Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
April 5, 2008: Easter 3
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Luke 24:13-35
That very day, the first day of the week, two of the disciples were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “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. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” Then he said to them, “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. As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 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?” That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Our God is a god of shattered hopes. Our god is a God of broken bread.
Our gospel this morning is easily one of the most well-beloved passages in all of Scripture. Two men, Luke tells us, are walking along a road from Jerusalem to the village of Emmaus. They’re sad and downhearted, walking and talking, trying to absorb their shattered hopes in the death of Jesus and trying to make sense of the fantastical tale of some women who claim to have encountered angels who say that Jesus is not dead but alive.
They are walking and talking when a third person joins them on the road, asking them questions about what has occurred in the last few days.
And so it goes.
Life after the resurrection, we discover, is at times life lived on a particular kind of road—not a road of jubilant “Alleluia, Christ is Risen” but a road of shattered hopes and broken dreams, a road away from our Jerusalems, so to speak, and toward some little village of refuge where we think we can get away from it all. Life after the resurrection can happen along such a road.
What our gospel says is that it’s there, while trying to get away, that we are met. It’s there in the presence of one who asks us questions that our story comes tumbling out, our story both of our shattered hopes and dreams as well as the perplexing story of the women at the tomb that challenges the way we see things.
Life after the resurrection can involve the telling of our story.
But according to our story, that isn’t all that it involves. It’s not enough, it seems, for us just to tell or retell our story, for the one who listens is also the one who then speaks, who is somehow able to place our shattered hopes and dreams into a larger story. That larger story makes sense of what we cannot comprehend. That larger story is the story that something or someone bigger who we call God is at work, has always been at work in the shattered hopes of a pilgrim people, of a wandering people, of a fleeing people.
And so life after the resurrection involves imagining our story within the context of a larger story.
And it is this, evidently, that awakens us, at least a little.
For when the one who has asked us to tell our story and who has helped us imagine our story as a part of God’s larger story, when he begins to walk ahead of us as if to go along his own way, we have the sense to ask him to stay with us as we continue along our journey. “Stay with us for evening is at hand and the day is past,” we say. “Stay with us” And he does.
And when we arrive at the village we had hoped would be a respite from our shattered hopes, we watch as he takes bread and breaks it in order to feed us. It’s then and only then that we know who he is. He is the Holy One who is the paradigm for us that shattered hopes, that broken bread, are the unlikely means of our renewal and are the path to a strange kind of wholeness that can only come after our shattering.
Right now there’s a lot of shattering going on around us and within us.
Just across town, St. Mark’s Cathedral is reeling from the resignation of the Dean there and all the fallout from a difficult period of conflict and confusion. And there are many stories from many different people about how this came to be.
Our Presiding Bishop will be here at St. Paul’s for a press event next Friday. She’s here for a conference on the environment sponsored by our Diocese. I wonder which of many shatterings she will be asked about: the so-called schism in the American Church (schism meaning division or shattering) or the shattering of the illusion that our natural world is impervious to our action. And, of course, there will be many stories about how each of these came to be.
And I know there are many of you here—and I count myself among you in this—that have experienced shatterings of your own as you’ve lost family members or have had to deal with illnesses or relationships ending in ways you never would have chosen. And each of us has many stories about how this came to be.
And the stories will be told and retold—to friends, to family, in community, to the press, to therapists, to whomever.
But after all the stories, the question will be, “Will we allow the one who listens to all the stories, to speak, to connect us to God’s larger story that comprehends what we cannot comprehend, the story of a God and savior who is always working to create a new thing not only in the midst of but through what gets shattered?” And will we continue to come to the table and be fed in the midst of this kind of transformation, fed by broken bread and spilled wine? And finally, will we stay in the village of our escape or will we, like the two who were walking to Emmaus, go back to Jerusalem to tell others and tell ourselves the preposterous story of life that springs up from a tomb, of renewal that comes after a shattering.
Some stories are worth telling more than once. I learned this with my own children, I learned it from living with the lectionary, and I learned it from myself as I was drawn to rereading particular books, retelling particular stories to myself because I needed them. This then is a story some of you have heard before. It is a story about God as the one who comes to us, who listens and, I would say, out of a kind of wisdom about a bigger story, is able to point us into a future that is forever creative and forever new.
One day a child was walking down the hall of an elementary school. School was over for the day, and in his hands he had a small, brightly colored ceramic bowl, one he had made himself during art class for his mother. Now, of course, this was a special bowl, hand-made, slightly misshapen and garishly decorated, the kind of thing every parent prizes and spends years trying to figure out what to do with. The boy was excited to find his mother and give her what he had made, and so he began to run. As he did this, he dropped the bowl and broke it into a thousand pieces. He began to cry, and everyone tried to comfort him. “It was just a bowl.” They said. “You can always make another one.” But the boy was inconsolable. Finally, his mother arrived. She listened to him as he told her what happened, put her arms around him and let him have his cry. Then after a while she said, “Let's pick up all the pieces. We’ll take them home, put them together, and see what new thing we can make out of them.”
