Easter 3A
2017
Rev.
Adam T. Trambley
April 30,
2017, St. John’s Sharon
Today’s gospel reading is Luke’s account of
what happened Easter night. For me, this
Emmaus account is one of the most powerful stories in scripture. Two disciples are walking the seven miles home
from Jerusalem to Emmaus. They were probably in Jerusalem for the Passover festival,
stayed with friends for the Sabbath, and after a tough morning of remembering
and comforting each other about what they had seen happen on Friday, they head
home.
They are walking, probably in that stunned kind
of silence following a tragedy, interspersed with intense mini-conversations
trying to make sense of it all. In the
middle of their rather personal time on the road, some dude approaches them
with an overly jaunty, “Hey guys, what are you talking about?” Here he is.
The person you most don’t want to have sitting next to you on an
airplane when you are flying home after a really exhausting trip. The two disciples just stop. Scripture says that: “They stood still,
looking sad.” Maybe he’ll get the hint
and keep going while we take a break.
But the stranger doesn’t. He just
stops, too, not looking so sad. So, Cleopas says, “Ah, don’t you know what
everyone is talking about.” “Nope.”
Then Cleopas explains. He talks about Jesus and their hopes and
their fears and their pain and their confusion.
Then this guy on the road says, in effect, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know this is how everything had to
happen? That the Messiah had to suffer
and enter his glory?” Then they keep
walking and the stranger tells them everything in the scriptures about Jesus
and why what they experienced had to happen the way that it did.
Then they get to the village of Emmaus and
Jesus pretends to go farther. Here is
another of the bizarre pieces of this account.
Jesus doesn’t let them know who he is, then he pretends that he is going
to keep walking. But Cleopas and his
companion – possibly his wife, but we aren’t told – convince the stranger to
have dinner and stay with them. He can
always start walking again the next day.
This offer was basic hospitality, since there were no hotels on the road
and it would be dangerous to travel at night for all kinds of reason. So, the stranger finally agrees to stay.
They put supper out on the table and,
interestingly enough, the stranger begins to say grace. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and
gave it to them. In that moment, their
eyes are opened and they recognize Jesus.
Then immediately he vanishes from their sight. This is another strange piece of the story:
when they don’t recognize Jesus, they can see him, but when they know it’s him,
they can’t. Luke doesn’t say that Jesus
left them. He just said they can’t see
him anymore. But apparently they didn’t
need to see him, because now they knew him.
They shared with each other the joy they felt at hearing his teaching on
the road and of being with him. Then
scripture says, “That same hour” they went to Jerusalem to find the
eleven. I assume that same hour means
they took long enough to finish dinner, since they had just walked seven miles
and had two more hours of walking back, but they weren’t dilly-dallying. They wanted to share what they had
experienced. They got to Jerusalem and
they heard that Peter has seen Jesus.
Then they proclaimed “what had happened on the road, and how he had been
made know to them in the breaking of the bread.”
I think the encounter of these two disciples
with Jesus has a lot to say to us on many different levels. On its most basic level, it describes the
process of coming to meet Jesus in a new and deeper way in our lives. Often a lot is happening and God is putting
things into place for us, but we have no idea what is going on at the
time. Some guy shows up on the road who
turns out not to be who we expected. We
thought he was going home, but then, somehow, we had an unexpected,
life-changing conversation. We were in a
vulnerable place trying to be by ourselves, and we felt something powerful. We find ourselves running back to people we
recently left, seeing them in new ways.
And in the midst of it all is Jesus, sometime unrecognized and sometimes
unseen, but in retrospect, we realize he was and still is with us the whole
time.
This Emmaus story also reminds us that Jesus
appears in the breaking of the bread.
The implications of this moves on two levels. One is our sacramental Eucharist, when Jesus
shows up. The other is in our breaking
bread with one another in any context.
Jesus is described as taking bread, blessing
it, breaking it, and giving it to the disciples. These actions are the same as when he fed the
multitudes with loaves and fishes and when he fed the disciples at the last
supper. They are also the basic actions
anybody without sliced bread would take.
You pick up the bread, say grace, break it into pieces, and give it to everyone. But because Jesus did these basic human
actions, and did that in such miraculous circumstances, whenever we do it we
are doing something holy. When we take
bread and bless it and break it and give it to our friends, we are doing what
Jesus did. We are doing what Jesus told
us to do. When we do what Jesus did and
do what Jesus told us to do, we can expect Jesus to show up. And he does.
