Eastertide: Emmaus, Luke 24:13-35, Bishop Alan Hawkins

It's good to be with you all. I've enjoyed a number of things

being here this weekend. Every year in the Diocese of

Christ, our hope a Bishop will visit one of our churches.

And this was my weekend to come here and it's been really great

to get to spend some time with Dan, of course.

And then yesterday morning I got to meet with the parish council

and engage them and hear some things on their heart.

Then to meet with the conferman's.

You'll see a number number of them up on the stage in just a

moment. And then I got the construction

tour and got dusty. Watched Dan cut a tree from the

3rd 2nd floor window with the 30 foot pole.

Very impressed. And then of course getting to

eat dinner last night with the Claire's Eden.

Great job reading. We were locked in mortal

survival over the card game Scout, and it was a great joy to

play games with you all. It's an honor also to be here

and to serve here at Church of the Resurrection.

We are going to look today at this amazing passage out of

Luke, chapter 24, where Jesus encounters people.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

They see the risen Lord, and Luke in his wisdom has recorded

three stories. And then at the very end of the

chapter, it's the ascension of Jesus, and off he goes as if it

was a short and sweet condensed package.

Luke tells first the story of Mary and some other women at the

tomb, and then of course, the road to Emmaus that we'll look

at, and then Jesus meeting the disciples.

And it's a great opportunity for us even again, to be reminded of

the power of the resurrection in our life.

And what could be more fitting than to preach about the

resurrection in the Church of the Resurrection in the diocese

when a new church has started? They actually asked the Bishop

now to approve the name. And I love the name Church of

the Resurrection. There's four churches.

And some people are saying we've got too many Church of the

Resurrections. It's kind of confusing.

And another church came and said, we really love this name.

Can we do it? And I said, yes, but don't tell

anyone I said so. So what a awesome thing.

I was also really blessed to see so money and the dramatic play.

And we certainly know Miriam is the talent and brains behind

that outfit. That was such a great dramatic

presentation of Lazarus being raised from the dead.

We're looking at Luke 24 and the Road to Emmaus, and it might be

important for us to consider this.

Why are these three stories so important and particularly for

us, why the Road to Emmaus? And I would submit to you today

because these three encounters of the Risen Lord have so much

to teach us. In fact, a few years ago, I

preached through the Road to Emmaus story over 6-7 weeks.

It is so chocked full of some things and I can only briefly

give you some of that today. The encounter by Mary and the

others, the encounter by the disciples bookend this great

story of Jesus meeting disciples on the road and we know that he

appeared to many. But again, Luke for some reason

wants us to know these three stories.

So today when I want to put before you are three things out

of the road to Emmaus. First, a long walk with Jesus.

Secondly, things that happened. And 3rd, burning bushes and

burning hearts. So a long walk with Jesus,

things that happened, burning bushes and burning hearts.

Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for this chance

to have Your word open to us, just as it was open to the

disciples. And may our hearts burn with a

fire to know you and to desire you and to love you.

And we pray, Holy Spirit, that you would come now and open this

word to us and be our teacher. And we pray this in Jesus name,

Amen. So first, a long walk with

Jesus. Now, I love to kind of poke the

bear prod folks who put stickers on their cars of distance races.

So if you have a sticker on your car that says 26.2, raise your

hand. One of you and the others that

have it are afraid to admit it. So I'm not coming after you.

Don't worry, I'll be gentle. So 26.2, you see, that's like,

look what I've done. 26.2 miles, right?

She's turning red. OK, I shouldn't have called on

you. It's all good.

We're very impressed that you ran a marathon.

I have a body designed to watch sports.

So now I do like it when someone backs down a little bit from

that kind of boasting. They have 13.1 on their car.

Isn't that great? It's kind of humble bragging,

right? I'm not 26.2, I'm 13.1.

I'm better than most of you, right?

13.1 I did see a sticker on a car one time, fell in love

immediately. It had 0.01.

