Luke 24:13-35
May 9, 2011
In my experience, when pastors are asked to share their favorite bible passage, there are a couple that get a lot of play: The wedding at Cana, and the Prodigal Son, for example. But, even more than those two, this one – the Road to Emmaus – often comes out at the top of the charts of favorite hits. And that makes sense to me. It’s such a great passage for those of us working on this faith thing. It speaks to what most of us yearn for – some assurance that we are on the right road, and that God is walking with us.
Because, of course, it doesn’t always feel that way. We can do our level best, make the best decisions we can, seek God’s guidance each step of the way, but it seems like rarely is it crystal clear that God is walkin’ along with us, saying “yes, this is right.” We pray and pray for at least a feeling of confirmation, but still there are times we think we’re on the right road, but really can’t be sure. And that’s when life is good. There are also times we know we’re on the wrong road, but truly, honestly, can’t find the alternative route.
These two people walking along – going to Emmaus – certainly must have questioned whether they had been on the right road all this time. These were part of the group of people who gave over their lives to following Jesus for a few years. They believed Jesus was sent from God…a divine presence in their midst who would bring about great change in their lives. But, they were sorely mistaken. The road became a dead end. All that excitement, all that hope, ended when Jesus was nailed to the cross. They had given up everything because they were sure God wanted them to walk this new path, take this new journey, and they were sure that in Jesus God walked the road with them, but in the end they were left feeling foolish, abandoned, and undoubtedly unsure what it meant to follow God.
Now, they could see no way forward. All they could think to do was to head home. They were on their way back to Emmaus – back to where they started. They were left at a dead end on the road they had travelled, so they retraced their steps, going back to the beginning, probably in hopes that they would find another road to travel – a road where they would really, truly, find God.
But in this beautiful parable of life called the Road to Emmaus, the author of Luke tells us that the goal of life is not to find the “right” road. There is not a path where, if we just find it we’ll find God and all God wants for us. In this passage we see that God meets us on whatever road we happen to be on at the moment…right, wrong, good, bad, or indifferent. Faith is not really about figuring out the right road. Faith is about letting God transform us on whatever road we happen to find ourselves.
Anne Lamott knows the road to Emmaus. She knows what it’s like to be journeying through life without hope, sure there is no meaning or purpose, only to realize that all along Jesus has been walking with her – she just couldn’t recognize him at first.
Anne Lamott was raised by her parents to believe you had a moral obligation to try to save the world. But no one in the family believed in God. Her father had had a terrible, painful, cold Christian childhood, and out of loyalty to him, no one ever talked about God. The family line was that believing meant you were stupid. Only ignorant people believed. Yet somehow, from a very early age, Anne felt someone – something – alongside her. “I bowed my head in bed and prayed,” she says. “I prayed because I believed – not in Jesus – but in someone listening, someone who heard. I do not understand how that came to be; I just know I always believed and that I did not tell a soul.”
Throughout her life Lamott has struggled with thinking she has to be perfect to be loved – and she has been anything but perfect. She began drinking and using drugs at a very young age. While her “outward” life looked okay to friends and colleagues, her private life of drugs, alcohol and sleeping around was breaking her from the inside out. She writes, “I was cracking up. It was like a cartoon where something gets hit, and one crack appears, which spider webs outward until the whole pane or vase is cracked and hangs suspended for a moment before falling into a pile of powder on the floor. [At one point,] I called a suicide hotline, but hung up when someone answered. Heaven forbid someone should think I needed help. I was a Lamott – Lamotts give help. I believed that I would die soon, from a fall or an overdose. I knew there was an afterlife but felt that the odds of my living long enough to get into heaven were almost nil. They couldn’t possibly take you in the shape I was in. I could no longer imagine how God could love me.”
At one of her low points, she was out walking, and she passed by St. Stephen’s Episcopal church. She had been there as a child with a friend. She’d heard there was a new priest, and later she decided to call him. When she went to see him, she told him everything – all the darkness, all the pain, all the shame. She told him that she didn’t think God could possibly love her. He responded quite simply: “God has to love you. That’s God’s job.” It was a start. Something changed that day – even though it would be four years before she got sober. As she put it, “I was not willing to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight.”
One of Anne’s favorite places was a flea market in Marin City, and she would often go on Sundays. At 11 o’clock on Sundays, she would hear gospel music coming from a church across the street – St. Andrew’s Presbyterian church. It was homely and impoverished. A ramshackle building with a cross on stop, sitting on a small parcel of land with a few skinny pine trees. But, she loved the music. She began stopping in from time to time, standing at the doorway to listen to the songs. The church was so run-down, with terrible linoleum that was brown and over-shined, and plastic stained-glass windows. But it had a choir of five black women and one rather Amish-looking white man, and a congregation of 30 people or so, radiating, as she puts it, “kindness and warmth.”
