Third Sunday of Easter
CONTENT
Good morning, everyone. It’s nice to see you all this fine day. My name is Steven Myles, I am a member here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church. So, if you are new or visiting with us today, I am not the person you would normally see in this space. Father Morgan Reed, the beloved Vicar of our church, has invited me to speak today, which just so happens to be the 3rd Sunday of Easter.
Several years ago – after I graduated college, I had the incredible privilege of working in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. During that time, I worked with a relief organization that was tasked with rebuilding churches, physical church structures, that had been targeted and destroyed during the 70-year civil war. After our team had completed all the church reconstruction in one geographic area, we would send out a scout into an unknown area, and that scout would go from village to village and collect the histories of these areas and based upon that information our organization could then identify the next villages eligible for physical church reconstruction. For a period of time, I was one of these scouts and – I can tell you – I will never forget the stories that I got to hear. The life of these people was so different from my own, one of the key differences I noticed was the way the Nubians were inextricably intertwined with their cattle. Let me give you a sense of what I mean by that - There was no school in most villages, so the young boys were in charge of shepherding the cows out to find pasture and water and protecting them from threats. While out in the fields, the young men would drink the cow’s milk to put on muscle mass and they would wrestle, wrestling was the national sport, so they would wrestle which allowed them to establish their place in the social hierarchy of their village. They would also use the cattle urine to dye their hair a vivid orange color, and they would burn the cattle dung for heat at night and use the ash from those dung fires to cover their bodies in ash and that would repel mosquitoes, because malaria was a real threat in this part of the world. And every so often they would come into town, for celebrations and weddings, and they would dance, the most incredible dances, and they would actually hold their arms imitating the position of their favorite cow’s horns, because every cow had varying degrees of value based on their horns orientation, coloring and patterns on their hide – hopefully you kind of get the picture - their lives, in a sense, revolved around their cows. And all the while these young men were out in the fields living a shepherd’s life they had plenty of time to dream, and what do young men dream about – women – let’s be honest, they dream about women but specifically how they would raise the dowry price for a wife. The average dowry, or the price a man would have to pay to his future father in-law for his wife, was between 50-400 cows and the vast majority of people didn’t have hundreds of cows, and that usually meant these young shepherds would form a group and would raid neighboring villages of different tribes. So the history of this people is one of perpetual violence unfortunately, perpetual cattle raids. It was common knowledge that you could tell where a man was headed based on the spear he was carrying, there was a spear for fishing a spear for hunting and a distinct spear for battle. So I would sit in these churches of mud walls and a grass roof, or sometimes just a few logs under the shade of a large mango tree and write down the histories of these villages. And the recurring theme I picked up on, was raiding other tribes for their cattle and then being raided in revenge, raiding and being raided, until one day light skinned men showed up– Arabs from the North- showed up with machine guns and tanks and the villagers would fight them with their spears, and when the Arabs left they got on with life as usual. For most of the villages I interviewed, that was the extent of their experience of the 70-year civil war in their country – just 1 or 2 brief encounters. Men and women lived their whole lives, raised families, built homes and communities but were otherwise completely detached from the broader context – this war that was going on around them. It was a battle over which government would rule the country, the fight over which laws would be instituted upon their land and they were mostly disengaged. I don’t think that is unique to the Nubian people though– is it? Certainly their situation is unique, and their day to day looks vastly different from ours, but as men and women on this Earth, we share the same tendencies. This propensity to trod along from one day to the next, and casually fall into the patterns of the world or the culture around us and all the while remain detached, oblivious or too pre-occupied to engage with the overarching struggles that surround us. So as we approach today’s passage, I ask that you would join me in praying that we could hear the voice of God calling out to us who are so prone to wander.
OPENING PRAYER:
The grass withers, the flower fades, but Your word O Lord will stand forever.
Lord the word that goes out from Your mouth; it shall not return to You empty,
but it shall accomplish that which you purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which You sent it. Father God clinging to that truth we ask You to speak to us this morning, that Your Word may accomplish that which is needed in each of us - in Christ’s Name. Amen.
SERMON:
Before we jump in - I find it helpful to provide a rough outline of what the next few minutes are going to look like. First, I want to establish where we are in the church calendar and understand the context behind the Easter season. Then we take a close look at our gospel passage from today’s lectionary in Luke 24 and these 2 men on the road to Emmaus. And finally I want to make the connection of how we sitting here today fit into this story – the story of Easter.
