Text: Luke 24: 13-49
Improbably, a stranger entered and, as he broke the bread, his disciples knew Jesus was with them.
Improbably, I knew my father was with me. I was standing on the risers, a first-year college student flanked by the other robed members of Samford University’s A Cappella choir and facing a packed crowd in a faraway state. Other than my fellow choir members and our director, all others in that auditorium were strangers to me. But shortly into a 90-minute concert, I realized my father was in the audience. At the conclusion of a Bach chorale, I had heard plainly the not-particularly-distinctive and not-particularly-loud sound of my father clearing his throat. He was somewhere in that room even though I could not see him, even though I was unaware my parents knew the details of the choir’s touring schedule, even though I was hundreds of miles from home—but I knew in an instant he had traveled a great distance to hear the choir and see me for a few minutes after the concert.
What a gift to recognize someone’s presence.
Last week we had our dog Lily shaved so she could shed her heavy coat and tolerate another summer in Mobile’s heat. Her summer buzz cut had not been required when we lived in Ohio. So it was only after moving here some summers back that we first saw her stripped of all her fluff and fur. The first time I picked up Lily from the groomer, I literally did not recognize her. She’d been clipped and shaved into an entirely different species. Even her personality seemed . . . shier, as if she were embarrassed by the new “do.” But at supper time I caught sight of the old Lily again when I brought out her dinner bowl and she broke into her signature dinner dance of ecstasy.
What a gift to recognize another.
Raising a child during the era when missing children’s pictures—and their age-enhanced images—haunted our milk cartons, I sometimes wondered if I would recognize my own daughter years later if the worst thing imaginable happened. Then I would recall my first moment with our newborn. That initial glance had seemed as if I were seeing her for the millionth time. If you had asked me moments before her birth to describe what she would look like, I could not have told you. Ultrasound images back then looked as if they’d been made by a 2-year-old with an Etch-A-Sketch. Gender testing during pregnancy hadn’t started. But as soon as Georgia and I locked eyes, I had the visceral sensation that I had always known our baby would be a girl and that she would look exactly as she appeared to me in that first meeting. “Yes,” I said to her in a silent glance. “I know you. I knew you would look exactly like this. If there are a thousand babies in a thousand bassinets in the hospital nursery, I will find you. I will know you.” Love in that moment felt like a jolt of recognition and, improbably, reconnection.
What a gift to recognize another.
Sometimes while holding my husband’s hand, I think that I could be deaf and blind but still could find George among thousands of other people if I could just touch his hands.
What a gift to know one another —through touch and sight and sound and taste and smell. We were made to appreciate the particularity of each earthly being and thing.
Blessed are we to have bodies to receive the sensory data that form personality, mental constructs, relationships, even spiritual experiences. The body and soul should not be pitted against one another. We are embodied beings. The unity of body, mind and spirit is at the heart of Christian theology—from the doctrine of creation to incarnation to resurrection. To deny the holiness of the body is heresy; to disrespect or harm the body is to wound the Christ.
Early Jesus followers were partly influenced by Greek philosophy that separated body from spirit and judged the soul to be good and the body evil.[i] Certain trajectories of Christianity ever since have been wary of the body. We think immediately of ascetics who deprived the body or of Victorian prudes who despised the body. We admit that we today also demean this gift from God, using human bodies to sell products, neglecting our personal health, injuring planet earth for short-term profits, covering up sexual abuses through the auspices of the church itself. But Christianity’s roots in Judaism helped the early church and can help us affirm the sacredness of creation and resist naming healthy physicality as “evil.” Salvation is not an escape from this world but a recognition of this world’s holiness and a commitment to its healing. Jesus acknowledged that God’s kingdom was a unity of heaven and earth when he prayed: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The only way we CAN glimpse the sacred is through the physical sensations of our experiences. No wonder Barbara Brown Taylor lists “the practice of wearing skin” as a spiritual discipline.[ii] We at Open Table include “embodied prayers” among our spiritual practices, praying not only with our minds and in words but also with our bodies through mindful breathing or walking or other physical actions or expressions.
Luke makes a big deal of Jesus’s bodily resurrection, maybe to affirm the sacredness of our physicality. Spiritual transformation has physical manifestations. An earthy Jesus is not offering us an escape route to some invisible realm in the clouds years hence; he offers a way to live as fully alive human beings here and now.
Luke’s story of Cleopas and his companion meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus tells that we, like those early disciples, often don’t recognize Jesus as we journey through life (See v. 16 of today’s Gospel reading). But Jesus is present. In the words of the song we sang earlier, “There is one among us whom we do not know. Host of highest heaven present here below.”[iii] Jesus’s way of resurrection is present to us when a stranger walks beside us . . . when we, too, interpret our own life stories alongside other stories of faith (v. 27). . . when we break bread with strangers (vs. 30-31). . . when we feel our hearts burning within us (v. 32). Jesus’s embodied spirituality engages us in relatedness and attentiveness.
