Can you believe that Easter Sunday was just two weeks ago? Here at Faith Lutheran, was it a wonderful day? Did you see friends in the sanctuary that you have not seen for a long time? Were there people you had never met who just seemed to wander in for the occasion? Were the Easter lilies fragrant, the sermon inspiring, and the music uplifting and joy-filled?
I attended First Congregational Church in Bridgton on Easter, and worship was all of those things I just mentioned. I suspect it was like that at most churches – even the ones that are dying and have given up any hope of a bright and thriving future. Easter seems to do that. Even in our deeply skeptical and secular age, many people still come out of the woodwork for Easter Sunday - either from habit or under duress or because they are wishing – consciously or not - that the event of Easter will mean something new and different this year.
Whatever the reason, there is a part of me that wonders just why that is. Why are churches more crowded than usual on Easter? I mean, all Easter Sunday is about is an empty tomb and a foolish, ridiculous, cockamamy story told by either one or several women (depending on the version of the story you read), women who didn’t know what to make of the whole thing.
The original ending to the Gospel of Mark has the women saying nothing to anybody because they were terrified – as were the Roman guards who, we are told, trembled and became like dead men in Matthew’s Gospel. In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene tells the disciples about the empty tomb, and they simply scoff at her tale over their second cup of coffee – just as they do in Luke’s version of the story. Peter does not know what to think when he arrives at the tomb, the disciple whom Jesus loved is hoping for the best, and Mary is left crying her eyes out to the cemetery caretaker.
Of course, if any of them really believed what Jesus had told them in the first place about dying and rising in a scant three days’ time (and I highly doubt they did. I mean – be honest now - would you had you been there?), I think the disciples, if they were anticipating anything at all, were anticipating a resuscitated Jesus who would pick up his ministry where it had so tragically ended. In short, they were looking – as I think many of us do - for an event that first Easter morning.
However, I think that resurrection is less an event and more an experience. And maybe that is why Easter is not just a day in the liturgical calendar. In fact, Eastertide is a season of 50 days.
And that is why I wonder why people flock to our churches on Easter Sunday. If they want to celebrate resurrection and the hope that it cannot help but bring to even the most jaded and cynical among us, they should be filling the chairs and the pews today and next week and all the weeks that follow when we learn how Jesus appeared to his disciples, how their lives were transformed by his presence, how one by one they experienced – not an empty tomb, but a resurrected Christ, how we can have the same experience too.
In other words, God knows that most of us need more than a day before we can shamelessly and confidently shout out alleluia. We need a season - as the disciples certainly did.
Take Cleopas and his unnamed companion that we meet on the road to Emmaus. Did you know that archeologists have never found a city, town, or even village that might have been Emmaus, seven miles from the Holy City of Jerusalem?
And so we are left to believe that Emmaus might just be a metaphor. Emmaus is where you go when you feel like those two followers of Jesus. Emmaus is where you head when all hope is gone. You’re on the road to Emmaus when there is no place left to go, when the journey itself is only about grief and loss. Presbyterian pastor Stan Gockel tells us that Emmaus is “the place where we go to escape from the cruelty of life and forget our pains, fears, and failures….. Emmaus is the place where we go when we feel like throwing up our hands and saying, ‘To hell with the whole dang thing.’”
That is why the two men were going to Emmaus – because nothing made sense any more. People like Mary were going crazy, and they felt themselves close to spinning out of control as well – but here they were talking about it anyway. Were they losing their minds?
“Are we losing our minds?” they asked the stranger who had joined them on the road. And why were they talking about this to a stranger in the first place? And when had he showed up anyway?
"Shalom! What's up, friends?"
“What’s up? Doesn’t everybody know the latest?!
"Where have you been?" they ask. "You must be the only one in the whole area who has not heard."
But then again, Jerusalem is a big city – and bursting at the seams right now with Passover pilgrims. To Cleopas and his buddy, it might have been headline news, but to others, as Reformed pastor Scott Hoezee observed, it was just another Roman crucifixion, a side story buried on page 3 of the Jerusalem Gazette.
Hoezee mused that clearly this stranger was one of the clueless ones, and so the two men on the road explained it all as best they could but mostly how they had hoped that Jesus of Nazareth would be the one to stop Roman oppression and make life bearable for the poor, the laboring, and the peasant class in general.
