It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
a sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
Psalm 116
Luke 24:13-35
Isn’t this a wonderful story? The story of the travelers on the road to Emmaus meeting Jesus along the way? Doesn’t it just give you goosebumps to know that Jesus is that close to us all the time? That no matter what we do, where we go, the Lord is here with us, beside us, traveling alongside – it’s simply up to us to recognize him.
The scripture tells us that “two of them” were going to a village called Emmaus about seven miles from Jerusalem. It doesn’t specify who the two of them are, or what they mean by two of “them.” We can guess that they mean disciples, but we don't really know anything about them, other than the fact that one of them is named Cleopas and that they were discussing everything that has gone on in the last few days as they walk along. I like to imagine that they are a husband and wife who cared so deeply for Jesus that they made the trek into Jerusalem to be there and support him through the trial, but we really don’t have any information at all. You can imagine your own two characters walking along the road, heading home or to a friend’s home or a family member’s that they want to share the news with.
Anyway, these two are walking along and they are talking and discussing when Jesus himself comes near and joins them in their journey. This was probably not that unusual back in those days when virtually all travel would have been done on foot and virtually all news passed by word of mouth.
The Bible tells us that their eyes were kept from recognizing him. I wonder about this phrase. Why were their eyes kept from recognizing him – and by whom? Is it like the Pharaoh in the time of Moses whose heart was actually hardened by God himself? Or could it be “the enemy,” Satan, who keeps them from seeing who Jesus really is? Or could it be – the answer that I think most likely – that their eyes were kept from recognizing him because of something in themselves? After all, we are often blind to all sorts of things in our lives. Blind to things that we don’t wish to see. Blind to our own faults or inabilities. Blind to the wishes of others if they do not align with our own. Perhaps it is their own doubt and fear that keeps them from recognizing their Lord and Master.
Whatever the reason, the two don’t know Jesus for who he is and when he asks them, “What are you discussing with each while you walk along?” they stand still, looking sad, unable to believe that he hasn’t heard.
Now hear these words: They stand still, looking sad. That’s what the Bible says and it seems to me this means they don’t believe the words they’ve heard – the words about Jesus’ resurrection. They tell him that “some women of our group astounded us” with these words of Jesus not being dead, but alive. But they don’t seem astounded; they seem depressed.
They tell Jesus that the women told them they had seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive and that some who were with them and had been told had gone to the tomb and found it empty, just as the women had said, but they did not see him. Indeed, these two seem determined not to believe. Despite being told by eyewitnesses, despite the tomb’s emptiness, despite the prophetic words that Jesus had left them with, telling the disciples at least three times that we know of that he would die and be raised from the dead, these two are standing still, looking sad.
How many of us are standing still, looking sad right now? How many of us have refused to hear and believe the good news of Jesus’ resurrection and of the resurrection power available to each and every one of us? How many of us came to church on Easter Sunday and boy, we had a great time and it was exciting and empowering and inspiring, but it’s over now and we’re back to our regular everyday ordinary business-as-usual selves?
But don’t worry; Jesus is patient. He continues to walk alongside these two and explains to them all along the way the story of God’s plan. He starts with Moses and he works all the way up to the present day, interpreting the scriptures and leading them gently along. Now seven miles should take about an hour an a half, maybe two hours to walk if you’re taking it easy and I imagine these three were, engrossed as they were in conversation, but eventually they get to the village of Emmaus. Jesus acts as though he is continuing on through the village and beyond. This is good manners in the Middle East and even perhaps for us today as we do not want to foist ourselves upon new found friends, but these two urge him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.”
I love this: they tell him “stay with us.” This is in direct counterpoint to Jesus’ time in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest and crucifixion. Do you remember? Jesus had called his disciples, James and John and Peter – the same three who went to the top of the mountain with him when he was transfigured – his nearest and dearest and most dedicated of all the disciples and he asked them to stay with him while he prayed the night away. He asked them to stay with him, to remain awake and to be there for him, but they were unable to comply. Oh, their bodies were there. I guess you could say that they were physically present, but three times they fell asleep despite his pleas that they stay awake with him.
