If you regularly go to the theater or come to church, you know that drama and religion are full of examples of characters, even gods, walking around in disguise. Now Jesus gets into the act. On Easter he appeared to Mary Magdalene looking like a gardener. Today he’s more of what Mark Twain would have called a “mysterious stranger”.
Today’s Gospel [Luke 24: 13-35] gives us Luke’s beloved account of Jesus’s appearance to his disciples on the road to Emmaus. This is a story we clergy just love to preach about, especially because of its final line: “He had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” The Eucharist is the holiest thing we Christians do, and it is not a big homiletical leap to say that we meet Jesus when we take communion together around the table.
Now that is certainly true, and nothing I’m about to say should be taken as a challenge to it. But, the more of these Emmaus sermons I hear over the years, the more I think they amount to a kind of special clerical pleading. I was ordained around the time the new prayer book (with its renewed emphasis on Eucharist) was adopted, and over the course of my life in the church I’ve seen the communion service force out all other kinds of corporate prayer. There was a time when churches couldn’t do anything—including a vestry meeting—without it being part of a Eucharist. When I was in seminary, the students who played volleyball wanted to have their year-end game as part of a Eucharist. (The dean, wisely I think, turned down their request to exchange the traditional elements for beer and pretzels.) And, of course, you can’t do communion without a priest. So, in a way unintended by the prayer book revisers, clergy became even more central to public worship than they had been before. There’s job security for you!
The Roman Catholic Church also experienced this phenomenon after Vatican II, the liturgical renewal that sparked our own prayer book revision. There have been a number of catholic studies suggesting that the range and variety of lay-led services in their church has declined over the decades just as it has in ours. Praying without a priest has seemed for some like a letdown, so why do it at all?
Now, in fact, I do believe that we meet Jesus in the breaking of the bread. It happens every Sunday. But the Emmaus story says something a bit more copious than that. As the disciples themselves say after Jesus’s vanishing from them, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” Yes, Jesus was made known to them in the breaking of the bread. But he was also revealed to them in the opening of the scriptures, in his recounting and proclaiming a sacred story.
When the disciples tell this mysterious stranger how perplexed they are about the events of Easter, he responds: “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?”
And then, we hear, “ beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” So, long before there has been a mystical breaking of bread, there has been something like an exchange of stories. The disciples have told Jesus their story, and he has told them his. Together these stories make up a new and fuller sacred narrative, one that sends them back to their friends with a new and expanded sense of meaning and purpose.
This story exchange is perhaps the most important thing that happens in this Emmaus encounter. The two disciples tell the stranger the events that took place in Jerusalem—the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus; then Jesus tells how their story fits into the big, long, scriptural story—“Moses and the prophets”. The Holy Week and Easter events are a story unto themselves, but they only make sense as parts of a bigger and deeper story that goes back to the creation itself. The two disciples need the big story to make sense of their own experience. The community needs their story of this encounter to complete the larger plan of salvation that is unfolding over time and space. Jesus tells the big story. Cleopas and the other unnamed disciple tell theirs. Together, these stories produce a new, deeper version of the truth.
If we mean what we say about all of us being made in God’s image; if we mean what we say about God being incarnate in Jesus and now in you and me; then it should be evident that every person’s history matters, that every human life is a new window into the experience and purposes of God. You have a story to tell. It is important to you, of course. But it is also important to me. We will never understand the fullness of God’s work in the world until we exchange the big story with the smaller ones and build them up into one new and gracious whole.
The older I get, the less interested I am in telling you the official, church-sanctioned version and the more interested I am in hearing what God is doing in you. It’s probably a good thing I’m about to retire again: it’s not a good corporate look to have a sales representative who thinks the customers are more interesting than the product.
Here’s why all this matters: when we talk only about meeting Jesus in the breaking of bread, we make it sound as if our business with God is a one-way street. I, the priestly authorized representative, impart to you, the lay consumer, the official sign of God’s presence at a highly-polished altar rail in an authorized liturgical rite. But reading the Bible tells us that God never works precisely like that. Even the Jerusalem Temple and authorized prophets could not regularly deliver the goods. It always took an outsider—David, Amos, Jesus, Paul—to rise up with a new truth. Biblical truth is almost never official and always messy. Your life experiences may not conform to your image of what holiness looks like, but they, too, are sacred story, and the witness of Christians across the centuries is that God is at work in even the most complicated and bumpy lives. You have a unique story to tell. We all need to hear it.
Well, I should probably stop talking now before the theology police come for me with their butterfly nets. I am grateful that Jesus opened the eyes of Cleopas and his friend to the larger things going on. And I am certain that Jesus took a new and expanded understanding away from that encounter himself. The big story is sacred history. Your story is holy, too. As Easter season unfolds, let us continue to gather and give thanks for the resurrection which is its heart, and let us speak and listen to each other so that we, too, may know Jesus and ourselves in the breaking of the bread. Amen.
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