For a while it had seemed so right. They had actually believed all that blessed is the so-and-so rhetoric, all those stories about make love, not war, peace and flowers in your hair. Yes, they had hoped that Jesus would triumph, but since dead people cannot achieve much, they had to deal with the depressing fact now that they had made a mistake.
But then, as Hoezee described the incident, the stranger goes from listener to Scripture ace and launches “into a quite serious and thorough Bible study. And after that, the rest of the trek to Emmaus just flew by! With breathtaking sweep and exegetical precision, this anonymous fellow traveler re-tells Scripture's story. It is Israel's story, all right, but the stranger tells it in a quite new way. The last time they'd heard anyone talk about the Bible in such an invigorating a fashion was . . . well, never mind.
Before they knew it they were standing in front of the Hotel Emmaus. With a slight wave and a nod the stranger says, "Nice talking with you" and keeps walking. Then Cleopas pipes up, "Sir! Look, the sun is setting which means the thieves along the highway will be coming out soon. It's not safe to travel alone—stay with us at least tonight."
The man agrees, and after having washed the dust of the journey from their faces, hands, and feet, the three find a place to eat. Before they know what's happening, the stranger reaches for the flat bread, lifting it up in a strikingly familiar way. He then gives thanks, breaks it just so, and hands it to Cleopas and his friend. They know instantly who he is but just as they are ready to cry out, ‘Jesus!’ he is gone.”
Maybe it was seeing the scarred hands as he lifted the loaf to heaven. Maybe it was the way he held the bread. Maybe it was the blessing that he said.
Or maybe, just maybe, they remembered the last time that they had shared a meal with Jesus. Oh, it seemed so long ago – the loaf of bread, the cup of wine, do this in remembrance of me.
None of the disciples knew where to look for a sign of the promised Risen Christ. They were all lost, each one trying to cope as best he could.
And so Cleopas and his friend had walked the grief-strewn road to Emmaus. Peter and a couple of the other disciples went fishing. A bunch of the followers returned to the Upper Room where they had shared the ritual of Passover together.
And they all encountered Jesus, and each time it was over a meal – or in a place of a meal remembered. But that is not so strange really because Jesus’ most memorable moments of ministry were experienced over meals – loaves and fishes shared with a huge crowd on a hillside, a wedding at Cana when the wine flowed as abundantly as water, tables shared with whores and tax collectors and the other assorted dregs of Jewish society, a last supper and a new commandment to love one another.
Christian writer Diana Butler Bass noted that the end of Holy Week and Easter takes us from table to trial to tomb (for burial) to tomb again (for resurrection) and finally to table once more. We have come full circle and so perhaps should not be surprised when the stranger takes the bread, then gives thanks, breaks it just so, and hands it to Cleopas and his friend. And they know instantly who he is.
None of the disciples returned to the cross or pitched tents by the tomb waiting for something to happen. They might not have been the brightest bulbs in the chandelier but they were smart enough not to go back to places marked by death and tragedy but instead to gather where they had once known joy and abundance – around a table, sharing a meal together.
And it was in those places that their lives began to take on a new meaning. It was not the event of the empty tomb that did it, but rather the experience of encountering the Resurrected One, breaking bread, drinking wine, even sharing fish.
In closing, I would suggest that it may not the tomb, but rather the table, that makes all the difference. My pastor in Bridgton, Emily Goodnow, raised this question – which I pass on to you. Now I am not saying that we should do this – just asking you to shift the paradigm for a few moments and see what happens. But - what if the symbol of our faith was not the cross (albeit empty) but seen by many as a symbol of death (and an excruciatingly painful death at that), but rather what if the symbol of our faith was a table, with a place for everyone, with more than enough food to go around, where life was joyously and abundantly celebrated? Would we live our lives differently? Would we express our faith in a different way?
I think the power of Easter, of the empty tomb, is only made manifest around the table – this table to be sure but also wherever bread is broken and wine shared, wherever the hungry are fed, wherever abundance is known, wherever joy and love are experienced. So – ponder that change in perspective as we gather to share in communion later in our worship this morning. Bread broken. Wine poured. Do this in remembrance of the Resurrected One – and all the joy and love and extravagant welcome that he stood for.