Like that's my kind of runners, right?

I tried to take a few steps and I gave up.

So in the Bible, one of the most common metaphors to describe our

relationship with God is walking together.

God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden.

Enoch and Noah walked with God. The prophet Elisha says walked

with God. What happens when we walk with

someone is we talk, we laugh, we listen, we share our hearts,

we're in harmony, we enjoy camaraderie.

Sometimes you have to walk to talk through difficult things.

Either way, walking is revealing your heart.

And when we are walking with God, we get to experience a real

and personal dimension to our Lord.

It's one of the most common ways of describing our relationship.

But walk with God. Walking with God also involves

how we live our life. The apostle Paul tells us in the

New Testament that we are to keep in step sounds like walking

with the Spirit. So it is this dimension of

living our life in a way that the power and the work of the

Spirit is in US and through us to walk with God can also imply

that we are choosing A pathway where we love and see the

goodness and the mercy of God versus another pathway, pathway

that may draw us from the love of God.

One of the most famous verses on this is Micah chapter 6, verse

Micah 6:8

8. It gives us a glimpse into God's

desire for us, for us today. Even He has shown you, immortal,

what is good and what does the Lord require of you to act

justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Walking with God is not just an activity reserved for a select

few, it's the call of God on all of us.

God desires all of His children to know Him and to walk with Him

and to walk humbly with Him. On the road to Emmaus, Jesus

takes a long walk with two disciples.

They say that Emmaus, there's a couple of sites that they think

are the former place called Emmaus, but all of them are at

least 7 miles from Jerusalem. So I want you to think about

this in the passage. Why would Jesus spend 7 miles

walking and talking with two disciples who had formerly fled

and left and left in despair? Why would he do that?

Why did Jesus take this long walk?

There are certainly a number of plausible reasons for this, and

you can read different scholars and thinkers on the different

reasons why they think Jesus chose to walk this long walk

with these two disciples. Either way, I've concluded and

believed this. He pursued these disciples to

reveal himself to them. It is an example of God's great

initiative always to us. We don't get right, get right

thinking, pull ourselves up and get religious and seek God.

It is always and firstly his drawing of us, his pursuit of us

through his Holy Spirit, through his grace to call us.

So Jesus demonstrates practically and tangibly A

theological truth. He initiated the walk.

He showed up and he walked with these disciples.

And this brings me to my second point.

Things that happened. Jesus asked the disciples, why

are you so sad? Why are you so downcast?

And one of the disciples named Cleopas asked him, Are you the

only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that

have happened there in these days?

They were in despair, and they're in despair because of

this. If you are living a life without

hope in the resurrection, despair will be a common journey

mate for you through life. It's why even today, after all

this time, after all the technology and advancement and

knowledge that we have, the number one fear humans face is

death. Without the hope of the

resurrection, we have this fear. About a month ago, I was flying

from LaGuardia Airport to Albany.

I've flown a lot, so I'm used to turbulence and bumps and bruises

on the plane, but I'm flying now.

I'm not a physics major nor a pilot, but I know when your

plane does this and then it does this, that's not good, right?

I'm smart enough to know that. And in that moment, you could

feel the audible gasp of fear. I was convinced we're not going

to make it on this flight. And the pilot who afterwards, I

saw him, he was 23. He looked like he was 23 years

old. But everyone looks younger to me

now these days. During the middle of this, he

said hang in there. It was really like, well, of

course, hang in there. Sure, we're all about to die and

you're telling us to hang in there.

So this grip of fear comes to all of us.

These disciples had despair because they did not believe the

resurrection. They did not believe in the

power of the resurrection. Jesus says in verse 19 what

things have happened? Tell me curiously, think of the

irony. Jesus, this stranger

unrecognized, is the only one who doesn't know what has

happened. The only one.

And yet Jesus is the one who knows everything about what

happened and everything about why it happened.

