Rev. Dr. Dennis Winkleblack Sermon
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Rev. Dr. Dennis Winkleblack
Sunday, May 4, 2014, Third Sunday of Easter
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford, CT
It's late on Easter Sunday. Two followers of Jesus, feeling very lost and defeated at the news of Jesus’ crucifixion, are making their way to a little town called Emmaus. Biblical archaeologists have tried to find Emmaus. Many figure it was around 7 miles or so Northwest of Jerusalem. But no one knows for sure.
It probably doesn’t matter. As Frederick Buechner writes, “Emmaus is the place we go to in order to escape – a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.”
As they're walking, a stranger falls into step with them. The Gospel writer, Luke, says it's Jesus. As the readers of the story, we now know the stranger's identity, but to the disillusioned disciples, he's still a stranger.
Now, exactly why they didn't recognize him immediately, we have no clue. Likely, it’s just the way the mind works: when you know someone is dead, they’re the last person you’d think of meeting on the street. In any case, they didn't recognize Jesus.
As night falls and their home is in sight, the stranger is inclined to continue on the road. Middle Eastern etiquette says no one would presume to be invited into someone else’s home. But the disciples say, "Stay with us." And he does.
Then, in the course of the evening around the table, the darndest thing happened, as if scales had fallen from their eyes: They realize the stranger is Jesus! The men now had more than the rumor of an empty tomb and a missing body. They had their leader back!
It’s long been a matter of debate as to what might have happened around the table to have opened the eyes of Jesus’ depressed followers. Clearly it wasn’t a sermon or even good biblical exegesis for as they were walking, Luke writes, “Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, Jesus interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”
But they still didn’t get it! Not even with Jesus doing the preaching!
So what, we wonder, could possibly have taken place for them to see that Jesus was Jesus?
Perhaps it might have been the way Jesus gave thanks over the bread. For there in that moment when anything but gratitude was in the air, when the noise from the shattering of dreams was still echoing, Jesus gave thanks to God for the bread they were about to eat.
BIG dreams do die hard, don’t they? Have you ever had a big dream for your life, but then one day had to admit it was dead? That it just wasn’t going to happen? Maybe it was about a job or a career. Or a relationship. Or something very personal? Have you ever had a dream so large that it once drove every minute of your life, but then was no more?
And how did you feel in that awful moment of awareness? Empty, sad, angry, depressed beyond words, despairing.
And what does one typically do in times like those? Give thanks?
In a church I used to serve there was a young man, around 12 years old, who came to our church with his mother. The young man was mentally challenged. The father couldn’t deal with having a less than perfect child and the couple had divorced a few years before. We set up a special class with a special teacher just for him so he could go to Sunday School just like everyone else.
One might wonder if his mother ever said to herself "If only my child had been born ‘normal.’" But apparently she didn’t spend much time thinking such thoughts. She told me her blessings far outweighed her burdens.
I used to watch him and his mother interact. Truly, it was beautiful. The way he would run to greet her after Sunday School. The smiles and the kisses they shared couldn't have been more glorious. No mother was ever more proud than she.
Gratitude. There likely is nothing more subversive in a challenging time than gratitude. In fact, in challenging times, gratitude, being grateful at all for anything, is a sure sign that God is implanted in your soul.
At sundown on Sunday night in a house filled with hopelessness, a stranger says, "Thanks." So, perhaps what enabled the two followers to recognize the one who had taught them to live always in gratitude to God was being reminded in bodily form of that subversive godly gift of gratitude.
Or, maybe what caused them to see the light were his hands. Luke records that the stranger took the bread in his hands and broke it.
Hands reveal so much about us -- gnarled, twisted hands; calloused hands, delicate hands; an open hand, a clenched fist. Hands tell so much of our story.
My mother died about 30 years ago. I remember looking at her hands folded gently across herself in the casket. I remembered one of those hands holding mine walking to my first kindergarten class with Mrs. DeBow. I was scared. I didn't know anyone. She was leaving me. But then she kissed me and left me there to make my way in my new world.
