Luke 24: 13-19; I Peter 1: 23-25

Directions to Emmaus

Many years ago I was doing volunteer work for a few months in Jerusalem.  Somehow I found out that in Bethlehem one of my theology professors from Claremont was giving a lecture at a Christian institute so I took the bus and showed up there.   On the way back I stopped in Cambridge in England where the dean of the same school was spending his sabbatical.  I showed up unannounced there.  Both professors had these puzzled looks on their faces.  But fortunately it hadn’t been more than a year since I had seen them. Today we find ourselves on the Emmaus road.  Words are spoken between Jesus and two people who should know him, but do not recognize him.  We have all had that experience.  Somebody we haven’t seen for a long time who now looks different.  Maybe their hair style or hair color has changed or their physique has developed in certain directions.   These things are more likely to happen when we see those people in a place where we are not expecting them.  But think of all the times you might have seen fellow high schools students in different places and you did not recognize them.   I don’t get to do that, because I grew up somewhere else.   But you may not know this. One day as I was taking some church people visiting from the Philippines through Old Sacramento and there I saw a familiar face that I had not seen for twenty years or so.  Seeing her with a white man and two children I put the pieces together.  It is was Herning and Bill and their two children. They were just moving to Sacramento from Atlanta.  She was a friend’s cousin and I had last seen her when she was in her mid-twenties.  So I guess sometimes we recognize people we are not supposed to recognize just as much as we do not recognize people we are supposed to. But the question that comes up is: How would we do on the Emmaus road, on that short seven mile stretch between Jerusalem and Emmaus?  Would we recognize Jesus? 

Friends, in a way we are jealous perhaps. We are jealous because we were not on that road to Emmaus with Jesus. There would have been so much we could have asked him and so much we could have told him.   Of course we believe His presence is still with us somehow, but we are not sure how to get to it.   It is possible that we are all on Emmaus roads of some sort.   But how do we get to it?  How do we get our directions to the Emmaus road?   I have always loved map, road maps, terrain maps, nautical and aeronautical maps.  I like plotting ways to get from one place to the other.   Like figuring out how to get somewhere by looking at the landscape.  Geography and a sense of space are important to me. If I am flying over a group of islands I have to figure out which ones they are.  There is always something new to be astounded by.  Did you know Sacramento is way further west than Santa Barbara and that Reno is further west than Los Angeles?  Did you know that flights from San Francisco to Bejing will often barely fly over the ocean. They will follow the coast to Alaska and then go over the Aleutian island to the Kamchatka peninsula and in over Manchuria.  You learn a lot about countries when you look at the map.  In order for Russia ships to get to their warm water ports on the Black Sea from the Atlantic, they will have to pass through the straits of Gibraltar and two narrow channels.  It changes your view of the world. But it is no excuse for aggression of course.

But then there are no maps that lead to the Emmaus road.  Oh I am sure you could get close to it on Google Earth, but the Emmaus road as a meeting point of us and Jesus, there is no GPS for that. A GPS is a device that combines word and map.  But perhaps our Bible passages can give us a clue.  In I Peter it says that the word of the Lord will last forever.  It is really the only thing that lasts, for nature doesn’t, including human bodies.  It quotes Isaiah 40. But in the Gospel of John Jesus in the Word, the Word that has always been there. So we find the word on the road to Emmaus, pointing the way to go. Word and road map like a GPS.  But the road is a spiritual one.

Friends, we may not have the map of the Emmaus road, but we do have the Word that does not change.  That Word is the word Jesus.  In today’s passage that Word teaches us that it is important to pay attention to strangers, because they may be people you know or want to know.  They may be people that have something to teach you.  They may be people who show you a roadmap for the rest of your life, just by the things they say.  They may be people you are supposed to help with a word of encouragement or a listening ear.  We are walking with strangers through whose words and thought and actions we may see and meet the risen Christ.   The Emmaus road is everywhere and it is inside you. May God point the way.