University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

HOPE IN THE PAST TENSE

Luke 24:13-35

A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Third Sunday of Easter April 6, 2008

            This story is a beautiful tale, exquisitely told… one of the most engaging stories in all of Scripture… and its meaning is clear. One scholar notes that such beautiful and complete stories do not need or invite interrupting comments.[1] Of course, that has never stopped preachers before; nor shall it today.  There are so many rich veins to mine in this story of that Easter afternoon: the palpable disappointment of the two disciples heading away from Jerusalem after the death of their master… the engaging conversation on the way when that as yet unrecognized master walks beside them… his willingness to stay with them and to break bread with them… the moment of recognition when, in the breaking of bread, they see him for who he is… and, once he is gone, the powerful remembrance of how he had stirred them as he opened the word to them… and the rush back to tell the others.

            There is so much here to ponder, and at different times I have found myself drawn to different parts of the story.  Today I am drawn to the words the two disciples speak to Jesus, whom they do not recognize, as they walk along the road to Emmaus.  In response to his question about what they had been discussing, they describe for him the events that led to his crucifixion, and then add plaintively, “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  We know almost nothing about these disciples who are on their way to Emmaus.  We know the name of only one of them, Cleopas, and beyond the name we know only the deep disappointment he voices.  We had hoped, he says.

Frederick Buechner once described the journey of this weary twosome this way:

There was nothing left to do but get out of town.  And where did they go?  They went to Emmaus.  And where was Emmaus and why did they go there? It was no place in particular really, and the only reason they went there was that it was some seven miles distant from a situation that had become unbearable.[2]

They had hoped and thought that Jesus was the one who would redeem Israel, an expectation that was built on the cornerstone belief that the Messiah would come with power, to destroy the enemies and to restore the fortunes of Israel.  But Jesus’ humiliation and trial and his cruel death seemed now to have proved that he was not the one. So now their eyes are clouded by a combination of tears and fears and disappointments. Barbara Brown Taylor notes that

Luke is the only gospel writer who tells us the story of what happened on that road, but everyone has walked it at one time or another. It is the road you walk when your team has lost, your candidate has been defeated, your loved one has died – the long road back to the empty house, the piles of unopened mail, to life as usual, if life can ever be usual again… It is the road of deep disappointment, and walking it is the living definition of sad, just like the two disciples in today’s story.

Hope in the past tense, [she says, is] one of the saddest sounds a human being can make.[3]

“We had hoped,” they said, past-perfectly defining their disappointment.  Says Jon Walton, “There, captured in a phrase is all the longing of a people who had hoped, waited, watched and remained vigilant for a messiah and who had found their fulfillment postponed.”  There are so many people, in Scripture and in everyday life, who have hoped, “longed and waited for a promise to be fulfilled, a potential to be realized, a possibility to become a reality, and who wait patiently still, hoping against hope, believing against all odds….”[4]  And, of course, there are others who have become skeptical, even cynical and bitter… for whom hope is only voiced in the past tense.

I had an e-mail this week from an old friend who is an American living and working abroad.  In recent years, he said, he has become increasingly distressed at the way American conduct in global affairs has tarnished America’s reputation in the countries in which he lives and works.  Then he said, “I had hoped that this year’s political campaigns would afford an opportunity to rethink and recommit ourselves to historic principles of truth and fairness and justice, but I fear that they have dissolved into the same old infighting.”  I had hoped, he said.

A couple I know, like others you know, so wanted children, but suffered one disappointment after another.  There was counseling, then fertility treatments, then… well, you know how it goes.  But one day she called him with the news; the pregnancy test was positive. Their joy was palpable.  Their friends felt the same way. No one would love a child any more than they. They painted and prepared an extra bedroom as the nursery. The baby showers were great fun.  But then, like a lightning bolt from a clear sky, came the miscarriage.  The joy gave way to wailing and lamentation.  We can’t go through it again, she said. We can’t. We had hoped the ordeal was finally over. We had hoped.