Now I looked at her hands folded across her chest and remembered how those hands had sometimes held on and sometimes let go. And probably did it all about as well as it could be done.
Hands. Hands touch all of life from the sublime to the most unpleasant. There is nothing more earthy, earthly about us than our hands.
And, to be sure, Jesus was nothing if not earthy. His hands touched everything from lepers to those possessed to fish and bread and wine.
The two men, of course, had witnessed Jesus’s hands in action. They had seen what God is like when God is being God: when earthiness is made divine. So, perhaps it was this reminder of Jesus’ divine earthiness that jarred open the disciples’ minds and hearts to the stranger in their midst.
Or, were their eyes opened because there was something about the way Jesus took charge of the supper and served them? Luke is clear. The house may not belong to the stranger, but the supper does. Jesus, the invited guest, becomes the host.
With their leader dead, these men had no center, nothing to give life any real purpose. They were on a road to the proverbial nowhere. They must have been totally confused about God. In any case, whatever life had been like for them before meeting Jesus, it was soon going to be only the same old, same old.
''Get over it and move on with your lives." Isn't that what everyone says or implies when a dream has died, or even when a loved one has died? "Get over it and move on with your lives."
In a world where good people like Jesus get nailed, where children die in a school for no good reason, where fanatics bomb buildings, where anyone with a hand gun can alter the world for scores of people, where senseless wars continue as if no one has learned anything from history ----- sometimes nothing makes any sense at all.
So, might as well get over it and move on with your lives, because there's nothing rational that will take away your hurt and help you make sense of things. Just get over it and move on.
No wonder the followers of Jesus were overcome with despair.
Yet in that room their eyes were opened by something. And it well may have had to do with Jesus serving them like he served them only 3 nights before just moments away from his arrest. Indeed, maybe it was this joining of God and daily bread and serving them that was the tipping point in causing the disciples to recognize the divine, earthy, caring Jesus in their midst.
At this point, in verse 33, Luke's Gospel records a most remarkable thing: "They (the followers) got up and returned to Jerusalem." They didn't even spend the night in Emmaus.
They went back to Jerusalem - the place of pain and perplexity and post-mortems. But, clearly, they went back with a new presence and power and purpose.
Lost and dead and hopeless: this is how only a few hours earlier it had all seemed to the followers of Jesus. It had seemed as if nothing was true except that life was terribly uncertain with a bent for the worst. Now there was a new truth: "There is always hope in God.”
So, would this mean, then, that there would be no more uncertainty? That there would be no more crosses? No more valleys?
You and I know better. The truth of the Resurrection is not that there are no more deaths and tombs, no more sufferings and sadness. I mean, you can't preach that to the folks on the Hospice floor of the hospital. Or, try to convince the parents of the children who died in Sandy Hook that belief in Jesus, going to church, being good means you get special breaks in this cruel world.
No, even people of faith live in good-bad Jerusalem where bad things happen to good people. It was then and is now, even after the Resurrection, a Bad/Good Friday kind of world.
Something, though, also became equally as true for the followers of Jesus on that late Easter afternoon long ago. And what became equally as true as the unpredictable, unfair, often inexplicable world was that the stranger in their midst was God in the flesh. In him, heaven had reached down and embraced earth! And, what was best: this Jesus reality would never die!
And so it is that the Christ still comes to us. Indeed, our religion is nothing if not a physically based, earthly, earthy spirituality. We call it incarnation, God in the flesh once; God in the flesh still.
Curtis Almquist writes: “I suspect for some of us, the people in our past who stood by us are indistinguishable from God: they are what God looked like and sounded like and felt like. Their presence was, to us, an experience of transcendence. They incarnated God, truly.”
At the end of themselves, the two lost souls found an embodied God.
And so it is for us: Whenever we are at the end of ourselves – whenever we are at the end of ourselves – with eyes of faith, Jesus shows up.