Keep Looking

sermon by Torin Eikler
Luke 24:13-25
(this sermon is inspired by the work of James Eaton, and the parts of his sermon that are present are used with his permission.)

A man is traveling, … all alone.

He happens to be walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, but he could be traveling anywhere, any time.  He could be a poor man in a bus terminal: hard seats, harsh lights and a scratchy PA system.  Over there, a family is rapidly speaking in a language he doesn’t understand. Down the row, an old man is staring straight ahead. He could be a rich man waiting in an airport terminal, sitting at a bar with a drink he isn’t really drinking in front of him.  Maybe he’s thinking that he wished he had something sweet to his wife when he left instead of just “See you Thursday, I think.”

A man is traveling, all alone.

And on the way he bumps against two people ahead of him. You know how that happens … when you’re shopping at the grocery store you see a small old woman pause and look, and you stop to help her reach something on a high shelf.  Or maybe you’re standing in a line and just to pass the time you smile at a child’s antics or talk to a stranger.

A man is traveling, all alone, and he comes upon two other travelers.

He walks into a conversation. They’re discussing the weekend, arguing about the meaning of the death of Jesus. They don’t know the man traveling alone but as strangers on the same path sometimes do he asks them what they’re discussing.

 

Now there are two sorts of people in the world: those who keep up with the news and those who don’t.  Newsy people turn on NPR when they come home or watch the six o’clock news and then the eleven o’clock edition to make sure they haven’t missed anything.  Newsy people are always amazed when they run into the other sort.  They are newsy.  So when he asked, they answered with some combination of smugness and incredulity, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who doesn’t know what happened in Jerusalem this weekend?”

He didn’t so they filled him in.  They explained that Jesus of Nazareth was a mighty prophet who was put to death over the weekend by the authorities. They told him of their hope that he would redeem Israel.  They told him about the women who found an empty tomb. But their faces and their steps spoke too, spoke and told him that they have lost their hope in fear and didn’t have any left for such nonsense. After all, they are on their way away from Jerusalem.

The strange traveler held up his end of the conversation. In fact, once he got the gist of it, he had a lot to say.  He told them they were foolish and questioned the strength of their hearts.  He may not have known much about the news, but it turned out that he was well read on Moses and the prophets.  

What did he tell them?   No one knows, exactly.  But I think he must have told them something like this: God’s love is so wonderful, so powerful, so unlimited, it can’t be stopped by the authorities any more than the tide can.  That is, after all, what you find in the stories of Moses and the prophets: over and over again they tell the story of how God loved beyond measure, even when God’s people were faithless and mean and small spirited.

A man is traveling, all alone, and he talks to two others who are also lonely, because fear is a lonely business.

All day long they talk about Jesus and the prophets until it’s getting near sunset. Now, the roads got dangerous after dark and the man who is traveling all alone doesn’t have a place to stay.  So, the other two ask him to stay with them.  He did and that evening after they freshen up they all get together for supper – a simple meal of bread and wine.  

They had been talking about Jesus all day, and I suppose that they must have told the stranger about how Jesus invited strangers and the lonely to his table, how he blessed the bread and broke it, how he gave thanks and poured the wine. And suddenly, as the lonely traveler was doing these very things their eyes were opened, and they understood that they had been to blinded by fear and disappointment to notice that Jesus had been with them all along.

Of course, you listened carefully to the scripture, and you’ve heard it before.  So you knew it was Jesus all along. I think that some part of us always wonders about those two travelers.  We shake our heads and ask “How could they not have known they were talking to Jesus?”  Some of us might even be thinking... “You fools!  Just open your eyes.  He’s right in front of you.”  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people – adults as well as children – wonder out loud if Jesus looked different, and I suppose death might change a person.  

I don’t think that that’s the reason they didn’t recognize him, and I’m not sure that the reason why really matters.  In the end, they did recognize him, and the “why” of that moment is more important.