A friend and colleague has served her congregation faithfully for years, a pastor in every way except that she remains unordained, unable to respond fully to her sense of call or to celebrate fully her manifold gifts because her life’s partner is a woman, not a man.  A couple of years ago a ray of light broke through the heaviness that clouded and obscured her ability to serve fully… a  task force that had explored the meaning of peace, unity and purity in our denomination and had suggested a new way of living together in our disagreement within this important discussion.  The new way would neither open doors fully nor close them completely and would require of us all careful and thoughtful discernment of individual stories and congregational needs.  We were only beginning to live into that tough conversation a few weeks ago when our denomination’s Permanent Judicial Commission closed the door, essentially declaring chastity in singleness to be an essential tenet of Presbyterian faith and polity, unless the General Assembly and presbyteries authorize a change in our constitution.  Like sunshine that shines ever so briefly through the storm clouds and then disappears, so the hope for a new way of dealing with one another in the Presbyterian family seems to have vanished as well… and I add my voice to those who say, “We had hoped for a new way of dealing with disagreement.” We had hoped.

The sadness of hope expressed in the past tense (or past perfect) is that it often marks the relinquishing of hope, the abandonment of hope.  It signifies the triumph of cynicism and agnosticism about the future. And, if the story of the walk to Emmaus is any indication, it also tends to blind us to the good that is yet possible… blind us even to the presence and power of grace to transform and redeem even our deepest disappointments.  Hope in the past tense drains the initiative from us.

            Can hope be resuscitated, resurrected?  Of course! This is an Easter story, after all.  Says Barbara Taylor,

The blindness of the two disciples does not keep their Christ from coming to them. He does not limit his post-resurrection appearances to those with full confidence in him. He comes to the disappointed, the doubtful, the disconsolate. He comes to those who do not know their Bibles, who do not recognize him even when they are walking right beside him. He comes to those who have given up and are headed back home, which makes this whole story a story about the blessedness of brokenness.

Maybe that is only good news if you happen to be broken. If you are not, then I guess it would be better news to hear a story about how those who believe in God may skip right over the broken part and go straight to the wholeness part, but that does not seem to be the case. Jesus seems to [prefer working with broken people, with broken dreams, in a broken world [in the midst of hope in the past-perfect].[5]

He comes to those who are broken.  He comes still. That, at least in part, is the meaning of Easter, after all… the meaning of this beautiful story from Luke’s Gospel: that even when our hopes have been dashed, even when our confidence in the future has been shaken, even when we find ourselves utterly broken and bereft, he comes still. And the place where he comes, says Frederick Buechner, is very apt to be our own Emmaus road… the road we take when we want to escape, when we want to throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.”[6]

But there are some things that even in Emmaus we cannot escape. We can escape our troubles, at least for a while. We can escape the job we did not get or the friend we hurt. We can even escape for a while the awful suspicion that life makes no sense and that [faith in] Jesus is just a lot of wishful thinking. But the one thing we cannot escape is life itself: the fact that [we are] here on this earth… living human being[s] with blood in [our] veins and breath in [our] lungs. We cannot escape getting hungry, and we cannot escape eating. We cannot escape walking or driving down a dusty road to get from one place to another. And my point is this, that it is precisely at such times as these that life is going to ask us questions that we cannot escape for long: questions about where the road we are traveling is finally going to take us; about whether food is enough to keep us alive, truly alive; about who we are and who the stranger is behind us.

In other words, it is precisely at such times as these that Jesus is apt to come, into the very midst of life at its most real and inescapable. Not in a blaze of unearthly light, not in the midst of a sermon, not in the throes of some kind of religious daydream, but… at supper time, or walking along a road….

The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only… the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our … imagination – if we live our lives not from vacation to vacation, from escape to escape, but from the miracle of one instant of our precious lives to the miracle of the next – what we may see is Jesus himself, what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hands of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love.[7]

            .

In such sacred moments, we rediscover our hope… our living hope… hope to inspire and encourage us, even in our brokenness, hope to sustain us in this and every day... hope, if you will, in the present tense.