Where Will God Find You? And Will You Notice?

Luke 24: 13-35

Roger Lynn

April 30, 2017

(click here for the audio for this sermon)

God is all around us all the time. And most of the time we don’t notice. We find this story played out over and over again in scripture. With very few exceptions, whenever folks encounter the risen Christ they don’t understand what they are experiencing. Mary thought she was meeting the gardener. Sometimes they think it’s a ghost. The disciples on the road to Emmaus saw only a fellow traveler. Most of the time we see what we expect to see and we don’t see what we don’t expect to see. And the sad truth is that much of the time we aren’t really expecting to encounter God in our everyday, ordinary lives. Which makes it ever so much more difficult for God to actually be encountered and experienced. 

For the disciples on their way to Emmaus, literally the last thing in the world they expected was to have an encounter with the risen Christ. Their world has collapsed down around them and they have given up. You can hear the despair in their comment, “But we had hoped that he was the one to set us free.” (Luke 24:21) “Had hoped” - past-tense. They are going home with their tails between their legs, dejected and defeated. And we know all about such feelings. At one time or another, and sometimes all too often, we find ourselves dealing with our own shattered dreams. Frederick Buechner, in his book “The Magnificent Defeat” describes the road to Emmaus this way. It is “the place we go to in order to escape – a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, ‘Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.’ . . . Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that [people] have had – ideas about love and freedom and justice – have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends.” How can we possibly pick up the pieces and go on? There is no meaning to be found anywhere!

Fortunately, encountering God is never just up to us. Even when we get lost in the dark and tangled mess of our own fragile and broken lives, we can find ourselves surprised by the unexpected presence of God. God meets us on the road to our own Emmauses – in the ordinary places and experiences of our lives, and even in the places where we retreat when life is too much for us. And so it is that from time to time we catch glimpses of something beyond the shadows, something greater than simply our own mortality. Perhaps, like the disciples in Emmaus, it is in something as mundane and ordinary as a meal – hospitality offered and received. Perhaps it is in “the meal” we celebrate when we gather at the communion table. Perhaps it is in an unexpected note from a long-lost friend. Perhaps it is in the simple hug from a child. God is not particularly choosy about the ways in which Divine Presence is made manifest. Since God is everywhere, literally anything can serve as an opening into a holy encounter. But we do have to notice. God will continue to surprise us even when we have stopped looking, but it is still up to us to receive the surprise – to be open enough to respond once God slips past our defenses.

And whenever we do respond, what we discover is that our lives are transformed. Not merely the life we think of as our future, but even that which we think of as our past. The ripples which spread out through our lives from the experience of an encounter with the holy move both backwards and forward through time. The disciples who met Christ on the road as they traveled back home to Emmaus were unaware of what was happening. If the encounter had ended before the evening meal, when the light came on for them, they likely would have found nothing at all particularly remarkable about the afternoon they spent with the stranger they met on the road. But once their eyes were open, once they woke up to the truly sacred nature of their experience, they were able to notice echoes of that experience even in the past. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)

Where will God find us? In the everyday, ordinary routines of our living, and in the extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime moments of our lives. If we are breathing, if our hearts are beating, it is a moment when God can find us. Even in those times when the light has fled and the life has drained out us, God is present, waiting for us to notice. The next time we are surprised by God, will we notice?