Sunday, May 4, 2014

Sermon: Able to See the Risen One

Luke 24:14-35
Able to See the Risen One
James Sledge                                                                                                   May 4, 2014

When I was in seminary, I had a wonderful opportunity to take part in three week travel seminar to the Middle East. Fifteen students, five from my seminary and five each from two others, joined a group of lay leaders from various churches on a trip that visited sites in Jordan, Syria, the Sinai peninsula, Israel, and Greece.
One of the things you discover in the Middle East, especially outside the cities, is the remarkable hospitality of the people, much like the biblical culture of hospitality, except in Israel. That’s not a knock on Israel. It’s just that its culture is largely imported from Europe and America and so very unlike indigenous, Middle Eastern culture.
One day, after visiting a number of archeological sites in Jordan, we made our way to an out-of-the-way, little village. There was an old Crusader castle on the hill overlooking the village, but it did not draw many tourists. We were the only Westerners, or tourists of any sort, at the single, little hotel that was about halfway between the village and the castle.
We arrived a couple of hours before supper, and a few of us decided to walk the bit less than a mile down the hill into the village itself. As we walked along the road, people would lean out the windows of homes and talk to us, ask where we were from, how we were doing, where we would go next, and so on. One boy – I guess he was 10 or 11 – asked if we would come in and join him for tea. But we wanted to get to the village and back before supper, so we said, “No.” He was insistent, running from the upstairs window down to the front door, showing us the teapot he would use, telling us it would be no trouble at all.
We were very appreciative. We thanked him repeatedly, but we had to keep going. It is by far my single biggest regret from that trip, and it ranks way up there on my list of all time regrets. To have visited in his home and enjoyed his hospitality would surely have been one of the more memorable and meaningful moments of the entire trip, certainly much more so than the few closed shops we saw at the bottom of the hill.
I have kicked myself over the years for not stopping, and I’m often reminded of that day when I read a biblical account that features hospitality. When I read the story of Cleopas and another, unnamed disciple meeting Jesus along the way but not recognizing him at first, I wondered if I would have missed out had I been walking along the Emmaus Road that day.
After all, I did not have time even to accept someone’s hospitality that day when I walked down a Middle Eastern road. Cleopas and his companion meet the risen Christ only after they extend hospitality, insistently, not unlike that little boy in Jordan. And they do so even though they are tired, confused, and heartbroken. Had I been there that day and Jesus walked ahead as if he were going on, I likely would have said, “So long. Nice talking to you.”

We live in a culture that is hectic, busy, and anxious, that is about doing things and accomplishing things. It values production and efficiency, and it hates to “waste time.” Even on vacation, we must do things. That afternoon in Jordan, my friends and I had set a little agenda for the next two hours, and we did not have time to waste. So we kept going, completing our agenda but missing something much more important. Our busyness blinded us to the wonderful opportunity right in front of us.
Busyness follows us to church. Our Sundays, our Sabbaths, are often as scheduled as the rest of our lives. We have to fit in church between other activities and events. At times all we can manage is to come in, grab a quick spiritual pick-me-up, say hello to friends, and go on to the next item.
I’ve told some of you about a time when my aunt visited the first church I served. She left her home that morning and made the several hour drive to the church, arriving 10 minutes or so before worship. She came in by herself and sat down. (Shawn and our girls were out of town.) When my aunt and I talked later that day, she told me that nary a soul had spoken to her. The church was small enough that some would have realized she was not a member. And she was alone. After worship she walked down the church’s center aisle as people slowly made their way out. She lingered for a while where folks were gathered just outside the narthex. But no one spoke to her.
Now don’t get the wrong idea. This was not an unfriendly congregation. Quite the opposite. We had a Wednesday Fellowship dinner every week with attendance that rivaled worship. People hung around for a long time chatting and catching up after worship and were very attentive to people who were sick or hurting. They did not mean to be rude to my aunt. They were just busy catching up with friends they had not seen in a while, grabbing someone to attend to some committee work, rounding up kids so they could rush off to soccer practice, or some such thing, and they simply did not see her. They missed her standing there, and I wonder if, like me, they might have missed Jesus if they had been traveling down that Emmaus Road.
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I recently finished reading the latest book from Old Testament scholar and prolific writer Walter Brueggemann. It’s entitled Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, and I put this quote from it on the bulletin cover.
“Sabbath is variously restraint, withdrawal, or divestment from the concrete practices of society that specialize in anxiety. Sabbath is an antidote to anxiety that both derives from our craving and in turn feeds those cravings for more. Sabbath is an arena in which to recognize that we live by gift and not by possession, that we are satisfied by relationships of attentive fidelity and not by amassing commodities. We know in the gospel tradition that we may indeed “gain the whole world” and lose our souls (Mark 8: 34–37). Thus Sabbath is soul-receiving when we are in a posture of receptivity before our Father who knows we need them (Luke 12: 30).”[1]
We live in a world of doing and producing and acquiring, but Sabbath is about stopping and receiving. Sabbath recognizes that faith, spirituality, and becoming fully human are not things that we can acquire by doing. They can only be received, but our busyness can make it hard to receive, difficult even to see the gift, the grace, standing right in front of us. Lord knows I need to slow down enough to see, to notice the person right in front of me, to see the chance to receive or extend hospitality, to be open to the possibility of the risen Christ being made known to me in the breaking of the bread.
Do we have the time? Can we let go and enter a Sabbath posture of waiting and receptivity? The risen Christ awaits us, longing to give us sustenance and nourishment that cannot be acquired, only received. God’s presence is here. Be known to us, Lord Jesus, in the breaking of the bread.


[1] Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014), 85.

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