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

Closer and Closer, Part 1: The Stories Women Tell

John 20:1-18               

I heard a story this past week, about a church organist who was fired; in the middle of an Easter hymn he broke into an interlude of “Staying Alive,” that old BeeGees song.  Apparently, playing interludes – or flourishes, as they are called – between hymn verses was a breach of etiquette at this particular church.  But furthermore, it was reported on ChristianFunnyPictures.com, the choice of “Staying Alive” was theologically problematic, because Jesus did not “stay alive.”  He was crucified, died and was buried, before rising from the dead.

And that last part is, of course, the one true part of the story.  Most of the story is not true; but it’s a good story, right?

***

Many years ago, my parents moved into a nice rental house in a nice neighborhood.  This was shortly after I graduated high school.  Most of the years I was growing up, we had lived in town houses, in neighborhoods where they were all rentals.  They were ok; there was nothing wrong with them.  But this place was different; it was pretty nice.  I don’t know how they found this place, probably from an ad the owner had put in the newspaper.  And we didn’t know why he was renting out the house, he just was.

But nothing abhors a vacuum like the imagination.  My mother was great at developing stories, and she went to work on this one.  She asked aloud, “I wonder why he and his wife don’t want to live in this house.”  There must be a reason.  Perhaps this woman is his second wife.  Perhaps he lived here years ago with his first wife.  This was the house they bought together.  But then they got a divorce – it was very sad. 

He probably lived in this house after the divorce – she moved away, out of the area.  It was for the best.  Then he met another woman, and married again.  But she couldn’t, wouldn’t live in this house, the house of his first wife.  Even though it’s a really nice house, there were just too many memories here.  Of course, they couldn’t live here.  It was she, the new wife, who insisted that they find a new house that would be their home. 

And when she finished this story, it was a drop-the-mic moment.  Boom.  Her work was done.  Now we had a good story to fill in the gaps.  And it was such a good story; how could it not be true?

So, I’m thinking, this might be part of the reason women have been thought to be untrustworthy witnesses. 

Historically, we know, the words of women have not been taken seriously.  This is true.  In ancient Jewish history, an authoritative list of ten categories of people who are not competent to testify, women are at the top of the list.  Women were not believed to be reliable witnesses – And it wasn’t just a Jewish thing – it was a human thing.    

Throughout most of human history, women’s stories have been laughed at, scoffed at, and brushed off.  Sometimes for unfair reasons – the idea that women are too emotional, or too easily confused and led astray, for example.  But, it occurs to me, it might also be because women are good storytellers.  Stories are, in fact, important to women.  It is through stories that women tell their truth.

Very often, it is not enough to just state a fact.  Many truths need to be told as stories, so we can hear it and see it and feel it.  With a story, it’s like you are there, you know this truth intimately.  Joe Friday might want “Just the facts, ma’am” but women have stories to tell.  And the women had quite a story to tell about that Sunday morning outside Jerusalem.  So sit back and let me tell you the story.

Jesus was gone – his body was gone from the tomb.  It wasn’t something that anybody had been expecting.  Just the Friday before, his body had been taken down from the cross.  It was about mid-afternoon.  Joseph of Arimathea, along with Nicodemus, collected his body.  Nicodemus, you might remember, is the one who had once paid a late-night visit to Jesus because he wanted so much to understand but couldn’t understand, at least not then.  These two men carried his body out to a tomb where they would lay it, along with the myrrh and aloe for the embalming.  Some say Nicodemus carried more than 100 pounds of myrrh and aloe.  Most people would say that you don’t really need that much, 40 pounds will do the job.  But 100 pounds of myrrh and aloe – well, that is quite a burial, one fit for a king.

And so they carried the body and the herbs and spices and clothes to the garden where the tomb was.  It was Joseph’s tomb, actually.  He assumed he would be buried there some day, but on this day he could think of no better use of it than to lay the body of Jesus in it.  By the time they arrived at the tomb, it was near sunset.

The Sabbath was coming.  Even with all the events that had transpired this day, it would not be acceptable to violate the Sabbath laws. They certainly couldn’t be handling a dead body on this holy day, and they needed to be getting home on time for the evening prayers.  So Nicodemus and Joseph left Jesus’ body in the tomb, covered the entrance to the tomb with a stone, and they left.  There was nothing more that could be, or needed to be, done that day. 

Sunday, after the Sabbath, Mary rose very early so she could go to the tomb.  She was awake well before sunrise, in fact, so urgently did she feel the need to go and finish the work that had been started on Friday.  There were some other women there in Jerusalem too, women who had, along with Mary, accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry.  A lot of people think it was just that band of 12 men who followed Jesus, but there were women too – women who used their own resources to provide for him and the disciples. These women had been there at the very beginning, and they were there at the bitter end.  Some say that it was a few of them who went to the garden that morning – the other Mary and perhaps Joanna.  But, it might have been Mary Magdalene, all alone, who made the trip that morning.

When she arrived, she was shocked, numb, to find the tomb a dark, gaping hole.  The stone had been removed, the grave was open, and the body was gone.

What this could mean, Mary didn’t know.  She only knew that the body of her Lord was gone, and that she did not know where he had been taken and she was frantic.  More than anything else, she wanted to know where they had taken him so she could go find him.  Mary was not ready to let go of Jesus yet. 

And she ran back to the house where they had all been staying, and she burst through the door where the men were all gathered, and she said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”  Now, some say that they didn’t believe her, that the men just dismiss it as “idle tales.”  You know, the kind of stories women tell. And perhaps some of them did.  But not all of them.  Not all.

Peter and one of the other men followed Mary back to the garden.  And they saw what Mary had seen – an empty tomb.  They left, but Mary remained.  She still didn’t know what happened to him.  She looked into the tomb and saw two angels – they had to be angels.  Not everyone agrees about exactly what angels look like, but when you see one, you know.  She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

Where is he? Mary wanted to know.  She asked whoever she saw, where is he?  Because Mary was not ready to let go of him yet.  Mary would not go.

And because Mary remained she was the first to see Jesus in the garden, in the flesh. Mary was the first evangelist, the first bearer of the good news, the apostle to the apostles.  

She immediately reached out to touch him, because Mary was not ready to let go of him yet.  But he said to her, "Mary, don’t hold on to me."  She had to let him go. 

She had to let him go so that that he could visit other people in other places and spread the good news widely.  She had to let him go so that he could ascend to the father – his father and her father in heaven.  She had to let him go so that she, and every one of us, could have him and hold him in our hearts, know him as our redeemer.

Eventually Mary went back to the disciples, her face shining brightly, and told them, “I have seen the Lord.”  She told them everything she had seen and heard.  Yes, the men did confirm what this woman had seen and heard, with their own experiences of Jesus.  But let us not discount the fact that this woman had been the first to bear witness to the resurrection.  Perhaps it was necessary that it be this way.  Because women are storytellers, and this is a story that had to be told.

 photo: Pueblo Storytelling Doll