IN THE BREAKING GF BREAD

April 10, 1988
11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Luke 24:13-31

“when Jesus was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed, and
broke it, and gave it to then.” ~Luke 24:30 (RSV)

This, I submit, is the most important: Sunday of the year.

By way of introducing that proposal, let me read a page out of a
wonderful first novel by Southern journalist, Olive Ann Burns. The title
of the novel is Cold Sassy Tree. That's the name of the fictional Georgia
town which is the setting. The intriguing characters include: Grandpa E.
Rucker Blakeslee and his grandson, Will Tweedy. Grandpa Blakeslee has
scandalized Cold Sassy Tree by marrying a beautiful, young hatmaker, Miss
Love Simpson, three weeks after his beloved wife died.

Since his hasty and eyebrow-raising marriage, Grandpa doesn't. go to
church anymore. He and Miss Love have church at home instead. Here is how
he describes it to Will Tweedy...

"We sang us some hymns, after which I talked to the Lord a while,
tellin' Him about the week, and then IE preached the sermon...

"I didn't have no words thought out,. you know, so I jest commenced
sayin’ thangs I been a-thinkin' on lately - 'bout the Virgin Birth and
Resurrection and all like thet. I said don't any a-them thangs matter.'

Will Tweedy is stunned. "Gosh, Grandpa, you mean you don't think
Jesus rose from the dead?"

Grandpa answers, “I'm a-sayin' thet did He or didn't He ain't
important, son. What's important is thet when the spirit a-Jesus Christ
come down on them disciples later, they quit settin' round a-moanin' and a-
tremblin', and got to work. They warn't scairt no more, and the words they
spoke had fire in'im. Compared to a miracle like thet, Jesus rollin' back a
dang rock and flyin' off to Heaven ain't nothin':" [p. 188]

That's pretty good theology. And that, it seems to me, is what those
of us who come back te church the Sunday after Easter are left with.

It is my favorite Sunday. Now that may seem like a very peculiar
choice. In fact, there is some thought that for the religious
professional, this is a good candidate for least favorite day - along with
the Sunday after Christmas, Labor Day, and those occasions in January when
the temperature stands at a frigid 10 degrees, the wind is at about 25
knots and the Bears are in the playoffs —- kickoff at 11:30.

The trouble with this Sunday is what do you do for an encore? What
do you do a week after a day which began with a hundred or so of us
standing on the shore of. Lake Michigan, at the very moment the sun
appeared, casting its rays across the water, singing with one clear trumpet
accompaniment, Jesus Christ is Risen Today; and then later, the church
filled twice, and flowers and trumpets and heroic music and the Hallelujah
Chorus?

We plan and prepare and point to Easter all year long and in the
season of Lent we are single-minded about it.

This is known in some quarters as "Low Sunday," a good day for
the professional practitioners to take off and rest our weary bodies and
cool down. our over-heated spirits. It remains my favorite, however.

It's not that FE don't love Easter. What could be better than being
the minister of a church like this on Easter morning? I dissent from that
school of thought which belittles those who come only on Easter. What
better day to come? You know, of course, about the preacher who began his
Easter sermon by wishing his congregation "Merry Christmas" because he knew
he wouldn't see many of them until the next Easter. Not me... If you only
worship God once a year, by all means do it on Easter morning.

I love Easter, but this - the first Sunday in Eastertide - Low Sunday
- is my favorite.

The problem, you see, is that when you celebrate as exuberantly as we
did last week, you might come to the logical conclusion that Easter is
about an event that happened two thousand years ago. Perhaps more important
than the Trojan Wars or the assassination of Julius Caesar, but like them —
history. The fact is that if we focus solely on the event of resurrection,
pondering the historicity of the accounts - what happened, where it
happened and when it happened, and who said what to whom - we may have a
lot of pondering to do. One thing we will not have done is to hear the
Good News - or confront the theclogical genius of Christianity.

