Sunday, May 4, 2014

Opening Our Eyes - The road to Emmaus

Opening Our Eyes

Many years ago now, I was a chaplain intern at the Brigham and Women's hospital. There were several of us in the program: myself, a Unitarian, a reformed Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest from West Africa, and a Pentecostal minister from Ghana. Talk about theological and temperamental diversity. I really enjoyed our conversations in which we shared our faith and compared our differences.
I particularly remember one conversation I had with Abraham, the Pentecostal minister from Ghana. In case you don't know what Pentecostalism is, it's about the Holy Spirit, praying in tongues, worship that is very enthusiastic and demonstrative and can go on for hours, "as long as the Spirit moves them" as we say. I was serving a Congregational church in Quincy at the time and I was curious how other people lead worship, so I asked Abraham, "how do you preach?"
Abraham smiled at me, thumped the table with his hand as he said, "I always rebuke them, Max. Before we get to salvation and the hope, I must rebuke them." Abraham thumped his hand on the table with every main point: rebuke, salvation, hope, rebuke, them.
"Really," I said. "And your people like being rebuked?"
"Of course they don't like it, Max." Thump, thump, big smile. "But they know it's true. I am responsible for their souls and I rebuke them because I love them." Thump.
"I'd be interested to see how that would over at my church sometime. My folks might enjoy the novelty, but as a strategy for long term success in a New England Congregational church...well, that would be a novelty. Rebuke usually works the other way round in the Congregational church."
We both laughed and as we were both too busy to ever come to each others' churches, I never found out how a Pentecostal rebuke would have gone over a Houghs Neck Congregational church. And yet, there are times when our Sunday lesson can only be rebuke, not all that sharp or even disapproving, but a criticism nonetheless of how far we are from where we are called to be.
This morning's lesson is a perfect example. It is perhaps my favorite Easter story because it so rich in detail and earthy in feel. Think about Easter for a moment, just three weeks ago many of us were on a spiritual high. On successive Sundays, we had the Faure Requiem, the Easter Pageant on Palm Sunday, and the Easter services, with the very moving Mandy Thursday and Good Friday services in between. If you participated in those worship services, you might have felt like Cleopas and the unnamed companion, that something new was happening, that new spiritual fulfillment was at hand, and then our hopes were dashed. The week of school vacation might have sustained the Easter buzz, but then came the grind of reality: work, school, sports, bills, competing priorities, conflict, and all the rest.
All of us fall off the edge of Easter every year. This morning, Luke gives us a recipe, a method, to keep living Easter, the Resurrection, except it doesn't sound like good news at all in the middle of our hectic, over scheduled, high expectation lives. It's really many of our ideas of a bad dream. A rebuke. Imagine going for a walk with a friend, which we can imagine, and you're talking about faith, which might be harder to imagine for many of us, and some stranger shows up and starts answering all your faith questions, leads you through a Bible Study. Twilight zone, right? And then, rather than brushing him off and walking away, you take the time while walking to talk about your faith. You stop for a meal together, a meal which has the feel of communion, enough so that we say it is a special meal of spiritual significance - our eyes are opened to Jesus with us.
And that is our challenge. Like the disciples, our eyes don't see. Why? Well, when you have exactly 4 hours and 23 minutes of unscheduled free time in a good week to recover and get ready for the next week, it's hard enough to get to church let alone fit in a small group. When you jump out of a plane, you know you're going to fall, really fast, and when you land and roll up your chute, you know you are going to have had an experience. The same is true about taking a nap in a hammock. Getting together with a faith group to read the bible and pray! well who knows what will happen? And if something does happen, it's going to take time, like longer than it takes to skydive from 6,000 feet, or to fall asleep in a hammock. And since we have never done faith groups before, the whole thing strikes us as slightly to very preposterous.
And yet, many of you here have had your hearts warmed by God in Jesus Christ at one time or another. Many of you here have told me of your desire to grow closer to God, to strengthen your spirits, to grow in love, to live a more balanced life, to find answers to your questions. The good news is that it's all possible. Jesus is just waiting for you to invite Him to join you. The bad news is you have to walk the walk down the path of faith for a while and you have to spend time opening your mind to God's word in scripture, spend time talking about and discussing the thorny questions with friends whom you can trust to share this intimacy, you have to have spiritual friends, this has never been done alone, you have to spend time together breaking bread in Jesus' name and spirit. You have to welcome him, invite him, run after him. In our survey, one of the main points which came up was a widespread desire for spiritual growth. Nothing could have warmed this pastor's heart more, but will you come out for the walk? Will you keep walking or break off for something else?
there you have it. Perhaps not a stinging rebuke, but a rebuke nonetheless. The good news is God in Jesus Christ invites us to grow in faith and relationship. The bad news is that the only thing standing between us and Christ is us! each of individually and all of us as we encourage each other to run here and there doing everything possible except feeding our souls and renewing our minds.

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