Yet here, these two disciples on the road to Emmaus ask Jesus to stay with them, and he does. It is like two bookends, two parentheses to the greater story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. No matter how often we don’t manage to stay with him, Jesus will always stay with us.
They go into the house and they sit down at the dinner table. Jesus takes the bread, he blesses it and breaks it and gives it to them and their eyes are opened. In the act of sharing table fellowship with him, they recognize him; they see him. This man that they earlier call a “stranger.” Do you remember that? In the opening of this passage, when Jesus comes and joins them and asks them what they are talking about, Cleopas answers him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”
Do you get it? “Are you the only stranger…”
I want you to take a moment and remember the build-up to Palm Sunday and the One Great Hour of Sharing Offering. The scripture lesson for that offering was from Matthew 25. As you heard this morning during the Time for Children, it is also the passage that our young people have been learning about and sharing about and working with for several weeks now. I’d like to share the whole text with you now. Jesus is telling his disciples a story – a story about the time after his death and resurrection, a story about the future coming when we will all be judged.
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory,” Jesus says, “and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Now it doesn’t seem so odd that the act of sharing bread with a stranger is what enables the two disciples to recognize the risen Lord, does it? The act of sharing bread is a no-brainer to us. It exemplifies the Eucharist, Communion, the Lord’s Supper that was instituted only a few days before this story occurs, although of course we must be gentle with Cleopas and his fellow traveler, for they could not have known what the Lord’s Supper would become over the centuries. But isn’t it interesting that the other piece of this is that it is when they share what they have with a stranger, that they are able to see Jesus? When they open their table to someone they don’t know, their eyes are opened.
Isn’t also interesting that as soon as they recognize Jesus, he disappears! As soon as they see him, they don’t need him anymore. As soon as he is a visible risen Christ, they feel their own resurrection begin pumping in their veins. They don’t sit and cry and complain, “Oh, gee. He was just here and he’s left us again.” As soon they’ve seen Jesus and he disappears, they know what they have to do and they go about doing it.
You see, the story of death and resurrection isn’t just about Jesus; it’s about us. It’s the story of our lives and Jesus’ influence in and impact on them. Easter is not over on sundown on Easter Sunday – it stretches into and throughout the rest of our lives. And much as we might think that Easter came two weeks ago and now we’re on to Scout Sunday, and Pentecost which is really about Confirmation and the end of June which is about being given permission to take the next three months off in the summer and then it’s about coming back and getting the kids in school, getting our ducks in a row and getting ready for Advent and Christmas again – it’s not!
As soon as the disciples recognize Jesus, they say to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” And then that same hour, they got up and returned to Jerusalem. Seeing the risen Christ, being party to the resurrection doesn’t mean simply sitting on our bottoms and saying, “Yippee!” It means action. As soon as we realize what we’ve been through – which admittedly might take a while – we respond.
The writer Amy Tan, known for numerous books but especially The Joy Luck Club, writes that her mother adamantly believed that she would grow up to be a doctor and impressed that fact upon her as often as she could. Now, however, her mother will brag to anyone to who will listen, “I always know she be writer one day.”
This doesn’t mean that her mother changed her mind in the face of the evidence, and that isn’t what I’m saying about the two disciples. But rather in retrospect, she was able to see the clues, to recognize the call of Amy’s talent, the stories jotted off, the scraps of paper filled, the pieces that made her feel her heart burning in her chest after the fact.
What is right in front of your face that you are keeping yourself from seeing? Where do you just need Jesus’ presence in order to feel your heart burning in your chest and the call to action, to move, to go to Jerusalem and tell the world?
