Sermon based upon Luke 24: 13-35
By Dr. Charles J. Tomlin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
April 12th, 2020
It’s Easter. And maybe like me, you feel some disappointment today.
----We are not in church together.
----This Coronavirus still threatens in the world.
----Covid 19 is still infecting people, killing people, and has the potential of infect thousands more. That’s why we aren’t in church.
As Pastor Rick Warren said recently, “God gave you a brain to use it!” We are using our brains and this is a disappointing and fearful time.
We are also praying that the infections will spike soon, so we can get our lives back.
But of course, some will not get their lives back.
Isn’t this why the message of Easter is so important?
This is only the second Easter in my life of 62 years, that I’ve NOT been worshipping in Church, with other believers.
The only other Easter I missed was when I was in Baptist Hospital recovering from a car accident back in 1975, when I was 17.
I had been in the hospital nearly 2 months. Easter came on March 30th. I didn’t get to come home from the Hospital until the April 4th.
I remember that that time very vividly. It was disappointing too.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The hospital staff were very good too me. I was fortunate to have had such good medical care.
I remember one day, I was in my hospital bed, playing my guitar and singing. Nurses came running into my room. Even though I was singing a John Denver song, they thought I was Elvis Presley. Elvis was in the same building battling Pneumonia. It was fun for me to be mistaken for Elvis, but you could see the disappointment on their faces.
That funny moment helped me with some of my feelings of disappointment.
---I was missing the best part of my Senior Year in High School.
---It was supposed be a time to celebrate years of hard work.
---It was a time to coast, to look back and to look forward.
But what did I have to look forward to?
Yes, I was alive. But there I was, lying on my back, confined in bed, wearing a body cast.
----I would be unable to walk normally ever again.
---I would never run ever again.
---I would not get to do many things I had dreamed.
---I wasn’t handicapped, but I was going to be limited.
---The pain was going to be with me every day.
Why am I telling you this? I want you to know. I know what disappointment is like. It remains with me everyday.
Now, we are all feeling disappointment this Easter.
WE had hoped it would be different, but this is ‘how’ it is now.
Haven’t we all had ‘great expectations’ vanished before our eyes?
---We had hoped that we would get that job.
---We had hoped the marriage would last.
---We had hoped our kids had turned out different.
----We had hope the cancer would not come back.
…WE HAD HOPED… That’s one line in this Easter story, which can stab straight into many human hearts.
And there is NO DISAPPOINTMENT WORSE, than the disappointment we can have with God!
That’s what’s happening in Luke’s story.
These two disciples, Cleopas and his wife, were walking the road of Disappointment, called Emmaus.
Archeologists have yet to locate the Emmaus Road, or the on a map? They don’t need too, haven’t we all have traveled this road?
And the disappointment these two disciples were feeling, wasn’t just that Jesus died. But when Jesus was ‘handed over’ to the authorities and crucified all their hopes died along with him.
—Jesus had been a ‘prophet mighty in word and deed’, but he did not redeem or restore Israel like they hoped.
—-Jesus had been a great light with ‘power’, but his ‘authority’ didn’t rest on his shoulders’ very long.
The ‘mighty God’ of this new David, was the King as they had wished. Now, all their righteous dreams for Israel were gone, like ‘Dust in the wind!”
‘When you are going through hell, keep going’, Winston Churchhill once said. One truth of this story, is that it keeps going, because it
was while moving along on this Road to Emmaus that something very mysterious, unexpected, and unforeseen happens. An unexpected ‘stranger’ joined them out on that that road.
Of course, they didn’t know who he was, but we do.
Jesus came as an unrecognized presence, like he can also come to us, even on the the most difficult roads of our lives.
Recently, I was talking to a new friend. We were talking about the Virus, our fears and our hopes that this difficult, disappointing moment, might bring us all closer to God.
Then he told me his story. Back in 2009, he was riding his motorcycle, when a car suddenly stopped in front of him. He had no where to go. He felt the end had come. He woke up in the hospital, realizing he had survived the crash, but his neck was broken, with other bones too.
With his mother by his side, he started feeling very bad. He told his mother than he loved her. He felt like he was dying. He went into cardiac arrest. He flat lined.
But in that time he was gone, something very mysterious happened. He remembered being somewhere else with a background of very bright, white light. He saw his deceased grandmother. She was sitting a chair looking straight at him and said, “What are you doing here! You need to go back and help your mother!”
He woke up again and that’s what remembered. He said he couldn’t explain it and hadn’t shared it much. Most people wouldn’t understand nor appreciate it. I did. When I asked if I could share it with you, he told me this this unexpected meeting put him on the road of walking closer with God.
Jesus can still be, mysteriously present.
But it’s also important to see that on this Emmaus Road, Jesus wasn’t just trying to make them feel better.
He was one trying to help them find God’s greater purpose. Jesus expounded the Scriptures, saying, ‘How slow of heart you are to believe what the prophets have declared!” Jesus didn’t give easy answers either, but rather, asked some hard questions: “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer and then enter his glory”?
If we want to recover hope, we too must move beyond our own interpretations and change our expectations too. We must keep walking with Jesus until we can learn to see things differently.
And that’s certainly not easy to do.
For many people, in this difficult time we are now experiencing, life is NOT going to return to the way it was.
I overheard someone say with great frustration, “I just want things to return to normal!” I also heard a stockbroker say, ‘stay calm.’ Your funds will recover.’
I understand the need for optimism, and I am, but what if it doesn’t? What if it can’t, what we can’t recover exactly like we want? What if I, you, we get this deadly virus? Many of us are in the danger zone.
Of course, none of us can see exactly what’s coming!
