A sermon preach by
Rachael Crowder
at St. John the Evangelist Church, 18 April 1999

The Road to Emmaus

Luke 24: 13-35

	Mealtime was always an important time in our house as I was growing up. My parents always insisted that we sit at table and eat supper together every evening. Many times I was convinced that is was so that my father was guaranteed a captive audience for his many 'shaggy dog' stories. I can't tell you how many times my dad told us about growing up on the farm outside Bolton, how there was more often than not an unfamiliar face at the table. Every child of the family was encouraged to bring friends home to share a meal, and usually did. The dinner plates were the size of wagon wheels, and the food plentiful and delicious. Even the family dog would join them at the table, and his manners, my father claimed with all seriousness, were impeccable, having learned to tie a napkin around his chin and use a knife and fork! (That was the part of the story I liked the best!) But the stories that we share with each other do more than entertain. I often wondered why my father kept telling me the same stories over and over again. Yes, they were entertaining and often made us laugh, but why did he choose THOSE particular stories?	the stories that we share with each other do more than entertain
	Have you ever wondered about that? Do you hear yourself telling friends and loved ones the same vignettes from your past- in spite of their groans and their thinly disguised requests that you stop, "I remember you telling me about that," and yet you drone on, unable to stop yourself?! Do you have certain memories in your head that you just cannot seem to dislodge, or that haunt you like a dream? I have this scene of a rain covered street outside a church somewhere in Toronto; I can feel the humidity of a mid-summer's day, smell the moist muddiness and hear the searing sound of the tires against asphalt. That's all there is to it. No sense of doom or drama, just a scene, a mental tone poem that seeps into my awareness for what reason I haven't been able to figure out yet.
quietly walking down the road to Emmaus	I think of this layer of my life as a kind of parallel universe, a place where my life is revealed to me on another plane or at a different level of consciousness. It is very close to the realm of the imagination, the seat of creativity where the artist sits to act as mediator and interpreter of this realm. It is the place where I go when I am most quiet, where I muse and think and feel and consider. I pray. I ask for guidance. I turn things over - turn them over in my mind, turn them over to God, turn them back into the soil of my imagination for composting. This is the place where we find Cleopas and his friend as we join them in the gospel story. They are quietly walking down the road to Emmaus, turning the events of the past days over in their minds. They are grief-stricken, shocked and disappointed. They are locked in intimate discussion with each other, supporting each other in their devastation.	turning the events of the past days over in their minds
There are the obvious parallels in this tale to our faith journey as Christians	This story is such a familiar one to us that I don't need to retell it again - and not because we have necessarily memorized every detail of the biblical story. It is familiar to us because it reflects our personal experience in so many ways. There are the obvious parallels in this tale to our faith journey as Christians: how our darkest moments of despair can be major turning points in our lives; how salvation history is revealed to us through scripture - Jesus (as the stranger) opens the scriptures and expounds upon them for the companions; the story talks about how we reconnect with the risen Christ through the breaking of bread; and finally, how we recognize the risen Christ in the person who is sitting next to us at the table. It confirms our experience that sometimes we don't understand what is happening to us while it is happening; sometimes after the experience we look at each other and say, "Did our hearts not burn within us?" How could we not have known? How could we not have known that THAT was Jesus?
	How could we not have known? But very often we don't. And so we must tell the story again so that we might integrate it this time, because we didn't quite get it at the time it happened. And so the cycle of story telling begins, because we never fully get the whole picture. We see layers of it, and sometimes when we finally see it, it slips from our grasp like a bar of wet soap, like Jesus disappearing from the companions' sight. So we must tell it again hoping that this time we can hold on to it, or hold on to another tiny portion of it.	so we must tell the story again
God is constantly asking me to stretch myself	This slipperiness is the part of being a believer I find the most challenging. I like a certain amount of concreteness and predictability in my life. I like knowing that when I go to bed and fall asleep I will wake up in the same bed in the same room in the same house in the same town. But being a Christian asks more of me than just living in the concrete, material world. It asks me to live in more than the now. God is constantly asking me to stretch myself. As a Christian I am asked to live in the past, present and future - all at once! I am asked to live on earth and in heaven - all at once! God asks me to live in every mode of reality - material and spiritual - all at once. My faith asks me to be who I am and to be the body of Christ - to see Christ's body in the broken bread and to see my body in the broken bread - all at once. It asks me to confess the resurrection of the body with the knowledge that God does not work outside of the natural laws of the universe. Lord I believe, help my unbelief! To paraphrase the wise person Janet quoted last week (Herbie O'Driscoll?), this edge of unbelief is where my (our) faith grows.