Perhaps your world seems too constricting for you to even imagine what it would be that you are to do. If that is so, remember the French saint, Thérèse of Lisieux. Born in 1873 to a middle-class family – her father was a watchmaker and her mother died of cancer when she was four years old – Thérèse became a Carmelite nun at the age of 15. Frustrated at one point in her very short life (she died at 24 of tuberculosis) because she wanted to be ordained as a priest or go to a foreign land as a missionary and realized that neither of these two things were going to happen, Thérèse said in a moment of mystical frustration, “Then I shall become love.” Now understand this, for Thérèse, becoming love was not an intellectual affirmation, it was a call. She was able to transcend the boundaries that were constricting her: of a church that would not allow her to be ordained, of a body that would not allow her to travel to foreign lands, and so on, by allowing God to become love in her. She wrote numerous prayers and books, including Story of a Soul, which tells of her journey to and with God, and blessed many people.
So what is it that God is calling you to do that your eyes only need to be opened to see it? You see, the two disciples didn’t get it either. They thought that their ministries were over; they thought that once Jesus died, the story ended and they were done. They were walking along in sadness and gloom, failing to see what was right in front of them, because they were so sure of reality as they understood it.
But God’s reality is not the same as our reality. And resurrection power is there and available for all of us all the time. But remember, we are all going to experience it differently. Look at all the different experiences that believers have of Jesus back in his time. There is the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb that we heard about on Easter Sunday. Remember how Jesus told her not to hang onto him, but to go and tell the news? Then there is the story we heard last week of the disciples hiding out and Jesus coming to the group first and then to Thomas – and what did he tell Thomas, but to put his finger in the wounds and to touch him in the side! Where he told Mary not to touch him, he told Thomas the exact opposite. There is the story of these two disciples that we heard about today where Jesus walks with them, explains the Bible to them, sits and eats with them. All four of these individuals experienced the risen Christ differently.
Jesus will come to us all in different ways. For some of us, it will be a still small voice. For some of us, it will be a roaring wind. For some of us, it will be in the words of a child. Some of us will be as clear as Thérèse in the face of obstacles; others will be like Amy Tan’s mom and only see the hand of God in retrospect. But it doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that resurrection power is here. Is now. Is in all of us. And manifests through us. In his book Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, Rowan Williams reminds us that resurrection comes with a price. He writes, “The believing community manifests the risen Christ: it does not simply talk about him, or even celebrate him. It is the place where he is shown.”
So this is our charge; this is our challenge. Because folks, it ain’t over till it’s over and it ain’t over yet. As long as we are still here, we have God’s love to bestow, Jesus resurrection to share, the Holy Spirit’s work to perform. As long as we are still here, Jesus lives. He lives in you and you and you and you and me and us. He lives and calls each and every one of us to minister to a world desperately in need. He calls us to write letters about atrocity such as the genocide in Darfur and the lack of food for those around the world when we in America have enough and more. He calls us to conserve fuel, to drive less and to buy machines – cars, boilers, air conditioners – that are energy efficient. He calls us to feed the hungry by filling that basket out in the foyer. He calls us to make prayer shawls and to receive them. To prayer for others and to be prayed for. He calls us to welcome the stranger. The stranger that we recognize as the new person in the pews and that maybe we don’t recognize in the grocery store and in the mall and using our church to get better by coming to an AA or a CODA or an SLAA meeting. He calls us to give rides to those who need them and fix casseroles and front stoops and maybe other things, but above all, to offer. He calls us to share our goodies at coffee hour and our gifts at Sunday School. He calls us to go through our closets, overabundant with clothing, and wash them and give them to the naked. He calls us to give water to those who are thirsty – that may sound like something nobody worries about any more, but believe me, there are plenty of places in this world where the land is dry and parched and not producing fresh water. All the area that was destroyed by the tsunami ironically enough covered by salt water had its wells and fresh water avenues destroyed. We who can’t walk a block without a bottle of water are called to financially support the building of infrastructure in places that are thirsty. He calls us to visit those who are sick and those who are in prison and those who are sick and in prison. He calls us to do so much and we do so little. And if we’re still here, it ain’t over yet, folks. Do you feel your hearts burning in your chests yet? Are you aware of the blessing and the gift of Christ’s presence in your lives? In this absolutely stunning day, surrounded by friends and family members who love and care for you? Then remember: he is alive and he is calling you! How will you respond? Amen.