St. Paul’s United
Church Sunday, May 15, 2011
Walking With Jesus – Rev. David Mundy
1 Peter 1:17-23 Luke
24:13-35
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Many of you have heard me mention that our twenty
eight-year-old son Isaac will be ordained as a United Church minister two
weekends from now. This is an important occasion in our family’s life, in no small part because he will represent the fourth
generation of Mundys in ministry and his other
grandfather was a minister as well.
While I sometimes joke that ministry is the family business, I
don’t want to minimize the faith journey Isaac has been on for most of his
life. As parents we were aware of his sense of call into Christian service from
an early age and of course we see significant milestones along the way.
One was his decision at age nineteen to take a term away from
university and go for a walk. It wasn’t just any walk of course. He informed us
that he was going to fly to France, take a train to the Pyrenees Mountains,
then spend a month walking across Spain, almost to the Atlantic Ocean. He would
follow an ancient pilgrimage route called El Camino, or The Way in English.
Every year for centuries, Christians have walked this route as an opportunity
for spiritual discovery. The Camino is just over eight hundred kilometres
across mountains and plains and he would need to cover roughly thirty
kilometres a day for the month to reach the pilgrimage church in the city of
Santiago da Compostela.
We love our son very much but at that stage of his life he was
rather scattered to put it charitably. So we assumed that he would fly away and
never be seen alive again. As I have said to some of you before, how could a
kid who regularly forgot to close the lid on the freezer after searching for
ice cream possibly survive by himself in not one but two foreign countries?
For some reason we aided and abetted this crazy plan. We
helped him chose a backpack and gear so that he could travel as lightly as
possible. He did most of the other planning and he was surprisingly thorough.
Before he left, we made sure our passports were up to date in case a rescue
mission was necessary.
Miracle of miracles, it wasn’t. Somehow he managed to overcome
the obstacles and challenges of the journey.
He quickly developed blisters on his feet but he kept on going. He had
to contend with what we can delicately call intestinal unrest, but he knew he
had to put one foot in front of another, all day long. He discovered that the
rain in Spain does fall mainly on the plain, but only severe thunderstorms
forced him undercover. It was absolutely necessary to keep on his journey.
While Isaac was walking he met some truly remarkable people,
of all ages, some in their seventies. They walked and talked and sat and
talked, sharing stories of faith and purpose over evening meals. He was
unsettled and even scared at times but he had experiences of the presence of
God and of Christ that were almost beyond description. On his last morning he
got up before dawn and set out alone needing to cover a considerable distance
before noon. In the dark he walked through fields where scarecrows loomed out
of the mist, and the experience was both unnerving and holy. In the end he realized that it was the
walking, not the arriving, which had opened something new and remarkable in his
life and his relationship with God.
This morning we continue on our journey through the fifty-day
season of Easter with another of the post-resurrection stories in the gospels.
Mark is the only gospel which just ends with Easter morning and the story of
the empty tomb. The others all give us stories of post-resurrection encounters
with the Risen Christ.
The one we heard this morning is unique to Luke, and it tells
us about two followers of Jesus who are putting one foot in front of the other
on their way home after the festival of Passover and ultimately more
importantly, the incomprehensible events of Easter morning. Instead of a
celebratory mood, they are trying to come to grips with the death of Jesus and
what the empty tomb could possibly mean. These two people on the road to the
village of Emmaus aren’t part of Jesus’ regular posse. One is Cleopas, a name we don’t hear anywhere else in the gospels.
The other is not identified, which may mean that this was a woman because women
often aren’t recognized by name in scripture.
A stranger ends up walking with them who is actually Jesus,
but they don’t recognize him. He moves them into a conversation about what has
unfolded over the weekend, the crushing sadness of his public execution on the
cross and the mystery of the resurrection.
And there is something in this story that I had never noticed
before, even though I have read it and heard it many times. For a time they
stop walking.
In the New Revised Standard Version it says “They
stood still looking sad.”
“They stopped short, their faces downcast” is the way this is translated in the
Jerusalem Bible, which is the Roman Catholic bible
In the paraphrase, The Message we find “They just
stood there, long-faced, like they had lost their best friend.”