Certainly they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread and the blessing of the cup, but I think that moment goes back farther in their story.  I think it might have its roots in the picture Jesus painted about judgment day and which people were in the kingdom.  The people were gathered together and told: You’re in! When I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked you clothed me, when I was imprisoned you visited me!” and they looked at each other in amazement and said, “When did we do any of that for you?”  He answered, “When you did it for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it for me.”  They hadn’t recognized Jesus.  They just did what Jesus would have done - they followed the way of love and compassion.

The same thing was true in Emmaus. The two travelers experienced the Risen Christ by welcoming another … by feeding him … by sharing the cup with him.  By their actions, the loner disappeared.  He became a part of a community.  Together, they learned to embrace a new way of being together. They became the Body of Christ because they recognized Christ in their midst … in each other.

I used to think that little story about the judging of the nations meant that we should get more involved in compassionate outreach and social action.  We should give out food, clothes, and fuel.  We should visit the sick, the lonely, and the imprisoned.  If we can, we should get the government to help out, but we shouldn’t wait for a miracle there.  It’s up to us.

I still think those are good things to do, but the more I think about it, the more I think there is something deeper, something more difficult and more wonderful in that story.  We can meet the needs of strangers, but what God really hopes for is that we will become a blessing to the people where we are - that we will embody the work that God does by becoming a caring community – the hands and arms of Christ to reach out in love.

That seems to be how God works.  When God set out to save the world, for example, God did not create a new program, offer a policy proposal or hold an election, God went and whispered to Abram: “Come be a blessing”.  When God gets to the next act and decides to come into the world, there’s no processional, no entourage and no advance at all, just a baby and a family.  And even when Jesus is on the cross, he reached out to make one more family saying to his own mother, “Woman, here is your son”, and to John, “Here is your mother.”

That’s what happens in this story.  As strangers meet, share a conversation and then communion, they discover that they are connected after all.  They become part of a community put together by the Christ who lives in their midst.  Even a lot of compassionate care and social action is not enough to make that happen.  What we really need is to take the time to come together … to make strangers into friends and friends into brothers and sisters in the community of Christ.  It is by building that community that we will discover the risen Christ.
That’s the power of the resurrection for me. We experience it each time that we see Jesus walking and talking and realize he’s right next to us. We experience it when we take care of each other the way we would take care of him. The resurrection happens again and again each time we recognize Jesus in our very midst.

It’s not hard to feel sorry for strangers.  We don’t know them, and all we see is a person who is suffering … a person who is hungry or homeless or sick.

 It’s not hard to feel sorry for strangers, but it is often difficult to see Jesus in the people nearby because they are so annoying. They make the same mistakes over and over.  They don’t seem to want to take your own good advice, and sometimes they don’t seem to be able to follow the simplest directions.  So, it is easy to see how wrong they are, and it’s satisfying in a way too.  But there’s a deeper reason we are here together and the reason is to so that we can become more like the kind of people God hopes we’ll be.

We may start out that way, but along the way we tend to fall away from that vision.  We wander off the path and find all kinds of ways to avoid our true identity.  I won’t list out all the ways that happens because the ones that don’t affect you personally might leave you feeling a little smug and the ones that do might make you embarrassed. But we do all make mistakes, and the important point is that God is right there trying to clean up the mess and put us back together.  

That’s in this story too.  Remember where the disciples are headed when the lonely stranger first meets them?  They’re walking away from Jerusalem.  They are going the wrong way.  And does Jesus chide them or send them back to the city?  No, he walks with them.  He goes out of the way to bring them around.  He’s willing to go the wrong way round, to get to the right place.

What about us? Where’s Jesus here? Look around: take a very good look. Because the whole thrust of this story is that he is right here, waiting to be discovered. He will be discovered when we take up our vocation to care the way he does. A playwright once said, “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. God’s grace is glue.”[1] If we take up the vocation of mending each other’s hopes and lives, comforting each other’s fears and hurts, I believe we will see Jesus, I believe we will see him right here and it won’t matter that we went the wrong way round because wherever we find him … whenever we find him, we will know that we have come home.

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[1] Eugene O’Neill, THE GREAT GOD BROWN, Act IV, Sc. i. You'll find it in Vol. III, p. 318, of the Collected Plays edited by Random House.; As quoted by Anne Lamott on page 112 of

Traveling Mercies, 112.