The Knowing

Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:28-31

One of my best memories is a few years ago when we did a sermon series on God the potter. We had a potter each Sunday at the front of the sanctuary throwing pots. The potters actually made a communion service. During the sermon you could hear the potter slapping the clay against the wheel. During the prayers you heard the potter working the clay.

All during the series we sang the chorus “Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me, use me. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.”

Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me.

During that series we had a series of house meetings. I forget how many. But quite a few, in the house meetings we asked people to share a time that they had experienced the spirit of God molding them.”

Night after night when I came home from those house meetings I came home staggering because of the stories people told. Encounters with God. Encounters with Christ. Encounters with the divine. Mystical experiences. Thin places. Ordinary events that became holy.

We don’t talk about these kinds of experiences much. Even people who go to church don’t. We are afraid somebody will think we are weird or unstable or unscientific.

A woman who once served with me at a church where we were pastors together is now a spiritual counselor. People pay her to discuss with her religious experiences that they are afraid to admit to anyone else including their therapists for fear they will be suspected to be unstable.

So I want to begin this morning by saying that it is possible to experience the reality of God, the reality of Christ, the reality of the divine and transcendent in our lives. God is knowable. Christ is knowable.

We’ve been looking all this season between Easter and Pentecost at the Easter story of the Road to Emmaus. Easter Sunday afternoon two disciples are walking six miles between Jerusalem and the small nowhere town of Emmaus just to get out of the city. They are confused and discouraged. A stranger joins them on their walk. It is Jesus but they don’t recognize him. They invite him to dinner. When he takes a loaf of bread and breaks it, just for an instance they know him. They recognize the risen Jesus and they know him.

We have such instances in our lives. We encounter the divine, the holy, the Christ and know it. We encounter Christ often without knowing it. But we have instances when we recognize Christ and know him.

We call these moments when we know Christ sacraments. The United Methodist church has two legal sacraments – baptism and Communion. The Roman Catholic Church has seven. (Jane could recite them for you.)

But there are actually more sacraments than we could count. Any moment in which you catch a glimpse of Christ is a sacrament. It may not be a legal Methodist sacrament but not everything God does is legal.

I love sitting on our little side porch and watching the birds in the bushes around our house. Sometimes I experience the presence of the divine in the earthy beauty of a fat robin pulling a worm from the ground. A cardinal can bring a gasp of surprise and joy.

Birds can be a sacrament.

Lunch with a friend can be communion. Changing a diaper can be a baptism.

You know Gerald Manley Hopkin’s poem

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

The world is a sacrament. You are a sacrament. The stories you have to tell can be sacraments.

God can be experience and known.

That is the first truth from this part of the story of the Road to Emmaus.

The second truth is that, if Christ can be known, Christ cannot be captured.

As soon as the disciple’s eyes were opened and they recognized him, he vanished from their sight.

Christ can be known but he cannot be captured.

What an impossible job we ask our communion servers to do. We ask them to serve you communion, to give you bread and to tell you it is the body of Christ, to ask you to dip the bread in the cup and to tell you it is the blood of Christ.

But there is no guarantee at all that you will know Christ in the bread and cup.

Christ can be known. Christ cannot be captured or contained or produced on demand.

As soon as they recognized him, he vanished.

He cannot be nailed down. He cannot be captured. He cannot be produced on demand.

All we can do is to try to live our lives with our eyes and minds wide open. We can share our stories with strangers on the road. We can listen to their stories. We can invite them to supper.

We cannot capture or contain him. But when he reveals himself to us we can know him and receive him with joy.