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April 6, 2008- RCL Year A, 3 Easter

The Rev. Mark Byers
“Seeing is Deceiving”

[Some preliminary notes about the Gospel reading. These are just so that people can put the whole thing in context properly.

-Still Easter Sunday

-A different Gospel: Luke, rather than John.

-Takes place, in strict chronology, before last week’s appearance in the room with the disciples.

-Two disciples walking together toward Emmaus.

One is named Cleopas, the other’s name we don’t know.

Emmaus- Location is disputed, but several miles from Jerusalem.

-Jesus approaches and walks with them, but they don’t recognize him.

I’ve come to think of one of two possibilities here.

-First, something like this: I knew a guy in high school, in Colorado. I hadn’t seen him in a number of years. While I was stationed in Bremerton, Washington, I took classes at a junior college. I kept seeing a guy who reminded me of Harry. “Man, that guy looks like Harry.” Long story short, I went to my five year high school reunion and saw Harry. “Harry, I was out in Washington, and I saw this guy that looked so much like you.” And Harry said, “Should’ve said something. It was me.” In other words, I didn’t expect to run into in Washington the guy I knew in Colorado. And the last guy the disciples expected to run into on the Road to Emmaus was their master who had been crucified last week…

-Or, second, Jesus’ resurrected appearance is somehow different.

-It might be either of these, or something else entirely. Food for thought. Doesn’t really matter, I suppose.

-Jesus asks, “What are you discussing?”

-Cleopas says, “Where have you been? We’re talking about the things that have happened in Jerusalem.

-Jesus then asks, “What things?”

-The disciples then tell their version of what has happened.

“The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”]

 

I want to tell you a little story.

I was in the Navy from 1985 to 1991, and I was a submariner. I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia from 1988 to 1991. I was scheduled to be honorably discharged from the Navy in February 1991. Anybody remember what was happening about that time? The first Gulf War. Now, I was able to assure my family, because I had asked people above me in the Navy, whether I would be discharged on time from the service. They said, “Yes.” There were a number of reasons why I was not going to be retained on active duty for the war. Among these reasons two stand out. First, my submarine was already scheduled to deploy to the North Atlantic during the spring. Even with the war going on, and even if it had lasted longer than it ultimately did, the Navy had other commitments. Second, also important, submarines have only limited utility in land wars that take place in the desert. I was able to tell my worried mother that I would be discharged as scheduled, although it came up every time we were on the telephone.

That day arrived when I received my separation papers and left the base for the last time. I arrived in Georgia a few days later at my mother’s house, where I was to stay for a few days to get my bearings and relax. My mom, who is an artist, took me to her studio. At the studio was an American flag with a big yellow ribbon on it, as if I had been deployed for the war, when I hadn’t.

I share this story not to make fun of my mother, but to make an important point about the human experience, and it is this: Even when we tell a story accurately and truly, there is no guarantee that it will be heard as we tell it.

 

There are two stories in the process of being reconciled on the Road to Emmaus. First, there is the story of the disciples. And what do they say?

 

-That Jesus Christ was a prophet. This is not simply any old word. It means a person specifically called by God to point to differences between what people are doing and what God wants them to be doing. There are lots of them we hear about in the Old Testament.

-That the disciples had hoped that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel. This means, again, rather specific things. It means that Jesus would restore God’s covenant people, the Jews, to self-determined nationhood and deliver them from their oppressors. Remember that the Israelites had, in their historical experience, two principal, defining experiences of being under non-Israelite overlords, in Egypt and then again under different empires after the fall of their independent kingdoms, the time referred to as the “Exile.” And even though many had returned to the land that had been promised to them, there was a sense that things were not as they had been. What these two disciples may be talking about, then, is that they hoped that at last Israel’s estrangement from God would be over.

-But the way they tell the story says, in essence, “I guess maybe he wasn’t the guy after all.”

-Finally, their confused relation of the women’s story. Some women of our group astounded us… His tomb is empty. Which doesn’t really prove anything to them, but does give them pause, on top of everything else.

 

The second story is the true one, and it is the one that Jesus has been telling about himself from the beginning. ‘“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.’ He reframes the entire history of Israel to be the story of how they got to, not another prophet, but the Messiah, the Son of God. He is not simply the Redeemer of Israel, and certainly not in the way that so many imagined and hoped. And his death is the place the story was always headed, but it is by no means the end of the tale.

 

Let me say it again. Even when we tell a story accurately and truly, there is no guarantee that it will be heard as we tell it. That’s a big reason for why we reread scripture every week, and talk about it, and pray to God, so that we understand the story we’re all part of.

 

In many ways, the experience of the church is the experience of those disciples on the Road to Emmaus. We are constantly in need of reminding ourselves, and of course, reminding those whom we meet, of what our story is really about. We’re constantly in danger of having the story taken over either by our own retelling of it to suit our own perception of our needs, or by those from outside the church who experience the Gospel as being simply another way of being a good person or, worse, something that turns people into a mean and intolerant tribe within society.

 

Hear this: if we believe the story of scripture is primarily about our individual selves or our particular tribe, we will probably end up finding it disappointing. Or worse, we will find that our mission will become polarizing and disunifying. “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” There is nothing wrong with wanting God to deliver Israel, or us, from our present circumstances to better ones, but the message of the Gospel is not addressed simply to a subset of humanity. It is God’s gracious, loving promise of hope to ALL people and nations. Seeing is deceiving. Because we normally only see that situation we inhabit, we apply what we know to all situations. Because we find ourselves challenged by particular burdens, we think that all people have identical burdens. Jesus Christ proclaimed hope within just such a situation, and people heard it as they nearly always do, in light of their personal or tribal experience.

 

But God is bigger than that, and God demands that we hear not our story, which is what Christianity is if we aren’t careful, but God’s story revealed through Jesus Christ. We are not the main characters of this story. And this story calls for different and bigger questions. What is the reason for human existence? How do we relate to other people in different circumstances, even other believers? What does a human life, rightly lived, consist of? Where are we going? Because this is yet another distinction between the self-story and the God-story. In our version, we’re all going to heaven, because we’re all basically decent folks, after all. Or we’re going to heaven, but you other folks are out of luck. Or, if we don’t even want to try to incorporate God into our lives, we’re just out for whatever enjoyment we can get. But the story is basically limited in what it hopes for in this world, and mostly focused on the eternal reward for the individual in heaven.

 

I want to propose that in the God-story, the hope that we are promised is that, in spite of where we are, God will restore all things to unity with Him as they were in the beginning. And the promise is not simply that heaven will be restored, but earth, too. “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” “Behold, I make all things new.” “If anyone is in Christ, it is a new Creation.”

 

When I look at church, I see, with some exceptions, a tool that was designed to do a different job than God intends. We’re supposed to be the means through which God will reconcile us to himself, the means through which, in the power of His Son, we will be residents of a realm in which there will be no more weeping, no more pain, no sorrow, no starvation, no war. Instead, sometimes our story sounds more like the two disciples on the road, wondering what happens next, not understanding what came before. Many times, I think we’ve reduced our sense of mission to making the best of things until Jesus comes back.

 

A good engineer, in designing a tool to accomplish work, looks at the job to be done and fashions an instrument to accomplish it. The way a church looks, in my judgment, should be a reflection of the purpose to which it is called. We retell our own story to remind us of where we have been, of who we are now, and of where we are going. Wise Christians reverse-engineer themselves in order to better serve the carpenter who will wield them in his work. They look at where we’re going and become disciples who can be a part of getting there.

 

I think back to Jesus with those two disciples, and how it must have gradually dawned upon them that something extraordinary was going on with this stranger on the road. “Were not our hearts burning within us?” Wise Christians are not deceived by what they see. I’ll go even further. We’re here to be undeceived, to be re-engineered, to know Jesus Christ’s story, and to know his real and eternal presence among us. What we see in life results in part from what we believe about the world. If we know we saw Jesus crucified, and that he is dead, then we will change the story to reflect what we think is reality. If we think that God is subject to the same limitations that we are, to the “reality” that we see, then we will build a church that will always operate within those limitations. Likewise, we have to check our own assumptions about what our faith is about, so that we are believing in God, and following Jesus Christ, rather than believing in ourselves, and hoping that God will come along for the ride. I want for us to tell the story of Jesus Christ, and to tell it truly, so that we know our past, better understand our present, and have confidence in our future. That’s a story worth hearing, and we’ll know it when we hear it, and we will go places and do things we didn’t think possible.

 

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