Waybread: Frome Elijah to Emmaus
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In T.S. Eliot's famous poem, The Wasteland, many of you may remember the first line:
"April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain."
Certainly for the Palestinians right now, April is the cruelest month, and it is hard to keep from devoting this sermon entirely to a Christian response to those events. Yet, for my own sense of what my calling is here, to be your pastor first, I preach the texts that I pray open the experience of God walking beside us-not just as a memory, but as a presence we intuit, as the One who illuminates our minds and ignites our hearts. The Risen Christ is a mysterious figure who meets two disciples (not apostles) on the way to Emmaus, a town that may have actually been about 20 miles out of Jerusalem, and not 7. We don't know if they made it, anyway. Because as they walked, the stranger led them through the Old Testament, helping them understand how the Messiah could be the man of sorrows, whom we esteemed not. When he agrees to join them for the meal, they recognize the stranger when he breaks the bread, and he instantly disappears from their sight. Then, it is as if they had dined on electricity, they got up with a shock bigger than the shock of grief, and booked back to the apostles in Jerusalem with the news of this exciting Christ-sighting. Thus this is the perfect communion meditation message. This morning I want to focus on the two parts of the story, the journey part and the breaking bread part. I will hark back to the Elijah story in my third section.
To speak first to the journey, later in the poem, The Wasteland, are the words that Bani put into one of the Lenten Progress series: "Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded..."
In the notes to the poem, Eliot says that the figure was suggested by a report from one of the Antarctic expeditions, possibly one of Shackleton's (TV movie with Kenneth Branagh tonight):
"it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted."
We are naturally fearful when we go out into new territories and new experiences and we may feel haunted by presences, shadows. As believers in God, we have come to assume that there is more to reality than we can fully know. Sometimes I think of our faith as the good shadow, a kind of golden halo or aura around things. Thus I urge you to be secretly delighted when things don't add up. I think the Holy Spirit wants us to have countless, innumerable moments of doubling, of déjà vu, of consciousness that layers people with memory and hope.
Carter Via and I were running on Monday morning and we were discussing our sermons and perhaps Jesus was running along side us. Carter had preached on this text Easter morning. For Carter, there were three wonderful lessons in the text. His first thought was hat Jesus can appear to us in almost random forms. Remembering what Jesus says in Matthew 25, where in the parables of the Judgement Day, Jesus commends some people for having helped him when he was poor, hungry, naked, homeless, they ask Jesus: when did we help you? And Jesus says, whenever you did it for the "least of these," you did it for me. So this sense of the presence of God in people is extended by the Risen Lord into all the world. Who is the Jesus you have helped lately?
Carter also focused on the language of the text: the disciples refer to Jesus in the past tense when they are talking with the stranger. "Jesus of Nazareth who was a prophet mighty in word and deed...we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel..." The point here was that memory alone won't save you. We don't live in the past. Faith is linked to hope as well as love, and these three produce imagination.
Carter's third point was that we encounter Jesus in the community, in the act of communion. We need to share our faith because our faith is made in sharing.
Now I would differ with Carter a little bit on how this Jesus works with us. We recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, Luke's phrase for communion, but we are prepared for it through God's leading in scripture. The Bible both sheds light on Jesus, and he sheds light on the Old Testament. "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?" Those of you raised Methodists may remember John Wesley's Aldersgate experience of his heart being strangely warmed. Here their hearts were actually burning from this Stranger. Maybe we could imagine that scripture is the Geiger Counter alerting us to God's presence. Raymond Brown, the great scripture scholar of Union Seminary, noted that the Gospel's Jewish readers would have themselves found it hard to link the crucified criminal with the glorious king in some parts of the Old Testament, while the pagan readers would have remembered mythological stories of gods walking among people in disguise.
But now we come to the table and look at this food, which is not just a sign or metaphor, but a symbol of God's presence. A symbol participates in the reality it points to. Thus this is not random, even though we can make comparisons. The comparison suggested in the scripture about Elijah is with the food the angels bring him when he has fled into the wilderness. Elijah is a great prophet, but it is precisely the measure of his greatness that he is all alone, on the run in the wilderness and there this magical bread sustains him for 40 days. This is the picture on the board from Russia-he is hiding out in a cave and God speaks to him with the still small voice. You know that voice friends, that voice of conscience, faithful and true, that is more powerful than all the media and propaganda of the world.
The phrase waybread comes from the Lord of the Rings, and time does not permit a full exposition-perhaps this December, when the next film comes out. But it refers to a special bread given to the Hobbits by the elves, and its like a power bar, full of energy that lasts a long time. The strange thing is that when the Hobbits have only this waybread left, it provides more energy the more it is depended on. (There is also a mystical drink, Entwash, a kind of water from the treemen that causes things to grow... but that's another story).
As we move toward communion now, I ask you to think of the mysterious strangers that you have met but not spoken with. As you think back, will the Holy Spirit move you from memory into dialogue? Will those figures ask us, where are you going? Are you fleeing the tragedy in Jerusalem? Have you abandoned the hopes you once had? Do you still have the instinct for discipleship that pulls out an empty chair for the Risen Lord who is greater than Elijah, but who was also a prophet run to the ground? Do you have in fact that unquenchable thirst for righteousness, and that hunger for the bread of heaven? I hope you recognize both Jesus and your true disciple selves around this table. Amen.
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