CHRIST AND THE COMMONPLACE John M. Buchanan
Luke 24:13-32 © ' Broad Street Presbyterian Church.
May 3; 1. 1 an Columbus, Ohio

It ha.;ened to Moses cne day as he was tending a fl.ck cf sheen: a voice from
out of a burning bush telling him to take off his shoes because the ground on
which he was standing was holy: telling hi: to go down to Egypt and lead God's
people into freedom. It happened to Isaiah, mysteriously in the Temple one day:
the air was full of the smoke and aroma of incense, six-winged seraphim flew back
and forth, one of whom touched Isaiah's lips with a burning coal and out of that
tremendous experience God called the prophet. It happened to St. Paul, Saul of
Tarsus as he was known then, one day on the road to Damascus, There was a blinding
light which knoc':ed him down and the risen Christ appeared. Joan of Arc had "her
voices", It happened to Peter Marshall in the middle of a violent thunderstorm
and Oral Roberts recently saw a vision of a 90( foot tall Jesus telling him to
build his medical center in Tulsa.

The trouble is that most of us have not had a comparable religious experience.

It's not that we doubt that others have them, or are having them today. It's

just that nothing remotely li!:e what happened to Moses, Isaiah, or Paul has ever
happened to us. Many of us, as a consequence, spend most of our lives wondering if
what we have is the real thing: wondering if we're missing something, feeling
envy even at those people in history, or our friends for that matter, whose faith
is grounded in some verifiable experience which involved their senses; something
they saw or heard or smelled or touched. We don't admit it and we certainly
wouldn't choose to discuss it but somewhere deep in many of us’ is the feeling that
since we have not had our faith confirmed in some marvelous experience and others
have, God must not be interested in us, or we aren't good enough, or spiritual
“enough, or we aren't tzying hard enough. Sometimes it occurs to us that our own
poverty of religious experience means that the whole business is simply fantasy
and the people who claim to have had that kind of experience are blessed with
hyper-active imaginations.

Scratch the surface of a Presbyterian and before long you will encounter some-

thing like what I have been saying. And that is why I love the story of Emmaus.

It really isn't an extraordinary story at all. In fact, it is utterly common-
place, It can't hold a candle, in terms of drama and high emotional content, to
‘most of the experiences which will be the subject of intense testimony on radio and
TV this morning. What happened at Emmaus gathers up our humanity, our ordinariness
and speaks directly to the whole matter of the concerns, questions and cynicism
‘we have about religious experience,

The setting is Easter Day, but the story belongs more to the Season of Easter-
tide, the time when Christians think about the continuing reality of the resurrec-
tion. In any event, it is after the fact, later in the day on Sunday, the first
day of a new *¥2ek. Sunday morning in Jerusalem was like a Monday in Columbus. The
Passover Sabbath was over, most of the pilgrims had headed home, the market place
was back in business, the banks open, and life was returning to normal. The dis-
ciples of Jesus, in the meantime, were acting like members of a family the day after
a funeral. Life has to go on somehow but you have the distinct sense that every-
thing is different, that you're a little out of step. You're surprised to see the
sun shining and the shops open'and people going about their business.

The disciples' situation was complicated even further on that first day of a
new week. None of them had performed very well in the final hours of His life.

oe

The broad assumption adrift in the land is that when God acts He will do so
in a way that is verifiable by the senses, He will speak in a voice that can be
heard or perform a miracle that can be seen, Those who don't agree or who haven't
had the experience are left, therefore, feeling spiritually inadequate, tottering
on the edge of unbelief. "Lord, if you are there, please give me something to
hold onto!"

A theologian friend of mine from Louisville Seminary was addressing a Con-
ference for church leaders on the future last week. He recited the standard list of
concerns about that future: poverty, violence, energy, economic justice in the
Third World. He profoundly disturbed many in the conference with a statement some-
thing like this. "Brothers and sisters: we are fresh out of miracles. God is not
going to part the Red Sea this time around." What he meant was that God does His
miracle wor!:ing through people and always has. God wasn't the only actor at the
Red Sea: it took Moses' audacity and foolhardy leadership and the people's faith and
courage to wade in. In fact, that is the real miracle at the Red Sea, as, you think
about it: not God parting the waters - but the courage of the people to walk in.
Centuries later when they wrote it down they gave God the credit, which is a good
thing, except that too many people keep waiting for Him to do something lite it
' again - which He would be happy to do if someone will contribute leadership Like
' Moses and if others will be brave and obedient and faithful.

If we just paid a little more attention to the Bible we would know better, of (oe
course. Those men on the way to Emmaus didn't experience the Risen Christ in a v\al 4
blaze of glorious light: they weren't knocked off their feet by His radiance. As a Vp v
matter of fact they didn't even recognize Him and when they did it was in the most ¢ %
routine of acts, and. as soon as they did He left. I take that to be a model of ae
religious experience which can be helpful, and comforting, to most of the Christians ‘a

I happen to know...Christ in the Commonplace.

A New York Times Entertainment. section feature several wee's ago suggested
that Hollywood is "into the ordinary". Instead of a Promethean George Patton, this
year's military star is a bumbling Private Benjamin; a Coal Miner's Daughter is
a new heroine and, of course, Ordinary People, an extraordinary motion picture pre-
cisely because it captured the poignant ordinariness of humanity. It is a healthy
dynamic, I believe, that celebration of commonness and normality. If there is sig-
nificance in life for you and me it will have to be in some modest, limited, set
of circumstances. Not all of us can be Chairman of the Board. Not very many can be
rich and famous. The cult of rising expectations has fed our fantasies, from
Playboy's promise of sensual delight to the slick ads for Johnny Walker Black Label
and Rolls Royce on the Sunday Times. But for the vast majority of us life significant
enough to be celebrated will be in far more modest circumstances.

More important, our faith is that God uses the ordinary for His purposes and
Jesus Christ will be known and served and followed in the commonplace. There is
something particularly Presbyterian about that. We were born as a church out of an
idea that ordinary people, with God's help, are perfectly capable of ordering their
own spiritual affairs. Their clergy are called to help them understand the Bible,
but ordinariness has always been so important that we carefully circumscribe those
clergy lest they begin to think they are somehow different. Those we choose to rule
we call Elders - not the Board of Directors, but modestly, the Session. I confess,
I wanted to call this sermon "Ordaining the Ordinary", but decided not to lest those
ordained today conclude I was describing their credentials. To the contrary, our
strength is in the fact that we ordain members of the church and ask them to be
spiritual leaders.