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The Road to Imumeaue
luke 24:13-32 :
April 18, 1971

John M,. Buchanan Rea

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, celebrated last Sunday, cannot be con-
fined to a one-day observation, The early Christian Church acknowledged it
and moved the day of corporate worship from the Sabbath ~ sundown Friday till
sundown Saturday - to Sunday, the first day of the week, the day of Resurrec-
tion. The intent was that whenever Christians gather +o worship, they should
do so out of their sense that the Lord Jesus Christ is alive, and that this
fact is the most important element of their gathering.

ind yet, in a very real sense, things are not that way at all. By
making go much of Baster Sunday. we diminish the significance of the Resurrec—
tion on every other Sunday. By tying the celebration of Christ's resurrection
to our culture's annual "Rite of Spring" we, in faét, sever the connecting
link between the central Christian event, and the whole experience of the °
Church. The fact that there were approximately 150% more people here last
Sunday than on any other given Sunday of the year ought to tell us something.

So on this day which is traditionally an areligious day for the church;
on this day when ministers usually feel empty, having turned it all on for
Lent and Holy Week, I would direct your attention back to the Resurrection,
and to a consideration of the idea that the world is a different place, and
every moment of every day is essentially different, because of what we ccle=
brated one week ago.

In classic terms the Resurrection means that Jesus Christ defeated the
powers of death, evil’ and sin; that we are safe from the power of death and
free from the power of sin, and that human life may be lived in an environment
of essential hopefulness. That is what most Easter sermons are about, in-
cluding the one preached from this. pulpit.

But the Resurrection also means that this Jesus Christ who was. dead is

alive: that he is present im the life of the world, and that obviously, is

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avery difficult doctrine. It is one thing to celebrate something which
tock place 2,000 years ago. It is another thing to extend the celebration
into a contemporary reality with which I ae deal in every day of my life.

Now, let's pause for a moment and do some clarifying. ‘Sometimes we
have difficulty with the traditional language of our faith. Words which once
had great significance tend to 1o#e content over the years; and often we find
ourselves using words without the foggiest notion what they mean. Put another
way, we use the words without knowing what identifiable, human experiences
they are meant to describe. Well, when the phrases "the Risen Christ," "The
Presence of God, and "The Holy Spirit" are used, my interpretation is that
we are talking. about the same, single human eiterténoe Not three séparate
phenomena, but the single experience that the reality we know as God is
strangely available to us.

That doctrine, and it Lecterns from our belief in the Resurrection, is
very important. It means, for instance, that we do not live in an abandoned
world but a world that is constantly being invaded by God himself. It means
that God the creator is not a bs aul aaeatn type who got everything going in
the beginning, but who has since ve back in some corner of the universe
observing it ran—down. Rather he is a participant in the unfolding of
creation: he is party to everything that happens, and his ereating is still
going on.

Those ideas are very important to the Christian Faith, and yet J sense
that they are not too important for most Presbyterians. Fancy, provocetive
theology -— but not practical reality. Good sermon material, but not the
kind ef idea that has relevance in the office, plant or elassroom.

The Pentecostals seem to be pretty sure of the divine presence, but
they've got their own private voeabiel ay, and their own esoteric, mystical
~experiences, all of which is a bit bewildering to the average Presbyterian.

Yet they seem to be pretty positive when thoy talk about an experience with

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Jesus Christ - and not many Presbyterians are.

Likewise the very pious, the nun in the cloister, the monk in the mona-
stery, the clergyman given to eiak prayer and reflection, seem to have a hold
of God's presence in the daily round in a way most of us do not,

find in those observations — that I would seen’ reflect the Presbyterian
mentality - Keay jt any experience of the reality of Jesus Christ depends
on traumatic, emotional upheavals, or the glib use of all the properly pious
phrases, or a life of quiet devotion walled off from all the rest, - in
that is a piviotal theological assumption. It is that God dwells only in
special places, and comes to special people only, and that any personal
religious experience must be marked by strange and unique behavior, words
and life style: 4t which point wo have left entirely the good news of the
Gospel, I+ sounds, in fact, like that old Greek idea that there are two
realms ~ the worldly and the spiritual, totally apart; that a man could move
in and out of each of them at his discretion; that most people spend most
of the time dealing with the worldly, with an oceasional foray into the
spiritual.

That is not a Christian idea. The Good News is that there is no longer
an easy iMatinetion between the worldly and the spiritual: there are no longer
holy places as opposed to worldly places, but that because God came into the
life of the world in Jesus Christ everything is now both holy and worldly -
all experiences, all relationships, all activity, all of time. God is
present in the common life of the world. That is what it means to believe
in a resurrected Christ. ind I think that is what comes through the little
post-resurrection story I read this morning from Luke's Gospel.

Let's reconstruct it. Sunday would have been the worst day of all.
Saturday - on ambiguous, nothing kind of day. i poet once observed "After
great pain a formal feeling comes." [Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent

Defeat, p. 83] We know a little bit about that. Whenever tragedy strikes ¥

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close to home we suddenly become very formal. It's one of the ways we pro~
teot ourselves from the full impact of what has happened, and most people
are glad for the little rituals we adopt in time of tragedy for this reason.
Saturday would have been that kind of day for his friends and disciples.
Little by little they were confronting the terrible thing that had happened.
I can see them doing a lot of pacing back and forth in their little locked
room, trying to make conversation, being a bit more solicitious than usual.
But the formality does not last long. Lafe has to go on somehow, even though
it is now different. The day after a funeral is always hard for us because
all the formality is gone and it is time to face the implications of what
happened.

