Sermon for 2007 Bishop’s Convocation

Bishop Margaret G. Payne
October 23, 2007

You know how it is with e-mail. Not even counting the spam, the messages are like endless waves of the ocean. Some are wild and splashy, some are only ripples, and some seem determined to knock you over.

A few months ago, as I was wading through my waves of e-mail, I saw one from a friend who usually sends me something wise or funny. It was #37 out of 184. So I decided to save it to enjoy later and kept plowing through those waves.

I felt tired by #65 (it reminded me of retirement). I felt triumphant when I passed #100, and I felt weary by #125 – so I took a break and went back to #37.

Her message contained three short sentences with a strange image below them – a funny pattern of light and dark shapes. The sentences directed me to stare at those shapes for 45 seconds, and then to close my eyes.

I did it – though I confess that I only did it so that I could tell my friend that
I had done it – I stared and then I closed my eyes,
and behind my weary eyelids it was first black,
then the darkness started to shift and flecks of light
swirled and gathered, and then I saw Jesus.

I think I gasped, and then I stared –
if it can be said that you can be staring when your eyes are closed –
and then I opened my eyes … and he was gone.

I closed my eyes quickly to try to see him again, but there was only darkness, because, after all, it had only been a trick pulled on my eyes … hadn’t it?

Haven’t you ever wished that you could just see Jesus?

Two people were walking along a road, the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

They were talking, talking, talking – the world has always been
so full of talking that sometimes the life and the truth
beneath the words is more often downed by the noise than revealed.

A third person began to accompany them –
Jesus came from nowhere and was suddenly
beside them. I wonder if that ever happens to us? –
when we are busily walking and talking,
even doing the holy work and saying the holy words that we are called to.

“But their eyes were kept from recognizing him”

Who or what did that to them? And does it still happen?

Those two people were walking along, so busy talking about Jesus,
that they didn’t recognize
that the object of their earnest conversation
had become their companion.
I wonder if that ever happens to us?

And Jesus said – so –
“What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?”

Now, at this – they stopped: they stood still, they looked sad.

And in a way that I can’t help but think might have been just a tad condescending, they said:
“Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?”

But Jesus, being Jesus,
did not roll his eyes or slap them upside their heads,
or lay the resurrection reality out for them
in newspaper headline style.

He just asked, in an innocent kind of way: “What things?”

And next they all followed our synod guidelines for listening:
they told their story and Jesus didn’t interrupt,
and he told his story, and they didn’t interrupt.

And what happened next is what often happens
when people accompany one another, and listen to one another’s stories, and begin to dwell in each other in a way that can never happen unless
we are walking on the same road, paying attention
to one another – there comes a deepening.

After their talking and listening, a feeling apparently arose in the two people when Jesus began to walk ahead, when he started to put distance between himself and them.

I don’t know if it was their ingrained sense of Middle East hospitality,
or an unnamable longing that was the dawn of their recognition of him,
but they wanted to stay with him,
they wanted him to come home with them.

And they said, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening”

Evening.
Evening is a gentle swaying bridge between day and night –
a time of vulnerability and a time of wistfulness;
it is the threshold to the deep darkness of night;
it’s a time when we crave company, it’s a time when we feel hunger,
it’s a time when we want to stop traveling and just hunker down at home;
it’s a time when we can be open to experiencing God.

In his book The Elusive God, Samuel Terrien talks about two strains of the presence of God in human life.

In Israel’s early nomadic tradition, God was “a walking God” –
God was present in the Ark of the Covenant
which could accompany the people, could be carried into battle –
God was on the road with the people.

Now, eventually, that “walking God” settled down into a Holy Place.

But there is a tension – and always has been – between these two traditions –
a god who might appear unpredictably by our side on the way,
and a God who can be predictably encountered in a holy place.

And then into the tradition came Jesus –
God walking alongside us, yet dwelling with us in the tent of our humanity, accompanying us on the way,
yet predictably present in bread and wine –
Jesus, without whom nothing came into being in all of creation,
but also Jesus in a baby in a manger, in a particular place on a cross on a hill.

Jesus is both for us – a walking God and a God in our holy places.

“So he went in to stay with them”

In this gospel story there is this particular instance of
“God with us” encapsulated in a few steps into a person’s house –
the Christian witness in miniature –
the walking God entering a particular place and time
that is home to limited human beings.

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him….”

