Text: Luke 24:13-35   
Speaker: Joel Miller

The hardest part of preaching on the Emmaus Road story isn’t finding something to say, but choosing what not to say.  The passage takes place on a single road between Jerusalem and the village of Emmaus, but it feels more like a hundred different story lines, all converging on this one dense path.  Which ones to follow and which to leave unexplored for another time? 

This is exactly as the gospel writer intends it.  This story occurs in the final chapter of Luke and serves as a summary of Luke’s message.  It’s his way of bringing his story to a climax, weaving together themes he’s been developing from the beginning.  It’s the gospel in miniature.  We are on a journey, together, confused and disoriented.  Jesus comes and walks alongside us, only we don’t recognize him for who he is.  The scriptures are opened and illuminated.  Hospitality is extended around a meal.  Bread is blessed, broken, and given, such that everyone has enough.  We, the travelers, have our eyes opened to Christ, are transformed, and go and share it with others. 

There it is, the gospel in one narrative sweep. 

Emmaus Road is a resurrection story.  It takes place on the same day the women visit the tomb and find it empty.  Easter Sunday.  “Now on that same day,” the story begins.  These two travelers who had been followers of Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to a town called Emmaus.  We’re told it’s about a seven mile trip.  Some of you commuted about that far to church this morning.  So if you want to have a biblical experience today, you can try walking home.  Pretty nice day for it.

Walking away from Jerusalem means they are walking away from the center of the universe, at least in Luke’s world.  Away from Jesus’ destination after his long journey.  Away from the other disciples, still camped out in the city.  Away from the women who came and told them the tomb was empty. 

­We might think of Jesus’ resurrection simply as the coming back to life of a man who was killed.  But what’s happening on the Road to Emmaus is more layered and interesting than that.  The story is just as much an experience of the absence of Jesus as it is the presence of Jesus.  Jesus is absent both at the beginning of the journey, and at the end of story, after that delightful and somewhat baffling detail about him vanishing from their sight as soon as they recognized him when he broke and shared the bread.  It’s only after he’s gone – again –  that the disciples realize their hearts had been burning all along.  The story is framed with this absence.  What these travelers finally comprehend, and what transforms them, is how to live with that absence in such a way that is overflowing with presence.

Let’s follow this storyline and see where it takes us.        

When these two are joined by this third person, Luke tells us something the pair does not yet recognize.  This is Jesus.  We know it, but they don’t.  And there’s this haunting line that these two disciples say to their unknown travel companion after he asks them what they had been talking about.  They begin by describing Jesus of Nazareth as a powerful prophet, before lamenting how he was handed over by the religious leaders to be killed.  Then they say, “but we had hoped…that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  We had hoped.  Because of all that Jesus had said and done, we had dared ourselves to hope. 

This tracks.  Jesus opened people up to a new way of seeing and being.  They had discovered longings within themselves they perhaps didn’t even know were there, glimpses of a beloved community they perhaps didn’t realize was even possible.  Hoping for the redemption of Israel was not an unusual hope for Jews of the day, but to see even fragments of it with one’s eyes, to participate in some small way, to actually go there in one’s beating and burning heart, was to watch this whole new space open up.  A strong, hopeful, rich, growing presence.  Followed by an aching absence.  “We had hoped.”      

This relationship between presence and absence is something I learned more about, unwillingly, through the stillbirth of our daughter Belle.  At the beginning of 2009, in our pre-Columbus days, Abbie and I found out we were expecting a third child.  This was not expected.  But the home pregnancy test came up positive each time.  One of the things that made this tricky was that our little two bedroom house was barely big enough for the four of us.  We would need more space.  And so we began looking for a bigger house.  We also began making room in our hearts, in our thoughts, in our lives for this new family member.  Abbie had the always-miraculous added task of making space in her body. 

It just so happened that a house three doors down had been newly rehabbed and was up for sale.  Sidenote: This was back when it was much easier to buy than sell a house, if you remember those mythical, long ago days.  So we bought it and made what will almost certainly be the easiest move of our life.  No moving truck, hardly any boxes.  A crew from the Cincinnati church showed up and literally took the clothes hanging in the closets of one house, and walked over and hung them up in the closets of the other house.  We moved out and moved in at the same time.

We were all moved less than three months into the pregnancy, but there were starting to be signs that all was not well with the pregnancy.  Although the baby was developing normally, Abbie went into early labor at 22 weeks.  Belle Ruthann Miller was stillborn May 21, 2009.  Having witnessed two live births, with squirming occasionally crying babies, the stillness and the silence of this birth was deafening.  I hadn’t realized how much space we had created in our lives for this child until that space was filled not with a live presence, but with an absence.  One of the connections we made with her name, Belle, was a line from Annie Dillard.  In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she writes: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted up and struck.”  This child had struck our lives, and was resonating in that empty space that enables the bell to hold its sound.