Luke’s story continues as these two companions and Jesus meet up with the other disciples in Jerusalem. Like the resurrected Jesus we read about last week in John’s Gospel, Luke’s Jesus speaks peace to frightened followers who need to touch his body. But when they all still disbelieve (v. 40), this Jesus asks for something to eat and they offer him a piece of broiled fish. What an odd detail! “Hey, you got anything to eat?” seems like the last thing you’d expect in a holy moment. I guess you can’t blame him since he’s not eaten for three days! And after all, Luke’s Jesus was always eating, mainly with sinners. Or he was feeding the hungry. So once again we see that sharing food—and appreciating it—are spiritual practices for Jesus followers. Shared meals connect body and spirit, strengthen community, and transgress social boundaries to usher in God’s liberating realm. It is through table fellowship that we often have our best shot at experiencing the presence of Jesus. It is when you and I share dinner with the mothers, fathers, and children of Family Promise—which we’ll do again a week from Monday—that I often feel God’s presence most powerfully. It is in tasting life in all its flavors that we know sacredness.
Since my favorite flavor of life is chocolate, I’ll share a modern Easter story, set in a little village in France, told cinematically in the movie Chocolat. For those who’ve not seen the film, picture a town of upright but unhappy villagers under the control of a repressed mayor who oversees even the young priest’s sermons--just to make sure they contain enough condemnation. Imagine a colorless wintery landscape overhung with gray, forbidding skies. One day the voluptuous Vianne, wearing a scarlet cape, arrives with a young daughter and without a husband. She opens a chocolate shop in town just as the 40 days of Lent begin. The citizens, monitored by their fanatical mayor, at first avoid the tempting treats. But gradually they succumb not only to Vianne’s confections but also to her warmth and vitality and indifference to propriety. The exotic chocolates begin to work their magic: reviving one marriage, imbuing an abused wife with courage to leave her marriage, reuniting an estranged mother and daughter. A festive dinner brings them all together one evening—as Vianne’s enemies plot her ruin. You see, Vianne, a female Christ figure, has started consorting with those on the fringes of society--gypsies living on the edge of town--so suspicions intensify. On the last day of the Lenten austerity, the mayor breaks into her chocolate shop to destroy it. But in the process he accidentally tastes the tiniest bit of chocolate. And he’s hooked. His long-denied appetite cannot be sated until he’s gorged himself into a chocaholic stupor. On Easter morning he’s found asleep in the display window of the shop, an undignified heap smeared with the dark evidence of his excesses. His stranglehold on the people has been broken. Life returns to the village with the signs of spring.
That morning Father Henri’s homily at the Easter mass has, for the first time, escaped the mayor’s edit. The priest begins to find his own voice: “I'm not sure what the theme of my homily today ought to be. Do I want to speak of the miracle of Our Lord's divine transformation? Not really, no. I don't want to talk about His divinity. I'd rather talk about His humanity. I mean, you know, how He lived His life, here on Earth. His kindness, His tolerance... Listen, here's what I think. I think that we can't go around... measuring our goodness by what we don't do. By what we deny ourselves, what we resist, and who we exclude. I think... we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create... and who we include.”
Has chocolate worked magic? Or has Jesus been present in everyday earthiness and kindness and community?
An earthy Jesus who enjoys broiled fish—and probably confections from a French chocolate shop—invites us to be human. Which means to love. To be grateful. To give up our need for control. To be resurrected into the fullness of life.
Because we are human, of course, our bodies will sometimes betray us with appetites and urges that can be harmful. With heartache and injury and illness that are painful. With age and diminishment and decay. That’s part of our humanness, too, as the Crucified One knew.
But we love and live as part of the larger life of the cosmic Christ. Your one life is uniquely and fleetingly precious. But it remains connected to the eternal life of God. And even on this side of eternity, we can celebrate the goodness of earth, of flesh, of God who took on human flesh.
Hear again the words of the hymn I sang earlier. These lyrics by Brian Wren are not what you’d expect in church. All the more reason to let them countermand the mayors of our world who deny the sacredness of earth and flesh:
Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
Good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
Good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
Good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
Good is the body for knowing the world,
Sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
Feeling, perceiving, within and around,
Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Growing and aging, arousing, impaired,
Happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
Glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
Good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.
If you would affirm this goodness, say out loud with me “Amen". Amen!
[i] Brown, Robert McAfee. Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy. Louisville: Westminster, 1988.
[ii] Taylor, Barbara Brown. “The Practice of Wearing Skin” in An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
[iii] Bell, John. There Is One Among Us: Shorter Songs For Worship. Chicago: GIA Publications, 1999. We are using this collection of diverse songs from the Iona Community as our primary songbook.
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