The Magic Moment

April 14, 2002

Luke 24:13-35

The miracle of Easter is not the resurrection. The true miracle of Easter is that anyone noticed. The true miracle of Easter is that anyone believed in it. The unexplainable part of the Christian story is the faithful response that followed Easter and the resurrection.

I know it seems to us now, from this perspective, that it was God’s plan and inevitable. The Gospel of John suggests this and Christian tradition maintains it. But I am not so sure because in scripture God’s plans get thwarted all the time. The story of God with God’s people is usually characterized in scripture by God deciding something and God’s people doing just about the opposite.

God’s original plan is a good example. It seems God planned that we would live in a garden paradise forever and always but God had to abandon that plan very quickly because of things his people did.

In fact most of the history of the Hebrew people is about God planning for one thing and then revising the plan because of something one person or many people did.

The garden didn’t work out so God put God’s people out into the world.

The world after the garden didn’t work out so God destroyed it with a flood.

The people who survived the flood weren’t quite what God had in mind so God dispersed them and gave them different languages.

God called a special group of people out and led them to the land that God would show them. And that Promised Land has been mostly a promise ever since. Even though God has seemed to try all kinds of ways to have them inherit the land.

I could go on and on. The Christian movement itself can be characterized as a response to people gone wrong. Some Christians fancy themselves as the new chosen people because the original chosen people gave up their birthright through disobedience. My point is simple. If you look at even a small part of what we used to call in seminary “sacred history” there is very little that makes a strong case for God having a plan that is well scripted or closely followed.

Was the disobedience of Adam and Eve God’s plan? How about the killing of Abel? How about the Flood? Did God see that coming from the first? How about the short unhappy history of Israel as an independent country? The Babylonian exile? The destruction of the temple twice? The destruction of Jerusalem? The death of Jesus? The enmity that exists in Israel now? Again I could go on and on but the point is clear there is no plan but rather a fluid relationship between God and God’s people and no one knows the outcome.

I am sure that God is shocked again and again by the decisions people make that are in utter contradiction to God’s will. That is why when Jesus got up on Easter morning I am sure that God had no idea what, if anything, would come of it.

You know it could have happened that the people who saw Jesus alive would discount what they saw and not believe that they saw him. That is just as likely as someone believing in the resurrection.

These two that we read about this morning could have just as easily said to themselves that it was just wishful thinking. Or something like we feel so bad about Jesus dying that we want to believe we have seen him. They could have thought that or something like it. That is what any psychiatrist worth his or her salt would tell a patient who saw something a dead man alive. That is what any sane person would say.

When I was in Seminary I would return to Minnesota every summer and work at a place called Camp Wilder. It was a beautiful place set up for the use of the service organizations in St. Paul. We would get day camp kids from the poor neighborhoods of St. Paul. We would get halfway houses for drug addicts. We would get abuse shelters. There was a whole array of people with a whole array of problems. One program that used Camp Wilder was a group home for schizophrenics. That was an interesting bunch. Many times talking to them they would seem as with it and normal as anyone else. One particular guy found out that I was studying for the ministry and so loved to talk about God to me. He was actually pretty well versed in the Bible and many times wanted to talk about what things in scripture meant. I was happy to oblige and learned any number of things from him. But one morning I was talking to him and he started saying things that Jesus had sad that I knew were not in scripture. They were actually quite strange. They were commandments about when to eat breakfast cereal and what kind of clothes he should wear. I finally said to him that I didn’t think that these passages were in the Bible. He said something like, “I know I just heard them this morning.” I asked him where he had heard such things. And he said quite confidentially that Jesus had told him just that morning at breakfast! Well as sane as he seemed that could be interpreted as a little crazy and yet that is exactly what the two on the road to Emmaus are claiming in the scripture reading.

No, I don’t think that the resurrection was the true miracle of Easter morning. Rather it was that anyone bought the story. You see because you have to get way out the box to get your mind around this idea. And I am not talking about simply the idea of flesh being somehow reanimated after death. That is the easy part and that is still mostly impossible. The hard part is not the physical impossibility it is rather the spiritual impossibility of the resurrection. To believe in the resurrection you have to believe that the worst darkness of this world can be redeemed and transformed. It is positive thinking gone berserk. And to accept it as a one time occurrence is challenging but then to claim it as a universal principle is otherworldly.

It would have been easier to just leave him be. It would have been easier to not recognize him and proclaim him alive. If he is alive then there is nothing that cannot be redeemed and we have a ton of work to do.

It never says what those two were doing on the road to Emmaus but I kind of think they were slinking home. The end had come and the cause that they had given their lives too had failed. And now they had given up. That is what John reports Peter did. He went back to fishing. But it was not over. The true miracle had just begun and God needed them more than ever to be a part of it. But to be a part of it they had to not give up, even when all was lost.

God gave them this chance but the great news is that God gives everyone this chance. I think God gives everyone this chance over and over again. Circumstances arise in our lives and we must decide if the resurrection is real. We have to decide if the resurrection is a story or a universal reality and then act accordingly.

For the two men on the road to Emmaus that decision came the day of Easter. Their lives had failed and the decisions they had made proved to be mistaken. Into their failure comes hope that they don’t even recognize. And when they do recognize it they have to decide if it is real or not.

I think it is so instructive where they look for confirmation for this most fundamental decision in their lives. They do not look for evidence. They do not say to each other things like, “Well it looked like Jesus” or “did you notice that mole under his ear? That was a birth mark.” They didn’t look for marks or wounds in his hands. They look for nothing external. Nothing could ever convince them finally of the reality of the resurrection. That kind of convincing is just not possible. So they look to the place where all the magic happens, they look to their hearts and decide. Is there hope? They are ready to stake their lives on it not because they are convinced but perhaps because it is the better choice.

Are you ready to believe something so positive? Are you ready to apply yourself even to the lost causes of your life simply because it is God’s will? Are you ready to live with such unrelenting hope? I hope so because your lives depend on it. I hope so because the future of the world depends on it. Because all it takes is one simple decision of faith to make all the difference. If it were not so we would have never heard of this moment from two thousand years ago.