"Recognize"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE GOSPELS Luke 24:13-35 Sermon –"Recognize." 

In some ways, the first few days after a loved one dies are the easiest.  I know that sounds bad, but over the years I’ve noticed two things.  The first is that the simple unreality of death comes as a shock. A person who was just with you, maybe talking to you, someone who was a fixture in you life, is suddenly gone.  

The first time I noticed this was when I was thirteen years old and my brother was involved in a car accident.  Up until that point, the words car accident were associated in my mind with something like a fender bender; something costly and inconvenient but certainly not life-threatening. This car accident was different.  

My brother and three of his friends were going to a movie, but they were running late. So, they were probably driving faster than they should when they hit some gravel  and the car started sliding to the edge of a road that had no guardrail. My brother’s friend who was driving turned the wheel to keep from going off the road which caused the car to roll the other way. Sadly, the boy who was driving suffered a fatal head injury and was removed from life support the next day.  

He was someone I knew; someone who had been to our house. Then he was gone. I can remember thinking it was like he’d just gone on vacation.  

Death was something I couldn’t quite absorb. Beyond the simple incomprehensibility of death, Once the shock wears off, there is so much to do. There are the arrangements to be made-  with the funeral home, with the church. Friends and family might be coming in from out of town to attend the service. It can keep a person so busy that they don’t have time to think, much less grieve what’s been lost.  

I once asked a recently widowed woman how she was doing in the days following her husband’s death. “It’s hard to hit a moving target,” she told me. That’s where these two disciples are in this morning’s reading. On the third day after the brutal and devastating execution of their teacher, they are on the move. The writer Fredrick Buechner talks about their destination, Emmaus, as a code word for, “the place we go in order to escape.”  

We head there not because the place itself holds any particular appeal; we head there because it’s hard to hit a moving target. Or as Buechner puts it, “Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that we have had- ideas about love and freedom and justice- have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish people for selfish ends.” Maybe the reason we celebrate Easter with so much fanfare is that in some ways it off-sets the complete lack of fanfare that accompanies the actual stories about the encounters people had with the risen Christ. When these two disciples encounter a stranger on the road, they recount their tale of woe and conclude with what might possibly be the saddest three words anyone can utter, “We had hoped.” What’s worse, I wonder, having no hope or hoping for something so much only to have that hope dashed, only to witness it crucified on a Roman cross. No matter what road we take to escape the reality that we’re not ready to accept, what these disciples discover on the way is that there is no escaping our own disappointed hopes.  

They follow us wherever we try to go. They may even haunt us. Who is this stranger anyway?  

Luke tells us it’s Jesus, but the travelers on that road can’t see it. They are prevented from seeing it. What prevents them? Some say that the word use suggests that it is God who prevents them from seeing that it’s Jesus. Who knows? Maybe it is their own grief, the sadness with which they look at him when he asks what they’ve been talking about. Or maybe it is their lack of hope. We hope, says the apostle Paul elsewhere, for what we do not see.  

So, if we have no hope, does it prevent us from seeing; narrow our vision to to only those things we expect, or make sense? Who can say? What we can say is that at a certain point it doesn’t really matter. What I mean is that whatever prevents us from seeing Jesus when he meets us on our escape routes, when he finds us in our disappointment, loss, and turmoil, he is there nonetheless. He walks with us nonetheless. He questions us, challenges us, and teaches us even when we may not recognize at the time just what is happening. It might be that the thing that prevents these disciples, and us, from seeing Jesus when he comes to us in such moments is our own expectation. Some miraculous sign, some dramatic out of the ordinary event, and he shows up as just another ordinary stranger. The good news is that he doesn’t wait for us to recognize him to show us what it is we really need to see. And if it’s God or Jesus who actively prevents these disciples, and in turn us, from recognizing him at first, well maybe that’s because it would just get in the way of what they really needed to see, what they really need to know. Twelve years ago I had the opportunity to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. No, not Scotland. Israel. One week in Galilee. One week in Jerusalem. Before I left, I had hoped that I might see Jesus there. But that isn’t quite what happened… 

I thought I had to go to Israel to meet Jesus, only it turns out he met me on the way.  

Whatever disappointed hopes we might try to escape, whatever sadness might be preventing us from recognizing Jesus as he meets us, friends, the promise of resurrection is that he finds us nonetheless. He finds us in the ordinary, in the unexpected, in the stranger who questions, challenges and teaches us what we need to know or who simply offers us a sandwich in order to trust that God is still with us, even and especially when what we had hoped appears to have come to nothing. What we will find is that all it takes is something as simple as a meal shared with a stranger to show us that when it comes to resurrection there is always more to the story than we can always see. There is life, and new life, and the promise that we can never escape the love of God that meets us on the way.