One of the important pieces for me in working through the grief was realizing this space was not going to go away.  It was going to live there, and remain open.  This was the way it had to be.  It was present as an absence, and that absence carried a quality and a power that wouldn’t have been a part of our life had Belle never been conceived.  If we hadn’t been anticipating her existence, the space wouldn’t have opened up, in our hearts, and in our physical house.  She was present to us, but present as an absence.  We had hoped…

And her presence in that absence has been a very alive space.  It’s a space that has deeply affected how I relate to the world.  Initially it created more capacity for holding other’s suffering.  Over the years, almost 16, I think the grief has evolved into a space of hospitality, like an extra room always ready to be filled.  I want to keep that heart-expanded space open.  Whoever enters that space is temporarily occupying the place Belle created.    

This may or may not match your own experience of grief and loss.  But I think it’s the closest thing I’ve experienced to what Luke might be getting at in this Emmaus Road story.  What it seems to be saying is that the life and power of Jesus does indeed create this massive space in the world that was not there before.  Jesus of Nazareth opened up and occupied a place where the deepest hopes and most pure aspirations of humanity dwell.  He spoke of himself as the Son of Humanity, the Human Being, the one who teaches us how to be truly human, truly ourselves.  Our forgiving, merciful, compassionate, unified-with-God self that has been so covered over with all of the other things we have made ourselves out to be.  Jesus taught us to discover and welcome that space because he lived within that space with us and for us. 

And then he was gone – leaving that wide open, empty space that would not be there had it not been for his life.  He is present to us as an absence.  And these two disciples on the road to Emmaus feel that absence in the depth of their being.  “But we had hoped…” 

At the beginning of their journey, that absence looks like grief and disorientation.  Jesus has died.  The grief is heavy.  That expansive space, once filled with hope, feels unbearably empty. 

At the end of their journey, that absence looks like the extension of hospitality.  The stranger says he will continue his journey without them, but they insist, and invite him in, making space at their table.  When he breaks the bread, blesses it, and gives it to them, they have their eyes opened.  Christ who opened that space where grief matures into hospitality, is the stranger who comes along and fills it again.  And again.  And again.

The place of Jesus, the space of the Christ, is not a dead absence, but utterly and eternally alive, pulsing with life.  That’s the place out of which God redeems the world.  Luke will end his gospel by saying that Jesus was taken up into heaven in front of their eyes, which is to say, among other things, that the flesh and blood person of Jesus is no longer with us.  That specific form that God took no longer walks this earth.  But we live as resurrection people.  The believers, the people, the church, has this space of Christ, which gives us a new way of relating to the world.  Because whoever now walks into that space occupies the place of Christ.  Jesus tuned his listeners into this when he said in Matthew 25 that whenever you visit someone in prison, or share your food with the hungry, whatever you do to the least of these you are doing to Christ.  As if Jesus is now morphing into a thousand different forms; whoever comes into that space that he opened up.

This is not particularly easy.  To accept a Christian identity is to carry with you a grief for a hope yet fulfilled, a world not fully redeemed.  It’s to walk around with this hole in your life and to accept that Christ is present to us as an absence of what we most dearly long for.  Christ is present to us as an absence of what we most dearly long for.  Whenever two of us are walking on the road, there is this emptiness beside us, an incompleteness, and then anyone, friend or stranger, can come along and occupy that emptiness and assume the place of Jesus.  “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in the midst of them,” Jesus taught.                                 

Every congregation that is truly alive, and awake to resurrection, lives with this absence, this incompleteness.    This may not be how we like to think of ourselves, but I’m not sure there’s another way to be in this life.  The church isn’t the place that fulfills all our desires and makes us whole.  If you haven’t found that out yet, just stick around a little while longer.  Instead, the church is the place that holds and honors all of our unfulfilled longings, and names that space Christ.  Being a welcoming community means we are constantly aware that we are not yet complete.  We still await redemption.  Whoever walks into that empty space among us is walking into the place of Christ and brings a piece of our redemption with them.

This is the Emmaus Road we are all on.  We are on a journey, together, confused and grieving.  Jesus comes and walks alongside us, only we don’t recognize him for who he is.  The scriptures are opened and illuminated.  Hospitality is extended around a meal.  Bread is blessed, broken, and given, such that everyone has enough.  We, the travelers, have our eyes opened to Christ, are transformed, and go to share this with others.