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Gathering, Word & Breaking Bread
By Administrator | April 6, 2008
A sermon based on Luke 24:13-35.
April 6, 2008 at Palm Bay, FL
By Rev. Scott Elliott
I have no sense of direction. None. This was not such a bad thing in Oregon where mountains and hills give those of us with no sense of direction a sense of where we are. I could always tell I was going north when the mountains were on my right and south when they were on the left.
Here in Florida my lack of a sense of direction is a problem. I am not sure if you have noticed it or not, but Florida is flat. I mean really, really flat. I am not sure, but I think sometimes from the causeway it’s so flat that I can see Tampa.
The Florida flatness means I have nothing to quickly judge direction with, so I spent a goodly portion of time when I first got here getting, well . . . lost.
Interestingly enough I learned that when I came to a place to turn invariably my intuition on which way to go was usually wrong. So for awhile I began to choose the way I did not think was right, and as weird as that was, it worked.
But it was taxing on my mind, not to mention my ego, to choose what I sensed was wrong in order to do what was right. If you think that it was mind bending to just hear that said aloud think how hard it was on my brain!
Now hear me loud and clear it’s not Florida’s fault that I have no sense of direction.
In fact, one time in Oregon when we first bought our property I was out in the woods trying to locate survey markers. I started at one and headed towards the other marching through dense old growth. After awhile I eventually came upon a marker, at first I was relieved, then I realized it was the same marker I had started at. I had gone in a circle.
What is really embarrassing is that a few weeks later with kids in tow I did the same thing again.
On the spiritual side of things I had in some ways an uncannily similar wandering and discovery, even choosing to go against my sense of direction. I started out as a Christian and then left that marker in my life to wander some twenty years on the path of life without Christianity, in fact my intuition was to wander as far from it as I could.
I always felt connected to God and creation before and after I wandered, but not the God of anger and vengeance and exclusion that I felt I had left behind at those first churches. I had become an atheist to that God of anger and hate.
The God I communed with in the wilderness was the God of Love.
I had no other name for that God as I wandered.
One day to my great surprise – and against my sense of where I thought I should turn, I visited a church. Ironically, I soon found myself back at Christianity. I had come full circle. My wandering ended.
In that church I learned to sit with the scriptures and listen for God’s call from the nooks and crannies of stories.
I learned that gathering with two or more magnified the experience of my– of our– God of Love.
I learned to break bread at a mindful meal known as Communion where God can be experienced in the basics of life – food and drink and community gathered in Love, in the name of God.
I learned that the God of Love who walked with me for twenty years in the wilderness could be called Christ, and my eyes were opened and I recognized Jesus for what he was; the best Way to walk with God for me. He became in my eyes truly Jesus-the-Christ.
We all have to go through a wandering in some sense. For some it takes a short time, for others (like me) decades, for still others it can be a life time.
Walking with God is important. We are often reminded in this place that Micah 6 tells us that what God requires of us is “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with [our] God.”
But it helps along the Way to know more about God. And it helps to know how to do justice and love kindness and how to walk humbly with that glorious God of Love. Such knowledge enables us to sense and experience God who is always there walking with us.
Today’s scripture reading is about two of Jesus’s followers walking on the road to Emmaus. We are told elsewhere in scripture that where two or more are gathered in Jesus’s name he is there. (Matt 18:20). And sure enough these two apostles were gathered walking together – on Sunday– focused on Jesus and the fascinating fact that his tomb had been discovered empty by Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary mother of James and other women; and that those women were told by angels that Jesus had risen.
Some read and hear today’s story as history recorded, that is a factual account of an event that occurred. Others read and hear it as metaphor. The point of the story is whether it is history or metaphor, the point is what you walk away from it with. What does it teach? Or what can it teach?
Many have heard this story as not just about Jesus’s resurrection and appearance after death, but as a story that teaches us how to be church.
The followers of Jesus after his death symbolize– or instruct by example– how to be church and consciously experience Christ in our presence.
The story teaches us what it takes as church and members of a church community on our walk with God to have our eyes opened, our disbelief dispelled, to recognized Jesus Christ as The Way for us as church and as individuals to more fully experience God.
We can walk humbly with God and do justice and love kindness on our own as I tried to do for twenty years, but this story suggests that it takes more to fully experience God and to do as much walking and justice and loving of kindness that we can. I have found that to be true.
For Christians it takes (as Cleopas and the unnamed disciple learn) Christ doing some things with us and for us along The Way.
Before those walking with Christ discover who he is in the story we are told “beginning with Moses and the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”
Can you hear how the United Church of Christ motto “God is still speaking” is an echo of this verse? Along the Way we must allow Christ to interpret scripture for us and listen to what Christ is speaking to us, how Christ is interpreting for us. How God is still speaking to us today.
God can be experienced and mediated through Scripture, but it certainly needs interpreting. We have to take into account not only the context in which the particular text was written, but Christ’s overarching teachings that God is love and that we are to love our neighbors and ourselves and God.
And traditions of the Body of Christ (the Church) aid in our interpretations as well.
So does how Christ speaks to us today through our own reason and experiences as we walk along the road of life with Christ.
