out for Emmaus in the afternoon of the third day after the crucifixion, the same day the women had discovered that tomb where Jesus had been placed was empty, whatever that meant.

Homiletically, for preaching purposes, I think we are on good ground to let Emmaus stand for that place in us where dreams go to die. Perhaps it can stand for places in our lives – inner and outer – to which we go to escape the pain of collapsed lives, disrupted plans, disintegrating hope instead of facing it head on. Maybe Emmaus can stand for the jaundiced times in our lives when we tell ourselves in despair that nothing ever really changes, that powers beyond our control will scuttle the new life we sometimes glimpse on the horizon and consign us to the same old, same old.

That is the state of mind in which in our story today we find the two travelers on the road to Emmaus. The sun beginning to set on the day, an emotional and spiritual night also is falling on them… until their risen Lord comes to them and turns them around to face a rising dawn, renewed hope, a second birth. Did you notice in the story that the two never got all the way to Emmaus, that after their encounter with Jesus on the road and in the breaking of bread they returned to Jerusalem ?

I do not know exactly what to make of the part of the story where it says that Jesus came alongside of them and they did not recognize him except I remember something that happened to me when I was a little boy and my parents took me to Disney World. It was crowded, of course, but across the way I thought I saw an acquaintance of mine from home at an ice cream stand. But I did not go over to him to talk with him because I convinced myself it could not really be him. It looked like him but this was Florida , not York . So I dismissed the possibility. The boy bore a resemblance to the person I knew but it could not be him, I thought, not here. But then, a few weeks after I got home and ran into this friend, he started telling me about his vacation to Disney World. It had been him, indeed, but in a place and time I did not expect to see him, and so I did not recognize him as my friend from home.

So maybe the last thing the disciples expected that afternoon as they slouched toward Emmaus was for the Lord they had seen crucified to come alongside them and so, even if the stranger had something of the visage and countenance of Jesus, the possibility that it could be him never entered their minds. Their gloom marred their perception. While Jesus had told his followers what to expect, that if he was killed that he would rise again, they obviously had not understood. So it was on the road as if Cleopas and friend had fog in their eyes when it came to the risen Christ.

One of the things Luke wants us to see in this story is that the risen Christ meets us when we are on the road to our own Emmaus. Christ comes alongside us in those times and places when life is frustrating and disappointing and perhaps a little too hard or discouraging for us. I wonder how many times we have been “slow of heart,” to use the phrase that Jesus did, slow of heart to believe what the biblical prophets and preachers have told us of God’s faithfulness to us. As a result, we often miss the presence of Christ in our lives because we do not really expect it. But he comes in a variety of ways, as one of our hymns puts it,

We meet You, O Christ, in many a guise:

Your image we see in simple and wise.

You live in a palace, exist in a shack.

We see You, the gardener, a tree on Your back.

(“We Meet You, O Christ” – words by Fred Kaan)

When my daughter, Katy, died, and I was plunged headlong onto the Emmaus road, there were so many acts of kindness ministered to me. But one sticks out in my mind that stands for all of them. We were at the house on the afternoon of her memorial service that was to be held that evening, and people were gathering from out of town, and Paul Hedin came to the door carrying the biggest plate of lunchmeats and cheeses I think I ever had seen. He couldn’t say much because he was moved so deeply and he did not stay long, vanishing out of the crowd, but nine years later, I still feel as if it was the visitation of Christ saying “I am with you always,” and it slowed my descent into Emmaus and set me on my return to the hope of Jerusalem .

Or this: a few days following the service, I set out for an evening dinner and walk at Barcelona and when I returned deep into that night, a lantern had been left on the back porch of my house with a flickering flame, some extra tea candles, and a note: “I’m leaving this lantern for you to have and to use for a little light tonight and in the coming dim season’s days. Your Katy’s light and life still shine…Here’s to a quiet time apart. Then come back to us all.” Well, the note contained Angus’ signature, but to me it was the Christ who gave the lantern and the invitation to return to Jerusalem .

A few weeks ago I made quick mention of a scene in the movie called “ Sweet Land ” in which Olaf Torvik hears the local bank’s auctioneer holding forth from his good friend Frandsen’s house who has a wife and nine children and who had fallen behind in his mortgage payments. When Olaf hears Frandsen’s house being auctioned, he rushes there and enters the bidding. “Four thousand, five hundred. Five thousand, five hundred.” And, finally, “seven thousand dollars,” quieting all other bidders and Frandsen’s house is awarded to Olaf that he then returns to Frandsen. Olaf turns to his fiancée, Inge – a woman unwelcome in that rural Minnesota community because she was a German in the years just after World War 1 – and Olaf says to her, “I do not have seven thousand dollars.” She says, “I know,” and I shed tears for the way she looked on him with such teeming love and deep respect, this man who would risk his own farm and livelihood for a friend.

Olaf’s act humbles the townspeople so much that the other farmers and members of Olaf’s church set aside their acrimony over Inge to save Olaf’s farm that was about to be seized by the bank to pay off his bid. They knocked on Olaf’s door late one night, giving him the proceeds of their harvests save what they needed to get them through the winter and spring planting. On his road Emmaus, it was Christ who appeared at Olaf’s door that night with the hope of Jerusalem .

Recently I have been going through something of a dark night, one of those difficult times most of us experience along the way when life as we have known it seems to be falling apart or changing. In the midst of my Emmaus journey, I read the death announcement of the Reverend David Wilkerson of whom I spoke briefly last week, he of the best-selling book The Cross and the Switchblade. I had not thought of Wilkerson since the release of that book in the mid-sixties, Wilkerson not being of my theological fold. But when I read of his death, I could not let him go – I think it was the Holy Spirit speaking to my heart – and I began to search him out on the internet and I found some of his sermons and downloaded them onto my iPod so that I could listen to them as I do my daily walking and, I have to tell you, I have been a walking fool since he died. It is about all I want to do because my heart burns within me as I listen to him open the scriptures and speak of the tenacious love of God. Wilkerson, whom I had dismissed all of my adult life as lacking the intellectual sophistication I thought necessary to make the faith credible, has been no less than Christ to me these past weeks and set me on my way again to Jerusalem when I only could see Emmaus.

When our hearts are not slow to believe the good news that Christ comes in our Emmaus times to be present in us, with us, through us, and among us in many a guise via God’s Holy Spirit, our hearts begin to burn with the beauty and bounty of God’s grace and our descent into our Emmaus night is stemmed and we begin to rise and return to the Jerusalem of God and the dawn of renewing hope.

Easter means that any and every moment can bring to us the presence of the risen Christ, the presence that holds the power to change the direction of our lives for good. There is no sin that disqualifies us from that grace, there are no circumstances. In my reading of scripture, it seems the only thing that slows and stymies it is unbelief. There is a story in Mark’s gospel of a father who brings his convulsing son to Jesus for healing and says to Jesus, “If you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.” Jesus says to the father, “Did you say ‘IF you are able! All things can be done for one who believes.” And Mark writes, “Immediately the father of the boy cries out, ‘I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.’” Most of us believe at some level, but we hedge our belief in unbelief and thus we frustrate the power of God.

The gospels tell of the time that Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth and the people were astounded at his teaching but then remembered that he had grown up a carpenter among them. He was just Mary’s boy and who does he think he is to be holding forth about the power of God and what God can do through him and they were dismissive of him. So Jesus said to them, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” And the gospels report that he thus could do no deed of power there and that Jesus was amazed at their unbelief.

The times in which we live and the culture of which we are a part conspire to make us think we should trust in ourselves, in our own abilities and reasonings, to get us through whatever we face. But in my experience, that just leads finally to despair for always there will be situations in our lives that are too much for us – too hard, too deep, too puzzling, too sad, too wonderful – and we need the presence of God to get us through and/or to thank.

So, my friends in the faith and partners in the gospel: Believe. Believe Easter, believe that the Christ of God is alive and will come to you in ways and means as surprising as the stranger on the road was to our two travelers, but believe that he will come to you. Believe that Emmaus is not our destiny but rather the Jerusalem that the last pages of the Bible describes as “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband”…the Jerusalem of joy and wonderment and being enfolded in God.

In the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah, God is portrayed as saying, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and trust shall be your strength.” In a world that seems often to dish up Emmaus, believe that the risen Christ intends for us Jerusalem and so meets us on the roads of our lives wherever we are to make our hearts burn and our lives sing again to the glory of God.

Amen.

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