Good morning,
Praise the Lord for the Lord's day, on which we can come apart to be with Jesus and His people. Something wonderful and glorious happens when the Risen Lord comes to transform our lives, to anoint our hearts, and to fill our cups. The mercury reached the upper 80's here in New York yesterday. We are having a heat wave. Alice spent the weekend with Jessica in Philadelphia. Laureen spent the weekend with some her Grove City Friends in Lancaster. The Lord blessed us with a blessed Sunday. We celebrated 14 Baptisms. We also had family cook off after the worship services. It was great day of worship, celebration, and fellowship.
The reading for Sunday was taken from Luke 24: 13 ff, the story of Emmaus - the Burning Heart Experience. As the men were traveling toward Emmaus, the Risen Lord joined the weary travelers. The men invited Him to be their guest, to join them for the night. He took over the situation, and became the host. In the breaking of bread they recognized the Risen Lord.
In the ancient Greek myth The Odyssey we read the epic tale of Odysseus, a valiant warrior who fought bravely in the Trojan War. According to legend, his homeward journey after the war was interrupted over the course of many years as the gods had decided to test Odysseus' true mettle through a series of trials. His journeys carried him far and wide as he encountered mythical beasts and lands, many of which have passed into common speech and language, such as the cyclops, the Procrustean bed, Scylla and Charybdis, the sirens' voices.
Meanwhile, back at his home, Odysseus' wife and family presume he must have died on his return from Troy. Finally, however, the day came when the gods released Odysseus and he arrived back home at last. Instead of simply marching through the front door and crying out some Greek equivalent of, "Honey, I'm home!", Odysseus decided to determine whether anything changed during his long absence. Did his wife still love him? Had she been faithful? In order to find out, Odysseus disguised himself to look like a stranger in need of temporary lodging.
The housekeeper, Euryclea, welcomed the apparent traveler and performed for him the then-standard practice of foot-washing. Doing so, Euryclea regaled the stranger with anecdotes about her long-lost master, Odysseus, whom she had also served as a nurse when he was young. She proceeded to tell the traveler about how long her master had been missing, noting that by then Odysseus would be about the same age and of about the same build as the man whose feet she was washing. When Odysseus had been a young boy, he was once gored by a wild boar, leaving a nasty scar on his leg. As Euryclea went about her task, her hand brushed against the old scar and instantly her eyes were opened. She then recognized, with great joy, her beloved friend and master!
Recognition scenes like that have long exercised a strong pull on the human heart, but no such tale is as dear to our Christian hearts as the one in Luke 24. Apparently, it didn't require too much effort on the part of Jesus to keep from being identified until he was ready to make himself known. Seldom has the shock of recognition been quite as strong as for these men, partly because of the sheer amount of time Jesus had spent with them. Cleopas and his walking companion were to be with Jesus for some several before they recognized Him. Their walk to Emmaus was a journey of seven miles, which could take a good two hours or more. That was the Easter afternoon trip on which these two disciples set out. The Sabbath was past by the time they started out. If it hadn't been for the Sabbath, they would have left Jerusalem a day earlier. They simply felt the need to get out of town. Staying in Jerusalem was proving too painful. The whole city seemed haunted by the memory of what had happened to their master, Jesus, on the previous Friday.
Indeed, as the days passed, their grief intensified. Frequently the day after the funeral is far more difficult than the days that were filled with formal activities and rituals. When all the official ceremonies are over and you're alone in your home again the reality of it all begins to hit you. It was so also for these two. As the new week began on Sunday (the first working day of a new week), Jerusalem had largely gone back to business as usual. The vendors were in the streets, the marketplace was abuzz with commerce, and life went on. Yet, how can the world go on after you've suffered a loss so deep you find it difficult to breathe? For this reason these two disciples decide to "get away from it all" and leave town. There was no longer anything in Jerusalem for them anyway. Jerusalem had become like a house after someone dies, a place empty of people and full of memories.
The men set out for Emmaus, but the act of putting some distance between themselves and the Holy City didn't make them forget the terrible things that had lately happened. They could not stop talking about recent events. Perhaps they were trying to make sense of it all, comparing the actual events concerning Jesus with the things they thought were going to be true of him. Then, suddenly, the stranger who had appeared so clueless a moment before, changed. First of all, He called these men foolish, and before they could raise an objection to this, the stranger has launched into a quite serious and thorough Bible study. After that the rest of the trek to Emmaus just flew by as this anonymous fellow traveler re-told Scripture's story. Even that cosmos-shattering day in Jerusalem was followed up by a Bible study session.
Frederick Buechner found hope in the understated nature of this tale of recognition because "all of us travel to Emmaus eventually". Where is your Emmaus? Do you have a place you go to get away from it all, a place to which you escape so that you don't have to think about how lousy life in this world can sometimes be? Maybe you to the mall where the noise of commerce and the rush of people keep you from thinking about life. Maybe you retreat to a bar where booze and beer nuts help numb you to the more bitter truths that swirl outside. Maybe you go to a matinee at the movies where you go to take in the escapism that Hollywood offers. Maybe the TV remote sweeps you away from it all as you channel surf. We try to escape our troubles, but those troubles end up being like the sky above: they extend over everything and we finally know there is no escape.
The good news is that it may be precisely in Emmaus where you are most apt to find Jesus. He cares enough for you to be there. Maybe he meets you along the way and walks with you as you silently trudge along; maybe you find him waiting for you once you get to wherever it is you were going. But he's there. You catch a glimpse of him in the kindness of a stranger. You see him in that note of encouragement that came in the mail on the very day you needed it most.
The simple truth is that we don't spend all of our lives in obviously holy places like Jerusalem. Sometimes we even think that a holy place is the last place we want to be and so we head out of town, head to Emmaus, go some place where, if we're lucky, we won't run into anyone from church. But then we run into Jesus and even if our glimpse of him is momentary, we know for sure he was there, and we know all over again that the world changed and our future burst in on a day called Easter long ago. It changes us. There are any number of things in our lives that drive us to Emmaus, but if we can find Jesus even there, then we sense with renewed wonder Jesus' words, "Surely, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." The first time Luke shows us the reality of that divine presence was in Emmaus, of all places. But that's just the point, He is with us in all places, all the time. Were not our hears burning within us. Look! It's Jesus.
In Him,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6Fl_nqGJc0
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment