Luke 24:13-35
Third Sunday of Easter
6 April 2008
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Yesterday was for me a day of discovery, a day of uncovering. I was up at my cabin. Last November, I had covered my 12 roses, my two lavender and my two salvia with cedar chips to better protect them against the winter weather. With the harsh, snowy winter we had I sure am glad I did that. Anyway, yesterday was discovery day. Yesterday was uncovering day. I went to each pile of cedar chips and carefully pulled them away from the hidden treasure underneath.
Today begins a sermon series that will attempt to do exactly the same thing, not with roses and lavender and salvia, but with our spiritual lives. Today begins a sermon series called “Our Questions of Faith.” These sermons will be molded and shaped by you, by questions of faith that maybe you’ve wrestled with for many years. This will be a series of discovery, a series of uncovering.
Today’s question that was submitted last week is “Where Do We Find Jesus?”
In answering that question, allow me to ask another question: “Wouldn’t it be great if life were perfect?” Of course it’s not. I didn’t have to tell you that. You already know that as well as I do. That second question, though – “Wouldn’t it be nice if life were perfect?” – is a question that is going to be able to be asked during each and every week of this series. We live in a fallen world. We live in a broken world. We live in a world that only very faintly – if even at all – resembles God’s original plan. In asking “Our Questions of Faith,” we’re dealing with that brokenness. We’re dealing with that fallenness. We’re dealing with that lack of perfection. We’re dealing with living and operating outside God’s original plan for us and for our world.
That’s the only thing that can explain what happened on the evening of Christ’s Resurrection some 2,000 years ago. Two followers of Jesus were returning home after an eventful week. They had traveled the seven miles up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. They had likely gotten caught up in the festivities of Palm Sunday, with the palm branches and the cloaks spread on the ground, and the shouting of “Hosanna,” and the animals and Jesus riding into town on a donkey. They had followed the news of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas and His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. They had perhaps witnessed Jesus’ trial before Pontius Pilate. They had heard the death sentence. They had stood at Jesus’ Cross. They had watched Jesus die. They had seen His body hurriedly taken off the tree and laid in a new tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea. Then they, along with the other followers of Jesus and every other Jew in Jerusalem, excused themselves from the events of the world and celebrated the Passover Sabbath from sun fall on Friday through Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning, they had been found with the other followers of Jesus, perhaps in that same upper room where Jesus had just three days earlier taken bread and broke it and said, “This is My Body” and taken that cup of wine and said, “This is My Blood poured out for you.” The news of the early morning women visitors to the tomb reached their ears, “Jesus is not there! Jesus is risen!” Perhaps they, along with Peter and John, had run to the tomb and found it just as the Marys had told them. But as St. John himself testified, “They still did not understand from the Scriptures that Jesus had to rise from the dead” [John 20:9]. They next did what was considered to be the normal next step. They packed up their bags and they heading for home. Work was waiting for them the next day. On the walk home, they tried to console themselves, “We had hoped that Jesus was the Messiah, but, once again, our hopes have been dashed. We sure are foolish men who got duped!”
Suddenly a “stranger” joined them on their journey. Though He looked like one of them and sounded like one of them, he must have been a visitor from afar since He knew nothing of Jesus. He knew nothing about what their entire lives had revolved about for the past week. Could anyone really be that ignorant? Since the eventide was falling, they had extended to this “stranger” the gift of hospitality, inviting Him to abide with them. He sat at their table. He took bread. He gave thanks. He broke the bread and handed it to them.
They had found Jesus! And as soon as they had found Him, He was gone from their sight. Only then did they say to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us as He talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
There, my friends, is the two-fold answer to “Our Question of Faith” today”: “Where Do We Find Jesus?”
We find Jesus just as did those two disciples on the evening of His Resurrection 2,000 years ago. We find Jesus in the Scriptures, in His Holy Word. We find Jesus in His Sacraments of Baptism and The Lord’s Supper.
In the fallen, broken world in which we live, our tendency is often to turn for help to just about everything else in time of trouble. We turn to self-help books. We turn to self-help groups. We turn to New Age and Eastern philosophies of thought and meditation and crystals. We become adherents of karma. We turn to friends. We turn to drugs and sex and alcohol, seeking and imploring an escape from reality. We turn to counselors. In many and various ways, we just simply try to extricate ourselves from the situations that have caused us pain and grief and brokenness. We ache for wholeness. We yearn for healing. We desire happy times be here again.
The funny thing – funny in a very sad way – is that in our search for wholeness, healing and happiness, we often ignore God’s way for wholeness, healing and happiness. We often cut ourselves off from the family into which God has placed us, the family known as “The Church.” Like those disciples 2,000 years ago, we pack up our bags and go it on our own. We commiserate with ourselves, “We had hoped ...” When we’re not in the family, in the Church, we’re often not in the Scriptures. Our hearts don’t burn within us. When we’re not in the family, in the Church, we’re not receiving the forgiveness of our own sinfulness through The Lord’s Supper. Our eyes don’t see Jesus in our midst.
Do you get what I am saying? If you get what I am saying, turn to your neighbor and poke him and say, “I get it!”
We find Jesus not in the ways we humanly expect. We find Jesus not in the human ways that we have cleverly invented under the guise of providing us wholeness and healing and happiness. We find Jesus not in running away from His family. We find Jesus in His Holy Scriptures that make our hearts burn within us. We find Jesus in His Supper as He says to us the words, “This is My Body, broken for you. This is My Blood, shed for you.” Then our eyes are opened and we realize that Jesus has been among us. He’s been alongside us in our grief and pain and loss and troubles. He’s walked with us. He’s talked with us. He’s told us that we are His own and that He will NEVER leave us nor forsake us. Give me Jesus!
Since His Ascension back into Heaven, Jesus has entrusted His gift of Holy Scripture and His twin sacramental blessings of Baptism and The Lord’s Supper to His disciples, to His family, to His Church. That’s why my answer to people who ask “Where Do We Find Jesus?” is always, “You find Jesus exactly where He has promised to be found. Wherever even two or three are gathered in His Name [Matthew 18:20], You find Jesus in the Church where His Word is proclaimed and where His Sacraments are administered. There you find a burning heart and open eyes. There you find Jesus.
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In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Pastor Christopher Schaar
Historic First Lutheran Church of Pasadena