Sunday was that kind of day, the hardest of all. For the Jews, Sunday
was like our Monday - the first day of the week. For Jerusalem it was tho
morning after the Passover. Life's cycle was beginning again: onsittatte
was returning to normal.

So it was that two of them did the only thing that made sense. To be
sure, a few hysterical women had claimed that the tomb was empty. ~But it
was only a rumor, ind rather than spend the day in Jerusalem two of them
decided +o go to Emmaus. Now Emmaus is just a few miles outside of Jeru-
salem; there appears to have been nothing much there, and it seems that the
only thing Emmanus had going for it was the fact that it wosn't Jerusalem.
They wore, that is to say, indulging in a little normal, predictable
escapism, which under the same conditions we would have done as well.

As they walked along the road they were joined by a third man with whom
they talked, ond to whom they ventilated some of their feelings about the
deaths events of Thursday ond Friday. They talked about it gome, and the
stranger referred them to those Old Testament passages which describe the
Messiah in terms of suffering and death. When they had arrived at Immaus

they persuaded him to stay with them for the evening meal. When he broke

bread, blessed it and gave it to thom, they recognized who it was. It was

Jesus - he was alive and in their midst. Then he left them. As quickly as Nes

he had come he vanished. me
What do you make of that? is is the case with the resurrection itself, S

no one was there getting it all on video tape. Presumably the story was told

by the two men who experienced, preserved by tho church until Luke wrote it

down. le aren't going to know for sure what happened to these two men =

except that in the middle of the journey to ‘Emmaus thoy had an experience

that convinced them that Jesus Christ was risen from the dead. ¥
I think there are two very important things we can learn from the story,

however. The first is that the divine presence in life — called the Living {

God, the Rison Christ or the Holy Spirit — is not confined to those special

times and places we usually regard as spiritual or holy. There is, in all

the resurrection stories an clement at ts common, the everyday. His birth ye

was heralded by an angel choir and kings bearing gifts. But this event

happened in the undramatic, sicectabeke oataks of life: Mary in the garden

mistaking him for the gardner, Thomas hiding out in a locked house, Peter .

taking his; boat out to fish at night time, and now these two - aiding down

a dusty road and breaking bread together. There is doting mick dramatic,

or unearthly or other worldly about it. The Gospel writers clearly wanted 3

the readers to understand the resurrection is experienced in the common

things of life.

Well, that's pretty significant, if it is true. It means, for instance,

that the sacred moments are often the everyday moments: and the holy places,
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just common places: and the truly religious experiences in which one feels

full of the love and presence of God, are not confined to the church build-

ing - but are the places where we spend most of our time. + | | ae
William Stringfellow put it this way: "It is this world, the world we 2

know, the world just as it is into which God comes, for which God cares, in mT

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which God is with us... ." [p. 62, A Private and Public Faith] And later,
"Now I am suroc of the Resurrection... It is not just some long ago event.
It is at once long an and hete and now. «. . Tt ig no myth . i. «-1t is
no abstract philosophic proposition .... It is no self-induced positive
thought... . but the disclosure of the vitality of doa in this world." [p. 71]
4 group of young people from Lafayette were in Washington D. C. last
weekend. ind on Easter Sunday they worshipped in the National Cathedral ~
an awesome and beautiful building. Some of them went forward to receive
communion — walked down the long aisle to the ornate chancel. One person who
did not go forward said they acted when thoy came back as if they had seen
God. That's understandable human experience. But the story of the Road to
Emmanus suggests that God is equally present in the crime ridden, dirty
streets of Washington, as he is at the Altar of the National Cathedral. It
suggests to mc that we may have trouble perceiving the Risen Christ because
we look too high when in fact he walks with us along dusty roads, and comes
to us as we sit to break bread together.
The story also suggests that it does little good to try to escape him.

I said carlier that we know a littlo bit about the art of escapism. Perhaps

we simply go to the movies to get away from it all. Or perhaps a few cocktails

give us that blessed relief from stress and strain. Or perhaps we fill our
lives with busyness to avoid confronting the fact that nothing has much mean=
ing and we're getting nowhere fast. The story of the road to Emmaus means
that Jesus Christ comes to us particularly as we try to escape; that he
pursues us even as we try to get away from him; that there is nowhere in life
we can go that is away from his presence.

That's important because I think at the heart of the religious mood
today is this old and mistaken idea that we can keep life neatly compart—
montalized: that the religious person is a different 4f not eccentric person:

that the presence of God - if it is real at all - is availatile and recognizablo

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“to only tose who devote their 12608 to teiok religious".
‘The resurrection of Jesus aint means that he is not ‘be but aie

that your life and my life are the arenas of his prosence: that he ok da

with us: that he is always out there, Geeply, so a in, the life of tho —

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May we become increasingly senai tive to that. — nae? overy sunday weet Cs =
day of resurrection. May every day be lived in communion ith ‘the one who ~
keeps coming into our midst. :

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Our father, give us care to hear your word as it cones through the
—_ —— of the world. Give us eyes to gee your presence in the lives | }
we lead. “Give us hearts responsive when you ‘come to us af a stranger, a
friend, a loved one. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.