What Easter is about is. the stunning suggestion that God lives - that
a“ the Creator of all that is, lives among us. The Risen Christ is the power
and love and justice and healing of the Creator God. God is not closeted in
some corner of the universe, seated on a throne invisible above the clouds,
or even in the complex formulas of philosophy and theology, but in the
world, in the stuff of ordinary life. That's what all the shouting was
about last Sunday.

There aren't many consistencies in the New Testament resurrection
accounts. Each Gospel tells it differently. The one thing the accounts

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are consistent about is that this empty tomb didn't convince anybody. All
the empty tomb did was scare to death the people who discovered it. Nor

did stories about the empty tomb convince anybody. The people in-the
narratives are astonished, confused and very frightened. What transformed

them from scared fisherman into. courageous heralds-of a new kingdom was
not compelling logic, but a powerful personal experience that they called
the Risen Christ. What brought Simon Peter from the shame of- denying that
he even knew the man to martyrdom, was not a ten second look into an empty
hole in the side of a hill - but experiences - undeniable experiences of
power and love and forgiveness and rebirth.

How did it happen? For two of them it happened in the most unlikely
setting you could think of... on a road ~ the road from Jerusalem to
Emmaus.

The story is wonderfully human. Do you. remember how it was, after
the funeral of someone you loved very much? How incongruous it seemed that
life was still going on: buses were running, stores were open, people were
moving about - as if nothing had happened. Didn't they know?

They had been hiding in that locked room for two days and‘ nights and
now, on the third day after the appalling disaster of Friday, two of ‘them -
could stand it no longer. As the two walked they were joined by a third
man. They told him about the events of the prior two days. They didn't
know him, but they persuaded him to eat the evening meal with them at
Emmaus. There — at table, breaking bread, in an act reminiscent of a
supper they had shared a few nights before - they recognized him.

Please notice the wonderful literary details of this finely human
story. Two people who knew him before failed to recognize him now..-Notice
that part of the reason they didn't recognize him is that they didn't
expect to see him there.

‘The writer of this story, it seems to-me, wants the reader to see
that the resurrection is not. an isolated historical peculiarity - a-kind of
religious shrine to which one can keep returning year after year. The
Gospel writer wants us to focus on a strange and wonderful reality of God's
love still present ~— still turning the world upside down.

In Olive Ann Burn's novel Will Tweedy is stunned at his Grandpa's
words about the Resurrection...

"What did Miss Love say to that, Grandpa?" (I was real excited.)
"Nothin'. I didn't let her interrupt me agin. I said thet same miracle is
still a-happenin', right here in Cold Sassy, in July of nineteen aught—six.
A crippled person or an invalid, or the meanest thief or the most
despairin' misfit, why, if'n he cam ketch aholt of the: spirit of Jesus
Christ, he can quit bein' scairt and be like risin' up from the dead. Once
his soul gits cured, no matter what his body's like, why, he can start a
new life." [Ibid, p. 188] ;

On this day, the word is that the power and relevance of Christianity
is not in-the memory of an event that. happened 2,000 years ago.- regardless
of how precious that memory is, or regardless of the glory and power of the
celebration. fhe essence of it is not history, but experience. Not then -
but. now.

Did you notice how those two at Emmaus had to see things differently
in order to recognize him. A good working definition of religious
conversion is learning to see things differently: learning to see the holy
in the. ordinary. If you have seen the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit, you have
experienced how the power of the transcendent can be expressed in ordinary
objects. Vincent VanGogh painted pictures full of spiritual power and
mystery. None of them are about "religious" subjects, but olive trees and
starry nights and sunflowers and iris... Sometimes to see something is to
know it for the first time even theugh you've been thinking about it all
your life. The passion. and poignancy of Romeo and Juliet can be described,
told in words, but when Juliet covers the dead body of her beloved
and tries frantically to place his limp arms around her, people in the
ballet audience. weep. It is seeing truth.

Last Sunday evening, at the end of a very long day, I came to
Vespers. I had thought about, intellectualized about, used ali the academic
devices and literary metaphors I could find to talk about the resurrection.
At Vespers.a liturgical dancer expressed - in dance — the Gospel reading
from John, and all who were there knew about the resurrection in.a very
eloquent way.

