A Fourth Church Sermon by Alice M. Trowbridge

April 6, 2008 | 6:30 p.m. Vespers

The Eyes of the Heart

Alice M. Trowbridge
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19
Luke 24:13–35

A few weeks ago here at Fourth Presbyterian Church, we hosted the Lorene Replogle Counseling Center’s twelfth annual midwinter conference. The guest speaker was Adele Calhoun, who is the pastor for spiritual formation at Christ Church in Oak Brook. It was a time intended for reflection, for exploring spiritual practices that might suit your lifestyle and then learning how to do them—spiritual practices such as worship, keeping the sabbath, journaling, and prayer. Her premise was that all of us are on a road, a journey, and we are here in church because we desire to know Christ deeply and to be more like him. But we can be slow of heart—we can be too caught up in this world to remember our walk of faith, which is where we are most at home, where we are most free. And so she took us through a number of spiritual practices that might help our hearts become yoked to Christ, to change the rhythm of our daily lives and to explore new ways of seeing and perceiving and engaging the everyday.

Of all the practices she mentioned, the one that applies most broadly to my life and the lives of those I know is something called “practicing the presence.” In my words, I call it “living in the now”; learning how to be. It is an invitation to see and experience every moment as a gift from God. It is a way of developing a continual openness and awareness of Christ’s presence alive in the face of each person, loved ones and strangers alike. We have a tendency, do we not, of dwelling in the past or fearing the future so much so that we abandon the now and forego the opportunity to be alive in Christ. The past can haunt us; the future is filled with unknowns; and yet today is the only day we most surely have.

When I think of those disciples on the road to Emmaus, I relate to them so readily. Here they are, their hearts and minds in amazement at all that has taken place that first Easter morning. So preoccupied are they that they do not notice their living Lord in the face of the stranger walking beside them. Luke’s Gospel says, “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”

Had those disciples benefited from the conference I attended last month, they would have known that there is a way to keep company with Jesus all day long, to have a deeper union with Christ—living as though the present moment has no competition; receiving each moment as sacred; seeing yourself through God’s eyes rather than the eyes of others; remaining open and teachable; searching for the face of Christ in all whom you meet; with the eyes of the heart looking upon others for the presence of the holy; finding that indeed in our joy and sorrow, in our emptiness and fullness, it is the everlasting arms of God that uphold us throughout it all. It is we who need to learn to see.

In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C. S. Lewis wrote, “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with God. He walks everywhere incognito.” Yet we can forget to look for God sightings in our day.

In her book The God Hunt, Karen Mains suggests that practicing the presence is like going on a God hunt. It is a way we keep our soul awake to God. And God can jump out at us anytime at all and say, “Here I am!” Are we paying attention?

When we think back on this stranger appearing to the disciples along the road to Emmaus, his presence must have seemed like a distraction, an interruption. We tend to be annoyed by interruptions, so focused are we on our to-do lists or whatever is sitting at our desks. And yet some of Jesus’ most gracious miracles occurred when he was interrupted. The next time the phone rings at an inconvenient time, the next time you are going ninety miles an hour in one direction and someone asks for a minute of your time, if you have even an inkling of a desire to live more closely with Christ and to be more like him, you might try practicing the presence and offering a prayer. Something like, “Lord, I am here. Help me to listen.”

Find a verse or a prayer that helps you stay awake to God. Calhoun says to “create your waking prayer, your in-the-shower prayer, your dressing prayer, your cooking prayer, your driving prayer, and so on. These simple one-line prayers can lead you into deeper encounters with God who is there—the risen Christ who is alive,” and these prayers can help you see with the eyes of the heart so that you can indeed recognize God alive in others and in you, throughout your day.

The church has not been established as an institution to safeguard the memory of Jesus’ life and good words and deeds. Rather the church is the community of those who encounter Christ as risen; the church is the place where people can come and worship and know that the Lord is alive. One of the strangest features of the resurrection narratives is precisely the theme of otherness, the unrecognizability of the risen Jesus and the places where he appears catch us off-guard. Our scripture today underlines this point. In fact the encounter with the risen Jesus began as an encounter with a stranger. Jesus is not where those disciples thought him to be, and thus they must “learn” him afresh, as from the beginning: They must see him with new eyes and renew their relationship with him. They must recognize that the living Lord is everywhere—on the road walking beside them, at the table hosting the feast, recognizable in the breaking of the bread. So the institution of the church is certainly the place where we proclaim these truths, but Jesus’ activity in the world is not confined to any institution, and this post-resurrection story attests to that.

Isn’t it remarkable that the first moments of Easter brought not clarity and joy and purpose, but fear, doubt, disorientation, and a sense of abandonment? And when the risen Lord appears, to give us back our speech, the language given to us is self-knowledge, penitence, the language of confession, a process of self-discovery, and the creation of renewed relations.

The language of Easter is bound up with the practice of the church, in prayer and mission alike. In fact the language of Easter and the post-resurrection story of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples (“and then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him”)—this is at the heart of our faith. Every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we recall not only the Last Supper before the crucifixion, but we remember as well the first supper that Easter evening long ago, when he broke bread with his disciples and their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and they were sent out to spread the news. They could not contain their joy, conviction, devotion; their hearts burned when he was with them, as if they had been set afire to spread the good news to all who would listen.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in his book called Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, writes about the significance of this moment when, in the breaking of the bread, the risen Lord is recognized as the one who was crucified. Williams writes that to discover, to grow into, a reconciled identity for oneself, we have to come to terms with the fact that the problem of suffering is never going to leave us. It cannot be caught and sealed and buried. In the resurrection, it is presented as the unconditional. Williams says, “I shall not be asked at the last day whether I have suffered well; I shall be asked how far I have allowed Christ to transform my life into compassion, and how far, therefore, I have allowed compassion in me to transform the world.”

Further, Williams also reminds us that the gospel will not ever tell us we are innocent or blameless, nor are we told we will be spared suffering. But it does tell us that we are loved, and in asking us to receive and consent to that love, Jesus’ gospel asks us to identify with, and to make our own, love’s comprehensive vision of all we are and all that we have been. That is the transformation of desire as it affects our attitude to our own selves—to accept what we have been, because God certainly promises to. And with our self-acceptance, we can be transformed, so that we are one with the living God.

Frederick Buechner wrote a memoir titled The Eyes of the Heart. In it he spends time thinking about the Easter message—that perhaps we all can identify with those harried disciples along the road to Emmaus, who were sorting through all sorts of mystery and conflicting information that day.

There is something about this story that weighs in on us, and then suddenly in the breaking of the bread, we read that their eyes are opened and they recognize him, as if a veil is lifted or a heavy burden of bondage or fear is released and they are set free to behold the living Christ. Is there any one of us here who would doubt that there at the table, in the company of our Lord, we know in our hearts it is where we truly belong? Is there any one of us who does not yearn—more than for anything else—to exist in that perfect freedom all the days of our lives? It is, as Buechner says, like going home. It is God’s love. And it is for you and for me to claim right here, in the now. May we believe it. Amen.