Extracts from 'Seven Stanzas at Easter' by John Updike	So, allow me to muse upon the resurrection of the body, because this is the part of the Emmaus story which strikes me most at the moment. Here is Jesus, supposedly in the flesh as some would describe him, talking and eating with the companions much in the same way that he would later appear to his disciples: they touch his wounds and he eats fish with them. He seems to be in a material body like yours and mine, but lo, when he breaks bread at the table with Cleopas and his friend, they recognize him and poof he vanishes. What kind of body is that? Is this the physical body that lay in the tomb? Let us consider for a moment these lines from a poem by John Updike, called 'Seven Stanzas at Easter': Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells' dissolution did not reverse,the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was His flesh: ours. The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that - pierced - died, withered, paused and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.	allow me to muse upon the resurrection of the body
	I like this poem. Not because I agree with it factually, but because it pushes me to the edge of one end of the reality tension. The images and ideas are rich. It stretches me, challenges me to turn the scripture stories I have heard from childhood, over again in my heart and mind. What does this mean, resurrection of the body? Is it a "physical" body or a "glorified" body? Is it historical fact or myth? Is it all those things all at once?	What does this mean, resurrection of the body?
I thought I had Jesus all figured out	I take the Emmaus story and enter that place inside of me where the curtain between this world and the next is very thin, the place I talked about before where the artist sits, where imagination and spirit crest together. Like the companions on the road to Emmaus who exclaimed, "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel," I thought I had Jesus all figured out. But here he is again, revealing himself and God to me through story - scripture - and through the stories and understanding of others on the journey.
it is in human love and relationship where God is revealed	And the 'others' part is really key for me. The presence of Jesus in the body - whatever kind of body it is - is only one part of the story. This story for me is really about relationships. When you boil this story down to its essence, it is about the one thing that is most important to each of us (as it was and has been to every human being in history), and that is, the people we love and those who love us: our parents, our children, our sisters and brothers, our friends, lovers and companions. This story touches our human experience because of the pain Cleopas and his companion suffer over the loss of Jesus; their compassion for each other; the joy in recognizing that their friend is with them at table and is present in their breaking of bread. The divine joke, (if I may call it that) is that Jesus, who is supposed to be in his glorified, resurrected body, is not recognizable to Cleopas and his friend- just as he was not recognizable to Mary at the tomb- until they figured out their relationship to him. It is this intersection of human lives in love where we recognize so succinctly the incarnation of God. It is in this moment, so present and so beautiful with family and friends, or in any act of unconditional love, that we are allowed to live in the past, present and future, in heaven and on earth, all at once. This is the good news of the gospel, that it is in human love and relationship where God is revealed, and where we gain entrance into eternity. Even though it is the first commandment, it is not enough to love God alone. We must love our neighbours as ourselves, is the rest of the formula.	because of the pain ...their compassion ...the joy
	So I reach to put my fingers around one thread of understanding, but have still not fully understood this notion of resurrection of the body. Nor will I ever I suppose, in this life, but I can attempt to grasp another layer of it. When I put the notion of resurrection of the body in the context of love and relationships, and the story of Emmaus, I understand that God is always present to connect with me, in concrete human relationships in the now or in that other level of consciousness where I go to pray, where it is timeless. God is present to connect with me in the scripture stories like the Emmaus story. That God is alive and constantly creating, and that I am a living part of that process no matter what form "I" or my body may take in this life or the next. And mysteriously, somehow like Christ, I am only really revealed and recognizably 'me' when I am in a loving relationship: past, present and future.	put the notion of resurrection of the body in the context of love and relationships
words and stories are what we have to share with each other	Words are both so rich and so puny when it comes to expressing all we are, and totally inadequate in expressing God. But words and stories are what we have to share with each other, and to express our love for one another to proclaim the resurrection and the promise that love is stronger than death. Therefore let us proclaim, "Christ has risen, the lord is risen indeed, alleluiah!"