Bruce Buursma, in. his last column as Religion Editor for the Tribune
last. week said it beautifully. He referred to a sermon .he heard in this
church by Elam Davies. Buursma wrote:

"There are moments. when.even religious. writers find themselves
transfixed by something said or done in the name of. God.".. And. then he
illustrated:

_ “Eyebrows can arch. There can be the wordless eloquence of a man who
tends the victims of AIDS.... and the woman who teaches children of
Indochinese. refugee camps,..." [Chicago Tribune, 4/1/88]

The essence of it is not memory or history, but experience. The
ultimate criteria for religion - for. sermons, beliefs, rituals, gestures —
is a blunt question: "So What?" “Does it matter?" "Does it make a
difference?" "Does it have anything to do with the life we actuaily live
with the secular as well as the religious?"

And on this day the word is yes. God's love lives among us. Death
itself does not defeat it. In the world, in the stuff of life, in the
breaking. of bread, there is heart-filling beauty and soul-stirring truth.

No one writes about it more eloquently than Frederick Buechner.
Speaking at a seminary graduation - to men and women about to become clergy
- he said:

ASINARR

“Again and again Christ is present net when, as priests, you would be
apt to look for him but precisely where you would not have thought to look
for him in a thousand years. The great preacher, the sunset, the Mozart
Requiem, can leave you cold, but the child in the doorway, the rain on the

roof, the half-remembered dream, can speak of him and for him with an
eloquence that turns your knees to water." [A Room Called Remember, p.149]

Or in the breaking of bread. It is no accident. I think, that Luke
sets the good news of God's love beside occasions when people are eating
and drinking together. I think he has done that — preserved this story for
us, in fact - to suggest that the Risen Christ is present in the ordinary,
daily activities and rituals of our life. I think, in addition, he wanted
to suggest that Christ is present particularly when we are hungry...
physically and spiritually.

It is precisely when we know our need for truth, for clarity, for
love, for acceptance, for encouragement - that the Risen Christ comes. It
is, I think, only when we have been absolutely devasted by grief, when we
stand in the darkest valley of the shadow of death that the familiar words
"~ "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me" come alive. It is, I think,
only when we know our guilt - that the power of forgiveness comes alive.

It is, I think, only when we know emptiness and boredom and staleness —
that the resurrected Christ appears... It is precisely when we are
painfully aware of our hunger, that bread is broken and our eyes are opened
and we recognize him.

There are actually two different ideas of communion in the Christian
tradition. The first, and by far the most familiar theology of the
sacrament focuses on the Last Supper.

“This is my body broken for you. Do this in memory of me." It is a
memorial feast. The mood is somber.

There is another motif. Equally ancient. Equally important,
theologically. It has its roots in this table at Emmaus, where the Risen
Christ was present. When in the breaking of bread "their eyes were opened
and they recognized him."

All year iong, in our observances of communion we try to keep those
ideas together. But mostly, and appropriately, we remember his death on
our behalf.

Today - first Sunday of Eastertide ~ the mood is different. Christ is
alive. You and - live in a new world.

God's love is there on the road to Emmaus and in the city streets and
dirty alleys. God's passionate love for the worid is there in the apony
and ecstacy, the tragedy and the heroism of the human story. God's love
lives in the ambiguity of the Middle East, and the tireless efforts of
peace makers. God's love is in Northern Ireland, Cabrini-Green,
Northwestern Hospital, the Chicago Housing Authority, Fourth Presbyterian
Church, and in your life.

God's. love lives. Expect it. Anticipate the healing, life-giving
Jove. of God in the very stuff of your life.

That's what this Sunday is about. [t is easily missed, actually.
The.two. who walked to Emmaus with him almost didn't realize it. It was at

table - to which he invites us - that “he took bread and blessed, and broke
it, and gave. it.to them. . And their eyes were opened and they: recognized

him."

Amen.

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