Sunday, April 26, 2020

Known in His Breaking (Luke 24:13-35)

A lot of Jesus' resurrection appearances have something in common: People don't seem to know who he is. Sometimes they do, but in several of them the people who see him don't recognize him. Christians through history have wondered why that is -- why would these people, who had been traveling with him and listening to him teach for the better part of three years, not know him when they saw him?

I don't know if there's one answer that fits all of them. Today's story, that of the walk to Emmaus Jesus takes with two of his disciples, offers what might be one of the stranger versions because the two disciples in question spend most of the day with Jesus but don't know him until the very end of their time together. When they later tell the rest of the disciples about it they say that he was made known to them "in the breaking of the bread." Why was that act the one that made the difference?

Let's look first at all the times they didn't recognize him during the day and see if something makes the breaking of the bread different from them.

They don't recognize him when he joins them on the road. We don't know if he caught up to them, they caught up to him, he joined them from a side road or what, but it's clear that just seeing him wasn't enough to truly know him for who he really was. And it also wasn't enough to just hear his voice once they started conversing. Here we see one answer people give as to why Jesus wasn't known to these disciples. Their eyes, it says, were kept from recognizing him. But really all that does is push the question back one layer. What's the point of keeping him from being recognized? We're still left with not knowing why they don't know him.

After the pair explain their situation to Jesus, he comments that they've missed the boat on things, and then begins to explain how the words of Moses -- the Law or Torah -- and the prophets point to him. If these two disciples had followed Jesus any length of time, they must have heard things they had heard before -- maybe even in the same exact words! But those aren't enough to clue them in on who they're talking with, even though both of them later note they were singularly affected by the experience. So far, neither the evidence of the senses, direct interaction through conversation or gaining wisdom and knowledge from Jesus' words and teaching have been enough to make it plain who Jesus is.

When they all get to Emmaus, Jesus makes as if he's heading on down the road but the two disciples invite him to stay with them. This may sound strange to us but would have been perfectly understandable to the people of the time. Even though Jesus was a stranger to the disciples -- or so they thought -- the hospitality culture of that part of the world made it clear that decent people would invite the stranger as a guest. In chapter 14, Luke records Jesus telling his listeners to invite the poor and the strangers to their table. The pair are obeying Jesus' own words and commands -- but this is not enough for them to identify him as Jesus. Seeing and hearing Jesus, listening to his teaching, even following his teaching have not been enough to help the disciples know who their roadside companion has been.

As the guest, Jesus is given the place of honor as the host of the meal, so he begins by blessing the bread and distributing it to those at the table. And then they know him. The breaking of the bread breaks the veil of perception and they know him, which they then run back to tell the others. Then they also learn that Jesus had appeared to some of them as well, including Simon Peter.

Why does the bread-breaking do it? We could say the familiarity of the act jogs their memory, but remember they've been walking and talking with him for a good chunk of the day. It stretches things to think this is the first familiar act or word Jesus does during that time.

Here's what I think. The bread-breaking is the first thing that Jesus has done all day that is completely and only him. When they see and hear them they're using their senses. When they listen to his teaching they're using their intellect to comprehend them. When they obey his teaching they've decided they will do so.

But when he breaks the bread Jesus does something that only he can do. He has been made the honored guest and the meal and it will not begin until he takes action. Only he can do this, and it is when the disciples no longer participate that Jesus can be seen for who he really is.

I really like thinking this way about this story. I like it because it shows us that while perceiving Jesus and learning about Jesus and even obeying Jesus are all important and vital parts of following him, we do not see the real Jesus until he performs the act only he can perform.

Methodist founder John Wesley called communion a "means of grace," or a way by which God communicates the grace of his love to human beings. That God communicates with us at all is an act of grace, because he's surely not required to do it. He chose to. Today we do not have the experience of seeing and hearing Jesus in the flesh the way the disciples of his time did. We can of course learn of him from the scriptures and we can obey what he teaches us to do, but just like then those things by themselves are not enough to know him for who he is. Only he can show us that, and he has chosen the breaking of the bread and sharing of the cup as special representations of his acts to help us truly see and know him. His messiah-ship was made real when he offered himself on the cross and in his own words the bread is his body, broken for us. He was made known in his breaking.

It's not automatic. We can go through these motions just as easily as we can any others with which we become familiar. But if we will let him, he will make himself known to us in his breaking.

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Hard Times (1 Peter 1:3-9)

In line at the store this week I was talking with someone I know about the way he's doing his job very differently than he did before the COVID-19 virus shutdown. He mentioned how the huge amounts of time at home had made a difference for his family. "We were doing OK before," he said. "But this let us build some things together and do things we wouldn't have known to do otherwise." The viral shutdown and the widespread illness were not good things, but he believed that he and his family had let God bring some good things from them.

