Sunday, April 30, 2017 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Emmaus Road

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116:1–4, 12–19
Luke 24:13–35

Lord Jesus, stay with us,
for evening is at hand
and the day is past;
be our companion in the way,
kindle our hearts, and awaken hope,
that we may know you as
you are revealed in Scripture
and the breaking of bread.
Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen.

Collect for the Presence of Christ
Book of Common Prayer

The hallway outside of the hospital emergency room was jammed with seventeen- and eighteen-year-old teenagers. It was after midnight. Tears were flowing. Faces had looks of surprise and dismay written all over them. I was there because I had received a phone call just minutes before from our daughter. One of their friends had died in a freak high-school car accident. All she said when I answered the phone was “Mom, Scott is dead.” Scott wasn’t one of the friends I knew, but she said it as if everybody should know. A few days later, the priest presiding at Scott’s funeral began his funeral homily with words that captured everything: “These have been brokenhearted days.”

Then there was that other hospital room years before. My brother and dad and other family members and I had been there several days in a row. On that particular Friday night, we left the hospital about 8:00 p.m. and went to my parents’ home to sleep—all of us except my mother. She was the one in that hospital room. When we got to his home, my dad said very little, except “I think we’re losing this battle.” It was the first time he’d allowed himself to admit to the hopelessness of my mom’s battle with cancer. We went back to the hospital the next morning, and within an hour, she had died.

Brokenhearted days. That’s what the two disciples had experienced over the past few days in Jerusalem. They were on their way out of town, making their way to Emmaus, just hours after the women had found the tomb empty. So much had happened, none of which they understood.

The story tells us that they were walking along, “talking with each other about all these things that had happened.” It’s what the teenagers were doing in that emergency room hallway: “talking about all these things that had happened.” Trying to make sense of a death that shouldn’t have occurred.

Cleopas and the other disciple kept walking and talking, and when the risen Christ joins them on the way, the story says that their eyes were kept from perceiving him. They had no idea who he was, but they went on to tell this supposed stranger all that had happened. In their lightning-speed recitation of the events, they say something that captures the depth of their dismay: “But we had hoped.” They had hoped he would have been the one to redeem Israel, and instead he met a violent and cruel death. “But we had hoped . . .” “We had hoped . . .” It’s like what my dad said that night so long ago: “I think we’re losing this battle.”

The disciples were on the road to Emmaus, talking about all these things that had happened, trying to make sense out of a death that didn’t make sense at all. They had hoped for something else. Brokenhearted days.

I’ll bet you’ve walked your own roads to Emmaus. I know I have. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “It is the road you walk when your team has lost, your candidate has been defeated, your loved one has died—the long road back to the empty house, the piles of unopened mail, to life as usual, if life can ever be usual again” (Barbara Brown Taylor, “Blessed Brokenness,” Gospel Medicine, pp. 20–21).

Frederick Buechner describes Emmaus in different words. “Emmaus . . . the place where we go in order to escape—a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, ‘Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.’ Emmaus is where we go, where these two went, to try to forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life” (Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat, pp. 85–86).

We’re all walking our own varieties of Emmaus roads, because we all have our own varieties of disappointments—and doubts too. We had also hoped that Jesus would be the one to make everything right in the world. Shannon reminded us on Easter Sunday that as much as our world might feel like a Good Friday world, we have to remind ourselves that we live in an Easter world, a world in which Christ is risen still. Not a world where Christ has risen, but a world where Christ is risen. A world where Love still comes up beside you and walks along with you.

Yet we are so pummeled with messages that say the opposite.

The disciples couldn’t recognize the risen Christ, even though he sidled right up next to them. Their eyes, the story says, were kept from recognizing him. What keeps our eyes from recognizing the risen Christ right here and right now?

The disciples seemed to know the story. They told Jesus all of the events of the past few days, but they couldn’t understand—or didn’t want to understand—that the one who came to redeem Israel would inevitably suffer and die, not because God required the suffering but because suffering in this life is inevitable. Jesus had told them this over and over again when he was still among them, and they couldn’t get it then. And they still didn’t get it.

