A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. John D. Painter at Centenary United Methodist Church Metuchen, New Jersey April 6, 2008 (The Third Sunday of Easter)

Text: Luke 24:13-35 – Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, an-swered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.”

Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.

As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were go-ing on. But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 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 rec-ognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 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; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has ap-peared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. —Luke 24:13-35, NRSV

All of the Gospels present Jesus as on a journey. Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is the end of that journey. It’s after the crucifixion and two of Jesus’ disciples approach the village of Emmaus. It was a good trip while it lasted, with Jesus. But it’s over. Death has spoken. It’s the end of the road.

Or is it?

There was a time when I was not. I have looked at the family photo albums—scanning the pictures there—and discovered that generations of my family came and went without me. Scores of people were born, died, and were buried somewhere with no knowledge of me because, though I may find it difficult to conceive, I was not yet conceived. I was not.

Then conception occurred, a zygote formed, a cluster of cells; blastocoels divided, and di-vided again (I am reconstructing this on nothing but the word of my high school biology teacher but I have no reason to suspect that he lied); and, gradually, through various chemical and biological processes, I was becoming.

At some point my mother became aware of me and announced me to the waiting world. My parents had eloped and gotten married seven years earlier, and many assumed they did so because my mother was expecting a baby…it gave her great pleasure to announce my impending arrival—what she described as “the longest pregnancy on record.”

Gradually the sack in which I floated became cramped, then things really began to move, to push and to pull. I was squeezed through a canal, and not of my own free will. The shock of mov-ing from a 98.5-degree world to a 75-degree sterile delivery room was almost too much for me. I awoke with a jolt. I screamed. The hands that had pulled me forth slapped me and gave me my first assignments. Now you sleep, now you wake, this is how you work for food, this is how you rest and wait and ingest and digest. A rub-down and bath even if you didn’t want it. And the slogans! This hurts us more than it hurts you; there is no reason for you to be screaming, you’ve just been fed; settle down you’ll feel better in the morning; you’re being infantile.

That primal eviction, that maternal shove from the safe, warm womb into the cold, busy, world would be repeated a million times over in the months ahead. I would be weaned, given solid food, made to sit up, made to get up, forced to pull up, walk out. I was given a name. At some point, when this name was said, I knew it meant me. I had become a “me.” “Me” meant that others named me, claimed me, and had new assignments for me.

Eating and sleeping, expelling and bathing were done according to their schedules, not mine—I really didn’t have a schedule. I was expected to get in step with their time. Answer to this name, eat this food, learn this alphabet. When all that I called “me” was stripped away in the early evening, just out of the bath, as I romped naked down the hall on my way to the irrelevance of paja-mas, naked, still sticky and wet, this was me, naked, vulnerable, fragile, just barely a me. It felt fun to be naked. I was still too new to know the vulnerability and fragility of all this and how threatening naked can be.

Years later, sinking into the 99 degree water of a hot tub, engulfed by the warmth, I think, “Now I remember what it was like! Now I recall what it was, before I was pushed out into the world.” But the sign on the side of the Jacuzzi commands: “Do not stay in this water more than 20 minutes!”
They were always pushing you out —first day at school, walking that long perilous hall into that huge building, moving from the warm womb of the family into the clutch of strangers. I must have said to myself, “I’ve been down this path before.” It didn’t get any easier, being pushed out, pushed into cursive script, multiplication tables, complex fractions, ballroom dancing. At some point, they threw me in a frigid New England lake and laughed as I sputtered and gasped for air. “Sink or swim!” they all shouted from the safety of the bank. I swam. But I also wondered what would happen if you said, “To heck with it. I’ll go back from where I came. I’ll sink.”

I swam through primary and secondary school. Sometimes gasping for air, dog paddling, treading water, looking over my shoulder, moving forward, or at least what they told me was for-ward.
You gladly grab the keys to the car but most of the other stuff is just forced upon you. Pushed out of high school into college, out of college and into a job, having to get it right the first time—marriage, family, career—forward. How far is the finish line? Lots of things around me now, things that felt less like gifts and more like attainments, achievements, my stuff, my goal, not my gift. Mine.
Whereas once my world was as small as a bed, a few toys, and this and that, now it was considerably larger, with more stuff, but with similar challenges.

At some point between my first birthday and my 50th, I turned. At some point, I stopped growing up and began the downward descent. The brown in my hair turned gradually to dull gray, then to white. I dozed off sometimes. I slept curled up rather than flat on my back. The world, which once came at me with such energy and force, appeared to be receding. I appeared to be reced-ing. Was I in a process of leaving the game too soon, was this near the end, or was I at last on the way home?
But I have, by now, seen enough of life’s leaving to know the end of the story even better than its beginning, having had more opportunity to observe life post-partum. Sometime between 50 and 70 gradually it dawns on your consciousness that you are being pushed out again, this time for the last time. You are beginning your last walk out, down the dark hall, the darkest of all.

Are you leaving, or are you arriving? Are you going out, or are you being drawn in? Are you being expelled from the world or are you being invited in? Once again, just like the very first days, your life is less in your hands than in other hands. You try to tell them what you want. But more often they are telling you what to do. They take things away from you.

Toward the end of John’s Gospel Jesus said to Peter, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18). And how!

Gradually, one-by-one, everything that has accumulated about you, all the works that made you you are relinquished. Each little letting go seems to be training preparation for the last ultimate relinquishment. Then breathing becomes belabored, and a great fatigue overwhelms, and you tuck your arms under you, and you curl up all in a ball. Surprise, it’s the fetal position once again. And as you doze you think, “I’ve been here before.” And you are cold, your feet are cold and your mouth is very dry, and it seems that you are being pushed or is it pulled? Once again you are being taken where you do not want, on your own, to go. Is it out, or is it in? Is this the end or the begin-ning?
And the whole thing has about it a sense of déjà vu. Gradually the light fades. And you are naked. And other hands are bathing you. And they don’t ask if it suits you. And the voices that come and go are utterly unaware of you because there is now so little of what once was you. And you are letting go, you are going down, curling up, and going back down. And it is dark, and now there are no voices, no sound, hardly any of you…

And gradually you sense…light. Light dawns in the darkness and there is new warmth. What seemed a closing door is clearly an opening one. You awake, and hands, other hands reach out to receive you, this time, not with an awakening slap but with an awakening embrace. This time there is nothing for you to do or to say, but only to let yourself be received. And what you thought was a journey into the dark was in reality (surprise!) a homecoming. What you assumed was an end, is a beginning—birth, rebirth—you are more you than you have ever been before, as a full gift of God rather than as a hard-won achievement. Your end, you discover to your delight, is not obliv-ion but home. The One who begot you, at last, after so many twistings and turnings, gets you, at the last. In our end is truly our beginning.

“Hey, it’s me!” you say. Me, falling back, empty-handed, naked, fragile, peacefully at rest in the full grasp of a living, waiting God.

I have often been challenged by Jesus’ saying that “Unless you turn and become as a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” How is it possible, when you are all grown up and big and clothed in accomplishment to “become as a little child”?

The grand implication of Easter—the great death-to-all-death good news—is: You will.

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PRAYER
Lord Jesus, as we think about the end of our lives, as we ponder the fact of our dying, we do so with one sure hope and that only: that even as you pursued us in life, you will also pursue us in our death. Therefore we give thanks for your faithfulness, even when we are unfaithful. We praise you for your grace in being willing to be with us, even when we do not always want to be with you. We honor you for your determination to speak to us even when we stop listening for you. This is our hope, in life, in death, in life beyond death. You are our hope, our only hope. Amen.
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