When we read Peter about how the "various trials" we undergo are a part of testing the genuineness of our faith, we're ready to ask right away if God causes the hard times we endure in order to build our faith or achieve some other purpose. That question, of course, is like a theological hand grenade with the pin pulled -- if you don't keep a tight and precise grip on it you will learn why Mr. Hand Grenade is no longer your friend. Some people have no real issue asserting that God brings hard times on people in order to teach them or strengthen them, or serve some other purpose. But some people -- who may have dealt with some serious hard times of their own or known people who did -- aren't willing to accept that. With a literal infinite list of ways he can bring things about, it seems to them very strange at best to say that God might bring cancer or disease or harm into people's lives.

Now one reason we ask this question about why did hard times come to us is because most of the time we don't have to deal with them. Most of us, especially in the nations of the developed world like the United States, live lives that have few hard times when we compare them to the way people have lived for most of human existence and the way many people around the world live today.

For most of human history and for developing nations today, the goal of the work people do is survival. They don't work to build a nest egg or save up for a new car. They work, sometimes pretty dadgum hard, in order to make sure that they can live through that day and maybe a little bit of the next. "Hard times" are the norm.

So they don't ask why hard times come. Hard times are how they live. Peter recognizes this -- remember he was a fisherman before Jesus called him, so he knows what earning your bread by the sweat of your brow means. The new perspective he brings is that the hard times can actually be redeemed by God into a stronger faith that will bring glory to God when Jesus comes and the world changed.

Many religions in Peter's time promised success and prosperity in return for devotion to a particular god or goddess. It's not an unknown idea in our time, either. But the gospel Peter heard, saw and later preached himself made no such promises. With his own eyes he had seen the arrest of his Teacher and he was probably among the crowds watching from a distance as Jesus died. But then came the glory of Easter and he saw Jesus transform the obvious defeat of his crucifixion into the tools God would use to redeem humanity.

Maybe one of the clearest examples of the difference is the way some people pray. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but comfortable people in pretty good circumstances tend to pray for protection from hard times, or that the hard times miraculously halt. Nothing wrong with that, but we often forget to add the part of the prayer that people in less comfortable circumstances fall back on more often: To ask for God's presence and for the strength to endure the hard times that have come. Peter's readers lived hard times most of their lives and the idea that they would end before death came to them would have been a little odd.

I like to think of it this way; I've used this example a lot in my preaching. Let's say it rains, because after all Jesus promised that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Yes, farmers and ranchers are glad of it, and we like it when it ends a drought. But I'm talking about when we get caught out in the rain ourselves. If you were certain that you could pray and God would immediately give you what you asked him for, how would you pray? Would you pray for an umbrella, for protection from the rain and a way to keep it from getting you wet and affecting your life?

Or would you pray for shampoo? If I've read Peter right, he was encouraging his readers to perform the lifestyle equivalent of praying for shampoo. Passages like this aren't much use to folks who want to say that following Jesus means blessings, benefits and bounty in this life. But they can lead us to be people who say along with the Christians who listened to and believed Peter, "Life is hard. But God is good."

And that has the distinct advantage of being true.

Sunday, April 12, 2020

Hidden (Colossians 3:1-4)

On Easter I usually preach from what one of the gospels tells us happened on Easter morning. And although this Sunday is Easter Sunday by the calendar it will not seem much like it, as only a handful of people will hear this sermon in person in the church sanctuary. The health guidelines put in place to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus mean that most people will hear it online in some way or read this blog entry. I think I'll save an Easter morning story for the day we all get to worship together in person.

But the Lord has risen, and Easter is the day we mark that. It's the foundation event for Christian reality -- Paul says in fact says if the Lord hasn't risen we're not only wrong we're pitiful. And maybe this strange Easter will give us a chance to look at some things about it that don't always get the attention. In this passage from Colossians, we're told there is a difference between "things above" and "things that are on Earth."

We have to be careful when we consider Bible passages about the difference between this world and the life to come, because it is waaay too easy to talk ourselves into the idea that since the "things above" are the things that matter most, we don't have to pay attention to things going on around us. And that does not mesh with what Jesus tells us to do for each other and for the poor and powerless we may meet.

Usually passages that draw this distinction are trying to get us to see what we might call a universal reality or maybe a real reality that's underneath the world around us.

Here we see someone who has made a host of bad choices and gotten themselves stuck at the bottom of the ladder, but the real reality of God says, "This is my child, too." Here we see an innocent man falsely accused, convicted and executed -- as complete a defeat as could be imagined. But the real reality of God says, "This is my greatest victory."

Here we see empty sanctuaries across the country and across the world, trying to prevent the transmission of a virus that is particularly harmful to weaker, older and sicker people but can harm others as well. But the real reality of God says these sanctuaries are filled with a great cloud of witnesses, and that every place Christians seek his face and praise his name becomes a sanctuary.

