Sunday Sermon - 19th of April

Sermon: Welcome to God’s new World - William Gibson

In today’s readings we hear of two events that both happen shortly after the resurrection of Jesus. First from the Gospel of Luke we have an account that occurs on the same day that some of the followers of Jesus had said that they had seen the empty tomb. We see here two followers of Jesus who were on their way home to a place called Emmaus.

The text says it is about seven miles outside of Jerusalem, which for walking at a steady average pace would take about two and a half hours and so understandably they are talking about all the things that have happened over the weekend. Can you imagine their conversation?

What did they talk about? Maybe they asked each other what they thought about the women’s report of the empty tomb? Maybe they went down the conspiracy rabbit hole and started discussing why the Roman government might open the tomb and remove Jesus’ body? Maybe they only spoke of their sadness, their heartbreak, and their grief? Maybe they discussed where they had been during the events of that weekend? We don’t know.

But all of a sudden, a stranger shows up and inserts himself into the conversation. I mean how rude? They are probably having a heart to heart and this guy they don’t recognise just butts in and goes what you talking about? One of them responds basically saying have you been living under a rock? Are you the only person who doesn’t know about what has happened in Jerusalem these last few days.

Turns out the stranger is Jesus, and he explains the meaning of the scriptures to them all the way from the Torah and Moses through to the Prophets. I mean they did have two and a half hours to kill. But eventually they reach Emmaus, and they insist the stranger joins for dinner and as soon as Jesus blesses and breaks the bread, they recognise that it was him all along and in an instant Jesus is gone.

The second story that we have is set 50 days later at Pentecost when the disciples receive the Holy Spirit and after being accused of being drunk at nine o clock in the morning the disciple Peter stands up to speak to the crowd in Jerusalem. He draws on the Hebrew scriptures to make his point that Jesus is the true Lord of the world not Caesar as the Romans claimed, and not an AI generated image of Trump as we have seen this week. He also claims that this Jesus who was crucified is also the expected Jewish Messiah.

Peter’s words cause the people who hear him to ask how they should respond to this news, and he says repent, turn your life around and be baptised. 3000 people join the Church on that day and after the passage we have just read, we discover that they devote themselves to the teaching of the people in Jesus’ inner circle, the twelve disciples. They also devote themselves to prayer and the breaking of bread together, as well as sharing all of their possessions in common so that no one had any need. 

These two stories might seem to only be related by the fact that they happen around the same time because they are very different events. However, Luke and Acts are actually written by the same author and can be considered to be a two-part work and so it actually makes sense to read this as a continuous story. This brings these two events much closer together. Between these two stories we see Jesus appear to the disciples and ask for food, we have Jesus again described as “opening their minds to understand the scriptures”, in both Luke 24 and Acts 1 we have Jesus’ ascension into heaven and his mention of baptism by water and fire, the replacing of Judas among the twelve disciples, and the events of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit is given to the Church.

There are a few things that this whole series of events might make us think about and I am going to focus on three of them. Food, baptism, and scripture.

What I want you to take away from today is this, that in these stories we find ourselves welcomed into the beginning of God’s new world. This is the world that the resurrection makes possible and is continuing to establish right here in the middle of our lives filled with taxes, doomscrolling, jobs, war, loss, uncertainty, corrupt politicians, and seemingly never-ending financial crises. In these few passages we see the beginnings of what would become a vision of what it means to be the Church.

FOOD

So first of all and the thing that you might all be thinking about as I talk right now, food. As the night drew in and they arrived at Emmaus the two disciples on the road invite Jesus in for dinner. So far, they have not realised who he is and it is only when he takes bread, blesses and breaks it that their eyes are opened to the fact that right in front of them is the risen Christ.

I wonder what memories this moment might have brought up for them, being raised in Judaism did they think of the Passover meals of their childhood, did they think of Jesus feeding the crowds with baskets of bread and fish, had they heard of that last meal that the twelve disciples had together where Jesus made a peculiar statement about the bread and wine being his flesh and blood.

We are on our very own road to Emmaus. We are walking often with grief, often with questions, and often meeting strangers on the way. Strangers who we might invite to come and join us for a meal. Because as a Church community once a month we find ourselves gathered for a meal. We call it communion or the Lord’s supper. It is recognised by the majority of Christians as what is called a sacrament. Which is a visible sign of a sacred thing. It is an external sign of God’s good will towards us. The word sacrament itself comes from the Latin Sacramentum which is translating the Greek Mysterion. A mystery.

This is not to say that it is something inaccessible but rather a recognition that it is something that we can’t manufacture. It is a work of God. You might be here for the first time today or you’re new to Christianity and you might feel a bit like everything here is a bit of a mystery, it is all strange and unfamiliar, it is a bit like you are sitting with a stranger trying to figure it out.

And I could stand here all day talking about and explaining it all as best as I can but in reality, we gather in faith that at communion and in our gathering together it is God who opens minds, hearts, and eyes to see the risen Christ is right here in our midst. Maybe today will be the first time you walk away and say, “was not my heart burning within me” like the disciples on the Emmaus Road.

And so in God’s new world the symbol of food comes to represent a few things. The body and blood of Christ at communion that makes possible this new world where all things are restored and made right, where we are able to be in relationship with God. It represents a world where everyone has enough, where there is no hunger or thirst, and where there is even abundance and celebration like what we experience at a wedding meal to which all are invited. So we who partake in this feast should be working for a day where that is true for all individually, politically, and spiritually. And it represents nourishment and sustenance, sustaining us as a community and in our daily lives.