Cleopas sees in Jesus all the ways that Moses was seen and

other great Old Testament people are seen.

Listen to what he says to Jesus, that this Jesus was powerful in

Word and deed, as well as before God and all people expecting him

to redeem Israel, to be the promised Messiah who would

deliver them from their oppression.

But what these disciples don't understand is why these things

happened. One Christian writer says that

every single text of Scripture points to Christ, from Moses to

the prophets. He is the focus of every single

word of the Bible. The great British preacher

Charles Spurgeon says it this way.

The Old Testament is Christ concealed and the New Testament

is Christ revealed. What these disciples and the

other disciples could not fathom in their expectation of this

Messiah is that the Messiah would have to suffer and die and

endure the cross in order for their true freedom.

Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 16.

He said the Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of

sinners, be crucified, and on the third day raised again.

Jesus announced his plan in advance and most of the

disciples didn't want to accept it or believe it.

Even Peter outright challenged it.

Only one, Thomas said let's go to Jerusalem and die.

Everyone else thought this cannot be a good idea.

This cannot be the way, my friends.

The cross and the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ will

always be a stumbling block to our human intuition.

It will always not make sense to us unless, as it says in First

Corinthians 118 in the Amplified Bible, the message of the cross

is foolishness. It is absurd and illogical to

those who are perishing and spiritually dead because they

reject it, but to us who are being saved by God's grace, it

is the manifestation of the power of God.

To all the disciples the cross was a shame and defeat, except

the very victory of God was walking with them.

Jesus says how foolish you are and how slow to believe all that

the prophets have spoken. He says did not the Messiah have

to suffer these things and enter into his glory?

Verse 27 beginning with Moses and all of the prophets, the

whole sweep of redemptive history.

He explained to them what was said in all the scriptures

concerning Himself. There are several of us in this

room who have paid a lot of money to be theologically

educated and think about this. These two disciples received the

seminary education of a lifetime. 7 miles walking with

not only the author and Perfector, but the subject of

Scripture, the Lord Jesus himself.

If you were walking with him, what would you be asking?

And this brings me to my last point.

Burning bushes and burning hearts.

When God appeared in the Old Testament to Moses, he appeared

in a burning Bush. This is often how the Old

Testament Saints would experience God.

They would see him often in the miraculous, although sometimes

the prophet Isaiah says he also whispers to us, but at least in

the miraculous for sure. In Exodus 3, Moses was tending

the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of

Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness,

and he came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

There the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of

fire from within a burning Bush. Moses saw that though the Bush

was on fire, it did not burn up. And he thought, I will go over

and see this strange sight, why the Bush does not burn up.

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to

him from within the Bush. Moses.

Moses and Moses said, Here I am, do not come any closer.

God said take off your sandals, for the place where you're

standing is holy ground. Then he said, I am the God of

your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of

Jacob. And at this Moses hid his face

because he was afraid to look at God.

This was often the experience. And yet the book of Hebrews

tells us in the past days God spoke to the prophets and our

ancestors, but in these last days he has spoken to us through

his Son. If you have seen the Son, you've

seen the Father. In fact, if you know this lesson

out of John 14, Philip asked Jesus, if you just show us the

Father, we believe in Jesus, says Philip, if you've seen me,

you have seen the Father. These disciples walked with

Jesus, and in hearing this most amazing course of all time, they

were encountering not a burning Bush, but a burning heart.

They still even couldn't recognize him until he opened

the scriptures and explained to them why we don't know fully.

Jesus would keep himself from them.

That's another day, another sermon.

But as they were walking and talking, they were fascinated by

Him, and as He explained the scriptures, they saw Him.

Then they asked Him to stay. He broke bread with them, and

their eyes of their heart were open to Him.

They didn't realize how deeply they needed to be redeemed.

Their understanding of the Messiah would be one who would

come and solve their circumstances.

Isn't that often what we want of God?