Are our expectations what keep us from recognizing the risen Christ when he comes up alongside of us? Our expectations that we should be protected from suffering, our expectation that our country should be protected from failure and decline, our expectation that our college degrees and all of our study should keep us from losing jobs, our expectation that we can beat aging, our expectation that if we see the doctor regularly and eat right we won’t get sick, our expectation that relationships will last forever. Do our dashed hopes keep us from recognizing the risen Christ when he pops up right in front of us? “But we had hoped,” the two on their way to Emmaus said. “But we had hoped . . .”

Or is it that we know the story but to us it’s just a story, a list of facts? Is it that we know it in our heads but not in our hearts and not in our personal experience of life? The two on their way to Emmaus knew all the details of the story, but while they were telling all of these things to Jesus, they were so focused on what they knew or what they thought they knew, they missed the fact that the risen Christ was right there with them. He was just anybody to them.

Just this past week, one of our members who is about to become a new officer told me what he had been thinking about in preparation for the new officer examinations that are taking place today. He works in the science and medical field. He said, “Everything in my work is evidence based. It all requires systematic observation. In my work, a person needs to see in order to believe. But in my faith journey, I’ve realized that I choose to believe and therefore I see. “Then he went on to tell me about an experience in his twenties, his experience of searching and searching for God and for some rational proof of God. One night, while still living at home, he woke up with a sudden overpowering realization that he was loved and that he would be loved forever. He wept and wept and wept and wept at the realization—wept tears of awe.

Barbara Brown Taylor says, “The blindness of the two disciples does not keep their Christ from coming to them. He does not limit his post-resurrection appearances to those with full confidence in him. He comes to the disappointed, the doubtful, the disconsolate. He comes to those who do not know their Bible, who do not recognize him even when they are walking right beside him. He comes to those who have given up and headed back home” (“Blessed Brokenness,” p. 22).

There’s our reliance on the extraordinary, too. We fail to see the risen Christ because we resist seeing God in the most ordinary of experiences. The disciples finally recognized him as he broke the bread and shared a meal with them. It was an ordinary meal. Jesus stayed with the disciples and simply shared a meal with them.

Ordinary experiences.

This community: every time we gather, the risen Christ is here. Love and connection is here, despite our warts and failings.

I see Stephen Ministers stay with their care receivers in sacred, ongoing relationships of listening and care. The Stephen Ministers go into those situations with fear and self-doubt, wondering if they can be enough. I’m privileged to see and to hear about the changes in people’s lives because of the caring that is given. And sometimes I even see changed faces—countenances once gloomy and isolated now lightened and full of increased hope. Deacons worry about their ability to pray with complete strangers in Stone Chapel after a service. Some have never had to pray out loud. And then one Sunday a person comes for prayer, and the risen Christ is there and words are given, words the deacons didn’t know they had. Today during worship our confirmands will become members. They have written statements of faith. For some, faith is strong. For others, the search is still primary. But I believe that the risen Christ was there in the writing of those statements, and the risen Christ will be there when those young people are confirmed, and the risen Christ will be with them forever—even when they wander away from him in their own disappointments and doubts and struggles.

I recently told a spiritual director that I was frustrated because my faith life seemed to have changed. I was recalling how there was a time when one revelation after another would come to me, would create a feeling of awe in me. I was frustrated because that was not happening in the same way. And she said, “So, the flares of the divine aren’t going up so often?” My challenge was to stop hoping for what once had been and instead to see the divine in the most ordinary of experiences right now.

It’s been a long time since the excitement of Easter Sunday. It was only two weeks ago, but to me it seems a thousand years ago. There has been a lot of time for doubts to creep in and news to weigh us down and the ongoing challenges of life to present themselves. We’re all on that Emmaus road, trying to figure it out. But whether we can see or not, the risen Christ is walking alongside of us, because he loves us, loves us more than we can imagine and because he so wants us to know of that love and to be more loving because of it.

Ask him, ask him to stay awhile. Ask the risen Christ to stay with you. Even if you have to keep talking with each other about all of these things that have happened, and even if you “had hoped” for something different in life, and even if these have been brokenhearted days for you, ask him to stay with you.

“Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion on the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of your love. Amen.” (Book of Common Prayer)