BAPTISM

Now second, in our tradition in the Church of Scotland we recognise two sacraments the first is communion and the second is baptism. Baptism is what Peter says should be our response to the good news that in Jesus the world has been made new, and this is because baptism is an external sign of the fact that we have been made new. When our lives are turned around by Jesus and we put our faith in him, our faith tell us that we don’t just have a new belief system, in fact we in the water of baptism go down into death with Christ and are raised to new life in him.

Not only this, but baptism is an equaliser. Our identity is no longer bound up in the labels we attach to ourselves, our own sense of being worthy or unworthy of good things, or the divisions which society tries to force on us. The apostle Paul tells us in a letter he wrote to the church in Galatia that those who are baptised in Christ are clothed with Christ and because of this there is no longer slave or free, Jew or Greek, male and female, all are one in Christ. This is what we call the new humanity; our particular identities are not erased but they are transformed in Christ.

Just like the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus, he was truly Jesus and yet he was transformed in such a way that the two could not recognise him. We have three other stories of resurrection in the gospels and in all of them they are alive again but not transformed because one day they will die again. The power of death continues to hold them but in the risen Christ the powers of death are defeated, and new life is made possible.

Baptism comes to represent this new life that is available to us in Christ a life transformed by the fact that we are freed from the powers of sin and death and recreated in Christ to do good, to love, and to become truly like Jesus. It represents our adoption into the family of God. It represents our initiation into a community where all belong, where all are welcome, and all our beautiful diversity is transformed into an even greater beauty. And like at Jesus baptism when the spirit of God descends and says this is my son in whom I am well pleased, in baptism we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. God’s enduring, guiding, and loving presence with us.

SCRIPTURE

Our stories today are also bound together by the theme of scripture. Jesus explains the scriptures on the road to Emmaus and Peter explains the scriptures to the crowd in Jerusalem. But in both of these stories they do something new with them. These are scriptures that the two on the road and many in the crowd would have been familiar with and yet Jesus and Peter are interpreting them in an unfamiliar way because they are interpreting them in relation to the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

We see a Jesus centred interpretation. The Hebrew Bible comes to life in a new way because of Jesus. In the gospel of John we see the most dramatic opening line of all the gospels. In the beginning… was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God, and the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. That word was Jesus. Jesus says another time that you look in the scriptures thinking that in them you find eternal life, but they bear witness about me. The book of Hebrews tells us that in the past God has spoken in a variety of ways but now he has spoken by his son.

What we see then is that God has told us who he is most clearly in Jesus. God is like Jesus and both the scriptures, and the church are human witnesses pointing us towards that divine revelation.

And so we see in these stories how scripture should function for us today. First, it should point us to Jesus. Second, it should help us to become more like him. As St Augustine said, “anyone who thinks that they have understood the scriptures but cannot by their understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them”. In other words if you read the Bible and it doesn’t produce a greater sense of love for God and the people around you then you are probably reading it wrong.

Conclusion

So now we come to ask why we have spoken about food, baptism, and scripture in relation to God’s new world. Well if we go back to the time of the protestant reformation they mostly agreed on at least two signs of how we might identify the church. They said that it is wherever the sacraments are rightly administered and wherever the word of God is purely preached. This is still how the Church of Scotland describes the role of a minister, we are ministers of word and sacrament.

The New Testament scholar and Anglican Bishop Tom Wright also makes the connection between word and sacrament in his commentary on the Emmaus road. He says that “scripture and sacrament, word and meal, are joined tightly together. Take scripture away and the sacraments become a piece of magic. Take the sacrament away, and scripture becomes an intellectual or emotional exercise, detached from real life. Put them together and you have the centre of Christian living”. 

So we see here in the stories we have focused on today a vision for the Church and for all of the world. A vision that has deep roots reaching back to the myths we have told about humanity’s beginning and a hope that is able to imagine a better future. On the road to Emmaus we can see the echoes of the very first pages of the story of scripture when Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree and the book of Genesis says that “then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realised they were naked”. Just as when Jesus broke the bread and Luke says, “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight”.

We see in all the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances, God’s new world breaking through into our world as it is. I know Doug quoted him last week but to quote GK Chesterton again he said of the resurrection “the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn”.

If we see the beginning of God’s new world on display in the resurrection stories, then at Pentecost and during the events that followed we see the birth of God’s new community. A community of resurrection, of hope, of love.

This is the community that we hope you might find here. That you might find people gathering in this place who because of Jesus are living in such a way that we however imperfectly are bringing about God’s new world. A world where everyone is invited to the table to eat and drink and all come away satisfied, a world where in baptism we find new life in Christ a life that overcomes our divisions and transforms us into people who by virtue of their new life have become enemies of death and the powers of death and injustice.

That here in this place you might find people who are patient with one another but impatient about the establishment of God’s justice and peace. Because we truly believe that the powers of death and sin that seem to have such a firm grip on humanity are in fact defeated. May you find here a community who are attentive to our shared stories found in scripture and who love both God and our neighbour better because we are transformed in the process of hearing that word.

I love the way that Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the Church. Christ existing as church community.

May we be that community of resurrection and if you walked in here today and Jesus seemed like a stranger, I pray that you may come to see him more clearly.

Amen.