SERMONS

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Philip Carter — 6/4/08

Christ Church

I grew up with parents who were Anglican – and we went to Church every Sunday – for those were the days – at least for us – of fairly strict religious observance – Good Friday was a day when everything shut down – we weren’t allowed to go to the pictures etc – and we ate what we used to call gold fish which was cheap English Fillet – and we couldn’t wait till Easter Day – which meant the day in the middle – Holy Saturday or Easter Eve was a very peculiar non-day – we didn’t do Holy Saturday well – it seemed to me then – and in many ways I suspect we still don’t do it well.  For this is threshold country – a liminal space – betwixt and between – the place of the tomb – the place of darkness – the place of waiting.  And yet such spaces have  their own work to do in all of us throughout our lives.

This work takes as long as it takes – it won’t be hurried – so it calls out of us the patience of waiting. And it has its own wisdom.  And for it to bear fruit we must give ourselves over to it – it’s a kind of journey – the destination beckons us – but not in a kind of way that robs the journey of its significance – so we need to allow it to unfold with both grace and meaning.

Which is of course the “poetry” of Emmaus – a place which doesn’t exist, or at least we can’t locate it – less a place than a state of mind.  And the state of mind hovers in the first instance around escape – escape from pain, loneliness, longing, sorrow, bewilderment and grief.  It’s an in between place – it’s a place we spend quite a bit of time in.  It’s in between (what I like to call the bookends of our life of faith).

“Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.”
                                                and
            “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.”

That’s the way it is for all of us – it seems most of the time “days pass when we forget the mystery” – so the diagnosis Jesus makes of the human condition is spot on – we simply don’t see – we just don’t get it – and he came to wake us up. “Surely the Lord is in this place and I never knew it.”

So how are we going to make sense of it all?  For that’s what these two friends are trying to do – talking with each other about all these things that had happened to them.  What things?  Jesus asks – ever respectful for ordinary everyday human experience.  And for them it was all close to the surface – Jesus had been arrested, tried, crucified and buried.  Their hopes had been pinned on him – and they were shattered – they were traumatized, grief-stricken, despairing and disillusioned.  They had taken to the road – to try to make sense of their experience.

But they can’t recognize the stranger on the road – because they aren’t yet ready for the shock of the new – not  open yet to this possibility.  But they are ready to tell it how it is – especially because he doesn’t set the agenda – but lets them tell him about the place they’re in –

 

          grief            -      because their hopes were dashed and the                                          love of their life – who had made such a                                                    difference to them – was dead.

          blame          -      because Jesus turned out to be other than                                          what they had hoped for.

          and shame  -      because they had turned out to be other                                             than they’d hoped for.

Here was a place where they could be real – and in the retelling of their story they begin to re-shape it – to find a different perspective on it.  Here Jesus was leading them from sight to insight... and then, sensing their readiness, he enlarges their story – “then beginning with Moses and all the prophets he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scripture.”  He places their story within the larger story – he reminds them of what they already know – and begins to close the gap for them between expectation and reality.

The Emmaus road is the true place of disillusionment – where illusions are stripped away and we see reality for what it is.  It’s then that the disciples begin to put things together – hope and reality... and it’s then their “hearts burn” – when hope “even amongst these rocks” is kindled.

Michael Leunig says:  I find that there is a crucifixion and a resurrection every day... so we don’t have to search for it or invent it – it finds us, in the circumstances (ordinary as well as dramatic) of our daily lives.  The circumstances of our lives – whatever they are – turn out to be the voice of God – not in the sense that God arranges it like this – but that God uses and speaks through the circumstances into our hearts.

They get in touch with the circumstances – and let the stranger be present to them – let God be present to them – as they are – offering hospitality and welcome and openness to the guest who becomes – wonderfully – the host – as Jesus receives their hospitality he provides the hospitality of God – which he wants us to know is around us everywhere.

And then the penny drops.  Their eyes are opened... and he vanishes – but they are not discouraged.  “Stay with us – they had said – it is about evening and the day is nearly over.”  Stay with us, we say – and as a community of faith, while we do not have the physical presence or sight of Jesus – the Word continues to burn in us – and the breaking of bread continues to meet us and feed us.  Those early disciples have no advantage over us for the physical presence of Jesus – just like the physical presence of Word and bread now, can become the place (for those of us who are open enough to see) where we meet the real and living God.

The Risen Jesus – at the heart of our faith – at the heart of the Word we preach and the sacrament we celebrate – is a reality which touches us from the inside – a reality which asks for our participation – and results in our transformation. 

The resurrection is an altogether new and surprising rupture into the way we usually see things – and it calls out from us an entirely new way of knowing and being.

It’s not about filling our minds with profound or precious teaching – it is not about assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding.  In that sense it doesn’t fit into the way we understand our world and our lives at all.

It’s not a puzzle to solve or a piece of information waiting for us to work out – but an inexhaustible truth – we tell the stories, like the one on the road to Emmaus – which we tell, again and again – not in order to analyse or understand – fitting them into our way of knowing and living – but to live.  We tell these stories to dispose ourselves and to make ourselves fit and ready to receive their truth and to live by that truth.  We keep telling these stories again and again in such a way that we might find ourselves open – and wanting to be open – to them so that they question and interrogate and woo and invite us into the one thing the gospel says we need and we want – which is a profound change of heart and mind – a profound reorientation.

We keep telling these stories so that they arouse our astonishment, incite our thoughtfulness, fan our desire, and divert our attention – our whole being to the reality of Jesus in our midst.

To discover that death is a matter of indifference to God.  That for God – death is as if it were not – which is why we say Abraham and Isaac and Jacob live in God.

This marks a crucial and decisive change in our understanding of God – that any understanding of God structured around death is a serious distortion and misunderstanding of God – for God (and we can say this because of the resurrection) is not characterized or marked by or defined by death at all – which is so at odds with our understanding of life – which is so marked by the inevitability of death.

God in Jesus is saying that it is possible to live as though death is a non-definitive, non-toxic part of our story and he offers us a way through and out of the “culture of death” which characterizes so much of our lives – and gives us a “model of creative practice which is not governed by death” – practise resurrection in other words – and live this new way of being, this new way of knowing.

Philip Carter
Easter 3
April 6 2008
Wayville UCA

We will – all of us and each of us – experience the pain of loss and separation and death – but a new contagion is abroad – an entirely new way of living – focused on a God who does not know death.  Can we be open and fit to receive this most precious and hopeful gift of new life?