It is such a good thing that we have the bread and the wine,
the meal that Jesus left for us as an inheritance,
because I think it is not only those two clueless travelers
who failed to recognize Jesus until he was made known to them
in the bread and the wine.

I believe that frequent Eucharist is a good thing –
to touch and taste Jesus, to be forgiven and cleansed and nourished
on a regular basis.

But I wonder, I wonder if it is also a danger –
I wonder if the Eucharist becomes a blinder that keeps us from seeing
all the other places where Jesus is present in our world?

I wonder if we can move beyond our limited vision,
to find bigger eyes to recognize Jesus wherever he is?

When my son John was four years old,
he actively disliked all of his babysitters; he was not overly fond
of his Sunday School teacher; he had trouble tolerating his siblings,
and many days he was not all that crazy about his mother, either.

But he fell in love with his pre-school teacher, Miss Gilbert.

The sun rose and set on Miss Gilbert; she hung the moon for him – and
any other sappy expressions that you use to name passion.

Sometimes it got to be a bit much:
I just love Miss Gilbert’s dresses
Miss Gilbert is really fun to be with
Miss Gilbert said it’s good to eat my beans and drink my milk, so I will. (Like I had never said that to him?)

But, for the most part, I was happy that he had a new love in his life.

Then one day John and I went to the supermarket,
and as we started down one aisle, I saw Miss Gilbert at the end of it,
and I said: ”Look – there’s Miss Gilbert.” And he said: “Where?”

So, we moved down the aisle, past the cereals and granola,
and right in front of the oatmeal,
John walked right by Miss Gilbert, without even saying hello to her, as if she weren’t there.

And I was very embarrassed, but Miss Gilbert consoled me by saying that
it happened all the time –
her students did not recognize her in a another context.

When I caught up with John in the next aisle, I couldn’t resist saying:
“You know, that was Miss Gilbert.”

And, with just as much determination, he said back to me: “Well, it wasn’t my Miss Gilbert.”

Then I finally got it – Miss Gilbert existed only in his pre-school class,
where he knew his place and he could see her in that place
and he knew for sure there that he had her attention and love.

She was so real to him in that place that he simply could not imagine
that she had a life apart from that –
that she shopped for groceries, that she went on vacation,
and maybe even had other people that she loved as much
as him and the other members of that pre-school class.

I’m really glad that those travelers recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread, and I am glad that we do, too.

But sometimes I wonder if that precious experience makes Jesus too much
into our Jesus in a way that limits our understanding
that he moves and loves and forgives and heals
in other places besides the bread and the wine.

I think that our lives could be wider and richer and more full of Jesus
if we more often look beyond the bread and wine.

“They 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?’ ……That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem.”

That same hour?

After dinner, when it was dark, and when they needed some sleep,
When traveling on the road was dangerous,
and they had already made the journey once that day?

How often do we feel that urgency in the work of telling others about Jesus?

How often do the needs of our human comfort and condition take a back seat to a yearning to tell someone else where you had recognized Jesus?

Maybe we need to make an effort to recognize Jesus in other places
in order to recapture the urgency
that is the stuff of love so deep that we can’t help
but want to tell others ...
as soon as we can.

I want to end this sermon with a quotation.

It’s a bunch of words that have lived in my mind for decades,
giving me comfort, challenging me, opening me,
reminding me that my best life is, most deeply,
to love and follow Jesus.

Some of you know these words and will recognize them as the last words in the book The Quest of the Historical Jesus by Albert Schweitzer.

Now, these words came unbidden to me just as my hands hovered over
my keyboard all set to type another ending to this sermon.

The Holy Spirit didn’t seem to help me much with the beginning of the sermon, though I trust and hope it was present enough to guide me in the right direction.

But I found myself very suddenly very deeply aware that truly being “On the Way” with Jesus, as we are seeking to do more intentionally this year, means that we are trying to be especially attentive to how Jesus is with us in mysterious ways that direct us differently than the ways we might have already planned.

Please forgive me for the presumption of updating the language of a man who quested with his whole heart and soul and mind and life for Jesus, and take a moment to meditate in silence on the witness of Albert Schweitzer, as he concludes the book on his long search for the deepest reality of the Incarnated Word of God:

“He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow me!” and sets us to the tasks which he has us to fulfill in our time. He commands. And for those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, in the conflicts, in the sufferings which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who he is.”