W hat if you weren’t there Easter morning? What if you weren’t with the women who saw Jesus at the tomb? What if you weren’t a part of the original disciples who broke bread with Jesus in the Upper Room? What if, unlike Doubting Thomas, you never had the opportunity to see Jesus’ wounds or to place your hand at Jesus’ side? How would the living Christ be made known to you? These were the questions that the early Church asked, just as we continue to ask them today. So Luke told this story about the disciples along the road.

       I don’t know much about Emmaus, really, except what Luke tells us: It was a small village about seven miles from Jerusalem. But I can imagine why the disciples were going there. The action was over in Jerusalem—or so they thought. My guess: they were going home. Back to life as normal. Business as usual. The place you go when you are sick and tired and there is no place else you can go. We all have an Emmaus in our lives. It may not be a village, or a particular place, but it’s where you go or something you do when things just aren’t going the way they are supposed to. The Presbyterian writer Frederick Buechner puts it this way:

       Emmaus is the place we go in order to escape — a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that men [and women] have had — ideas about love and freedom and justice — have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends.

       What an affront, then, is this stranger, who meets them on the road. The disciples, presumably good Jews, should have been prepared to confront God in the person of a stranger. After all, the Hebrew Scriptures are strewn with stories of divine messengers disguised as one unknown. Time and again in the Biblical narrative, it is the stranger who is the bearer of good news, a messenger of special promise, even the vehicle for divine revelation. In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, Abraham and Sarah are visited by a pair of strangers who announce to Sarah the incredible news that she will bear a son, thus predicting the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. Those same strangers, you may remember—who later turn out to be angels—are treated inhospitably in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, thereby leading to their destruction.

       But Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus don’t recognize the face of Jesus in this stranger, and so are unprepared for his challenging revelations. They think they already understand the world and how it works–but he turns them around. He interprets the Scripture to them, opens up their lives, makes sense of the last few troubling days. And then—the moment of denouement in the story—they invite him to stay for a meal. And in the blessing and breaking of the bread—Jesus’ signature behavior through out the Gospels—they recognize him. Then he vanishes from their sight.

       But the story doesn’t end there. The disciples do not continue on their way to Emmaus. Instead they turn on their heals and rush back to Jerusalem. It is no longer business as usual, life as normal. Because of their encounter on the road, suddenly everything is new. The encounter with this stranger on the road has required them to change directions.

I t does not take a great stretch to understand why this story was so precious to the early Church. It describes their life together: The disciples on the road (the early Christians were called “the people of the Way”), share a journey together, study the Scriptures, share fellowship at the table, and then break and bless and share bread in Christ’s memory. Or better, not in his memory, but to make Christ present with them, for Christ is made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

       One scholar suggests that Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Do this in memory of me,” would be better translated, “Do this so that I may be present with you.” That was the big dilemma for the early Church. How is Christ made known? For the early Church, it was in the disciplines of Scripture and hospitality that Christ was known and experienced. But notice the effect. Their encounter with Christ does not just send them on their way. It sends them in a new direction.

O ne of the things we talked about during Lent was the recovery of ancient spiritual practices or spiritual “disciplines.” The idea of disciplines rubs many of us the wrong way in our do-whatever-feels-good-world. But all of us here in this room share at least one common discipline, and that is worship, and Scripture and hospitality are still at the center. But there is a difference. We often think of worship as a moment of spiritual refueling. A place to be strengthened and fortified. Worship is all those things, and more. But what if we expected the experience of worship to pick us up, yes, but then to send us off in a different direction. What would our worship be like if we expected to leave a changed person? Is worship like that for us now?

       I have a friend in the hospital because her heart is beating irregularly. To get it going in the right way they had to do a procedure they call, somewhat astonishingly, a “conversion.” In a conversion, they stop the heart and then start it up again, in order to get it beating in the right way. That’s something like what happened to the disciples that Easter day. Their hearts stopped, and then started again beating to a new rhythm.

       Perhaps it is hard to imagine worship causing our life to change directions each and every week. But the weekly disciplines of Scripture and hospitality serve to remind us that since Easter morning, every thing is new. We are no longer the same people we once were. We are still the people of the way. We are still on a journey. But whenever we share the stories of our faith together and practice hospitality—especially to strangers—we invite an encounter with the living Christ. And an encounter with the living Christ always changes our direction.

       I’ve been reading a book recently by a young evangelical author named Shane Claiborne. When he was a student at Eastern College outside Philadelphia, he was reading about Mother Theresa, and as part of a school project he called her on the phone to do an interview. She said to him what she said to many hundreds of people: “Come and see.” So he did, spending a semester working with the sisters in Calcutta. After he graduated, he couldn’t see embarking on the traditional post-college career path, so he and a group of students moved in to an abandoned church in inner-city Philadelphia and began living in community alongside the poor in what some of calling the “new monasticism.” Claiborne prefers to refer to himself as an “Ordinary Radical,” and in his book by the same name, he writes about the meaning of conversion:

       It’s a shame that a few conservative evangelicals have had a monopoly on the word conversion. Some of us shiver at the word. But conversion means to change, to alter, after which something looks different than it did before — like conversion vans or converted currency. We need converts in the best sense of the word, people who are marked by the renewing of their minds and imaginations, who no longer conform to the pattern that is destroying our world. Otherwise, we have only believers, and believers are a dime-a-dozen nowadays. What the world needs is people who believe so much in another world that they cannot help but begin enacting it now.

       Then we will start to see some true conversion vans — vehicles that run on veggie oil instead of diesel. Then we will see some converted homes — fueled by renewable energy — and laundry machines powered by stationary bicycles and toilets flushed with dirty sink water. Then we will see tears converted to laughter as people beat their swords into plowshares and weld their machine guns into saxophones, and as police officers use their billy clubs to play baseball.

       For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.

       There is the kind of conversion that happens to people not because of how we talk but because of how we live. And our little experiments in truth become the schools for conversion, where folks can learn what it means for the old life to be gone and the new life to be upon us, no longer taking the broad path that leads to destruction. Conversion is not an event but a process, a process of slowly tearing ourselves from the clutches of the culture.

       Like the disciples along the road that day, the world we live in still drives us toward Emmaus— wherever that place is for us. But like Shane Claiborne and his cohorts from Eastern College, the stranger who meets us along the way, the one who still opens our eyes at the table, constantly turns us around, changes our direction, and sends us back to Jerusalem, back to where the action is. May it be so for us today.                                                                ✞

© 2008 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel