"Unveiling Faith"[1]

A sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Hilary Barrett

at Pleasantville United Church of Christ, May 8, 2011

Luke 24:13-35

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.  Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.  They said 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?’”
(Luke 24:30-32)

I have always loved a good road trip.  I come by it honestly: most of the people in my family love road trips too.  When I was 12, my Dad and I drove across the United States –all the way from Berkeley, California to Boston, Massachusetts -- in a grey ’67 VW convertible.  I have one photograph from that adventure that tells the story.  If you’ve ever seen the film, Grapes of Wrath, and you remember what the Joad family car looked like, then you can get a sense of how our little car looked.  It took us well over 4 weeks to cross the continent factoring in the annoyance of having to rebuild the engine three times during the odyssey.

That’s the thing about road trips – you never know exactly what’s gonna’ happen.

A couple months ago, I heard about another road trip that caught my attention.  On September 8, 2010, Maxwell and Richard Brookes packed their dad’s 2004 Kia Sorento with their belongings – including two new digital cameras – and headed off on an adventure.  Max and Richard are 22 year old fraternal twins from China Grove, North Carolina.  They are recent college graduates, members of Mt. Zion UCC, and they are undertaking a unique road trip.

Their task is to travel across the United States visiting all the sites where the United Church of Christ has folk doing long term volunteer work.  They are visiting disaster response teams in Mississippi, New Orleans, and Tennessee; college kids working in homeless shelters and residential facilities for the mentally ill.  They are visiting camps for physically challenged children, homes for older adults, and outreach centers for the poor.  As they travel, they are making a documentary about what they are hearing and seeing, and they plan to share that at this summer’s gathering of the national church called, “General Synod.”  Pastor Amelie will be at General Synod this summer and we can ask her to keep her eye out for the Brookes Brothers. 

You can follow Max and Richard’s adventures by logging into the denomination’s website and searching on “Brookes Brothers.”  One of their posts is entitled, “The Top Ten Things that We’ve Learned Since Starting Twin Maps.”  It’s worth the time.  Besides the fact that they’ve learned that ‘gas prices are expensive…everywhere!’ they’ve also learned that ‘when you give, you receive more,’ that ‘the next story is always different from the last,’ and that ‘there is so much good in this world.’  No matter what else these kids are learning, one thing is clear: this road trip is changing their lives and deepening their faith -- which is as exactly as should be.

One of the earliest names for Christianity was The Way.  The Bible is full of stories of life-changing events happening to folk on the way from one place to another.  We make much of efficiency and speed in our culture, finding the quickest route from point A to point B.  But what we learn from scripture and, in fact, what we eventually learn from life is it really is about what happens on the journey.  

So Jesus is on his way to someone’s house when a woman touches the hem of his garment and she is healed.  Jesus and the disciples are passing through Samaria on their way north when Jesus encounters a woman at Jacob’s Well.  They are on their way to Jerusalem when a blind beggar named Bartimeus calls out to Jesus for mercy.  Saul is on the road to Damascus when the Risen Christ confronts him.  The Ethiopian Eunuch is headed home when he meets Philip on the way.  The priest and the Levite are too busy going from A to B to stop and help the man by the side of the road but the Samaritan just passing through is willing to take a detour on the victim’s behalf.

It seems the Bible is trying to tell us something.  Faith is never static, we are to be always moving always growing always on the way and we need to pay attention to the lessons of the journey.

Today’s Eastertide gospel lesson is a case in point. We find two grieving disciples on the road home to Emmaus -- and Jesus joins them on the way.  But the Bible tells us that they do not recognize him.  Tears of grief can do that to us: they can make us blind.  So too can the fierceness of anger or the dark depths of despair.  Jesus meets these grieving disciples on the way, walks along with them listening to them, and then he asks them about whom they are speaking.  This is when their grief and anger splashes out: “Are you the only person in the whole country who hasn’t heard what happened in Jerusalem, about Jesus of Nazareth, a man of God, a prophet whom the authorities plotted against and had him killed?  And we had hoped that he was the one who would set Israel free.  And then some crazy women said they saw angels at his tomb and some of the disciples said his body is missing and it is all just too much, too much, we are packing it up and going home.”

They really didn’t know who to be mad at; this nosey stranger, the authorities who had Jesus killed or Jesus himself for letting them down, for abandoning them when they needed him.  It is not unusual for families to be mad at a loved one for going and dying on them.  That is why the opening prayer of the funeral liturgy invites people to pour out their grief and their anger and all the conflicting and complicated emotions that flood us at a time of loss, pour them out the prayer says and know that God cares.   The two men in the story are about to find that out.  

As they walk along the road, the stranger begins to explain the scriptures to them: that all these things were meant to be; God really does have a plan; God is at work in the midst of our failures and disappointments, our losses and our grief; God really does care.  God is in our midst even when we are too blind to see.  Arriving at their destination, the disciples invite the stranger to join them for supper.  And this is a key moment.  The Bible says Jesus acts like he is going on further down the road, but they invite Him in.  Hospitality is a deeply rooted practice of faith.  What would have happened if they had said as they got to where they were staying “well it was good talking with you, safe travels” and left it at that? Again and again in scripture, hospitality to the stranger becomes the means by which Jesus reaches out to us.  These two disciples come out of their grief long enough to remember their manners and Jesus joins them at the table.

There they sat, two confused and soul weary travelers at the table with a stranger, still pondering the thoughts he had shared with them but too blinded by grief to do much about it.  And then the stranger took the bread in his hands, and blessed and broke it and their eyes were opened!  The veil of grief and anger and confusion and fear are torn in two like the temple curtain at the moment of Jesus’ death.  And the light pours in, touching the broken places, healing the grief, conveying a peace that passes all understanding.  Their eyes were opened and they recognized him: the Risen Christ in their midst.  

And what is the very first thing they do once they recognize Jesus?  They get on the way again.  They head back to Jerusalem to share the glorious news with the others who had been on the Way with them.  They are on the way again, not knowing what the next bend in the road would be, not knowing when the traveling would get rough again, but knowing this: they were not traveling alone; the One who had greeted them at His Own Table would also greet them at their journeys end.

            There’s no telling what we will learn on a road trip – nor who we will meet. 

Jesus said I am the Way, the way, the truth and the life.  Come and follow me.  I will bring you home.  I love you and you are mine.  Amen.