If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake. Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.

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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, answered 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 going 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 recognized 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 appeared 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.

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I have never thought of the church this way before, but what if the church is a detective agency? A detective agency-what if that’s part of our job? What if part of our job is tracking down leads and detecting clues, finding obvious looking pieces of life that are unobvious grace signs? What if part of our job is tracking down resurrection clues, bits and experiences of life when God appears as an unrecognizable stranger but nevertheless real and present to us?

Certainly the text from Luke causes us to realize that when it comes to God, we may not recognize God from a stranger. That Easter evening on the way back to Emmaus, the two followers of Jesus did not recognize him. They couldn’t pick him out of a line up. They needed clues, leads. Why couldn’t they recognize him? Why did they mistake him for a stranger?

I suspect for the same reasons we don’t recognize God. For one thing, Jesus never went about being God among us, with us, and in us in terms of how we would prefer God to show up, act and perform. Disciples never really got who Jesus was. That’s why all forsook him and fled when the bottom fell out and he was crossed. If Jesus is how God fulfills God’s job description, then no one really got it then, nor do we today--not often and never for very long.

We would write God’s job description so that God would show everyone how we are right and they are wrong, show everyone how wonderful we are and how everybody else that is not one of us needs to straighten up and become like us. In other words, we want God to be a mirror image of who we are. If God would only cooperate and be like us, then we would recognize God.

But when Jesus went about disclosing a God who turned everything upside down and interacted mercifully with those whom we would not approve and went about disputing and disrupting all our preferences of power arrangements, then everyone, including original followers and present-day followers, has a difficult time recognizing Jesus as God’s Christ interacting in our lives.

If we don’t recognize Jesus as God with us before the cross and on the cross, then we are not going to get it on Easter either. God will almost always look like a complete stranger to us for one simple reason: our hearts are not yet conformed to God’s heart, and our minds are not yet conformed to God’s mind. And we know this. Really, I suspect this is why we don’t recognize
God. What Holiness would really want to come alongside the shabbiness of our spiritual lives?

It is not so much the implausibility of Easter as much as our own cynicism about ourselves and our world. We think God would act as we do when we see someone we don’t like. We hide our face and hope they don’t see us, or we walk away as fast as we can before they spot us. This is really the part of Easter that is impossible--that we might be so loved that God would want to come alongside us.

I think, too, there is another reason we don’t recognize the Risen Christ. It’s not just that we struggle believing God would be so loving toward our messy, unloving lives, but we don’t know how to be awestruck anymore. Technology and education have beaten into our heads that the world is flat. Just as the science is uncovering a strange, mysterious universe that seems weirder and weirder, we are somehow in popular culture suckered into only accepting as true the general idea that everything going on “out there” is the result of some easily discovered material cause and everything going on “in here” is due to something our mothers did to us when we were three or four. The explanation is either nature or nurture but never divine mystery.

In the popular world of modern thought, it is a closed, fixed, flat, demystified, disenchanted, and dull world where if the issue cannot be established by empirical method, then it is not of interest. This is a way of knowing which I can fully appreciate, yet this is a way of knowing which so easily leads me never to doubt my doubts and therefore not to recognize that reality is stranger than I know or can know.

Look, the way of knowing that is based upon quantification and empiricism leads to wonderful productive good things like penicillin, computers, microwaves, tall buildings and machines. Such a way of knowing is wonderful for discovering realities like these. But it is limited.

Are we really better off because our children are fascinated with handheld computers and stare at screens for hours but don’t notice flowers or the sound of birds or know the mystery of sitting in a tree and dreaming and thinking about ideas like who made God? Empiricism and the technology of gadgetry enamored with facts, mathematics and common sense are great, but they have their limits.

Religion, not sick religion-mind you-where we kill or conquer in the name of God or practice superstition or thought control, no not that kind of religion, but religion where we love and reach out and recognize the common humanity we all have in God’s image and religion which invites us to look at nature as the theater of God’s glory—this kind of religious approach offers us a different way of knowing that is of incredible genius when it comes to thoughts of beauty and mystery, right and wrong, good and bad, when it leads us into ways of hoping, loving and being motivated by faith to believe more than we know. And if anything, the God of Easter in a very intrusive, macho way pushes us to believe more than we know, daring us to be awe struck!

The two followers of Jesus are traveling. Jesus comes alongside them. They don’t recognize who he is. He is a stranger to them. But by the time they complete the journey, they have moved from discouragement and despair to hope and faith. Isn’t that exactly the journey you and I are traveling? Isn’t this what happens at church? We sometimes come here with the weight of life bearing down upon us, and leave knowing it is still all too much for us but not for God.

We are the people who are learning together that if we want to experience Easter in our lives, then we simply get up each morning, put one foot in front of the other and head down the road. And along the way, just like today, sometimes our hearts are warmed by the surprising awareness that the Risen Christ has crept upon us with the offer of companionship and hope.

Look, I see resurrection signs and clues in you. I see sometimes how surprised you are that you were overcome with the desire to forgive when so rarely has forgiveness been your strong card, or how you were shocked by how you uncommonly gave of yourself to meet a need in someone’s life and didn’t care if anyone gave you credit or not. I heard you tell me how you baffled yourself because you did not respond with the customary anger and disapproval but instead found yourself unexpectedly laughing and lighthearted, strangely recognizing how much fun it was not to be in control and have things always have to go your way.

What makes it hard to recognize the clues is not really their elusiveness though granted they are never obvious and never bang us over the head with convincing certainty; no, what makes it hard to recognize God is our lack of belief that God could really love and change lives as selfish and fearful as ours, that God would even be interested in coming alongside us and reaching out to us. But that’s what this text from Luke, what the baptismal water, what this table all promise: God’s life and love raised up in Jesus come alongside you.

Let’s be faithful and good detectives, helping one another spot the clues and identify the suspect, recognizing when God is un-obviously obvious in our lives and on the journey with us: a journey through a world that is full of God clues and enchantment and is anything but flat.