We know that he always shows up when we
celebrate the Eucharist. When we take
the bread, bless it, break it, and distribute it, Jesus has assured us that the
bread becomes the Body of Christ. He is
made known to us as we recognize him in the communion bread, as we receive him,
and as we see him in those who come to the table with us and are now the Body
of Christ, as well. Part of what it means to say that the Holy Eucharist is a
sacrament is that we are sure that when we celebrate it as Jesus instructed us
to do that he will be present. We don’t
have to wonder about whether the priest did everything just right or if
everybody’s spiritual mojo was in good order that day or if God was busy
helping people after a natural disaster on the other side of the world and
didn’t make it by the 8:00am service.
Jesus comes to us in the breaking of the communion bread every single time. Maybe some days it seems more meaningful to
us for some reason, and that is normal – what God has for us on any given day
may be different and we don’t always have the same receptivity. Those changes, however, are about where we
are, not about whether Jesus showed up or not.
Jesus always shows up. It’s almost unbelievable, but we can be assured
that we can encounter the Son of God in worship every week at 8:00 and 10:00 am
on Sunday morning and most Wednesdays at 5:30pm if we just come and do what we
know to do. That we might decide to
ignore that promised encounter is almost unimaginable.
The Emmaus story isn’t only about the
Eucharist, however. The disciples are
also testifying to us that we can encounter Jesus in the breaking of the bread
in all aspects of our lives. When we
share a meal with one another, we can look for Jesus to be present in that
fellowship. Yet, we might keep in mind a
couple of caveats. First, unlike the
Eucharist, Jesus has not promised to be with us at every meal. He can be, and he’s always everywhere on some
level. But there is a difference between
intentionally worshiping God and passing chicken nuggets around in the car at
the McDonald’s drive through. Jesus can
be revealed in both places, but we only have a guarantee about one. Second, if we hope to have Jesus revealed
when we break bread, we should attend to his actions. Jesus took bread, which is almost required if
we are going to eat. Then he blessed
it. Jesus stopped, recognized that the
food they were eating came from God, thanked God for it, recognized the value
and importance of those with him, and asked that the food be good for
them. All of those things are implied in
the two words, “blessed it.” Jesus put
God in the middle of table – in their food, in those gathered, and in their
time together. We do the same to make a
meal a chance to encounter Jesus. Then
Jesus broke the bread and gave it to them.
These steps again seem straightforward.
You have a loaf of bread, so you break it. You have a bowl of green beans, so you pass
it around. You have half-gallon of ice
cream and you scoop it out. Yet,
sometimes we don’t break and share.
Often, people are increasingly bringing their own food and eating their
own meals in front of each other. This
practice is what Saint Paul condemned in Corinth, because rich people were
feasting while poor people had a small piece of pita bread or something. Implied in these last two actions are a sense
of sharing, of forming a real community, of people putting what they have on
the table and passing it around for everyone else. When we are doing these steps, including
blessing and sharing, we can easily see how we would encounter Jesus in our
fellowship, and even in the food itself.
Yet, amazingly, we seem to have such difficulty
finding the time and opportunity to really share meals with each other and open
ourselves to an encounter with Jesus.
The times when we might have dinner with a stranger on the road are
almost non-existent these days.
Increasingly complex and heavy work schedules, the need for two career
families with no one at home full time to do all the cleaning and cooking
needed for regular hospitality, and the availability of prepared food in
restaurants and even gas stations, all combined with increasing media options
to distract us when we decide to eat alone, make it harder and harder to find
regular occasions, even with our family, to sit down and take bread, bless it,
break it and share it. We find it all
too easy not to bother taking the time to break bread and share meals, even
when such times provide opportunities to come to know Jesus in new and deeper
ways. Personally, I can be terrible at
this myself, yet I know that we can’t grow in our faith individually, nor can
we grow as a church, unless we make time to really engage with one another at
the level of the basics of our life, like sharing a meal with each other.
Jesus is longing for us to know him more and
more deeply. Our lives are always richer
as we accept his invitation to take, bless, break and share, whether we join
him at the Eucharist around the Lord’s table here at St. John’s or whether we
join him with strangers, family, or friends at kitchen tables, restaurant
dining rooms, employee break rooms, school cafeterias, picnic blankets, or
wherever else we can break bread together.
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