INCARNATING THE BIBLE

Luke 24:28-35

Presenting Engagement: the emerging church.
I recently read a description of the Bible that said this: “If you look at a window, you see fly specks, dust, the crack where Junior’s Frisbee hit it. If you look through a window, you see the world beyond.[i]

Now, in one way, that description talks about the window and in another way it talks about the person who uses the window. I found that just after reading a discussion of the religious movement called the Emerging Church and together these two readings made me consider how we think about practicing Christianity, how we make God real in our lives.

In the language of the Bible, they made me think about how we incarnate the word of God.

This Emerging Church movement is a big subject of discussion these days. Some like it and some can’t stand it. This Emerging Church movement defies definition, although many people do try to define it.

It’s not a church or a denomination. It isn’t only a non-tradtional, inter-active, media oriented worship practice. It isn’t only an emotions and senses based religious exercise that goes beyond the mind and appeals to the heart. It isn’t only about making Christ’s church relevent in popular culture. It isn’t only a way of getting more teenagers and young adults excited about attending church or enticing people into worship who normally think of church as a boring, Sunday morning chore that encroaches on their scarce and precious free time.

The emerging church is holistic. That means, it is a bubbling stew pot filled with many different elements; things that pertain to the era that we live in right now rather than the era that we used to live in just a few years ago.

In the modern era that has now ended, life was governed by reason and predictibility. In this postmodern era, people see that rational predictibility as a false premise. The world isn’t rational; it’s chaotic and random. In a rational world, people don’t deliberately fly airplanes into large office buildings and kill thousands of innocent folks. In a rational world, people don’t get terminal illnesses even though they take care of their bodies or have devastating car accidents even though they drive safely.

Oh no. Unreasonably random and chaotic events occur in our lives.

To a postmodernist, what counts in life is what is authentic and what is genuine even if it’s not rational. The 17th century scientist Isaac Newton has been replaced with the 20th century artist Andy Warhol or maybe even somebody more current than Warhol that I’m just not hip enough to know about.

This is really an important subject, this Emerging Church, because it challenges the traditional paradigm of how we do church. That is: it challenges the customary practices of our religious experience and our traditional religious point of view. It challenges how we incarnate the word of God. And that’s probably a good thing. After all, we may be nicknamed the “frozen chosen,” but one of our basic, organizing principles as Presbyterians is the credo: reformed and always being reformed.

But it seems to me that the really important question about reforming religious customs has nothing to do with the style of the worship service. The really important question is: what do we think about ourselves in terms of God when we worship God? What do we think about ourselves in terms of God?

Because what really matters, what is truly essential, is our relationship with that window over there that we look through in order to see the world.

You see, it doesn’t essentially matter what songs we sing; that is a matter of taste. When we pray it doesn’t matter whether we kneel, bow, or look upward with our hands raised toward the heavens. It doesn’t really matter whether we sit in oak pews or cross legged in a circle on the floor; that is a matter of preference and arthritis. It doesn’t matter if we have no candles or if we have a thousand pots of incense burning with the aroma of peach-mango-grapefruit-chutney salsa. All of that is a matter of style and some styles appeal to some folks and not to other folks.

But the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the window that we look through. I’ll say it again: the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the window that we look through.

And that revelation is not a matter of style or preference because the Triune God whom we worship is the eternal other- the eternal “not-us”, the eternally faithful, the constant moral center of the universe whose mysteries we try to understand and make happen in our lives every time we use the window to see the world.

And the most important thing we do to build our relationship with that window, to build our relationship with the mystery of the revelation in Christ, the most important exercise we do in church is celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Biblical Context: what is going on in the text?
We read this morning about the revelation of God in Jesus Christ in a tavern in Emmaus. We read how two Christ followers, one anonymous and one named Cleopas, recognized Jesus as he blessed and broke bread. It wasn’t a matter of chance that their moment of revelation came in that re-creation of the last supper. It wasn’t just coincidence that their eyes were opened with the act of receiving the Bread of Life. It was Easter, the day of Jesus’ ressurection and according to Luke Jesus’ was revealing himself to lots of people.

What’s really interesting here is that this moment came after a hot and dusty seven mile hike from Jerusalem to this village of Emmaus. It happened right smack in the middle of several disturbing, random, and chaotic days in the lives of Jesus’ followers. I’ve been to Jerusalem in late march and I can tell you that it is truly hot and dusty even at the time of Easter. The walk would have been slow and they would have been thirsty but so much had happened in the previous few days that these two men had a lot to talk about.

During that hike they were joined by a stranger. It was Jesus and they did not know him. But they walked together all the way and talked about the meaning of the crucifixion and the resurrection as they walked. Three people walking along a dry road talking about religion in their random and chaotic experience.