“I went back to St. Andrew about once a month,” she writes. “No one tried to con me into sitting down or staying. I always left before the sermon. I loved singing, even about Jesus, but I just didn’t want to be preached at about him. To me, Jesus made about as much sense as Scientology or dowsing. But the church smelled wonderful, like the air had nourishment in it, or like it was composed of these people’s exhalations, of warmth and faith and peace.”
Then, Anne Lamott had her Emmaus moment. It wasn’t exactly like the one in the bible, but it was her moment of recognizing God in the midst of her journey. She had been seeing a married man, and got pregnant. She had an abortion. “I didn’t go to the flea market the week of my abortion,” she writes. “I stayed home, and smoked dope and got drunk. On the seventh night, though, very drunk and just about to take a sleeping pill, I discovered that I was bleeding heavily. Several hours later, the blood stopped flowing, and I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill. I had a cigarette and turned off the light. After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there. After a while, in the dark, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.
“I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud, ‘I would rather die.’
“After that, everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in. But I knew what would happen: you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever. So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.
“One week later, when I went back to church, I was so hung over that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me. I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “Fine. I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.” This was my beautiful moment of conversion.”
Just like with the two people on the way to Emmaus, God met Anne on the road she was already travelling. But also like those two people, something had to happen before she could recognize God walking with them. It took a community – a community gathered, breaking bread, singing songs, reading scripture, loving one another. It took church.
Anne’s life did not become perfect after she found church. It was still some time before she got sober. She got pregnant again – only this time she had the baby. Parenting is not, of course, the world’s easiest jobs, and she made plenty of mistakes. She did not find the perfect path – the right road – because there isn’t one. She stayed on the rocky, imperfect, sometimes ugly journey, but now she knew God walked with her – no matter what her life looked like, no matter what she did. And St. Andrew was the bedrock of that journey. It was through the people of her church that she stayed grounded and connected to Jesus. It was her life line.
She writes, “No matter how bad I am feeling, how lost or lonely or frightened, when I see the faces of the people at my church, and hear their tawny voices, I can always find my way home.”
Jesus meets these two people on the way to Emmaus. He doesn’t come to them in Jerusalem. He doesn’t wait for them at home. He doesn’t bid them make some holy pilgrimage or undertake some pious feat. Rather, he meets them where they are – on the road, amid their journey, right smack in the middle of all the pain, frustration, and despondency that threatens to overwhelm them. Jesus listens to them, to their pain, he interprets scripture to them, he walks all the way home with them. But they don’t recognize him until they are together around a table, in a sacred moment of church, breaking bread together.
It’s not a bad pattern to emulate, is it? Meet people where they are. Open up the scriptures so they can make sense of their lives in light of God’s mercy. Gather them to the meal that they might behold and be nourished by Christ’s own presence. There is no doubt this story directs us to the church, where we may encounter Jesus in the word and the sacraments. But not the “the church” that’s equated with the institution. We are directed instead to the church that meets a very ordinary world, a world marked by human loss and brokenness. Maybe church is not just a place where you come to find out how to be a good Christian. Church is where you come to find out that Christ loves you, God walks with you, even when you are nowhere in the ball park of being good.
Anne Lamott is not an Easter person because she is so amazing. One of the reasons Anne Lamott’s faith story is so compelling is because she is so honest – so authentic. She tells the truth about herself – even when it is painful. In honor of Mother’s Day, I would recommend reading her book, “Operating Instructions,” which is about her life right after she had her son, Sam. By the time she has Sam, Lamott has found church, God, even Jesus. But the book is about an imperfect mom, who makes mistakes. And for those of us who are mothers, we know how unforgivable it is to make mistakes with our children. How could we do that? It’s the most important job we have, yet we make mistakes. Sometimes big mistakes. There is no better road to travel if you want to learn about God’s love and forgiveness that the road of parenting.
Anne Lamott is an Easter person because she was dying and then she met Jesus, found a church that helped open her eyes to God’s presence in her life, and found new life. She was Easter-ed. We’re a small church of kind, warm-hearted people. We can Easter people. We can be a community that opens people’s eyes to the presence of God in their lives no matter what those lives look like. We can meet people on their road to Emmaus. And it’s not a matter of convincing someone of something, converting someone, telling them right from wrong. It’s a matter of doing what we do: gathering, singing, breaking bread, loving, welcoming, not judging. We do this well. We can help Easter people who are dying into a new life. Amen.