And maybe they had lost their best friend, or at least their
best hope. As one writer has put it, they were stuck on Saturday when Easter
Sunday had already come, assuming that their hopes were dead. But in the “give and take” of a
conversation about what had unfolded, their hearts are opened to the possibilities
of abundant life once again. And while the story doesn’t tell us how and when, Cleopas and the other start walking with Jesus again. They
may have stopped for a time, but they weren’t stuck.
How is your walk with Jesus these days? Of course I’m not
asking whether you literally go for strolls with Jesus, and I would be
concerned if you told me you did! I’m not even asking whether you plan to go on
a pilgrimage such as the Camino. But if we are Christ’s followers, our hope is
that there will be movement and energy in what we often call our spiritual
journey.
That’s not always the case, is it? We can end up standing still, even getting
stuck, without really knowing that it has happened. We might continue going
through the motions of the life in faith, but we aren’t drawing closer to
Christ. It can be because of our
busyness or our complacency. We become distracted by all those demands of work
and family
As often as not, it is the sadness and the unfairness of life
which stops us in our tracks. We have
those disappointments and losses which keep us from recognizing Christ with us.
As I suggested last week, these circumstances can allow chronic doubt and skepticism to creep in. Even though we may know the story
of our faith well, we are robbed of its comfort and power for living.
Whatever the reasons, we may not be able to identify a
particular time or place when our walk with Jesus faltered, or came to a
standstill, but the reality is that it can happen for any of us, at any stage
of life.
There is always the possibility for Good News though. The
story of the road to Emmaus is deeply symbolic of what can happen when Jesus,
who is the Christ, comes to meet us where we are.
A young woman began attending worship regularly here at St.
Paul’s and for the longest time I had only the “hello, good to see you” moment
at the door on Sunday mornings. Eventually, though, we talked and she shared
her story of how she came to the church. She was not raised in the Christian
community, but she had gone through the deep sadness of two miscarriages which
left her bewildered about her purpose in life.
Something or Someone stirred her to attend church one Sunday
morning and she did so with some trepidation. As she made her way up the walk
she wondered whether she would stand out, or whether she would feel foolish
because of what she didn’t know. Instead she found solace and a relationship
with God which gave her hope. And for her there was the “happy ending” of
giving birth to a child who was baptized into Christ. This Easter she
experienced an overwhelming sense of unity with this Christian family and a
sense of the presence of God. Writer
Steve Pankey describes getting going again in faith
this way:
Lots of things get us hung up. Hopes
dashed, budgets trimmed, taxes raised, life altered. We get stuck when there
isn't enough. We get stuck when the power of evil gets the edge over the light,
but if Easter teaches us one thing, it is that light always wins. In word and
sacrament, in the exposition of scripture and the breaking of bread, God's
glory is revealed again and again and again, helping us to get unstuck again
and again and again.
The invitation for all of us is to put one foot in front of
the other on our way to Easter hope. We are all on a pilgrimage of faith even
if we never leave our hometown.
And of course we hear at the end of the story that, when they
came near the village of Emmaus, the still unrevealed Jesus is about to
continue with his journey, to walk on, but the other two ask him to stop again,
this time so that they can show him hospitality. The painting that best
captures this part of the story for me is by the same Renaissance artist
Caravaggio, whose work I showed you last week. It is in the National Gallery in
London and on the few occasions I have been there, I seek it out.
Something remarkable happens when they sit together at the
table over simple food. Their guest becomes host. He blesses the bread and
breaks it and then their eyes are opened and the stranger is a stranger no
more. Yet Jesus is only with them for a moment as their eyes are opened. He
vanishes from their sight and they must see him in a new way, as the Risen and
present Christ. And these two find others
to let them know about their amazing road trip and how Christ had been revealed
in the breaking of bread.
The old hymn, Just a Closer Walk With Thee, never made
it into any United Church hymn book, but the refrain can be our prayer this
morning as we commit ourselves to walking with Jesus in all that life brings.
Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.