On TV, I watched an interview with Bill Gates, Microsoft’s Co-Founder. In his days of retirement, Bill Gates does a lot of Philanthropic work in the developing world. And back in 2015, he was warning that the next big disaster would probably not be from missiles, but from microbes. But even Bill Gates couldn’t get governments or investors to take him seriously. He didn’t see it unfolding this way either.
Most importantly, Bill Gates wasn’t harping on this. When reporters tried to push him, he answered, ‘There will be time for Postmortems later.’ ‘Right now’, he said, ‘we’ve got to focus on what we need to do together to stop the spread of this virus.’
That’s how you get through, anything, isn’t it? You focus. You talk, listen and learn and keep working with others. You don’t focus on what wasn’t, or what could or should have been, but you move forward into what is real now.
And, as these two disciples continued to move forward, walking, talking and learning from this mysterious stranger, and before they knew it, this long, even this very difficult road had brought them home. The day of disappointment had been transformed.
Arriving home, they invited their new conversation partner to stay and eat with them. It was then, when he blessed the food, that their ‘eyes were opened’ to WHO had been with them, all along.
What will it take for us to realize Jesus is wants to be our conversation partner through this—through both the joys and the suffering, through the breakthroughs and the breakdowns, and through disappointment until we can see hope?
But realize that Jesus is with us, seldom happens all at once. We may believe we are in this alone. Nothing may make sense.
And most likely, the eyes of our souls won’t be opened because we have figure something out. We may never find adequate answers to what has happened, but we may instead, find him, the presence and promise of Jesus, right there in the most difficult questions we ask.
When I was lying there those two months, fighting to recover, I should have been greatly depressed, but somehow it never happened.
I can’t fully explain how I kept my hopes up.
When I finally did get back to school, I walked my crutches straight up to the fellow who caused the accident and said, ‘Its OK, you didn’t come and tell me you were sorry. You might be afraid. But I want you to know that I forgive you!’
Was that naive? Was that the idealism of youth? Perhaps.
But isn’t it ‘better to the one who does the forgiving, than the one who needs forgiving’?
At that time, and not anytime in that hospital, did I ever feel alone, defeated, or broken. I had too many bone broken, but never my soul.
It was also, while in that hospital, that I, as a young person, gained direction and wisdom for my life, that some never find.
In that hospital, I decided not to go into medicine nor journalism, and I was confirmed in my leanings toward pastoral ministry.
I also recall, my surgeon coming into my room, like he did every day, checking to see if it my foot would heal. He had done all he could. Now, he had to wait for two weeks and see what happened. On this particular day, he was showing his interns my foot, telling his students, ‘Oh, I want you to meet his special case. He’s got bad foot damage, but now, he’s got religion too’. What the Doctor, didn’t realize was Jesus had me long before this. But he was right, about one thing, this challenge had given me clarity. Like Jacob, I too had wrestled with God and lost. I would walk with a limp too. But I would be better for it, for the rest of my life.
And when you understand that limps or any other disappointment in life can make us better people alone, but you must still find hope out on the road, you too, are already walking toward Emmaus.
For it was only an encounter with the resurrected Jesus who made them see everything differently. This is the eternal, living, universal Jesus, who promises his presence and the his eternal hope, even when we are walking on the most disappointing road.
Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was Pastor of the largest Protestant congregation in southern Japan, in the city of Hiroshima.
One day, a yellow flash suddenly appeared. Somehow, instinctively, Pastor Tanimoto drove into a garden and wedged himself between two huge rocks.
Next, a powerful blast of wind and fire blew over him. It knocked him unconscious.
When he came to and got on his feet, the city was flat as a desert.
Sixty-eight thousand human beings were killed instantly.
Only 30 members of his 3,500-member church were still alive.
But having hope in this redeemer, Jesus Christ, Pastor Tanimoto began to rebuild his crucified church. He arranged for the spiritual adoption of 500 Hiroshima orphans by North American families.
As a result of his work, all bomb survivors became eligible for free medical treatment.
Pastor Tanimoto also created a Peace Foundation. In that Foundation's museum a little girl named Sadako placed two cranes made of folded paper. It was her belief that if a person who was ill made these little paper cranes, the person would get better.
But neither, Tanimoto nor little Sadako were fully healed in this weorld. After 10 years of horrible suffering from the effects of radiation, both the Pastor and little Sadako died in the great disappointment of everything that happened. But they also died with a firm faith that Jesus was with them and had prepared a place for them.
Today, a statue stands in Hiroshima to their memories. This year is the 75th anniversary of that bombing. The statue to their memory is Triangular, representing the Trinitarian Christian Faith, made from the figures of two children on either side and another child on top, with their arms outstretched to express their hope for a peaceful world. Today, Japanese children still keep the center of that statue filled with many-colored paper cranes to confess their hope that will not disappoint.
Today, the people of God confess the foundation of all hope as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is why we sing, straight into our own disappointments too:
‘He lives. He lives. Christ Jesus lives today. He walks with me and talks with me along life’s narrow way.
He lives. He lives. Christ Jesus lives today! You ask me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart.
I hope he lives with your own heart.
Is there any reason you can’t recognize him?
What keeps you from being in his presence? Don’t you see?
Jesus quickly disappeared from those two disciples in Emmaus to come and be with all his disciples, everywhere, and says: ‘Let not your heart be troubled. Believe in God. Trust in me’. Will you recognize Him?
Let us pray: Dear Jesus, thank you that there is nowhere we can go and nothing that we may go through, that your love does not seek us out to bring us your eternal hope.
On this day, Easter Sunday, the Lord’s Day, we remember that you were not in the tomb that was empty, so you can reveal your loving presence to all those who will walk with you.
Jesus, you are the true, living hope in our hearts, even in life’s great disappointments. Come, Lord Jesus! Be with us on this road now. Amen.
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