Sermons from the Pulpit

"Stay with us." -Luke 24:29
"Stay with us," they beg him, and that is precisely what he is not going to do. He will stay just long enough for them to recognize him, and then he will vanish from their sight.

      There is something cruel about this. They can know him or they can be with him, but not both. Either way they are missing him. When he is with them he is a stranger, and they don't know what to make of him . When he is gone, they wring their hands: "If only we had known!"

      Well, they did know, sort of. "Were not our hearts burning within us?" they say to each other with what they hope is 20/20 hindsight, but it might be just desperation, not wanting to admit that they spent all that time with him and never noticed who it was. "We knew it, we just didn't know we knew it!" He fooled us. He sneaked up on us. He messed with our minds.

      Somebody said this story is about the ordinary everyday things of life turning out to be extraordinary, holy, sacred, and wonderful, which is good news. Maybe so, but Cleopas and his companion failed to notice this until it was a little late, which is not good news. Because it's over, and all they have is a residue of holy heartburn.

      The great moments of life get past me all the time, and I know I'm not the only one. I can be plunk in the middle of a miracle and pay no attention whatsoever to it because I did something dumb yesterday and my brain is awash with the horror of it, it swamps and submerges all other realities. I can be as thick as the great oracle Balaam, in the book of Numbers, so intent on the task I'm performing that God could open the mouth of the donkey I'm riding and give her the gift of speech, and she could speak the rebuke of God directly to me, and I would only berate her and call her a stubborn ass, without the slightest inkling that it's myself I'm describing.

      Human cluelessness is a fascinating thing. Our nimble intelligence, our keen senses - nothing should escape us! Yet we are always playing catch-up - trying to figure out what just happened or bluffing and pretending we didn't miss a thing.

      The philosopher and psychologist William James said it was a matter of what we do and don't pay attention to, which wasn't all that earth-shaking as a discovery, but he may have been the first to notice how important it is. Here's something he wrote about that. It's not easy to follow, but it's worth the effort, and it's short. He wrote,

Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

      We pay attention to some things. We pay no attention to other things. It is not random. It is not dictated by freshness or fatigue. The way we bestow our attention follows a pattern, and the pattern is by us ourselves. We are constructing a universe, or at least we are constructing our own particular conception of the universe.

      It is Easter today for the third Sunday in a row, and it will be Easter for four more Sundays, for the benefit of those of us who are slow to get it. Cleopas and a companion are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a distance of about seven miles, late on the same day as the resurrection. They are disciples, but they are not among the special twelve whom Jesus drafted. They are generic disciples, extras in the cast. They could be anyone. They could be us.

      And their universe, the one which they think they inhabit, cannot and does not contain a living, breathing, walking, talking, teaching, bread-breaking, bread-blessing, fish-eating Jesus. They know this. They plan to continue knowing it. Nothing that contradicts it will penetrate their defenses. To borrow a term from the great crisis of the end of the millennium, they are not resurrection compliant.

      "Oh, how foolish you are," he says, "and how slow of heart." Notice that he is not calling them blind or stupid. He knows that is not the problem. We are bright, we are perceptive, we are sensitive, no question. But slow of heart. Stubborn. Selective. Closed to whatever we do not expect. Disinclined to go with the flow, no matter how laid back we may like to think we are. Until he vanishes, and then it's whoops, we knew it all along, 'cause we've got holy heartburn. Determined not to see how comical we are.

      Sometimes I think this is only the natural consequence of our sin. Other times I think that it must be part of God's design, that the presence and power of God should always be just beyond our easy grasp, so it will always pull at us and we'll always be restless, questing, praying, hoping, wondering. A glimpse here, an epiphany there, a transfiguration tomorrow. On this theory, we could plead till the cows come home for Jesus to stay with us and he won't do it. Except incognito. Somebody said the only way to keep Jesus is to go where he's going, but we want to take him home with us.

      Which is what Cleopas and his companion apparently were doing. The story says he went in to stay with them. Where - in their home? Is that what they were doing that afternoon, walking home to take up daily life where they'd left it off to follow him to Jerusalem? One expert says that's just what they were doing, and the other one's name was Mary, and she was one of the women who witnessed the crucifixion, and Cleopas was her husband.

      Well, I don't know about that, but I do know about taking him home with us. We could if he was a puppy or a kitty from the SPCA, which is what the people of God have been trying to turn him into for 2,000 years, and oftentimes it seems like we're succeeding, but there always comes that moment when he lets us know who he really is and then disappears, and leaves us awed and confused, full and empty, grieving and rejoicing all at once.

      After they're back in Jerusalem with the others, Jesus comes again and they all think they're seeing a ghost, and he says, "Look at me, touch me, I'm not a ghost," and then it says, "In their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering." The older translation says they were "disbelieving for joy," which is one of my favorite lines in all Scripture. Disbelieving for joy. I think that might be a pretty good definition of faith. Unsettling, I admit, but where did we get the idea that faith should be settling?

      And that's when he said, "You got anything to eat?" and he ate that piece of broiled fish. It seems like Luke the evangelist wants to rub our noses in this: The ridiculous and the sublime are not at opposite ends of some spectrum, they blend into each other, they are the very same thing seen from different angles, and God's gift to us in Jesus is not to help us figure out which is the one correct angle, it's to help us see them all.

      Too often the Resurrection is used by those who believe in it as a club with which to clobber those who don't, or who doubt. "My faith, it is an oaken staff," in the words of one old hymn that I confess I have never liked. "My faith, it is a weapon stout, the soldier's trusty blade."

      The Resurrection isn't that. It's more like an unfinished mediaeval tapestry, like that grand series of tapestries in the Cloisters in New York about the Unicorn who represents Christ. Woven together by many hands. Big enough so that you have to stand across the room from it to take it in, but with a texture that only the nearsighted Mr. Magoo could appreciate. Endlessly provoking to the imagination, and tantalizing to the heart.

      "Were not our hearts burning within us?" Yes, indeed, and there is a difference between indigestion and the Holy Spirit, even though we frequently get them confused. Do you remember what they did, these two generic disciples who could have been you and me, after they recognized him? "That same hour, they got up and returned to Jerusalem."

      If we have the geography of Emmaus right, this means they walked seven miles, uphill, at night, fourteen miles round trip, to be with their friends and get all excited together. That's not what indigestion makes you do, but you might do it if you saw a unicorn or something and wanted to see it again.

      People always do want to see it again. And that's the power of it. You never know what you might do if you're disbelieving for joy, if something has caught your attention that never caught it before. And it won't let go. That could alter the whole universe.

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