Because– when we take a step back, friends, collectively we are all a part of one story. The story of God and who He is, and how He endeavors to communicate and relate to us– that is the greatest story there will ever be. And to tie it back to my work in Nuba, I believe that is the battle that is ongoing and enveloping us all-whether we recognize it or not. This battle for the truth of who God is. Bear with me here, I’m going to start pretty far out and abstract and then slowly tighten our focus and zoom in. Now, a lot of people take exception with how God has chosen to reveal Himself. The most common refrain throughout all human history is mankind saying, “if God is real, why doesn’t He just show me who he is?” Seems fair - But have you ever stopped and given that question any thought? How should an infinite God convey to finite creatures the breadth of who He is. Would just one look really do it? From what I can observe and from what Scripture teaches me, God is unchangeable, He is a constant, from eternity past to eternity future He is.
Because God is a constant, He is unchanging, He reveals Himself in A consistent and repetitious manner. All throughout Scripture, we can trace these story lines of God revealing His character, from one generation to the next. He reveals Himself as Holy, as a King, as a Father as a shepherd - metaphors that we can relate to. And the absolute beauty of God’s word is the congruity or the uniformity of these revelations – each of these nuggets of truth in the Bible were recorded by different men or women, from different time periods different geographic locations, and the purpose of their writings were wildly different, some men wrote poetry about God, some recorded history, some transcribed prophecy, but despite all those variables taken together the whole of Scripture conveys the nature of an infinite God just viewed from different perspectives. The season we call Easter, is one example of God, slowly and methodically, leaving a trail of compounding evidence which not only reveal his character but His plan of redemption for mankind. So let’s look closely at Easter - In order to understand, we have to go back to the Jewish traditions before Jesus, there is the holiday of Passover, this commemorates the night, 3500 years ago in Egypt, Jews had to slaughter a lamb and wipe the blood of that animal on their doorposts. In faith, the families who obeyed these instructions were saved, and the spirit of death passed over their homes. The very next Sunday after the Passover, there is a ceremony the feast of first fruits, where a priest will collect a sheaf or bundle of wheat, the best and most perfect bunch of wheat, and he raises it up before God and thanks God and ask that the rest of the harvest would be just as good. From that Feast of First Fruits there is a period of 50 days which ended in another Feast. That final feast of weeks signifies ten commandments and God’s covenant with Moses. I want to make sure you are still with me – that was a lot of words. What I am trying to highlight – is the pattern? There is a 1 to 1 direct connection between those ancient traditions, and our Easter season – and they all occur during the same stretch of the calendar – roughly March to May. The pattern begins with death, few days later a raising up, a period of fifty days, and the institution of a new covenant. Death, raising up, 50 days, and a new covenant. So let’s make those 1 to 1 connections to really drive this home - For thousands of years Jews, before Jesus, had an annual holiday where they remembered the day a lamb was slaughtered so that they could live, and fast-forward to Jesus’ time it’s on that very same day the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, died to save the world. Back to the Jewish traditions, three days after the Passover, the priest would lift up the perfect grain offering, fast forward to Jesus’ time and three days after his burial Jesus was raised from the dead. Then a period of 50 days and the mark of a new covenant with the giving of the law and now a period of 50 days and the mark of the new covenant with the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
I don’t know what you imagined it would look like, I don’t know what you think it should like, but this pattern is God is trying, desperately trying to reveal to us, the collective us of mankind, who He is. He is not distant, He is not far off, aloof or indifferent. He has been engaged during this whole arc of history and He is engaged here and now. Regardless of what time in history you were born, whether it was before Jesus, during the life of Jesus, or after His resurrection. God has been using this same stretch of the calendar - 50 some days from March to May– for thousands of years to capture our attention. To the Jews it was Passover and the Feasts and to us it is Easter – but the purpose of these traditions remains consistent and that is to break up our day to day and focus our minds and affections on God’s plan of redemption for mankind.
You guys with me still – that was a lot. That’s why I don’t do this for a living. So that was part one, we’ve set the stage with the significance of the Easter season, and all the careful meticulous effort God has crafted into its messaging.
