The Road to Emmaus (3rd of Easter, 2024-04-14)

The Road to Emmaus

Easter 3, 14 April 2024, Acts 3:12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:13-35
© W. Kirchmeir The Gospel is not that listed in the RCL.

May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be ever acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.

Dear Friends in Christ,
     Today we’ve heard one of my favourite stories, the story of the two disciples travelling to Emmaus.
     They met a man going the same way. They started chatting with him about the recent events in Jerusalem. They became so engrossed in this conversation that they didn’t notice much about their fellow wanderer. What caught their attention was what he said, the questions he asked, the way he connected their thoughts and ideas to the scriptures. They wanted to continue the conversation, and besides, it was getting dark. In those days, night was definitely not a safe time to travel. So they invited him into their home and prepared a meal. When the stranger said the blessing over the bread, then they saw who he was: Jesus, the friend they had mourned since the day of Crucifixion.
     Try to imagine the shock.
     Try to imagine the mixture of joy, astonishment, awe, and hope when they recognised him.
     You can almost feel the twinge of self-doubt, knowing they had been talking with him for an hour or more without knowing who he was.
     Quite an emotional scene, this: so much so, that they hurried to tell Peter and the others about their wonderful encounter with a stranger who turned out to be Jesus.
     Why didn’t they recognise him? Well, there’s the odd psychological fact that we don’t actually see what’s in front of us. We see what expect to see. We don’t see what we don’t expect to see. In other words, we don’t see, we perceive. This odd and uncomfortable fact explains otherwise inexplicable collisions at intersections. But I didn’t see the stop sign! Yeah, tell me another one! – But psychologists have shown that in fact the hapless motorist did not see the stop sign.
     This error of perception is so common that psychologists have given it a name. They call it “selective inattention.” That’s a very helpful name, I think. Every parent, every teacher, every married couple knows exactly what it means.
     “Selective inattention.” It certainly helps explain what happened on the road to Emmaus. Cleopas and his friend certainly did not expect to see a dead man walking along the road with them.

     Simply as a story, the road to Emmaus is an impressive achievement. There’s grief and hope. Could it be true what those women reported, that their murdered friend was alive after all? Hope aroused will be either fulfilled or denied. The disciples meet a stranger, and they talk to him about the very things that depress them, and that also give them hope. When they recognise the stranger  as the risen Jesus, hope is fulfilled.
     They now see the events that led up to this moment from a different angle. They now recall how intense the conversation was, how it led to insight and understanding, how they were absorbed in it. No wonder – for the stranger was Jesus.
     When the turning point in a story not only resolves the tension of the plot but recasts it in a new light, that’s great story telling. Maybe that’s the reason I’ve liked this story so much. A well-told tale has always pleased me.
     But as much pleasure as we may get from the sheer telling of the tale, there’s a good deal more here. There’s our reaction to the contents of the story. Surely, we think, we would have recognised Jesus! Surely we would have had some suspicions when Jesus begins his conversation with Did not the Christ have to suffer this and enter into his glory? Surely we would not have suffered from that selective inattention that plagued Cleopas and his companion?

     H’m. Really?

     It’s easy to forget that we have the benefit of 2000 years of hindsight. We suffer from a different kind of selective inattention. We don’t attend to the fact that we would have known exactly as much, and exactly as little, as those two disciples. I think it’s pretty certain that we would have behaved exactly like them.
     I’ll go further: I don’t think we have progressed much further from that incomplete understanding that the disciples had.
     We are no further along the road to Emmaus than they were.
     We too, suffer from selective inattention.
     We too fail to recognise Jesus among us.
     For Jesus is among us. He really is. I am with you always, he said.
     He’s not safely tucked away in some sunny blue heaven filled with fluffy white clouds and angels with golden harps. The right hand of God is not some place beyond this universe. Jesus has not left us behind to ascend to some unearthly planet beyond the sky, from where he watches us with some kind of super-telescope to make sure we do as we’re told.
      No, he’s here and there and everywhere. We just don’t always recognise him.
     Well, who am I kidding? We hardly ever recognise him!
     Why don’t we recognise him?
     Do our assumptions about class and respectability get in the way?
     Do our stereotypes about young and old, male and female, friends and strangers prevent us from seeing who is right there in front of us?
     Do our ideas about intelligence and smarts, about common ground, about people like us and people who are different, do these expectations interfere with our perceiving what our eyes and ears are telling us?
     Yes, and yes, and yes.

     Where is Jesus, then?
     Or maybe better, who is Jesus?

