Roger Ray, pastor
Easter 3a May 4, 2014
Luke 24:28-35
28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29But 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. 30When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them.31Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32They 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?' 33That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34They were saying, 'The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!' 35Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Many of you came to us from churches that taught you to take biblical stories fairly literally. Most of you grew up as Catholics, Baptists or members of the Assemblies of God or the Church of Christ.
Many of you have expressed both shock and a tinge of outrage when you have learned that most of the Bible's history is not historical and that none of the miracles or other worldly claims should be taken literally.
I didn't grow up in a conservative church through I sure did grow up in a conservative part of the world that, even after the passage of half of a century has only evolved to the point of being sufficiently liberal to elect the likes of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to represent them in Congress.
The church I grew up in, even in the 50's and 60's was a labor union organizing, school integrating, capital punishment opposing, war protesting congregation with a prophetic and academic pastor.
But I did have a flirtation with fundamentalism. As a college student majoring in philosophy, I was naturally drawn to religious debate and I found myself, for all of the wrong reasons, married to a very ardent member of the hard right wing, non-instrumental Church of Christ.
We were both students at Memphis State University and as involved in the Church of Christ campus ministry there as were any of the full-time paid staff members. I was just a 19 year old sophomore but I was so curious about Biblical studies that I audited classes at the Church of Christ Graduate School of Religion.
Now, there were right wing evangelicals there who were as literalist as any reality denying televangelist you have ever seen but that was not true of the Bible scholars. Even there, even 35 years ago, even in the heart of the deep, deep south, the Bible professors were telling us not to take talk about incarnation, substitutionary death or even resurrection literally.
I strongly suspect that none of the students sitting around me in class who were going on to become Church of Christ ministers ever breathed a word of this in the churches that would later employ them, but I know, because I heard it with my own two ears, that they were exposed to a critical understanding of scripture.
This came to mind for me as I read over the scripture reading from the lectionary for this third Sunday of Easter because there was a day when, in a fit of adolescent self confidence, I challenged one of the graduate students about the resurrection of Jesus by quoting this Emmaus Road text from Luke.
He was not more than three or four years my senior but he looked as if my ignorance was breaking his heart as he shook his head and looked at the floor. He said, "Can't you see that this is just an early church sacramental myth?" And, I had to be honest, I not only didn't see it but I didn't know what the word "sacramental" meant. It was a painful conversation.
And just as an aside, I want to assure you that while monolithic churches like the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Church, the Lutheran Church, etc. may have all kinds of parish pastors and priests who deal in magic and superstition day in and day out, they all have scholars among them who know better. The Catholic Church has some of the most amazing scholars in every field of religion but their work unfortunately tends to stay bottled up in graduate schools, rarely finding a footing in either the church or the Vatican.
But Biblical scholarship can be sort of like looking at a "Where's Waldo" puzzle. You can't see Waldo at all until the moment you do see him and from that moment on, any time you look back at that puzzle, your eye goes right to him. Once you can see how the gospels were constructed to teach a theological message but not to give a historical account, it is so obvious that you can never go back.
The disciples and the members of the early church had some kind of profound experience of the continued presence of Jesus after he was dead. They tried to articulate that experience in ways to pass along both their experience and to tell successive generations that the same potential existed for them.
Paul, the earliest of Christian writers, does not claim that there was an empty tomb on Easter morning or that the literal body of Jesus showed up at meals and church gatherings. The earliest layer of Christian tradition described resurrection as being visionary. The resurrection accounts were always metaphorical with even the same authors occasionally contradicting themselves.
Luke, who wrote both the gospel we are reading today and the book of Acts, in the former says that Jesus ascended into heaven on Easter day but then in Acts he says that Jesus appeared for 40 days and then ascended to heaven. Of course, Matthew, Mark and John don't say anything about an ascension at all... they conclude their metaphorical accounts in other ways to suit their literary needs.
All of the resurrection accounts are symbolic and formulaic. They all serve the intended message of the writer. They are not eyewitness accounts of a historical event.
If this is the first time you have ever heard anyone say this, then you are feeling some of what I felt that afternoon in Memphis nearly 40 years ago when this student pointed out to me that all of the resurrection appearances happen on Sundays and each had something to do with the theology of the book in which they appear.
