April 6, 2008 Third Sunday after Easter
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 116; Luke 24:13-35
An alcoholic feels that old familiar cycle beginning: the demonic voices in
her head that list all her problems, failures and resentments and build their case
toward the insane conclusion that she might as well drink, or the only thing that
could help is a drink. She can feel the pull of that old logic, and she knows that
she is absolutely powerless to stop it on her own, because she’s tried to fight it
alone a thousand times and lost each time.
You could say to the alcoholic that it was not God’s higher power that
pulled her out of her crisis, restored her to sanity and kept her sober, you could
say it was her own shifting of attitude, it was the help of the meeting—nothing
spiritual or superhuman about it. But she would say back, “That is how the
higher power of God works—through our attitude and through our meetings.”
George Bernard Shaw wrote the play Saint Joan about Joan of Arc.
During Joan’s trial her accusers say that when she hears God’s voice it is just her
imagination. And she replies, yes, that is true. That is how God speaks to me—
through my imagination.
The word theophany is the technical word for a visible manifestation of
God. The word theophany comes from two Greek roots, one meaning God and
the other meaning “to show.” Theophany is, of course, always a matter of belief.
To believing eyes, it is God who shows through the AA meeting or the angelic
vision or the healing. To unbelieving eyes it is anything but God.
Did the two disciples in today’s passage from Luke really see Christ risen
from the dead? It does not seem likely, does it? All the odds are against it. They
themselves did not recognize the man as Jesus at first. They walked along the
road to Emmaus for quite a while together talking and they never thought, could
this be Jesus? They did not recognize him, they said, until he was at the table
with them and took bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to them. The instant
they did recognize him, he vanished from their sight. Then they looked back
over the past few hours and said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he
was talking to us on the road?”
That was all they had. Their hearts burned within them. He was made
known in the breaking of the bread. And he vanished as soon as they recognized
him. It did not add up to enough to convince skeptics like Thomas, we can be
sure, but these two were completely convinced—convinced enough to get up and
walk through the night the ten miles or so back to Jerusalem to tell the other
disciples.
One of the oddly beautiful things about this story is that there is no
historical record of a village called Emmaus, so we are free to make of it what we
will. One theologian, Frederick Buechner, says Emmaus is anywhere we go in
order to escape what is wrong with the world. For the alcoholic it could be a
bottle. Others of us have our own places that we habitually turn to for comfort or
numbing—foods or soap operas or even church can be used as an escape.
The remarkable thing about a theophany, an authentic encounter with God
or Christ or the Spirit in our lives, is that however ephemeral or unprovable it
may be, it is enough to make us leave the comfort of the Inn at Emmaus and
reverse our track. It drives us back to sanity and sobriety, back to life and
whatever challenge we have been trying to escape. It has the power to hold us
together when everything is conspiring to make us fall apart. It has the power to
make the disciples not only come back to Jerusalem, but go forward and launch a
church against the empire and the establishment, and create a counter-culture
based on their belief in God’s truth even though it goes against the empirical,
cultural and accepted religious truth of their day.
It is dangerous to walk back home on the road from Emmaus, but making
that choice shows God’s presence as powerfully as anything could. It gives life
positive meaning and direction. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was
assassinated forty years ago on April 4th, 1968, and you could say it was because
of what happened to him on the road to Emmaus. He was just settling down into
his first pastoral ministry when God’s truth came to him in the form of Rosa
Parks and his fellow Montgomery clergy who called upon him to lead their
struggle for civil rights. King suffered enormously because of his decision to
turn his back on the Emmaus of escape and accept his call, but after much
suffering he said, “I still believe that standing up for the truth of God is the
greatest thing in the world. This is the end of life. The end of life is not to be
happy. The end of life is not to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. The end of life
is to do the will of God, come what may.”
The question remains, how do we know a real theophany when we see it?
How do we know God’s truth or God’s will or God’s presence? The answer is,
we ma not know, at least when it is happening. We may have it right in front of
us, we may feel a burning in our heart that tells us something is happening on a
deep level, and yet still not understand. It may not be until after the fact that we
gain the faith to understand.
As St. Anselm of Canterbury said “I do not seek to understand that I may
believe, but I believe in order to understand.” Once we do believe and
understand, theophany can become something more in our lives. The presence of
God can be something we practice. The Spirit’s comfort, guidance and power can
be things we look for in every moment. Something amazing happens then. We
find that we recognize the risen Christ not just in the breaking of the bread at
communion, but in every breaking and sharing of bread: the potluck after
worship; the mundane meal at home with family or friends; the food we put in the
food shelf basket; the food we help someone in Africa grow through our
contribution to One Great Hour of Sharing. Or we hear what we say to each other
in our small groups and church council meetings and Vision Sunday and we put it
all together into a plan for the church and then our eyes are opened and we see
that it was the body of Christ speaking all those times. God was present with us,
even though we may have missed that fact in the moment. The Holy Spirit’s
wisdom and power were flowing through our thoughts and voices and love. Like
Shaw’s Saint Joan, we come to see that it is through our faculties—it is through
us—that God speaks and works.
Today during communion or during our potluck, let us try to see with the
eyes of faith how the Spirit of Christ is real and made know in the breaking and
sharing of the bread. Let us rejoice in it even as we ask for help believing more
so that we may understand more. And as we meet and consider our church vision
and plan, let us have faith that the Holy Spirit will be present with us as it has
been all along the way here. Let us pray together in silence now, practicing the
presence of God, practicing looking within our hearts with the eyes of faith,
willing to be completely open and trusting that God is there. Let us pray in
silence….
Sermon 04/06/2008