Since we are called by Jesus to love and to see God as love; Scripture, tradition and our own experiences must be interpreted in ways that reflect Christ’s call to know God is love, and teachings to love God, ourselves and others. We do just that, here, each Sunday.
Hearing today’s scripture reading in this way we can understand that we are on our own walk with the risen Jesus to our own Emmaus with Christ guiding us through Moses and the prophets and all the rest of scripture. Simply put, it is through the risen Christ that Christians must comprehend scripture.
But Cleopas and the other disciples do not discover they are with Christ through his interpretations of scripture alone. They have to also affirmatively show Christ hospitality, invite him in. Remember? They stop and Jesus is about to leave them until “they urged him strongly, saying ’Stay with us’. . .”
All who are Christian must do this. We have to invite Christ not only on the walk with us, but to stop and stay with us in our homes, in our lives, in our community. So that our lives are Christ’s lives. So that our community home is Christ’s house– Christ’s church.
And it is important to note that Cleopas is not alone when he discovers who Jesus is. He is with another gathered on Sunday, two or more in Jesus’s name, as church. We certainly do this too. There is no church if there is but one person. People must be gathered to make church, church.
And what is the act that finally brings those gathered to recognize Jesus? Sharing bread at the Lord’s Table together. The experience of taking bread, blessing it, breaking it and giving it mediates the Scared. We, of course, also do this at Riviera United Church of Christ by reenacting Jesus’s table practices. A Sacrament Jesus taught us.
Unlike the Roman table practices that dictated who could come and break bread and drink wine, Jesus’s table “is a table without controls, a table without boundaries. It represents a community in which all are welcomed, into which all may come.”
At Jesus’s table the Reign of God comes into being – if only for a few minutes– because at that table in this church all are equally loved and entitled to spiritual sustenance and a place at the table. Justice and kindness, as well as nourishment are served.
It has always been, and always will be, that at God’s table in the here and now “[n]o one is exempted. Everyone is invited. Women as well as men, prostitutes as well as Pharisees.”
The experience of Jesus’ table is so powerful that to Jesus’ followers in today’s story that first Easter afternoon they did not just remember Jesus, they recognized and experienced Christ in the room with them. Ever since, Christians have gathered together and reenacted Jesus’s open table.
We will be celebrating those table practices here again today, gathered in Jesus’s name where at Jesus’s table unmediated access to God, community and spiritual foodstuff is available to anyone.
Communion can work on a number of levels. The images of the bread, body, cup, wine and blood can serve as mindful metaphors. The Bread of Life. The Body of God. The Cup of Blessing. The Spirit of God. The Life-blood of Creation.
The Lord’s Supper can also be understood as symbolic of the sacrifice Jesus made for us by laying his life down in such a powerful way that he lives on even today, his life of love and broken body and spilt blood long vindicated by God.
At Riviera United Church of Christ we insist that Communion is a reenactment and presentation of God’s open table where anyone – anyone– is welcomed and valued just as they are.
Not all churches celebrate Communion as God’s open table. Some close it off, but that is not the table we share and know and love as a Sacrament that mediates experiences of God’s presence.
I found an open table at the United Church of Christ I wandered into in Oregon. And Christ was there interpreting scripture, too, in a house that was open and hospitable, with two or more gathered in Christ’s name. But it took me more than a day in that place to have my eyes opened and recognize Jesus as the way for me. I think I went about two years before I felt comfortable enough to take Communion and a while longer before I felt I could call myself Christian and be baptized into the family of Christ.
As you have probably gathered by my presence up here, my return to Christianity firmly “took” the second time around, it took a long while, but it “took,” by God. And because of it I have had the greatest mid-life “crisis” ever known. I left practicing law and became a pastor in this beautiful place, in this love-filled church! It’s been an amazing blessing!
Today’s scripture reading reminds me that church would not have took for me, nor for any of us who call ourselves Christian if we did not have our own road-to-Emmaus-experiences with Christ.
We all have walked with Christ.
We all have had scripture interpreted in light of Jesus’s resurrection by Christ’s very presence with us.
We all have gathered two or more in Christ’s name in a hospitable place that invites not just us, but also Christ into a welcoming space.
We all have reenacted, remembered and celebrated Communion as God’s open table.
And we do all these things still.
When Cleopas and the other disciple experienced these things, they recognized and experienced Christ in their very presence– and they had Church.
Today here in this place if you have not already done so you may find that you have reached your own Emmaus. Break bread with us.
This “church is composed of those who have been led beyond disbelief to faith by the gracious revelation of God” 2 through the presence of Christ on the walk, resurrection inspired interpretation of scripture and in the breaking of bread at God’s table.
Won’t you join us?
All are welcomed and valued here as an equal child of God!
Amen.
Endnotes
1.Texts for Preaching, CD ROM, p. 280. CD ROM, p. 280. 2.Crossan, John Dominic, The Birth of Christianity, San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, (1998), 86.
3. Fiorenza, Elisabeth, In Memory of Her, New York: Crossroad Publishing Co. (1983),121.
4. Texts for Preaching, at 281
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