“Making Known” Vance L. Toivonen
READING Luke 24:13-35
Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, "What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?" They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?" He asked them, "What things?" They replied, "The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him." Then he said to them, "Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?" Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, "Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over." So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, "The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!" Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
READING Rumi (13th century Persian Poet, Islamic jurist, and Sufi mystic)
Someone says, “I can’t help feeding my family.
I have to work so hard to earn a living.”
He can do without God, but not without food;
he can do without Religion,
but not without idols.
Where is one who’ll say,
“If I eat bread without awareness of God,
I will choke.”
SERMON
If you have been to a few memorial services at Hope Church over the years, you will recognize the Call to Worship in today’s service. One of the major changes for me as a pastor in coming to Hope has been the change in practice from funerals to memorial services. In traditional Christian funerals, the emphasis was often on the eternal destiny of the deceased, and on words of comfort from the scriptures that he or she was okay.
Here at Hope Church from day one I learned that the emphasis in a time of grief and loss is to be about remembering, an emphasis on the holding of the deceased in memory as a means of keeping the loved one present in our every day lives. I have grown to cherish this practice. I am honored by, and find much pleasure in listening to the stories of family and friends as they remember. The emphasis is on celebrating a life, to be sure. And, for me, there is also an emphasis on asking, “What can I learn about my life from this life? How can reflection upon this life help me grow as a human being?”
Another thing that was very different when I came to Hope Church over five years ago was the practice of Holy Communion. I went from a congregation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that celebrated the Eucharist at every worship service, to a UCC congregation that celebrated the Lord’s Supper four times a year. A year or so after beginning my ministry here, there was a discussion among the deacons, not without its controversy, a discussion that resulted in the expansion of Communion to six times a year. We now celebrate Holy Communion every other month on the first Sunday of the month, and a seventh time on Maundy Thursday, during Holy Week.
On the surface of it, the first reading this morning may seem like just another post-resurrection text from the New Testament. The risen Jesus appears to two men traveling down the road together. He appears to them, but at first they do not recognize him as Jesus. He is a stranger to them. They have been talking about him, and he knows it; and they know he knows it; and they think it odd that he does not seem to know anything about the things they are talking about. It must have been that all of Jerusalem was abuzz about the death and burial of Jesus of Nazareth. They say to him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place…?”
Jesus is a stranger to them, not least of all, I suppose, because they assume him to be dead. This assumption alone can block us from having encounters with those who have gone before us. And Jesus is no exception. If we think Jesus to be dead and gone, over two thousand years decomposing into the dust of the earth, and if this is our only sense of Jesus of Nazareth, our experience of Jesus will be rather limited, if not altogether nil.
If, on the other hand, we have a sense that the risen and living Jesus, more often referred to as the Christ, is alive and well and living in us and among us, our experience of Jesus takes on a different tone and color and shape in our lives. This is true of Jesus, just as it is true for other loved ones. Naturally there are those who pass on that we do not mind saying goodbye to. I’m sure that no mater what one might think about the war in Iraq, none of us are particularly keen on the idea of having Saddam Hussein hanging around. But someone we have known and loved, someone who has been a significant inspiration in our lives, someone who makes a positive difference in the world – these are the people that we work at keeping alive through memory, through history, through writings and speeches, and over the last hundred years or more through film, video and audio recordings.
The further back we go in history, the less memory material we have for those who have made significant contributions to the human experiment. And we humans are that, just another small, but significant aspect of a grand, universe-wide experiment called creation. Those who believe there is a greater intelligence behind this grand experiment, an intelligence people of faith refer to as God, carry with them a sense that someone is running the experiment, and hoping, sometimes against hope, for a positive outcome. Remembering those who have made a positive contribution to the experiment is part of the process. Jesus is one of those people, and a very important one at that.
Think about all of those people who likely also made some positive contributions to the experiment, those who lived at or before the time of Jesus of Nazareth, and those who have long been forgotten, their writings and wisdom lost to us. There is something remarkable about a community of human beings holding so precious and valuable the memory of one particular person that their thoughts and memories are still accessible to us today.
Which brings me back to Holy Communion. In my basic training in Lutheranism I learned that there are basically three different approaches to the practice of Holy Communion . There is the Roman Catholic approach with its doctrine of transubstantiation. In the Catholic Mass, even if the priest is alone at the altar, when the words of institution are spoken, the host and the chalice are elevated heavenward, and in that event bread and wine are literally, physically, changed into the body and blood of Jesus the Christ. The communicants, the congregants at the Mass, literally eat and drink, literally commune intimately with, Jesus of Nazareth who died on a cross near Jerusalem in the first century and who rose again from the dead and is a living, physical presence today. This transubstantiation makes that living, physical presence actual for the communicants.
Lutherans, I was taught, believe in something called Real Presence. This means that in the celebration of Holy Communion Jesus of Nazareth, and the living, risen Christ, are really, really, really present…it’s just that we do not know how. There is the body and the blood, but the wine stays wine and the bread stays bread. All four elements are present somehow, and our communion, in similar fashion to the communion of the Catholic parishioner, is with the crucified and risen Jesus in some kind of actual, metaphysical sense.
This brings me to the third tradition, the reformed tradition. This is the tradition of the churches that make up the UCC, and most other Protestant churches throughout the world. When communion is celebrated in Catholic and Lutheran churches, there is a stronger emphasis on Jesus’ words, “This is my body…This is my blood.” In reformed churches the emphasis is on the words, “Do this in remembrance of me.” In reformed traditions Holy Communion is a memory meal. Which brings me back to where I started, the story of Jesus on the road to Emmaus.
This story is, it turns out, not so much a resurrection story as a Communion story. Actually it is both, woven together by the community of those for whom it was very important to tie together the two. The stranger accompanies the two men to their home and there share a meal together…they break bread. The text reads, “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.” The men later tell others that the risen Jesus was “made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”
Once they brought Jesus back to life in the combination of their memory and the meal, he vanished from their sight. There is an invitation here to combine our simple act of breaking bread, our common, everyday activity of eating, with the act of remembering Jesus of Nazareth, both pre and post-resurrection. It is strange, I suppose, that we have isolated our remembering to a ritual in a worship service. The reason the earliest followers of Jesus made it such a priority to keep his memory alive was so that they could do so every day. Since eating is a natural process every day, the invitation is there to use the meal as a reflective event for the keeping alive of this, the central figure of the church, Jesus the Christ.
This being the first Sunday of the month, and not a Sunday that we are celebrating Holy Communion, we will need to wait until May 4th for that. But we do not need to wait in order to remember. By reading the material passed on to us by those who thought it important to keep Jesus’ memory alive, by reflecting on the meaning of his life for our lives, by remembering him by any possible means, any time of the day or night, we keep alive the living and risen Christ, and keep alive the possibility that his life, and his wisdom, will imbue our lives with much needed perspective when dealing with all of the stuff life throws at us.
Sure, we’re not celebrating Holy Communion this morning, but we can do the same thing when we go to coffee in a few moments, or to brunch or lunch, or just home to make a sandwich. We can take a moment to be conscious of this one, significant life, and ask ourselves what difference that life can make in our lives. This is how someone who lived on this earth over 2,000 years ago can still be alive today, made known to us in the breaking of bread, made known to us in the memory of his life and teachings, made known to us in the conversations we have about him with one another, made known to us for the sake of a world that can still benefit from his presence, his real presence, in the here and now.