Do they look like that to us? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes people say that as we grow in our relationships with God we begin to see things as God wants us to see them, and so these mundane things in the world are transformed. There's probably something to that, but it seems to me it only goes so far. Even though it's filled with heavenly witnesses, this place still looks like a mostly empty sanctuary. Even though the guy who acted like a jerk at work is a child of God, he still acts like a jerk. It goes both ways, of course. If we're the jerk we may be children of God but we are still a class one pain in everybody's rear.

Differentiating between things above and things that are on Earth doesn't mean developing a kind of heavenly squint that lets us see things the way God sees them. It means seeing them as they appear to us and accepting the real reality of God anyway. Faith, as you recall, is evidence of things not seen. The wonder of the resurrection didn't erase the pain of the crucifixion -- the risen Jesus bears scars for a reason. But faith that God keeps his promise to never abandon us shows us that the worst the world can do can't touch what makes us who we are. The real reality of you and me is hidden with Christ in God, and it will be revealed in glory when Christ is himself revealed in truth.

The Christian faith doesn't try to pretend bad things aren't bad things or that hard things aren't hard. So I'll paraphrase Frederick Buechner to close. The worst thing may very well be the worst thing. But Jesus says it's never the last thing, and he invites us to say it with him.

Sunday, April 05, 2020

Blessed Is the King! (Luke 19:28-44)

Generally the Pharisees who meet Jesus are irritated with him or maybe a little smug about how a Nazareth carpenter doesn't have their extensive education, no matter how many of the rabble show up to hear him teach. But in this passage, they give the impression of being a little scared, don't they?

Well, they probably were scared, but not of Jesus or his followers. They were scared of the Romans, who took a dim view of groups that went around proclaiming this or that random dude was a king. Some local yokel hot-shot in the back end of the Empire thinks he's king instead of Caesar? Eh, Romans don't care. But he might cause unrest, and unrest would disrupt business, and disrupted business stalls tax revenue. And now Romans care. So they tended to stamp those kinds of things out and they weren't careful who else might get stamped while they did so. That concerns the Pharisees, who worry they might get roped into the "who else" group.

Either way, they want Jesus to get his people to pipe down and maybe ix-nay on the ing-kay alk-tay. I can see Jesus laughing at the absurdity of their demands when he tells them, "If I shut these people up the rocks are going to proclaim I'm king!" The people aren't proclaiming what they wish to be true or what they hope to be true. Their words don't outline a reality they intend to bring about. They state a reality that already exists. Their praise just acknowledges an established truth: Jesus is Lord. So if the people quiet down, the rest of creation will pick up the slack, even parts of it not generally known to vocalize -- like rocks.

In a culture where we used to selecting our own leaders, even if the choices are often between Absolutely Awful and Even More Awful, the idea of someone who is Lord just because he shows up strikes us oddly. In fact, we may be working with the idea that Jesus is Lord because the people proclaim him a king, even though the reality is the other way around.

But those who follow him know Jesus is indeed Lord. At some point in our lives, circumstances prompted us to face his question to us: "Am I Lord?" In seminary, I learned this is called an "existential question" because the answer determines how we live our lives and shapes our existence. Unlike most of the lords and kings who ruled during Jesus' time and indeed still today, this Lord will not threaten or demand. He will let us say, "No." To do so is to deny reality just as surely as we would if we denied that gravity worked, but he will let us do it.

Of course, he will be back and ask again. He won't coerce us, but he will persist. And most of us who follow him have realized that leading a life that continues to answer, "No" to his question leaves us wanting something more even if we don't understand what that more might be. So we have answered, "Yes."

And once we've done so, we find we have yet a second chance to turn away from having Jesus as our Lord because he will ask a follow-up question. We answer "Am I Lord?" with "Yes," and now he asks, "Am I your Lord?" See, whether or not he's Lord is not really in question. The only uncertainty is how long we want to live in denial of that fact.

But is he your Lord? Is he my Lord? Those questions are still open. Our Lord knows that a relationship of obedience from fear is completely inferior to one of obedience from love. The Lord of love will not force himself into our lives -- if you remember that famous figure of speech from Revelation, you'll remember that he stands at the door and knocks. He doesn't kick the door down or pick the lock or deceive us that he's a candygram delivery or something. He waits on us to let him in, to acknowledge his rightful place and if we open the door, he will come in.

Joining the crowd on Palm Sunday, waving branches and shouting "Hosanna!" is a great acknowledgment of the lordship of Christ. Following him, though, only starts there and following as a willing disciple is what he truly desires us to do, for our own benefit and flourishing. As he makes clear to the Pharisees, if all he wanted was acknowledgment of his lordship, he could get that from rocks.