{"id":195,"date":"2011-05-09T13:29:45","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T18:29:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/?p=195"},"modified":"2011-05-09T13:29:52","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T18:29:52","slug":"third-sunday-after-easter-in-our-midst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.newunionchristianchurch.org\/home\/2011\/05\/09\/third-sunday-after-easter-in-our-midst\/","title":{"rendered":"Third Sunday after Easter: In Our Midst"},"content":{"rendered":"

Text<\/span>:\u00a0 Luke 24:13-35<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The story of the revelation along the Emmaus Road at the Inn is a story of how Easter becomes local, how it comes into our midst where we live.\u00a0 Two relatively unknown followers of Jesus, Cleopas, and an unnamed disciple\u2026quite possibly his wife as women are often unnamed in the Gospels, \u00a0are trudging along the dusty road seven miles from the big city of Jerusalem where all the political events and major religious festivals are held,\u00a0 away from complexity and back to the simplicity of a small village called Emmaus when they are joined by a stranger, whom Luke tells us is the risen Christ.<\/p>\n

The stranger has a face like all faces, his glory hidden behind the countenance of a stranger.\u00a0 By the time they reach the end of their journey they have moved from discouragement and despair to hope and renewed faith.\u00a0 The first readers of this story would have wept for joy, because they recognize this road on which these disciples were walking was not simply the road to Emmaus, it was the road that WAS the WAY.\u00a0 The first name given to Christians, according to the book of Acts, was \u201cFollowers of the Way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The road to Emmaus was for them a symbol of the Christian life.\u00a0 They were first called the people of the way, and in this story there was embedded the promise:\u00a0 if you want to experience the resurrection of Jesus Christ, in your life, where you live, get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other and head down the road.\u00a0 Follow the way<\/em>.\u00a0 Somewhere along the journey, the efforts to care for neighbor and to revere God, you will find yourself walking with one who surprises you.\u00a0\u00a0 If you are lucky, your heart will burn.\u00a0 If you are determined to do it your way, the Frank Sinatra way, you\u2019ll miss him.<\/p>\n

Rembrandt\u00a0 painted the Emmaus Road scene a number of times.\u00a0 In one of those paintings, Rembrandt has captured the very moment when the spark of recognition erupted in the eyes of the two disciples.\u00a0 You can almost see the sense of awe, the awakening of faith and insight, reflected in their eyes.\u00a0 In that same instant, a bored and weary servant is offering them a plate of food with a loaf of bread on the tray, seeing nothing remarkable going on at the table.\u00a0 I suspect Rembrandt caught the truth of the gospel:\u00a0 that the reality of the living Christ is apparent only to those whose eyes are open to see it.<\/p>\n

For most of us, instances of spiritual insight come in the form of our ordinary experiences\u2014in happenings that could be read, if we chose, in entirely secular terms.\u00a0 Faith knows that there is infinitely more to existence and to reality that we can see with our eyes.\u00a0 But faith\u2014the assurance of what cannot be seen\u2014is the only way we can know this.<\/p>\n

The story is told of John Muir, the naturalist, who as a young man, was out walking in the woods.\u00a0 He happened upon a delicate white orchid.\u00a0 As he stood silent before it he realized it was the very \u201cThrone of the Creator.\u201d\u00a0 He knelt down beside it and wept with joy.\u00a0 Someone else may have simply passed the orchid by with hardly a glance.<\/p>\n

Gustavo Gutierrez, one of the wonderful liberation theologians whose work was censured by the late Pope John Paul, II–now being beatified by the Vatican (the Pope, not Gutierrez) \u00a0suggests that the \u201cinitiative in encounter belongs to the Lord.\u00a0 But,\u201d he said, \u201cif we open the door of our being to him, we shall share his life, his supper.\u201d\u00a0 Recognition comes easily if we practice being attuned to the holy in our midst.<\/p>\n

In a chapter on \u201cattention\u201d, psychologist William James said:\u00a0 \u201ceach of us literally chooses, by [one\u2019s] ways of attending to things, what sort of universe [one] shall appear to [oneself] to inhabit.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And Rabbi Kushner, the author of Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, says somewhere:\u00a0 \u201cFaith is a way of seeing life.\u201d\u00a0 He notes that the multi-colored lights on an airport landing field do not make a lot of sense to many of us.\u00a0 But there are some who CAN discern a pattern in them, and land the plane safely.<\/p>\n