So now, the second part of toady’s message, we can turn our attention to the passage in Luke 24, and I’m hoping with this context established we can better understand the dialogue that is going on between Jesus and these 2 men on the road to Emmaus. To quickly set the stage, this is one of a dozen or so instances where Jesus appears to people after His resurrection. We pick it up in verse 13 Cleopas and his friend are on a short 7 mile walk, downhill and to the West, from Jerusalem to Emmaus. And these men are discussing the latest events in Jerusalem, but verse 16 indicates that their eyes were kept from noticing that the stranger who joins them was actually Jesus. And as they are walking and talking with this stranger, the stranger inquires in v.17 “what is this conversation you are having?” And it’s pretty palpable right, the incredulousness of Cleopas, his incredulity in verse 18 when he answers and says, “Are you the only visitor in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what has happened in these days?” But Jesus’ interest is in hearing if these men have picked up on this sequence of clues, so he invites their explanation by saying “What things?” And here I can imagine Cleopas and his friend launching into the story with excitement in their voices, finishing each other’s sentences and maybe adding details that the other neglected, in verse 19 they say “There was a man, Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet, mighty in deed and word before God and man.” And slowly their excitement fades, and their voices drop because they inform the stranger that – v.20 “Our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be crucified, we had hoped he was the one to redeem Israel, but it has now been 3 days since he died. Women we knew went to his tomb this morning, but they did not see his body”
Jesus’ response in v.25 might come as a bit of a surprise – it pretty cutting, “O foolish ones - slow of heart to believe”. It’s important to distinguish that when Jesus calls these men fools, He is not making a judgement on their intellectual capabilities, he is not calling them stupid. In scripture the term fool has a very specific definition, it’s an indictment against the aspect of our humanity that rejects wisdom and despises instruction. “O foolish ones - slow of heart to believe” Psalms tells us that “It is a fool that says in his heart, there is no God”. And every one of us have played that fool – but why? From the time our parents ate of that forbidden fruit we have been cursed to believe that the biggest obstacle, the biggest barrier to what we perceive to be our own joy and happiness is God’s law. So we want to do away with it, we want to be free we want the autonomy to do whatever we want to do and not what He commands us to do. The deepest most pernicious bias of all human inclination is this bias against our blessed Creator Himself. We are “Foolish ones – slow of heart to believe.”
Thanks be to God that He understands us and He is patient with us. Jesus, recognizes that these men are unaware of the situation of the context they have missed that this the unveiling of God’s plan which has been in motion for thousands of years. So in v. 27 it tells us that, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, Jesus explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” And I can only imagine how riveting that must have been, to listen to the author Himself explain the intention and the nuance behind each piece of His story. So he points to the law and the prophets, the poetry and the wisdom books, and he reveals how those writings are proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah – the one the Jews have been waiting for, the one who will save mankind. Not only were the events of the last few days foretold, but the events of the last few days were necessary, v.26 Jesus says it “was necessary that the Christ should suffer these things.” Because without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins.
But still that’s not enough - is it. All the facts and information can be laid out in the most compelling fashion. Men can have all the knowledge there is, and yet it will not penetrate into their day to day lives. We will remain undeterred, we will remain indifferent, information is not enough to change a man’s heart. So in v. 32 we hear the men remark, “did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us on the road.” And this my friends is a gift of God. These men described there interaction with God as a fire burning within them, and similarly the prophet Jeremiah records his experience as a fire shut up in my bones, and the only way I can try to explain this is that when we truly hear the voice of the eternal God, it resonates with the part of us that is also eternal, our own soul and it produces a visceral response. The history that before appeared to be just a coincidence, the man we walked with who appeared to be just a stranger. We recognize its not just a coincidence, we recognize its not just a stranger. We see that it is God who has walked with us these many, and it is His voice calling out to us. “Do you see me? Do you see who I am? Do you see my love for you in this great plan I have made? Will you not repent and turn back to me?”
In closing, I want to quickly read from our passage in Psalms 116– the author writes “What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?” Surely this Easter season is a period of joy and thanksgiving. It is a time to celebrate and remember the grace of God through Jesus Christ His Son. And what a privilege to live during these days, where we can look back and connect the dots to see God’s mighty arm moving through history. It’s said we need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed and my hope this morning we are reminded of God’s faithfulness and how He has been using the Easter season for thousands of years to break up people’s day-to day and to call them back to Himself. As we approach the altar here to receive the elements, the body and blood of Christ, let us remember the second part of Psalm 116, the author answers his own question “What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.” If God has your attention this morning, call out to Him, He is near. If you don’t know what to say, there are people after the service who would love to pray with you. Happy Easter my Friends – He is Risen! He is Risen indeed!
