Easter 3, Year A
April 10, 2005
The Reverend Melissa Skelton

It is the day of resurrection. The women have been to the empty tomb and have told the disciples their story—a story that the disciples don’t know how to believe. Two people—two men or a man and a woman—are going from Jerusalem to Emmaus, a village about seven miles away. Grieving and perplexed over the turn of events, they’re talking about all that’s happened when a stranger falls into step with them. He asks them what they’re discussing. Jesus, they tell him, the one they had hoped would redeem Israel, has been crucified. And they go on to say that just this morning, some women visiting the tomb have found the tomb empty. The women are claiming that he is risen, something that no one can believe.

The stranger listens and then speaks. He begins by upbraiding them a bit, calling them “foolish” and “slow to heart” and proceeds to use Scripture to explain to them that contrary to their expectations, the Messiah must suffer and die to come into his glory.

As they approach town, the stranger speeds up as if to leave them behind, but something in them reaches out to him, and they urge him to stay with them for the night. He does so, and the minute they sit at table and he blesses, breaks and gives them the bread, they know who he is—their risen Lord.

I love this story—maybe because, unlike the other resurrection appearances that occur, for instance, to a fearful group of disciples behind locked doors or to a discouraged group of disciples who have gone back to fishing on boats or at the seaside, this resurrection appearance seems more intimate and everyday—Jesus joining a couple of dispirited companions walking down the road together.

I also love this story because it’s all about something you and I experience every day of our lives—the difficulty, the real struggle to see and recognize the sacredness of what or who is sitting right in front of us, the sacredness of what or who is walking right next to us.

For we, like the two on the road to Emmaus, the two who, as Luke says, “had hoped that Jesus would deliver Israel” are forever looking at life through some kind of lens of disappointed expectations. We, like they, are always hoping that things had gone differently: wishing that our childhoods had been less troubled, wishing that our vocations had been more fulfilling, wishing that our partners or our children had been easier people to live with, wishing that our political and economic world would have been in a different place by the year 2005.

And just as in our Gospel story, these kind of disappointed wishes and hopes become the lens through which we look at and experience the world. And, of course, they also become the barrier to seeing and receiving what is right in front of us, what or who is walking beside us.

It takes a lot sometimes to break down that barrier—to see what has been there all along.

I have a friend back East, a woman in her 40s, a solid Episcopalian, who recently got some disturbing news about her health. Nothing is clear quite yet but the questions raised and the tests she is undergoing have shifted the way she sees the world. Gone (or at least gone from time to time) are any of her disappointed or frustrated hopes about family, job, her world. In a recent e-mail to me, this is what she said:

“The uncertainty of my health situation is, of course, worrisome, and I do go through times of real fear and dread at what might be ahead for me. But at the same time I’m (amazingly) experiencing intense periods of gratitude for my life exactly as it has been. In these times, I find I don't need a better marriage, I don't need a better upbringing, I don't need a better family; I don't need a better job. I guess all this religion stuff works after all.”

When Jesus speaks to the pair along the road about the nature of his messiah ship (that it was “necessary that the Messiah should suffer…and then enter into his glory”) and more importantly, when he sits at table with them and actually breaks the bread in front of them, he is, I believe, witnessing to two related realities:

First, the source of healing and wholeness, is neither far off nor has failed them, but instead, is right beside them, is their traveling companion—the broken one who lives and whose brokenness gives life to the world. Second, the way they and we receive this has something to do with the breaking open of expectations about how things should be, about what indeed has the power to save.

And how do we get broken open? Our story and our experience suggest that it has something to do with the engagement of our hearts—when our hearts are set afire, enlarged, loosened up, broken open so that they somehow recognize that what is sacred does not live in the realm of the ideal or the perfect or the powerful. No, the sacred, is sitting right next to you, warts and all, especially wounds and all.

Frederick Buechner in his book The Magnificent Defeat, put it this way:

“Sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only . . . a garden, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with our being and imagination . . . what we may see is Jesus himself.”

In this Easter season, I invite us to pay attention to where our hearts are being set afire, to see the broken bread of the everyday being offered as a gift to us. I invite us to receive it and the wounded risen Christ who walks beside us and sits before us—not as a way to be complacent, but to be in a place of peace and acceptance from which to offer our real everyday selves, ready to be broken for the world.