A sermon on the road to Emmaus from Easter evening.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
I hate to throw a wet blanket on the celebration, but...if you would allow me to speak frankly for just a moment, I have an unseemly question to ask. Easter is the apex of the church year, the holiest of holies on the church calendar. Easter is the day when we mark Jesus’ greatest triumph, defeating death. Which is great, but there is an elephant in the room…where, exactly, is Jesus?
If you were paying attention on Easter morning you may have noticed that in Mark’s account of the resurrection Jesus isn’t there. The women find an empty tomb and that's not an anomaly. In Matthew and in Luke there is no Jesus to be found on Easter morning. He’s gone on ahead of the disciples, leaving behind an empty tomb. Even in John, at first the disciples discover that Jesus is not there.
Shouldn’t Jesus, I don’t know, show up for Easter? Around the world millions, if not billions of people make it to one of the only two services they will make it to for the entire year on Easter morning. But Jesus can't be bothered to show up on…Easter?
On the Emmaus Road we find the disciples doing what I find myself doing often, aimlessly wandering down the road of faith. Then, only accidentally, do they stumble upon the holy and then the past and the future all of a sudden make a lot more sense.
I normally point out here that I would have appreciated it if Luke could have unpacked the whole ‘he opened their minds to understand the scriptures’ piece a bit more, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe Luke was trying to get at describing what our experience with the risen Christ is like; how easily we are distracted from God’s presence among us, here and now, how we only come to understand later with reflection and retrospect
There is a beautiful piece from a novel called Emmaus that gets at this reality. The narrator writes…
"How, for so long, could we know nothing of what was, and yet sit at the table of everything and every person met on the road? Small hearts--we nourish them on grand illusions, and at the end of the process we walk like the disciples in Emmaus, blind, alongside friends and lovers we don’t recognize--trusting in a God who no longer knows about himself. For this reason we are acquainted with the beginning of things and later we experience their end, but we always miss their heart. We are dawn and epilogue--forever belated discovery."
Indeed, I find myself drawn into the past and the future simultaneously, but rarely the present. Over the course of our time in Guatemala, during a pilgrimage, I was overwhelmed with figuring out what was going to happen next. What should I have done yesterday that would have made things better? I know I’m probably alone on this, it’s probably just me, but I have a significant amount of anxiety invested in the past and the future.
If that's what Luke is getting at, maybe the good news of Easter is that Jesus is not here. Maybe the good news is that Jesus has gone on ahead of us, that we don’t know where he has gone and we don’t know where he is leading us.
Indeed, that’s the promise proclaimed on the way to Emmaus. The disciples are left wandering down the road of faith, not knowing where Jesus has gone. And yet, he finds them. Not once, but twice. As they continue to wander, as they continue to make the choices set before them, Jesus finds them.
The big punch line, the good news of Easter is that God is the God of the past and the future. On the cross Jesus holds all of our brokenness, the brittle pasts our lives have woven together. In the empty tomb Jesus holds our futures, the sandcastles we’ve built out of our hopes and dreams. In doing so, in holding the past and the future, God opens up the present for us as a gift. The present is the new life that comes on Easter. The present is the new life freed from the shackles of the past, unbound by the gravity of the future.
We know know Christ's presence by Christ's absence on Easter, just as God takes the throne on a hanging tree, just as Christ’s power comes in powerlessness. One more layer of the mystery of life that emerges from the tomb.
There is this saying attributed to Pascal that’s fairly well known in evangelical circles. It is that ‘There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.’
I’ve never been a big fan of this quote, but on the road to Emmaus I wonder. What if Pascal’s right?
Not in the sense that each of us has a hole, an emptiness inside of us for which the only for is an internal organ (perhaps an appendix or gallbladder) in the shape of Christ or a particular confession of faith that when inserted into our bodies magically unlocks for us the full realization of life and love.
But...if God is the one who holds our futures and our pasts, it does create a vacuum, an empty tomb in each moment of our lives. The work of God on Easter is the work of a vacuum, pulling all of our lives into this safe and sacred space. Into the here and now. Into this moment, into this world where God is found in the waters of horse troughs, in fish sandwiches, and in a cup of wine and some corn tortillas.
As you continue down the road of faith, down el camino colorado, discerning the futures to which God is calling you, I have some Easter advice.
- Know that the future and the past do not belong to you. They belong to God. What God has given us is this moment and the way of faith is found by diving deeply into each moment. Do the best you can in those moments, build the best sandcastles you can dream up without fear or regret, because Jesus has gone on ahead of you.
- Expect that this vacuum of God’s presence will pull all of you into each moment and into a future that you/we can not yet imagine.
- Trust, hope, and live into the promise that Jesus will find you in each moment along the road, no matter where it leads.
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