Easter 3.  April 6, 2008.  Luke 24:13-35

Opening Our Hearts by Rev. Stephen Schuette

This story first made an impression on me in high school years. In our home town, one of the health and welfare ministries of the United Church of Christ was a local institution...the Emmaus Homes. It began when Eden Seminary moved from a rural town - Marthasville, MO, where the students helped to sustain the school by working an operating farm between their studies. The Germans who came in the 1840's and '50's were rural and poor, but not uninterested in education. They came because they didn't have a choice, unlike the middle-class Germans who had come in previous years. And back in those years Elmhurst College was founded by the same German immigrant group way out in Elmhurst, miles from the City, where there was ample farmland still around, and where the real city growth didn't take place until the 1950's. I understand in the early years that Elmhurst College also had a college farm....so, similarities between these two old Evangelical institutions.

Similar in many ways, but there was no city close enough to grow up around Eden Seminary in Marthasville, so it moved to St. Louis. And that's how it got its present name too... "Eden" was the street car stop out in front of the building.

So, when the buildings in Marthasville were vacated a use was found for them as the new Emmaus Home (another "E" to go along with Elmhurst and Eden) - a center for mentally handicapped adults. And later a satellite campus developed in St. Charles. And every year our youth choir would present our Christmas program to the residents of the Emmaus Home in St. Charles. And behind the altar was a stained glass window of two walking along the road, with a third figure. And it didn't take much for even this high school student to get the biblical allusion: this was meant to be a place where people could live out their life's journey in the presence of Jesus. It's about people who were unaware, but in the end become aware of Jesus.

That act of singing for mentally handicapped adults as a high schooler is memorable. But if you want to hear inspired music we can someday invite the Emmaus Home Choir to sing for us at Bethel. That's inspired music! Not necessarily refined, but inspired.

Well, all this is to say that I come to this story with all these images and history. "Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened..."

What were they talking about? They were talking about what people talk about...they were talking about the news! Did you hear about the high school students shot on the south side, another one? Did you hear about the 40^th anniversary of Martin Luther King's slaying? Did you hear? Have you heard of death, how it intrudes, breaks in, disrupts life, tears out the heart and leaves you wondering how meaningless hope can be? Have you heard about Jesus? He was in the news too...

This story takes you to the heart of the Christian story itself. And you can't go there without facing that symbol that is before us, so large, but so common for us that maybe we miss it...the cross. Certainly in Jesus' time it wouldn't have been missed. It would be a bit like putting an electric chair in front of the room. Except it had political overtones, so maybe more like a gas chamber. It's a symbol of death, and death that is used by those in power to make a point - to bend others to their will, to make an example, to show what happens when the rules aren't followed. It was first about human power to inspire fear. That's how the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome was imposed.

But this story opens up a new understanding. On this road to Emmaus the stranger interprets the events for them. He tells them about scripture and God's purpose in these events, and how the news has changed and shifted and how there's a new story going on in it all, through it all, if you can see it, if your heart is open to it. The news, he's trying to show them, is really about life. He's patient. He's gentle with them. He doesn't push. He shares until their hearts are ready to see.

Maybe you remember the violent movie that Mel Gibson directed, the Passion. It's a difficult thing to sit through, all in the interest of Gibson's view of realism. But what I find most off about it is that it tends to push the meaning further away as it assaults us with the gruesome details, almost like a horror movie.

Next weekend I'm singing with the Elmhurst Choral Union Bach's b-minor Mass, and I couldn't help but think of the contrast with Gibson's movie. Bach's setting of the Crucifixus - I almost played for you today, but you can find it, play it or come to the concert... Bach's setting is in the minor key, to be sure. There's a bass line that could be the hammering of nails...or in a larger sense the course of fate that has brought Jesus to the cross. That's good Lutheran theology...that Jesus was born to die, that the cradle already has the cross inherent in it. But there is as well in Bach's music a mournful kind of beauty, a tenderness, a sympathy, an invitation to see that God is doing something marvelous, world-changing in this cross. That God is trying to reach our hearts.

The same kind of feeling flooded back to me again this week as the press dug through old footage and replayed the comments of Bobby Kennedy, who soon would be assassinated himself, upon the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. They say this was a very rare occasion when he spoke of his own brother's death, as he tried to calm the crowd in the black neighborhoods of Indianapolis. And many believe his speech was the reason for peace that night in Indianapolis while there was violence in many other American cities. So he called for peace, for understanding. And then he quoted Aeschylus,

"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

And I wonder if that's something of what the two felt, when after they had walked, and after they had discussed the events, and after they had encouraged him to say, they went in to eat, and he broke the bread...and their hearts knew - not their heads - but they knew in their hearts what this was about....

This was God's call to let Christ's suffering be the end of suffering, to let his wounds be the end of our wounding each other, to let his death be the end of death....that God means to touch our hearts, to encourage them toward forgiveness, and grace, and understanding.

So those residents of the Emmaus Homes continue to be teachers. They, mentally handicapped, are not heart-handicapped. I'm sure, through this story, that God desires that we be heart-healthy, able to feel for each other...through the cross of Christ.

Let us pray,

We pray to one who knows what it is to suffer, from a world that knows suffering still. Save us from the hardness of heart that would guard us from love, that would insulate us from feeling. Fill us with the tenderness and compassion of Christ until all are drawn into its safety and peace. Amen.

Children: band-aids are for scrapes or cuts that hurt. What do we feel when someone else is hurt? We know what it feels like, so we feel "sympathy." That feeling is what God has for us in Jesus.