Luke 24:13-35
Rev. Jay Rowland
Sunday April 26, 2020
Many folks these days are doing a lot more walking. Springtime always has this effect on us. But ever since the stay-at-home restriction was issued a couple weeks ago I’ve seen many more people walking in my neighborhood. The image and activity of walking is a wonderful touch-stone for today’s story from Luke’s gospel--often referred to as the Walk to Emmaus. Peter Hanson provides a wonderful entre to this story, helping us enter into this story given the current global crisis (from the d365 daily devotional for Wed 4/22/20 d365.org):
Imagine you’re walking with a friend, keeping your “social distance,” comparing thoughts about our current situation, sort of like Cleopus, when suddenly, someone interrupts your conversation to ask what you’re talking about. But when you tell him, he honestly replies,
“Kah … Kah-row... kah-what-now?”
“How do you not know about this?” you ask. “This world-stopping virus that has millions of people very sick--and killed thousands; closed restaurants and schools, the reason why there’s so much space between us as we walk along--uh, by the way, would you please back up a few steps?---any of this sound familiar ??? No????”
We’d probably be rolling our eyes and biting our tongues with such a stranger at this point. And that’s Cleopas’ strong reaction to the stranger who intrudes upon his conversation with his companion. But he quickly settles down and treats the stranger with compassion rather than contempt, patiently sharing what he knows--including their devastation, their dashed hopes and the equally-hard-to-comprehend news from the women at the tomb.
We may perhaps be in different “places” from one another in our response to and our coping with this pandemic. The walk to Emmaus is a vivid reminder of the importance of talking to each other, sharing our own stories of sorrow, unmet expectations, and dashed hopes; our sense of loss, our stresses, our fears and apprehension. Sharing and talking it out is a way for us to keep watch together for hope and for new beginnings as we walk this walk together. For the Lord surely blesses such conversations, using them to awaken our compassion and deepen our connection with each other--at a time when this is what we most need to keep our hope and our humanity alive.
That’s what I see happening between the two companions on the walk to Emmaus. They’re processing everything that’s just happened--the awful death of Jesus on Friday, his public assassination/crucifixion by the State, but also the perplexing account of the women at the tomb that Jesus is … alive(!?????) It’s all just too much to take in. So they’re walking … and talking … with plenty of long pauses in between. Richard Swanson points out the significance of the distance between Jerusalem to Emmaus Luke identifies for us: it’s a two-hour walk; then another two-hour walk back to Jerusalem. Many folks appreciate how therapeutic a good walk can be. It helps clear the cluttered mind. Therapeutic but also sacred. There’s something sacred about the walk Cleopas and his companion are on. Just like any and every walk we’ve taken together or alone since the invasion of COVID-19.
As the two companions walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus, they are walking toward someplace like home, and if not home, then perhaps at least some distance between themselves and the place their hope turned to despair, the place where the world came crashing down on them, and also, strangely, the place where they were told something too-good-to-be-true (rationally speaking), too good to let themselves hope … All of this swirling in their heads and in their conversation as their feet take step after step forward. They are moving toward some “place” of stability, someplace familiar where they might recognize life the way it used to be, some “place” where they might at least be recognized or better, recognizable to themselves--a very human response to the trauma and the powerlessness they have experienced.
In The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner identifies Emmaus as the place to run to when we have lost hope or don’t know what to do, a place of escape, of forgetting, of giving up, of deadening our senses and our minds and maybe our hearts, too. For some that may be home. For others, it may simply be any place which offers relief from the burdens of life. Buechner even asserts that for some, Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday.1
Wherever that “place” may be for any of us, it’s a deeply human response to trauma and danger--this impulse to move, to get to our Emmaus. And if our Emmaus is church then praise God! For at its best, faith community, it seems to me, is that rare place where we truly experience that we are life companions. Fun fact: the word “companion” is rooted in the Latin words “with” (com) and “bread” (panis).2
The resurrection appearances of Jesus are, above all, powerful glimpses into faith community, that is, our community of believers, doubters, and struggle-ers gathering and breaking apart, and gathering again, coming together to share experiences, memories, difficulties and hope. Most importantly, faith community is the place where we are gathered and claimed by the promises and actions of Jesus. Whenever we gather together to worship we seek and shine the light of Scripture on our struggles in order to find new, deeper understandings about what’s going on in our lives.