     He’s the homeless beggar sitting in front of Tim Horton’s on a busy downtown street.
     He’s the fellow parishioner sitting beside you in the pew every Sunday with whom you exchange the peace.
     He’s the bus driver taking you and 50 other tired people home after a long day.
     He’s the teacher who made you do an essay over again because he knew you could do a better job.
     He’s the girl at the checkout who rings up your groceries and smiles Hello.
     He’s the old lady who walks her dog up your street every day.
     He’s the scruffy man who holds the door for you at the post office.
     He’s the waitress who brings you a glass of water.
     He’s the neighbour who watches your house while you’re away for the weekend.
     He’s the club member who volunteers (yet again) to sit with you selling raffle tickets.
     He’s the guy staggering under an enormous backpack who’s getting on the bus to go planting trees up around Kenora.
     He’s the kid at the gas station who comes out to fill up your tank in a blizzard, while you wait in the warm car for him to finish.
     He’s the young man, oh so handsome in his uniform, who’s been deployed to Afghanistan, where he will see things you don’t want to imagine.
     Jesus is all these people and more.

     There’s more.
     Marie said she thought the story of the road to Emmaus is about sociability, about companionship on the journey. I think she’s right. She’s right because we need someone to accompany us on our journey of faith, someone to open up the scriptures to us, someone who will listen to our questions and help us grope towards an answer. That someone is Jesus.
     But like the disciples, you may not realise it. And when you do realise it, it may be not so much because of the serious discussion that you had, but because of a simple gesture of faith, such as saying the blessing over a meal.
     These insights may come in other ways, too. There’s the story of  the little boy whose Sunday school class had to memorise the 23rd Psalm. Although he practised and practised, he could hardly get past the first line. When his turn to recite the psalm came,, he stepped up to the microphone and proudly said, "The Lord is my Shepherd, and that's all I need to know!"
     A charming story, isn’t it? Did the boy know the full meaning of what he was saying? Probably not. But we grown-ups are a little further along, we understand it, right?
     Well, maybe we do. These aha! moments are very satisfying. Finally, we’ve seen a truth we didn’t see before. But they are also troubling, for how many truths have we not yet seen? How much have we not understood?

     When a grown-up presumes to teach us what we need to know, we are less likely to be charmed. We may even be offended. Every pastor knows that sooner or later a sermon will upset someone in the congregation. Every preacher has felt the temptation to soft-pedal a hard message, to use the familiar words that comfort us because they are familiar, and won’t raise questions.
     Why? Because we all have different takes on what the Bible teaches. When we read the Bible we often suffer from selective inattention, and it prevents us from reading what we don’t want to hear.
     There is one message among many that these days seems to be selectively ignored: What you do to the least of these my brothers you do unto me. We like to think in terms of those among the poor that deserve our help and those that don’t. Not surprisingly, we tend to think that most of the poor don’t deserve our help. They aren’t like us, you see.
     There are those who believe that Jesus has gone away to some other place, and will return on some specific date to judge us all. He will take those who have the true faith up to heaven with him. For some reason, those who make this prediction are convinced only they will be among the elect. Well, we can scoff at these and other notions as the effect of misunderstanding biblical language. But when we do so, we may be selectively inattentive to the core of the message, which is that Jesus has risen, and lives.

     Remember what Paul wrote to Timothy, that all scripture is given to us for our understanding, that we may learn what we need to know. I think Paul really did mean “all scriptures”, that is, all written texts. Paul knew that the old texts he had studied as a young man were written by people long dead. But the insights and knowledge of those long dead seekers after truth were just as valuable as anything he heard anyone say. Writing is speech preserved for us, that we may hear what our ancestors have said.

     We need to listen to each other. We need to discuss, not argue. We need to share, not declare. Jesus showed Cleopas and his friend how the old writers from Moses onward had told the same story. How they had spoken of the Anointed One who heals us from sin. How asking the right questions leads to the best answers.
     We all have insights and understandings, and those insights and understandings are gifts of the Spirit. We need to pray that our eyes may be opened, that our selective inattention becomes more complete perception, that we may know Jesus in whatever form and person he reveals himself.

     We are on a journey; we have not yet reached its end.
     We are surrounded by travelling companions; Jesus travels with us.
     We wonder whether what others have testified is true; Jesus will reveal the truth.
     We are anxious about where the journey will lead us; Jesus assures us that we will arrive home safely.