Just come fix my problems, fix whatever circumstances and

trials are coming my way. Just fix my problems.

And we can often miss that. The biggest problem is right

here, and that's primarily what Jesus has come to fix.

The Messiah was going to throw off all oppression and save them

in this worldly realm, and Jesus came to save them eternally.

This is why his death was so catastrophic and why the

disciples were so downcast. If you if you've ever put your

eggs in one basket or bet the farm on something and it doesn't

come true, you're devastated. I had breakfast with a good

friend about a month ago who had started a business and the

business took off. And by all counts, he's a multi

millionaire. And then a couple of troubling

circumstances came the way of the economy and he's about to

file for bankruptcy. And he said this to me over

breakfast and I couldn't even believe my ears.

He said I've never been closer to God.

Interesting. It is easy to see as a God at to

see God as an answer to our problems and miss that what he

is ultimately and eternally interested in is our hearts.

We want a burning Bush, but what Jesus offers is a burning heart.

The reason Luke gives us this appearance is it can even happen

to us today. A burning heart.

And how does our our experience of Jesus happened today?

He gives us the gift of this story through Luke to remind us

that our experience of God is primarily located in the

Scriptures. His testimony to us.

He even says in another place, blessed are those who have not

seen me, but yet believe these disciples.

Now we're beginning to understand something.

They understood that God was opening his full revelation to

them in the Scriptures and ultimately in the breaking of

bread. Most people want God to answer

our dilemmas by anchoring ourselves in a story like the

flood. I read about the story of the

flood and then I immediately start to think, what are the

floods of my life? If the Lord would just take away

the floods? Or I read about David and David

took on a giant. What's the giant opposition in

my life if I could just get that solved?

When all along what Jesus wants us to know is his desire to walk

with us. What has God promised you?

What promises has he made to you in this life?

Has he promised you your life will go well if you just do the

right thing and live the right way?

Sadly and unfortunately, he has not.

He has promised you something greater, something more lasting

and something that you can build your life on.

He has promised you this. I am with you no matter what

happens, even to the end of the age.

Jesus explained that the Bible is about Him.

He then sits down with them at a table and has a meal, the

breaking of bread, and their hearts are ignited, burning

hearts, and they finally see Him.

And this, brothers and sisters, is why we come back week after

week, Sunday after Sunday, to hear the Word opened, to be

reminded of God's promises, to see the pardon that he offers us

in the cross, and to break bread and have the eyes of our hearts

burning. The Holy Eucharist is made for

us. It's given for us.

It's presented for us so that our hearts will be on fire.

The liturgy that we say and recite prepares us for what's

coming, just as Jesus prepared the disciples with patient

instruction. 7 miles of a seminary education.

The early church sees this story in On the Road to Emmaus and

they see it as confirmation of the Eucharistic meal and the

opportunity to graciously and with Thanksgiving rejoice that

God is with us in His Word and in the sacrament.

This is how the Lord stays with us.

We don't need His physical presence.

We have His promises and the witness of Scripture.

He rooted His disciples and hopefully us as well today in

love and service and He rooted them in the breaking of the

bread and that this awareness He is with them always.

Everyone wants an experience of Jesus, but I want, I want to

submit to you that in the grace of the breaking of bread we find

strength. It is why the pastor who

celebrates communion holds up the bread and the wine and says

these are the gifts of God for the people of God.

Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on

him in your hearts by faith. Jesus said, I am the bread of

life. Whoever comes to me shall not

hunger. Whoever believes in me shall

never thirst. I am the bread of life.

Your Father's ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.

This, however, is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that

one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came

down from heaven, and if anyone eats of this bread, he will live

forever. And the bread that I give, I

give for the life of the world, and it is my flesh.

Jesus broke the bread. Jesus is the bread.

Jesus was with us in the breaking of bread, and Jesus

provides the bread. Brothers and sisters, in the

name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.