This text, the Emmaus Road account, is literally a metaphorical description of early church worship. Our services are structured in basically the same way. The text begins with Jesus explaining the Hebrew Bible to the disciples just as our services begin with a scripture or wisdom reading followed by a sermon that hopefully illuminates the reading for the congregation....
I don't know how often you say to one another on the way home, "did not our hearts burn within in us when he taught us," but that's the idea of the text.
And, just like us, following the proclamation they gathered at the table and broke bread. No one recognized the presence of Jesus until he broke the bread. So, while this is not a literal account of an Easter event, it is a symbolic message that says, you will encounter the resurrected Jesus when you meet in community, share in a discussion of scripture and celebrate communion with your brothers and sisters in the faith community.
And then, in the narrative, Jesus simply disappears but the disciples are affected by the encounter.
So, if the resurrection accounts are not to be taken literally, what is the intended message? What does resurrection mean for the church two thousand years later?
If either our good friends and Bible scholars, David Trobisch or Charles Hedrick, were here preaching this message today, this is the point where they would stop talking and sit down.
A good Bible professor will basically tell you that what you grew up believing is absurd and indefensible. This is what the text meant to the author. But when it comes to posing the question, "What does this mean for you or for the church today?" they would leave that entirely up to you.
And that, my dear friends, is the difference between a Bible scholar and a pastor. You are always welcome to completely ignore us but we feel compelled to tell you what we think it should mean to you!
Seriously, the most obvious and the most likely reaction to being made aware of the fact that the Bible should not be taken literally or historically is to then be fairly dismissive of it. You can tell your friends, I used to consider myself to be a Christian but then I found out the Bible was just a bunch of myths and metaphors and now I don't care anymore.
Which is pretty much how we all feel about Greek mythology, right? We read the Iliad and Odyssey in middle school but we don't then start to worship Zeus or pray to Aphrodite for a prom date. You read it and it affects you the way that a lesson in history, or sociology affects you but it does not dig down into your psyche the way a religious message might. And you no more believe that Jesus turned water into wine than the Greek god, Bacchus, was said to have turned water into wine a thousand years before the story was attached to Jesus.
There is even evidence that the priests at the Bacchanal temples rigged up a fake duplication of the miracle annually, locking a drum of water into chamber over night where secret tubes drained the water and replaced it with wine to amaze the faithful each year.
But Luke is not trying to sell his readers on Christian hocus-pocus. They knew their accounts were not literal but they also knew that they were true. They describe Jesus appearing on Sundays as a metaphoric way of saying that whenever a few of you are gathered in his name that his is in the midst of you. They didn't literally see that with their eyes, but they experienced it.
And some people are going to describe that spiritually and others would describe it psychologically but what you can see from the spread of the faith and the survival of the faith is that people continued to experience something that was life altering and profound. For me, the hocus-pocus gets in the way of the deeper reality that is symbolized when we gather, discuss wisdom teachings and share a symbolic meal.
Faith communities are not immune to melodrama, gossip or petty competition but what Luke, and John, and Matthew hold out to later generations in their Easter story is that is a potential for a life altering encounter in community that is not available on any other day of the week.
The old religious hocus pocus was convince people that they had an invisible soul that was destined for an eternity in an invisible place of torment but the church, that created the problem, was also the only institution that could sell you a cure.... A cure that not only would cost you morning a week and a lot of money but would also involve denying you almost everything in the world that is pleasant for a person to do.
That is not Luke's story... it is not my story and I hope that one day soon the old bad theology of threat and cure will pass away and we can get back to a serious understanding of what the gospel writers meant when they referenced the faith community as being the body of Christ.
Healthy spirituality has been so obscured by unhealthy religion that it would be easy for those who, once liberated from mythological religious manipulation, to toss the whole business without ever slowing down to see the value of true community.
The literal can hide the real. Magic and make mystery seem absurd. But as Tillich said, sometimes you have to kill the little god in order to be able to see the big God.
Behind all that is wrong about traditional religion stands a reality, clothed in mystery, and promising personal transformation and if I can take these texts seriously, it is found only in community.
Allow yourself to suspend doubt for a moment.... Let yourselves believe what the gospels say is true... that the resurrected Jesus is found within the people standing around you. How is he to be revealed?
Certainly he will not show himself by dissecting one another through gossip and criticism... he will not be found by enumerating and cataloguing one another's irritating qualities or bad habits, nor will he be found through dismissal of those who lack physical beauty. Still, there is a way and discovering that, I can only leave up to you.