Let us pray:
Lord Jesus, show yourself to be present among us. Give us the grace to see you in each other. Give us the heart to have compassion as you had compassion. Give us the wisdom to recognise your truth, and the humility to know how little we know. Guide us by your Holy Spirit, that we may live as you have shown us how to live, so that in our words and deeds your glory and your love may be revealed to all the earth. We pray in your name, O Lord, you who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.

Doubting Thomas (2nd Sunday of Easter A -- 16th April, 2023)

Doubting Thomas

Wolf Kirchmeir

[ Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31]

O Holy Spirit, assist us we contemplate your word, that we may be enlightened by your truth. Amen.

Dear Friends in Christ,
     Today we’ll think about Doubting Thomas. I’ll start with a few questions.
     How do you react when somebody tells you something unbelievable? Do you just smile tolerantly? Do you tell him he’s out to lunch, and it looks like he won’t be back for a while? Do you frown skeptically, and ask for more facts? Do want to see for yourself? Do you decide to check with a more reliable source, one that likely knows what really happened?
     Nowadays, it feels like we’re drowned in unbelievable stories. We likely all know someone who has disappeared down a rabbit hole of unbelievable stories. And I’m sure we all like to believe we won’t be caught up in crazy beliefs or crazy theories. But we all have weak spots. None of us can be sure of never going down a rabbit hole.

     So how can you tell whether some story is worth at least a second look? It all depends, doesn’t it? Some stories are more outrageously wrong than others. Some stories are more believable than others. Some stories we want to believe, because they confirm something we’ve suspected. And some stories we do not want to believe for exactly the same reason.

     Seeing is believing, they say. Well, not any more. What with computer generated images, you can’t even believe your own eyes.

     Here’s a story about that. It happened a long time ago, well before radio and TV. An elderly relative told it to me, so it must be true. It’s about a cousin of a neighbour. He lived way back up in the hill country. He’d never been further than the next village down the valley, until one day his cousin invited him to Vienna, the capital city.

     The old man was duly impressed with the Imperial Palace, and the parks, and the grand avenues with their shops and restaurants. He enjoyed riding the tram cars, and was amazed at the horseless carriages. On the last day, his cousin took him to the zoo, which the old man found very interesting. He was always willing to learn something new about livestock. He admired it all, the buffalo, the elephants, the lions and tigers. Then he came to the giraffe. He stared at it for a long time. Then he turned to his cousin and said, “You tryin’ to fool me. There ain’t no such animal.”

     We all have our notions of how the world works, and what may be a reasonable story to you may be pure fantasy to me. Or vice versa. Sometimes, it seems, seeing isn’t enough. There ain’t no such animal.
     We’ve all met with a few things that we’ve found very hard to believe because they conflict or disagree with what we think we know. We pride ourselves on our skepticism. But much of the time skepticism just an excuse to hold onto our prejudices and favourite superstitions.

     Today’s Gospel tells the well-known story of Thomas, who refused to believe what his fellow disciples told him.
     It didn’t square with what he thought he knew. It conflicted with everything he understood about how the world works.
     His name has become a way of scolding skeptics: Doubting Thomas.
     So what can we learn from Thomas?

