"The Christ Beside Us"
Christ comes to us by faith.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, April 3, 2005
Text: Luke 24:13-35
On April Fool's Day last week, I was thinking about the various times I have been fooled in the past - and they have been numerous - but this year I am pleased to say, I escaped unscathed! I thought of something that happens, not to me, but to many listeners of the radio.
In 1938 Orson Welles presented a radio version of “War of the Worlds,” the wonderful science fiction novel by H. G. Welles. It was a science fiction fantasy about invaders coming to Earth from Mars. Welles did such a good job presenting this story that people thought a Martian invasion was actually taking place, and it affected their lives profoundly. Orson Welles always sounded so believable, didn't he?
They went running out into the streets in despair, believing that what they had heard was true. And this despite several disclaimers during the broadcast itself. Now, I want you to tuck that story away in the back of your mind. I want to bring it back a little later on. This morning, I want to start off by saying that there are basically two ways in which you can look at the world.
You can look at the world by focusing on the negative, by focusing on death and sorrow and oppression and destruction and sin and grief. When that becomes your principal point of focus, then all that we celebrated last week seems to completely contradict reality. Easter is almost anathema when you think that the world is essentially about the negative.
Now, you might see Easter in a positive light through one little glimmer, one little lens: you might see it, for example, as a happy ending for which we all wait, something nice at the end of something that is ostensibly a miserable life story. We might equate the events of Easter Sunday to the movie Aladdin or The Lion King or, one that I recently saw and was quite taken with, The Terminal. This is a wonderful story of a man who comes to the United States to get the autograph of a jazz musician to complete his late father's collection.
He arrives in New York City only to find that his country has gone through a coup, and therefore, his passport is no longer valid and he can't enter the country. But he can't go home, either, so he stays weeks - can you imagine the hell of it? - in the airline terminal. I can barely take three hours in one of those places! Afterwards, he manages finally to spend just a few hours in the city, and gets the autograph of the great jazz musician that he had come for, and the story was complete. He had had months of misery, but now it was all worthwhile. It was a happy ending to a beautiful story! Well, we see Easter in the same way - like a Hollywood movie! A happy ending, a good news event at the end of misery: so Easter reflects what many people see as the nature and the meaning and the focus of life.
The other way of looking at reality is to see the world and life through the lens of Easter, to believe in the incontrovertible love of God, and how that love of God is victorious and ever present. If you see the world through the lens of Easter, then it is sin and oppression and death that are contrary to the norm. They are the things that are absurd; they are the parts of life that do not fit with God's original will and intention. The message of scripture from the very beginning, when God created the world and made it good, to the very end, where we get the glory of the resurrection as revealed in the Gospel stories and carried out again in the Book of Revelation, is the story that suggests that it is Easter which is reality, and it is everything else that we look at that is a contradictory spin on reality.
I love what happened when a Sunday school class was asked by the teacher, when studying the story of the creation, what God did on the first day. They all answered that he created the world.
The teacher said, “What did he do on the second day?”
They listed all the things that God had done on the second day.
Then, the teacher asked, “What did God do on the third day?”
A little girl piped up: “He raised Jesus from the dead, that's what he did on the third day.”
Not so far from the truth! In other words, the resurrection of Jesus was something that was in God's heart and mind and purpose from the beginning of time.
The resurrection of Jesus is not an accident of history: It is part of God's divine plan and love for humanity and for the world. So, if you look at the world through the lens of that resurrection, then everything changes in the way that you look at life. Now, you can imagine when these men, from Luke's Gospel this morning, were on the road to Emmaus after the events of Good Friday, they were downtrodden and they were looking at life through the lens of the first perspective, through the lens of death and what had occurred in Jerusalem.
Everything seemed dark, and then, a stranger pulled alongside them. It must have seemed like the hoax that I mentioned earlier - something extraordinary, something fictitious, something beyond their knowledge, their perspective and their point of view. They couldn't understand it, when a stranger came up beside them and started to talk to them. It was amazing for them, because they were still looking through the eyes of death, not through the eyes of the resurrection, not through the eyes of Easter.
When the stranger did pull alongside them, he transformed the way that they looked at life. He transformed the way they looked at Christ, and he transformed them, themselves. These men were clearly emotionally distraught, distraught and grieving. The only thing on their minds was that Jesus had died. The only thing that they could tell the stranger was “Do you not know the events that have taken place in Jerusalem over the last few days? Are you the only one who hasn't heard about the misery that we are experiencing, and the grief that has grasped our hearts? Don't you understand how much we are hurting?”
They did not recognize Jesus; they did not see him in the way that they ought. Now, there is a reason for this, a reason that I mentioned Easter Sunday, that Jesus' body had gone through a transition, a change from a mortal to an immortal body, from a body that was perishable to one that was imperishable, and so when this person came beside them in a bodily form, it was one they could not recognize and could not comprehend.
They were so clouded by their grief that they could not see things through the eyes of Easter, they were still seeing them through the eyes of Good Friday. The great Corrie ten Boom always inspires me, and she once wrote: “Worry does not empty tomorrow of sorrows, but empties today of strength.” Those disciples, in their worry, were being robbed of the strength to even see him or even countenance the belief that it could be the risen Lord who was with them.
Furthermore, and this is the point made by Frederick Buechner, one of my heroes, one of the people whom I read the most. He said, “Have you noticed that every time Jesus appeared to people, he appeared in the most inglorious fashion? Rather than with trumpets and the sound of cymbals, and the power to make the earth shake, he appeared to people in the resurrection stories as a gardener to women at a tomb, to fisher-people as they were catching fish, to people when they were having a meal, or just walking beside them on the road.
