Closer and Closer, Part 2: Walking with Jesus

Luke 24:13-35

Who remembers when John Kennedy was shot?  If you do remember, tell me: who were you with?  What were you doing?  How did you feel?

Who remembers when the planes hit the World Trade Center?  Where were you? Who else was there?  How did you feel?

How about when the Challenger went down?  Do you remember?  Who told you it had happened?  How about when the levee broke in New Orleans?  With whom did you speak about it?

When really big things happen (and why they more often seem to be tragedies, I don’t know) we remember the experiences vividly.  When the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded, I was standing in a room full of sleeping toddlers and the daycare director came through and whispered this news to me.  I felt dismayed, sad. 

When the first plane hit the tower on September 11, I was standing in the parking lot outside Grace Lutheran Church in Lancaster, PA with my seminary classmates.  Grace’s pastor came out to greet us and told us the weird and tragic thing that had just happened.  The rest of the morning I remember with just as much clarity.

We have probably all had conversations like this before; and the fact that we remember so many of the details about big traumatic experiences is an interesting fact.  At the roundtable this week we discussed this phenomenon.  Very often, the first experience is the experience of disbelief.  When you first heard the words, “the president has been shot,” maybe it didn’t seem real, or even possible, to you.  You went in search of verification – hoping it wasn’t true.  But when you heard the same thing from another source, you began to realize it was true.

When something extraordinary happens, our senses are heightened.  We tend to see, hear, feel, even smell the entire experience of it.  The experience then becomes a marker in the timeline of our lives, a point at which everything changes. 

I have no doubt that the moment she saw the open tomb is one that Mary remembered vividly for the rest of her life.  I have no doubt that she remembered everything about her walk to the garden that morning, and everything that happened there that day.  And I know that for Cleopas and his companion, their Sunday walk to Emmaus was forever etched in their memories.

A couple of weeks ago, someone at the roundtable observed that sometimes when we are considering big, important things, the narrative slows down.  Every detail is remembered and shared.  Time. Slows. Down.  It might be mildly surprising to you to realize that in today’s text we are still on the very same day we were on two weeks ago. 

On that same day, later in the day, after all the chaos of that morning when the tomb turned up empty, when the angels appeared and gave the women the good news – He is not here!  He is resurrected! After he appeared to Mary, briefly, but then disappeared, saying You can’t hold on to me, Mary. After all the fragments of the story had been shared with all the disciples of Jesus, all the fragments which weren’t enough yet to bring real understanding, these two men are walking along the road to Emmaus talking to each other about all of it.

Why they were walking to Emmaus, I don’t know.  They might have been walking out of fear – walking away from a dangerous place.  It is also possible they were walking just to walk – because who could sit still at a time like this?  Perhaps they were walking to work things out.

Do you ever take a walk to clear your head?  I have often found it helpful to walk when I have a difficult problem to sort out.  Walking helps to calm the emotions, and bring some clarity to your world.  There is actually scientific evidence for the power of this.

Repetitious, rhythmic activity that alternately stimulates one side of the body, then the other, can help the human brain work things out.  To put it crudely, this type of activity might help the two sides of your brain talk to each other.  It’s called bilateral stimulation. Maybe Cleopas and his companion were engaging in bilateral stimulation.

And while they were doing that, another one joined them on the road, inviting himself into their conversation.  He was a stranger to them – they thought.

But they didn’t shoo him away, as brazen as he was to just walk up and ask them what they were talking about.  They responded in an equally brazen manner, “My friend, what rock did you just climb out from under?  Do you not know all that has happened in Jerusalem this weekend?”  Then they proceeded to tell him everything in their own words.  They didn’t mind repeating it all for him.  That’s what you do when you are trying to work through something; you talk about it again and again and again. 

And when they finished the telling, the stranger reaffirmed his brazenness by saying, “Wow, you all are more foolish than I thought.”  And there begins the great unpacking of the meaning of everything they have seen and heard and known these past three days and more. 

It was a long walk that day – seven miles.  I think it had to be a long walk for all there was to talk about. There was a lot to unpack and process and accommodate.  By the end of their walk they were on their way to knowing.  But they were not quite there yet when they arrived at Emmaus.

They are about to part ways.  But on an impulse, they beg the stranger to join them for the night at the inn.  They can continue their conversation across the table, over bread and wine.  And that was the place revelation happened.

The bread.  He took, he blessed, he broke, he gave – and he was revealed to their eyes.  Just like that, then he was gone. 

Where were you on the day of resurrection?  What were you doing? Who were you with?  How did you feel?

No one could forget.  The depth, the power, the intimacy of this moment of knowing Christ resurrected, knowing Christ with you.  It is a fleeting kind of knowing – as Mary recognized him in the calling of her name, and as these men recognized him in the breaking of the bread – he was gone as soon as he was known.

Yet, one thing I do know is that he is everywhere, or as the poet put it, “Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his, To the Father through the features of men's faces.”  Christ is present to us in one another. Christ’s presence with us makes us more present to one another.

Christ’s nearness to us draws us nearer to each other, as it did in those first days.  The real and present Christ drawing near to his friends who loved him and needed him.  And his presence with them forged bonds between them that would never be broken. 

This is how it is.  Christ bids us come to him and in doing so we come nearer to others.  Christ bids us come walk with him and as we do so we walk alongside brothers and sisters.  There is no question that as Christ draws us nearer to himself he draws us nearer to one another.  In Christ, we are closer and closer. 

There is no other way to be a Christian.

Let our hearts be open and renewed to him in love and faith; let us open our hearts to one another, the friend and the stranger equally, with God’s own mercy and grace, through Christ Jesus our savior. 

photo: By Randi Hausken from Bærum, Norway - Walking in Rome, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29875850