Spiritual Hiccups - Trying To Get Home

Many Christians know the story of Jesus appearing to a pair of his followers as they walked the road to Emmaus on the evening of the Resurrection.  The term Emmaus has become synonymous with spiritual awaking or discovery.  But we know nothing about Emmaus.  We do not know where it is, nor do we know why these two were headed there.  Perhaps it was a stop on the way somewhere else.  Perhaps it was home.  Regardless, I'm inclined to think they were headed home, home to Emmaus or someplace beyond it.  They had heard the report from the women of the empty tomb and a vision of angels saying Jesus was alive.  But despite this report, they have left Jerusalem.  They are headed back somewhere, presumably home, going back to their old lives.

It is not unusual to yearn for home, especially when life has unraveled, when things are not as we would like them.  We would like to go back to a place where we are secure, where we understand how things work, where life makes sense.  Longing for "the good 'ole days" is a form of wanting to go home.

Yesterday I wrote about "Cemetery Churches," congregations where one is unlikely to find the living Christ.  But later in the day I was rereading the Walter Brueggemann book, Cadences of Home, which uses the metaphor of "exile" to speak of the church's loss of special status and influence in American culture.  He says that similar to Israel's exile to Babylon, this exile is only partially our doing.  Our exile is not entirely our fault.  We share some blame.  We have not always been a faithful church, but there are also cultural forces at work beyond our failings. 

Seen from this perspective, perhaps my cemetery churches might more charitably be understood as communities that have not come to terms with exile.  They have been cut loose from their moorings and find themselves in a land they do not really know.  And like the two disciples headed to Emmaus, they seek to return, to go back home.

But we cannot go back to how things once were any more that those two disciples could return to a pre-Easter world.  Like them, we are called forward to something new, but I suspect that moving forward requires mourning our loss, naming our exile. 

In my own denomination, accepting this exile is difficult for many.  Some conservatives, like Old Testament Deuteronomists, insist that our decline is entirely our own fault, a failing that can be corrected if only we will be more orthodox and less accommodating to the secular world.  But more moderate and liberal Presbyterians like myself often reject such a view, but we too suspect that if we only did things better, we could get back home.  We are unwilling to mourn and lament our exile.  We keep looking back, and so we miss the power of resurrection in our midst.

When the disciples on the Emmaus road meet the risen Jesus, all thoughts of getting home are forgotten.  They immediately return to Jerusalem and head toward an uncertain future.  It is something new that God will bring out of death and exile.  It is the new home of God's coming reign, the Kingdom.  This no pie in the sky when we die, but God's will enacted here on earth.  It is a dream, even an impossibility.  But it is the only home that lies ahead of us rather than behind.

Click to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.