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Luke 24:13-49

When my father died, I was a first year student in seminary.  His death, unexpected and premature, was a life-changing, faith-shattering experience.  I was just taking my first tentative steps toward a life of Christian discipleship – a life devoted heart, mind, body, and soul to Christian ministry.  Seven months after his death, I had a vivid dream about him.  I was standing in the pulpit of the wonderful little north woods church I was serving for the summer, and in my dream, something very serious and terrible happened outside the church.  All the parishioners left the sanctuary to go outside until there were only two remaining in the sanctuary, my father and me.  Even in my dream I knew my father was dead, yet there he was, sitting in a back pew, legs crossed, arm slung over the back of the pew, quietly watching me.  What are you going to do, he asked me.  I don’t know what to do, I said.  I think, he said, you should go outside with your people.  That was the end of the dream and I never dreamed of him again.  Had my father appeared to me, giving me the advice for which I longed, or was that simply my own tired brain at work?  There have been a thousand times since that last dream I’ve wanted to summon his presence, ask him a question, hear his voice, as anyone would who has lost a wise and trusted mentor.  But I have never felt his presence so strongly as I did in that dream more than thirty years ago. 

There aren’t very many stories about Jesus’ appearances to his disciples, after his death.  Mark doesn’t include any.  Matthew, Luke, and John each tell one or two, but, on the whole, the stories about Jesus’ appearances after death are few.  But the ones that we do have are so rich in meaning and metaphor, they practically preach themselves.  There was Thomas who needed to see the signs of Jesus’ suffering before he could believe.  There is that tender and magnificent story of Jesus and Peter on the beach, when Peter is asked three times, “Do you love me”, allowing him at last, to redeem himself from his betrayal of Jesus in his hour of trial.  Mary Magdalene, according to the 20th chapter of John’s gospel, was weeping outside the empty tomb on the very morning of the third day, when “she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus.” And there is this story Evan just read to you from Luke, when two disciples, incredulous that this stranger could be so oblivious to all that had happened, finally recognized their Savior in the breaking of the bread. 

In each of these resurrection stories, Jesus appeared as a stranger, as one who gives to those he met something they needed, what they most needed to know him and then go on.  Each of the stories illumines the lasting, tenacious, transformative power of Jesus’ presence in the lives of those who were not physically in his presence ever again.  Each one of them speaks to particular limitations, obstacles to faith.  Mary, do not touch me.  Thomas, place your hands in the wound in my side.  Peter, do you love me?  “And beginning with Moses, and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” Each of the stories describes the moment when each disciple recognized Jesus but in a new way.  Each found the way to receive from him strength, forgiveness, confidence, understanding, wisdom.  All of the disciples were devastated by his execution – that we know.  Those who found the way to know him beyond the execution were those who could bear witness that death, even the death of the Messiah, was not and would not be God’s final act.

In a really good book about the resurrection written by Rowan Williams we are reminded that the risen Christ is presented in the gospels with a somewhat ambiguous, supernatural quality.  Those to whom Jesus appeared were all people who knew him well in life.  They were intensely, personally affected by his death and by the strange disappearance of his body from the tomb.  But, Williams goes on to say, the quality of the post-resurrection stories do not allow us to dismiss them as human inventions or the stories of highly suggestive followers or even the common dreams of those who have lost a person who, in life, exerted tremendous power over them.  The stories are so tentative and confused on the one hand, and so rich and resourceful on the other, that they summon us in to their depths, to believe that beneath them, within them lies the very mystery of God, strange and powerful, sustaining and eternal, real and ephemeral. 

Stay with us, the disciples on the road to Emmaus asked the mysterious stranger.  They didn’t know to whom they spoke – only what they felt in his presence – understanding and hearts on fire.  Does that mean that we cannot know Jesus, or recognize him, until we also have had the stories, beginning with the prophets, broken open for us?  Does it mean that we will not know the Messiah if we remain fixated on his suffering and death?  In today’s story, the two disciples did not recognize Jesus until he broke bread with them.  And then, as soon as they realized who he was, he disappeared from their sight so that all they had left was the memory of their hearts burning within them as he opened to them the scriptures, and the story they rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples. 

We all want wise people to stay with us.  As we acknowledged the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination this past week, there was a longing for him.  Tonight, Susannah Heschel will be remembering her father, Rabbi Joshua Abraham Heschel, in a celebration of the 100th anniversary of his birth.  I wish Eleanor Roosevelt were still alive, and Mahatma Gandhi, and Abraham Lincoln, and the prophet Muhammad, and my grandmother, and Richard Niebuhr, and Katie Savides, and Bill Coffin, of course, and so many others, witnesses to the struggle for justice and peace.  I wish they all could have stayed with us.

When we break bread together, when we eat this communion meal, when we are in community, studying together, acting together, living and eating and worrying together, they are with us – all those saints who have gone before.  They are with us in a new way, not as those who died but as those who lived.  That is not so difficult a concept is it?  And if we know that in us, they continue to live, as we live, why wouldn’t it be so that our Savior lives in that same way?  And that because he lives, so shall we live?  Eternity is not so difficult to understand, is it?  Not so difficult at all.  Amen.