"Meeting the Christ"

Luke 24:13-35

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

April 6, 2008

Easter 3

In a sermon at Chautauqua a number of years ago, Ross Mackenzie, formerly our Priest-in-Residence and now our Priest-in-Absentia, said something that became for me a key to unlocking a deeper way of understanding and interpreting scripture. Ross in his inimitable way said that “poetry tells glorious lies on the way to the truth.” He was, of course, referring to the metaphors and images that poetry employs that are not literally true but that convey deep truth.

I immediately made the connection: the gospels, too, tell glorious lies on the way to the truth. They also use figures of speech and contrived stories in order to tell the truth. Such a notion is discomfiting to some but, as Marcus Borg reminds us, our modern, western culture is the first in human history to equate truth with facts. John Dominic Crossan, tongue in cheek, puts it a little more indelicately, saying, “It is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we now are smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we now are dumb enough to take them literally.” Ouch! But Crossan is right in suggesting that many people consider something to be true only if it really, actually happened. But people in earlier times and cultures did not have such a narrow view of truth and that is why we often misread what they wrote, including scripture.

The gospel story today tells of two nondescript followers of Jesus, including one whose name is not even mentioned, walking dejectedly from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus in the afternoon and aftermath of the most confusing morning of their lives. Their hopes that had centered on Jesus had been as “crucified, dead, and buried” as Jesus himself three days earlier. Yet now they had heard that Jesus had been raised from the dead and they really do not know what to make of it all. On the road that afternoon, a stranger comes beside them and asks what they are talking about. Cleopas and his companion are dumbfounded that he does not appear to know about the buzz in Jerusalem and so they begin to tell him. The stranger listens for a time and then, demonstrating his own facility with scripture, tries to put the events they were describing into the context of a larger story.

As the three neared Emmaus, the two travelers veered off the road to make their way to their home. The stranger kept on walking until the two called out to him with an invitation, “The day is almost over. Stay with us.” So the stranger went with them to their home and supper was prepared. When they began to eat, the stranger took the loaf of bread from the table, blessed it and broke it, and gave it to his hosts. And Luke says, “Their eyes were opened, and they recognized the stranger as Jesus; and then he vanished from their sight.”

Did the story really, actually happen as Luke writes? With the preponderance of biblical scholars, I think probably not. To this day there has been no archeological discovery of a village that could have been Emmaus. Stories similar to Luke’s about entertaining angels and divinities unaware were a dime a dozen in Luke’s time. And the story seems formulaic in that it contains “word and sacrament” components that would conveniently have buttressed the authority of the church (“our hearts burned within us while he was opening the scriptures to us” and “he was made known to us in the breaking of the bread”).

Did the story really happen as Luke presents it? I hope not. If it really happened, then the events of that first Easter afternoon are locked in history as a museum testament, wonderful for Cleopas and friend, but not touching our lives in our time. But is the story true? I believe so absolutely. And if it is true, then it is true for us. Luke’s intention was not to write a history book. Five or six decades removed from Jesus having been crucified, Luke, in writing his gospel, was employing a “glorious lie,” an invented or adapted story, in order to share the good news that, though Jesus had died many years ago, yet people continue to experience his enabling and ennobling presence in their lives.

Jesus appeared to the Emmaus Road travelers in the guise of a stranger on the road. In John’s story of the resurrection, Jesus appeared to Mary as a gardener. That reminds me of a snippet of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins in which he writes,

“…Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”

I love that! Christ is raised into our lives. The risen Christ plays in ten thousand places and I have found at least some of them. I have met the risen Christ

*in a woman who, at Shari Erickson’s and my request, took into her home and her heart an infant daughter of an incarcerated and drug addicted woman we had been trying to help and has raised the child as if she was her own for almost three years now;

*in a member of our church who, well into her ninth decade and diagnosed with cancer for which there is no treatment, is living the days that are left to her with grit, grace, and gratitude;

*in a poet who writes these instructions for living – pay attention, be astonished, tell about it – and then does all three in so captivating, compelling, and best of all, contagious, a way that my whole life has brightened;

*in a simple man named Frank whose heart is big and childlike, a member of my “other congregation” about which I sometimes talk who comes frequently to the church for help and companionship, on Friday bringing two quarters to give to me to put into the offering plate “for God and Jesus”…and then before he left asked for ten dollars for a bus ticket to go to see his lady friend in Erie (I think Frank has the “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” part of Jesus’ teaching down pat!);

*in a little girl named Avery who, on one recent Sunday when my children’s sermon had been a fiasco as they sometimes are and the children gathered on the chancel steps had not understood a word I had said, came wandering out of worship arts during the final hymn, climbed those same steps into the chancel to come to where I was singing, and handed me a picture she had drawn as if to say, “It’s all right, Mr. Sweet, we know you meant well”;

*in the large throng of people who marched on Washington on the first weekend in March to say, peacefully, but firmly, to the leaders of our government: “No more war.”

I am sure if you think about it that you can come up with your own list of people and events in whom and in which you see the living and risen Christ. Easter, indeed! In fact, what I would like you to do at the end of the sermon and before the singing of the hymn is to take the card that has been inserted in your bulletin and write on it the name of one person or event in whom or in which you have beheld or behold the presence of the risen Christ and then put your card in the offering plate as it comes to you today.

Know this, too: you yourself need to be included on your list for the risen and living Christ lives also in you, lives in each of us. If we are able to discern that presence in all others and honor and nurture it in ourselves, well, think of the holy communion, instead of the unholy dis-union, we could share in the world. That is the great hope of the gospel.

I invite you now to write on your card the name of a person or event in which you have seen the presence of the risen Christ, and when you have done that, we shall stand and sing our sermon hymn together.

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.

In millions alive, away and abroad;

Involved in our life, you live down the road.

Imprisoned in systems, you long to be free.

We see you, Lord Jesus, still bearing your tree.

We hear you, O Christ, in agony cry.

For freedom you march, in riots you die.

Your face in the papers we read and we see.

The tree must be planted by human decree.

You choose to be made at one with the earth;

The dark of the grave prepares for your birth.

Your death is your rising, creative your word:

The tree springs to life and our hope is restored.

(“We Meet You, O Christ” – Hymn #311, The Presbyterian Hymnal)

Amen.

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