     I think the first thing we should recall is that his story is only one of several. There are many stories about what happened in the time between the Resurrection and the Ascension. Thomas wasn’t the only one who wanted to see for himself. On the contrary, his skeptical attitude, his desire to see for himself, his need for confirmation of a hope he hardly dared to hope –  this was how pretty well everybody responded to the news of Jesus’s Resurrection. Thomas was after all an ordinary human being, just like you and me.
     When the women returned from the tomb and said it was empty, Peter and James ran there. Why?
     To see for themselves. They wanted confirmation. Were they skeptics? The Gospel writers don’t use that word, because it wasn’t in their vocabulary. But I think they were. After all, nobody rises from the dead. Besides, in those days women weren’t considered reliable witnesses.
     On the other hand, Jesus had said something that sounded like foretelling his resurrection. So what were Peter and James to do when the women came and said the tomb was empty? What were they to do, when Mary Magdalene said she had seen and spoken to Jesus?
     What would you do? You’d want to see for yourself, wouldn’t you? Even if you already believed that Jesus would rise from the dead, you’d still want confirmation that this was it, that this was what you’d been waiting for. You would want to be sure that what other people reported was in fact what Jesus had said would happen. That this was in fact the event that would change everything. That this was not some hopeful hallucination deluding grieving women and sorrowing men.
     You too would run to the tomb.
     But seeing isn’t the same as understanding. We see what we expect to see, and we don’t see what we don’t expect to see.
     When Mary Magdalene first saw Jesus, she did not expect to see the risen Jesus. And she didn’t see him. She saw a gardener. She was sure that someone had taken Jesus’s body away. That’s all she could think of to explain the empty tomb. So she asked the gardener where they had taken the body. When Jesus answered her, that was when she recognised him.
     Then there’s the disciples on the road to Emmaus. They didn’t expect to see the risen Jesus either. All they had to go on was other people’s reports. Puzzling reports. Reports that didn’t make sense. When a stranger joined them, they didn’t see who he was. They didn’t see the stranger as Jesus until he said the blessing over the meal they shared with him when they arrived home. Then, of course, they told themselves they’d known all along there was something different about the stranger. Had he not spoken so wisely about the Scriptures and the Messiah?
     Ah yes, hindsight. Hindsight is comforting, It’s the illusion that we already knew something that we did not actually know at the time. It’s a way of telling ourselves that we are smarter than we really are. Or that the world isn’t really a mystery that we can’t solve. Too often hindsight confirms our face-saving belief that we knew it all along.
     Hindsight is likely to make us mistake the meanings of the story of Thomas. After all, we know that Jesus was raised from the dead, right? In fact, every Sunday we say we believe it. Besides, we are the blessed ones who haven’t seen and yet believe, aren’t we?
     Poor Thomas.
     Aren’t you glad you aren’t like him, and believe without seeing Jesus in the flesh?
     Hindsight makes it easy for us to think of Doubting Thomas as some sort of failure, someone who should have known better, an awful example of the dangers of doubt.
     But is that the best way to think about Thomas?
     I don’t think so. He was merely doing what we all do. He wanted proof, some supporting evidence, some facts that would confirm what he was hoping for. For Thomas, I think, hoped for exactly what the other disciples hoped for. He hoped what we all hope for: That Jesus was really resurrected, and that this would confirm his promise of renewed life for us, too.
     Now on the face of it, that’s a crazy hope. Never mind that people have argued about exactly what it means to be resurrected. Never mind that people have tried to figure out how it will happen given all our bits and pieces will be widely scattered atoms when the last day comes. Never mind that we can’t do more than hint at, wave our hands, give our best guess, put together some words that sort of, kind of, in some way, so to speak, suggest what we mean.
     Or what we believe.
     Or what we hope for.

     Suppose someone showed up right now and claimed he’s seen Jesus, really seen him, and talked with him, and broken bread with him. Watched him pour milk in his coffee. Pick up a cookie and bite into it. Well, wouldn’t we demand more than that person’s word for it? I would think that the more you hope against hope that Jesus really did show himself, the more skeptical you’d be. Somebody else’s word just wouldn’t be good enough.  You wouldn’t want to take him up on it and give in to a false hope.

You would want confirmation.

You would want proof. 

You would want a personal encounter.

You would need a personal encounter.

And that I think is at the heart of the story of Thomas the Doubter. 

He wanted a personal encounter. He wanted to know Jesus directly, not at second hand.

And that’s true for us, too.

     Someone has said that faith is the ability to tolerate doubt. That I think describes Thomas. He didn’t doubt because his faith was weak. He was uncertain, unsure. But he was hopeful. He didn’t want to accept a false hope. Listen again to what he said: Until I see and touch the marks of the nails, and the wound that the spear made, I will not believe. That is, I think you may be mistaken, so until I can see for myself that this is the same Jesus that died on the Cross, I will not believe.

     And when Jesus appeared among them, Thomas did in fact recognise him. And Jesus said to him, You believe because you saw me. Blessed are those who didn’t see me, but yet believed.
     Indeed, we are blessed. We have the testimony of many witnesses who have told us, and still tell us, of the reality of Jesus in their lives. That reality can be and is yours and mine also.
     We weren’t there when Jesus died, we weren’t there when the disciples said they had seen the risen Christ, we weren’t there when Thomas saw Jesus with the marks of his cruel death visible on his body. But we can hear the story of Thomas, and with him know the hope and joy of the promise of the Resurrection.
     And by the grace of God, we can experience Jesus in our lives. We can know the transforming power of the Spirit. We can do the work the Creator has given us to do. We can do all this because the promise of the Resurrection has become a reality for us, as it did for Thomas.

Let us pray.
God Father, Son, and Spirit, give us the grace to know the presence of the Risen Christ in our lives, that our faith may be confirmed, and that we may be strengthened and comforted by the hope of renewed life. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.