And so, after spending considerable time ... and miles … and words … seeking some intellectual understanding of all that has happened, when at last Cleopas and his unnamed “companion” sit down together at table and break bread with the stranger, at last they come to see with their hearts what (Who) was with them all along.
Next time we share communion together, remember, the word companion literally means, “with bread.” We are companions, we are a faith community whose main identity is “with bread”—Bread of Life. Without this identity established deep in our “dna,” in our very marrow, there’s nothing to distinguish us from any other community group no matter how wonderful or helpful such groups can be. Our community was formed and fashioned in and around a particular community narrative.
First the disciples’ world is turned upside down by the life of Jesus. Then their re-oriented world is suddenly obliterated by his death. None of them has had time to absorb it all. Think about that. The first days after the death of someone close to us, the first days are a blur, a haze, an effort to simply function—to get through the day. Others need us or expect us to be functional. That’s where all the disciples are after Jesus is assassinated. They are living in that blurry haze when the strange, new stories of Jesus’ appearance begin to spread among them.
There are times in our lives when we are shaken to the core of our foundation—what we believe in, what we count on—too fast to process and integrate. This leaves us disoriented. Lost. Faith community, even a couple of companions, helps re-gather us, re-orient us, helping us move toward some peace and balance, which then helps us begin to re-build a new foundation, together.
This is one of those times. This is partly why the pandemic is causing so much wide-spread anxiety and stress previously unimagined. The lethal threat of this lurking virus has shaken our foundation--our orientation to life and the world around us. It has challenged our presumptions about safety and security and justice, and mortality.
Like the disciples long ago, our world has been flipped upside-down. We’re suddenly trying to integrate new information and experience. Like the disciples after Jesus’ death, many of us feel especially anxious and uncertain about the future. COVID-19 is an invisible enemy, impossible to ignore or flee or combat. And so in the midst of all the anxiety, stress, and fear, we’re not sure what to believe, or what to do, or think, or expect, or even hope for. And so we find ourselves today on that road to Emmaus with two disciple-companions who were themselves trying to make sense of their world after following the One who had brought new meaning, new hope, new trust to their lives.
In the end, their experience of the Risen Christ was fleeting (“and suddenly their eyes were opened and they recognized him. Then he vanished from their sight”). Ours tends to be fleeting too. But perhaps that’s by design. Perhaps it is only afterwards, looking through the rear-view mirror that we are able to recognize and integrate the sacred and the holy better than we can in the moment. I am convinced that God is speaking to us today, in the midst of this global crisis, in the midst of our collective disorientation, through the encounter of Cleopas and the earliest Christians with the Risen Jesus, but also through our own fleeting encounters with Him too, in the breaking of bread, in the sharing of our stories, in our study of Scripture.
Because Scripture tells us more than something that happened to other people, long ago and far away. Scripture actually opens us to the amazing somethings, the wonderful appearings, the Life-sustaining Presence of God happening here, today, in our lives, too. If we can allow our eyes to be opened, then maybe our hearts, too, will burn within us. As we continue to struggle with questions we just can’t answer on our own, let alone understand, when we are shaken to our core by what’s happening around us, Scripture tells us we will find restoration and life together, often walking among us, as together we walk and talk and work our way with Jesus toward home and Emmaus.
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Notes:
1 This sermon integrates material by Kathryn Matthews, www.ucc.org/worship_samuel_sermon_seeds/
2 companion root words, Latin, com- (“with”) and panis (“bread, food”), www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/companion
