Why Emmaus?

Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-35

Luke tells an Easter story in his gospel that no other gospel writer tells. It is a story about telling stories and about a meal that is itself not just a meal but a story. It is a story about the relationship between resurrection and telling our stories and telling our story and understanding our story as part of a larger, eternal story.

We are going to be talking and thinking about Luke’s unique Easter story all of this Easter season until May 19 Confirmation Sunday. I would encourage you to mediate on this story in your personal life for these next six weeks – it is Luke 24:13-35. I’d encourage you to find a few minutes to reread Luke 24:13-35 every day and to take a few minutes to think about it and to absorb it.

While we are studying Luke’s story about telling stories we will be having a story-teller’s workshop led by Pastor Theresa and then a story-telling showcase which you can read about in the Focus.

It was the first Easter and two of Jesus’ disciples were traveling –walking—on the road from Jerusalem where crucifixion and Easter had happened to Emmaus a little town seven miles away.

Two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Luke tells us that one of the disciple’s name was Cleopas, so they were probably not part of the group of 12 disciples who seemed to be Jesus’ inner circle.

Luke earlier in his gospel --and he is the only gospel writer to tell us this—Luke tells us that Jesus had not just 12 disciples but another larger group of disciples that they called the 70. So Jesus really had three sets of disciples – there were Peter, James, and John who Jesus took with him places where he did not take the rest of the 12. There were the 12 and then there were the 70.

Cleopas and the other unnamed disciples were probably part of the seventy – the larger group who were followers of Jesus. They were disciples but not part of the inner circles.

On Easter Sunday afternoon they had decided to take a walk to Emmaus.

The question we want to ask this morning is why Emmaus?

Why on Easter Sunday did they decide to take a walk to Emmaus?

Emmaus is not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. Archeologists have not been able to figure out where it was located. They have not been able to identify any ruins. Why Emmaus?

Frederick Buechner says because Emmaus was “no place in particular really.” He says, the only reason Cleopas and the other disciple went there was that because it was some seven miles distant from a situation that had become unbearable.

Cleopas and the other disciple had just been through Good Friday which had not felt so good at the time. Jesus whom they had believed was the promised messiah, the promised king, who would restore Israel to a land of independence and freedom and respect again had instead been crucified. They had given three years of their lives to the vision of an Israel without oppression, without poverty, without shame, without injustice. They really believed that Jesus would establish that kingdom.

Then he died on a cross instead.

And just that morning to make things even worse, some of the women who were disciples of Jesus had said that they had talked to angels at the cemetery who told them that Jesus was not dead but alive and they did not know what to make of this and it was all too much and so they had taken off for Emmaus just to be somewhere that wasn’t Jerusalem.

Fred Buechner says that there is no one of us who has not gone to Emmaus with them. Emmaus, he says, can be a trip to the movies just for the sake of seeing a movie or to a cocktail party just for the sake of the cocktails. Emmaus may be buying a new outfit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes that we really want to, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus, he says, may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to get away from our confusion, our disappointment, our lostness. Emmaus is where we go when we are lost where we are and we may as well go somewhere else.

There are two kinds of vacations, I’ve discovered in my life. There are vacations that you plan carefully in advance. You have a destination. You research it and have lots of things you want to do and see.

Then there are vacations when you say I don’t care where I go or what I do when I get there. Just get me out of here. Am I the only one who has had that experience?

I remember once during a difficult time in my life, I lived in Philadelphia. I had a close friend who had moved to Pittsburg. I had arranged to visit my friend for a few days. I was going to get there on a Monday morning, but I was so desperate to get out of town I could not wait until Monday morning. I took a bus Sunday evening, got into Pittsburg at 2 a.m., sat and drank coffee for a couple hours at a hamburger joint downtown filled with cab drivers, prostitutes and lost souls, I figured out how to take a bus to my friend's house about 5 a.m., fell asleep on a lawn chair on his front porch. When my friend came out in the morning to get his newspaper he found me sleeping asleep on his front porch.

It was a time in my life when I just needed to be somewhere else at least for a few days.

All of us have our Emmauses. The places we go, the things we do, where we hide, where we escape to when life lets us down, maybe even when God lets us down, or when our small g god has let us down.

When love lets us down, when vocation lets us down, when our dreams let us down, when we let ourselves down.

I am feeling bad for Rick and Kay Warrren this morning.

I admire that letter. I have respect for Rick Warren this morning. No platitudes. No pieties. No hollow reassurances. Just real pain and a plea for prayer.

Life lets us down and we can’t sugarcoat it. Sometimes it feels as if God lets us down.

And it doesn’t need to be dramatic. Sometimes it is just a sense of drifting. A loss of direction.

We all have an Emmaus where we try to escape to just to get away from a life that doesn’t seem to be working for us anymore.

Now here is the thing. On the road to Emmaus we hear footsteps behind us. It is a stranger. At least no one we recognize. And the stranger says to us, “Tell me your stories.” Tell me what has been going on in your life, in your world. Tell me what life looks like to you, what it feels like. Let me see inside your soul. Tell me your story.

And for the Cleopas and the other disciple whose name we do not know, this is the beginning of their journey to resurrection, their journey to Easter. They tell their story -- a story of confusion and lostness, and they listen to a stranger’s story, and they break bread to eat and pour wine to drink and on their road to Emmaus Easter comes to them.

Jesus meets on our road to Emmaus and listens to our story and tells us his. It is the journey towards resurrection.