And of course, after they recognized Jesus, hindsight set in like quick drying cement. “Oh, I had a feeling all along that man was not just another traveller. He knew something. He, he was somebody holy and I felt it in my heart. It wasn’t rational but my senses picked up on something and I just couldn’t put my finger on it.”

They were so excited about their experience that they walked all the way back down that dusty road in the twilight just to tell the eleven disciples all about it.

Explication of Text: What’s it all mean?
Well, this was no dream. It was an authentic, genuine experience for Cleopus and his companion recorded by Luke in his gospel. And as Luke writes in the preface of his work, that gospel was intended to be an orderly account of events set down after a thorough investigation. Luke was a doctor after all, so I’m sure his method of investigation was rational and scientific.

How Presbyterian.

But there are things Luke does not record. Things that would be recorded if they were significant or if they were relevent to an accurate statement of events. What doctor does not document everything, every symptom and every fact, every important thing that has to do with a medical investigation?

So the things Luke leaves out must not matter in terms of what the story is all about.

The name of Cleopus’ friend did not matter. The name of the owner of the tavern where they stopped did not matter. The kind of bread did not matter. How the bread tasted or how it had been baked did not matter. It’s shape did not matter. The method of breaking the bread did not matter. It did not matter whether they were all standing up, lying down, or doing handstands. Those things did not matter.

What mattered was the revelation that came through the breaking of bread. What mattered was the relationship that ocurred when the eyes of those two were opened and they began to see the world through an entirely new windowpane.

Listener Context: How does this relate to my life?
There are many things about popular religious movements that are simply a matter of style. That’s just fine even though these styles are very often not my preference. But my preference doesn’t matter.

There are many things about these new, postmodern movements that I completely agree with. I agree that for too long the traditional church and especially the evangelical church has emphasized the next world. That is: focussed on getting people into heaven and nurturing the internal spirit of the faithful while ignoring Christ’s mission to the poor, the dispirited, to the socially and economically exiled. Ignoring the Kingdom of God in this world.

I agree with the Emerging Church’s emphasis on community. Worshipping God is not an exercise meant to build one person’s individual relationship with God without involving other people. But then the idea that Christianity is a community endeavor is certainly not new. The Austrian- Jewish theologian Martin Buber wrote in 1923 that we can only recognize God through others.[ii] And the German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was matryred for his resistance to Adolph Hitler, wrote in 1938: “Christianity means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ.”[iii]

But what about this sacrament of the Lord’s Supper? What about this breaking of bread and drinking of the cup? What about this partaking of the new covenant in Christ Jesus?

Is this fellowship with Christ through the Holy Spirit something that we can agree or disagree about doing?

Is it a component of worship that is no more or less important than any other component?

Is it something that we can do away with if we think it is a boring chore or a rigid, humdrum ritual that is irrelevant in the chaotic world where we live our lives?

Is it something that we can de-emphasize if it doesn’t seem authentic or if it seems too deeply theological?

Conclusion: What’s the Point?
In our society, we tend to make up our own rules. We have short attention spans and want to be entertained. We often see the world as we something we can mold and shape for ourselves, adding or subtracting bits of philosophy according to according to what we like and don’t like. We call it freedom.

But I think that freedom has made us weary as a people. It’s made us weary in spirit.

I think it’s made us feel that life offers nothing that we can count on.
That freedom has split many of us apart. It has added to the random chaos that frustrates us and challenges our efforts to be fathers and mothers, to be children, to be communities, to be congregations, and to live meaningful lives.

Sometimes, some folks just give up and accept what ever is comforting no matter how isolating or unhealthy or misleading that temporary comfort might be. Back in the 1960’s, the popular phrase from the Woodstock generation was: “tune out and turn on.”

But Jesus calls all those who are weary and heavy laden. That is part of our salvation.

You see, God is the eternal other- the eternal “not-us” and the revelation of God is something that exists outside of us. It confounds all our attempts to change the parts we don’t like. It is patient when we are easily distracted or turn toward immediate gratification.

This revelation of God in Christ is a gift of something permanent in our lives that saves us from spiritual weariness.

The revelation of God in Christ is something that brings us together.

Despite the sins of the church as a human organization over the centuries, the revelation of God in Christ is something that human beings cannot manipulate.

We can look through the window but, despite Junior’s Frisbee cracks, we cannot change the characteristics of the window no matter hard we try. We can incarnate the word of God in our lives, make it real in our lives but we can never change the word of God with our lives.

Thank God!

Never forget that you were called to faith through your baptism. And you are called to the Lord’s table even now, today. Come joyfully to this table and recognize Jesus in the breaking of bread right now, right here on this hot and dusty road through your life.
AMEN.

[i] Frederich Buechner. Listening to Your Life. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), p 159.
[ii] This is the concept commonly known by the English title of Buber’s work: I And Thou.
[iii] Dietrich Bonhoeffer. J. Doberstein, transl. Life Together. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1954), p 21.