Christ did not make a spectacular appearance here but a subtle, hidden appearance, one that nevertheless revealed himself to them in the most delicate and gentle of ways. Jesus came to these disciples when they were at their most distraught emotionally, and he simply said: “Why are you so sad?” He identified with them in their loss. He knew and understood their sense of bereavement. He wanted to bring them the comfort of his presence, and he did so in the most gentle of ways. Christ still does that.
John Greenleaf Whittier put it so poetically in a hymn:
But warm, sweet, tender, even yet,
A present help is He;
And faith still has its Olivet,
And love its Galilee.The healing of His seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch Him in life's throng and press,
And we are whole again.
That is the power of the risen Christ coming alongside us!
The two men on the road were not only emotionally distressed, but they were also intellectually distraught. Their whole point of reference had been shattered. For them, Jesus' life had changed nothing! Rome was still in charge of the Empire; they were still under a death warrant themselves from religious leaders; and the death of Christ was still the ultimate reality in their minds. Intellectually, they were struggling with coming to terms with all of this. They could not understand what was happening, but then Jesus came alongside them - and what did he do? He opened the Scriptures to them. He said, “Look, everything that has happened to the Son of Man had a purpose: it had to happen; it had to take place.” They needed to have the eyes of faith in order to see the Scripture come alive.
Philip Yancey makes a wonderful point that when Jesus made his appearances, the scars from the Cross were visible on his hands, and Yancey asked the question why that was so? The answer is that there is still a link and there is still the identity of Christ, from his life to his crucifixion to his resurrection, just as I spoke of last week. The scars in the hands of Jesus are there as a symbol of God's will and intention working its way throughout the whole event of Holy Week and beyond - from the moment of bearing the cross right through to the empty tomb and to the appearances. In other words, Christ wanted people to know that this was not just an accident of history; it was part of God's purpose and God's plan.
Intellectually, the way that we access that is still only through faith. If there is anything that John Paul II has given the world, if there is anything that is consistent in all his messages, it is his profound belief that every form of reality - intellectual, philosophical, scientific - only makes sense when seen through the eyes of faith. Faith is not an anomaly; faith is not contrary to reason; faith is not something other than the true experience of God and truth. Faith is the very thing that unlocks those realities and makes sense of them. Jesus, by coming alongside the disciples when they were intellectually distraught, revealed to them the Scriptures and said, “This is God's will and purpose. How slow of heart you are to believe!” The only thing that makes the presence of Christ come alive fully is faith. What we have to have in our lives and in our hearts in this Easter period is faith.
There is one last reality: The two men were feeling spiritually distraught. There is no doubt that their whole lives had been shattered. Clearly, these were people who had committed their lives to Christ. They had made themselves his disciples. They had an agreement of faith, and they had seen it shattered. Their Lord, it appeared to them, was dead. Everything that they held true seemed to have evaporated over those days. Then, just when they thought this was just a great big hoax, Jesus revealed himself to them. How did he do it? This is critical: he did it by the breaking of bread. He did it by a physical act. He did it by something he would have remembered from the events in the Upper Room. And just as I said here on Palm Sunday, it is in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the fellowship that Jesus Christ is revealed, and seen for who he is.
I have said this before, but I think it is worth repeating: a lot of people today genuinely want to have a spiritual experience. Opinion polls will tell you that people want a spiritual experience, but don't necessarily want organized religion. What they are saying is that they want a spirituality that they can grasp, but they just don't want to be bothered to do it with anybody else.
My friends, Christ reveals himself in community. He said so in Matthew 18:20: “When two or more are gathered then I am in their midst.” It was in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the wine that Christ revealed himself to them. The disciples who had met him went back to the others in Jerusalem and said “Oh, my goodness, our hearts burned within us! We were overcome with joy when we realized we had gathered with him in a room and he broke bread and revealed himself to us.” It was not to a single person that Christ revealed himself in the resurrection stories; it was always in the gathered community of the faithful that Christ made himself real. That is one of the reasons the Church is so important.
It also raises one last question, one that has been on my mind and may have been on yours as well, and it is this: Why does Christ reveals himself in such a hidden way? Why doesn't he just come into this church this morning, walk down the aisle and say: ”Hey Stirling, sit down! I am going to preach today.” (Now, you would hear a better sermon, and I wouldn't mind as long as I still get paid! He can preach all he wants!) Why doesn't he just walk into our lives, why doesn't he just physically, in his risen body, stand beside us? Why not? Why this need for something more? Why does he not just make himself visible? Well, I think the answer to that is very clear, and it is twofold.
The first is that the way in which we are meant to see Christ, the way in which we are meant to experience Christ, and this is what he wanted from us first, was by faith. Why all this necessity for sight? He comes in faith.
There is also something more. C. S. Lewis wrote when he talked about Christ and the end of time something that made a lasting impression on me: “Why is God landing in the enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the Devil? Why is he not landing in force, invading it? Is it that he is not strong enough?”
Well, Christians think he is going to land in force, but we do not know when. We can guess why he is delaying: He wants to give us the chance to join his side freely. Oh, God will come, but I wonder if people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when he does come. When that happens, it is the end of the world, when the awesome are on the stage and the play is over. So, my friends, between now and then, whenever then is, what do we have? We have faith. Who do we have beside us, but Christ? This demands that we look at the world, not through the focus of decay or the cross, but through the eyes of Easter, which makes it all make sense: the Christ beside us! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.