Embedded in the Emmaus story is the outline of\u00a0 spiritual formation, of the way we come to faith,<\/em> of the road to an encounter with the risen Christ.\u00a0\u00a0 The first step<\/em> is one in which we acknowledge our disillusionment with other ways of interpreting the world.\u00a0 \u201cWe had thought he would be the one to redeem Israel\u201d.\u00a0 That was the illusion\u2026.sometimes our expectations of God blind us to the real God.\u00a0\u00a0 God\u2019s ways necessarily appear meaningless to humans who understand events in terms of their own purposes and ways of achieving them.<\/p>\n

The second stage<\/em> of the faith journey involves study and reflection.\u00a0 The stranger on the road interprets the scriptures for them.\u00a0 This fresh look at old familiar words begins to provide a new vision of how God works in the world for the would-be disciples before a crucified and risen Messiah can make any sense at all to them.\u00a0 No church has ever grown without some kind of study program.\u00a0 The early church began out of a new comprehension of what the author of Peter called the living and enduring word of God.<\/p>\n

The third stage<\/em> is one in which the traveler, in stead of looking always for others to provide for their needs, offer hospitality in their lives and in the homes.\u00a0\u00a0 Hospitality is about \u201cmaking room\u201d , room for caring and sharing.\u00a0 The disciples offer Jesus what they have been given.<\/p>\n

And then, fourth<\/em>, in the common, simple acts of every day\u2014the breaking of bread, and pouring of drink\u2014they perceive the Christ in their midst.<\/p>\n

The fifth step<\/em> involves a willingness to head back into complexity once again.\u00a0\u00a0 Their hearts burned within them, Luke tells us.\u00a0 To have one\u2019s stony heart moved, that is where faith comes alive, where what is dead in us is resurrected\u2026and it drives us back to community, not to isolation, back to living among people who do things we don\u2019t like, who may be cowards when suffering or sacrifice seems to be the order of the day, who may be hard-headed, or who don\u2019t always bow to our superior wisdom.\u00a0 The enemy of church growth is not conflict and differences.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The enemy of church growth is to demand simplicity when only the complexity of caring, of the particularity <\/em>of caring about individuals will lead us to that\u00a0 revelation of being born anew.<\/p>\n

You know,\u00a0 it\u2019s a strange thing, but Biblical scholars say that there are three different places in the Holy Land that claim to be the village of Emmaus.\u00a0 Three places.\u00a0 Further, there is no record of any village called Emmaus in any ancient source.\u00a0 The only place in all of the writings of the New Testament where we hear of the village of Emmaus is in Luke\u2019s Gospel.<\/p>\n

Marcus Borg, a New Testament scholar, says that \u201cEmmaus is nowhere.\u00a0 Emmaus is everywhere<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emmaus is wherever in your life journey, as you are going along the way, either at church or at home, in the forest, on a park bench eating twinkies, or at a family dinner table,\u00a0\u00a0 Emmaus is where you meet the risen Christ and Easter comes to dwell in you<\/strong><\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So Easter MUST be more than one day on the church calendar, celebrated and then packed away, like our Christmas decorations.\u00a0 Easter is a continual unfolding\u2026.just as faith continues to become clearer to us the longer we travel its road.\u00a0 The painful and refreshing truth is that it is not in the articulate language of some preacher, or of theology, or even of scripture that the resurrected Christ is known, rather it is in the intimate, yet utterly common gesture of breaking bread in the midst of a community.\u00a0 The risen Christ travels with us.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know about you, but I think I caught a glimpse of his shadow just last Sunday in that new space just under our feet.\u00a0 The risen Christ meets us in the breaking of bread.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Taste, and see, the glory of the Lord.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Text:\u00a0 Luke 24:13-35 The story of the revelation along the Emmaus Road at the Inn is a story of how Easter becomes local, how it comes into our midst where we live.\u00a0 Two relatively unknown followers of Jesus, Cleopas, and<\/p>\n

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