Year A
 Acts 2:14a,36-41
 Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17
 1 Peter 1:17-23
 Luke 24:13-35

May the words of my mouth O God…  speak your truth…

M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled… starts out with the sentence…  Life is difficult…  it’s a book which makes the unpleasant-sounding claim…  that facing and solving our problems can be a painful process… that many of us try to avoid this pain… and by avoiding it we can increase it…  and reduce our ability to grow psychologically and spiritually…  but Peck claims that confronting and resolving our problems… and struggling through the changes it brings…  can also enable us to reach a higher level of self-awareness…  and self-awareness leads to spiritual maturity…

Peck wrote about the importance of gratification delay… which means giving up present comfort for future gains  ] accepting responsibility for our own decisions  ] being dedicated to truth and honesty in both word and deed  ] and learning to manage conflicting expectations… 

I know what it is to put things off…  like writing this sermon…  perhaps some of you do too… and I can confirm the fact that it can bring some level of discomfort… and sometimes we can get away with putting things off… so we can prepare ourselves for them… like training for a marathon prepares runners… but eventually they have to run the race…  eventually we have to see and name our stuff and deal with it…

Some years ago…  I got a new pair of glasses…  both lenses and frames… I’d put it off because my prescription hadn’t changed very much… but now it was time… and I got a pair of progressive lenses…  with one adjustment that corrected for an astigmatism…  a focusing issue…  and one which corrected…  with something called a prism adjustment…  for a mild form of double vision…  or lazy eye…  something I’ve had since childhood…  and I needed it more when it was almost evening and the day was nearly over… when my eyes were tired… ]  so I get the new glasses… and go to a lecture a few days later… but I see two speakers at the podium…  and I knew something wasn’t right…  now optometry is a science… but it’s not rocket science… and my confidence…  my faith in this eye doctor was shaken… because my glasses had always been right the very first time…  so I go back to the eye doctor and they check the prescription in the lenses… and check my eyes again…  they even call my former eye doctor in Ohio… and after talking…  they decide to remove the part that corrects for lazy eye…  because unbeknownst to any of us…  that part of my vision had improved…  and voila…  my eyes were able to focus on the same spot… and I could see…

But here’s the lesson…  I had been pointing mental fingers at the eye doctor… and the technicians… thinking it was them… thinking that it was something in the lenses they prescribed and customized for me…  not realizing that there was some improvement in my own eyes…  that I didn’t need that particular correction…  and which was now keeping me from seeing clearly…  and as in so many things…  while I didn’t know it at first…  I ought to have been pointing those fingers at myself…

The Gospel says that Emmaus was about seven miles from Jerusalem…  but no one really knows just where it was… some think Emmaus might have been the site of a Roman garrison… built around a pool of water…  all the resurrection stories happen on the same day…  in today’s story… it’s still Easter day… these two have heard stories about the empty tomb… they’ve heard all the reports…  they have all the facts… but are struggling with the meaning… with how to interpret it all…  they’re sad and dejected… they know about some other disciples who ran away from the cross… but by walking towards Emmaus… they’re also walking away from Jerusalem…

John Shea claims that the whole of the Gospel is a journey toward Jerusalem… the revelation of the cross takes place in Jerusalem and the story ends there… according to Luke… avoiding Jerusalem is avoiding the path of Christ… walking away from Jerusalem and toward Emmaus…  means that these two are walking away from the other-worldly power of Christ… and are walking towards the worldly power of Rome…

I understand some of this… because when the glasses didn’t work out the way I expected them to… when I couldn’t see clearly… I had the facts but didn’t know how to interpret them…  I wondered how many more trips to the optometrist I’d have to make… and maybe I couldn’t…  but I wanted to forget the whole thing too… walk away…  maybe find another teacher…  I mean another optometrist…

And so it’s easy for me to wonder…  how many more times must I hear Jesus’ story before I get it… before I understand it clearly… before I see Jesus right in front of me…  in creation…  in relationships…  and in the breaking of the bread…

Yvette Schock… Associate Pastor at Faith Lutheran Church in Arlington, Va… wrote… my vision needs returning all the time…  so I find comfort in the Emmaus story…   Jesus does not leave the disciples on their own…  blind to the reality of resurrection…  in their grief they can’t see well enough to go looking for him…  so he finds them…  he walks with them and takes a place at their table…  and in the breaking of bread…  their eyes are opened…  and after he vanishes…  they acknowledge that they kind-of…  sort-of…  mostly knew something was up the whole time…  adjustments had been made to their understanding when Jesus interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures…  and the were able to see with the eyes of their hearts…

My vision needs daily refocusing too… even though I am fed by scripture… even though my search for God goes back to childhood…  even though I strive to share the radical forgiveness… unmerited grace… and loving inclusion of God in Christ… I too can get beat down by the myopic vision of the world… which sometimes can’t see grace sitting at our own tables… but at this Table… something happens… though it may be difficult to see… we may taste bread and wine…  and wonder if the flesh and blood we can’t see is real… and reliable… but Eucharist is mystery…  and that which connects the unmanifest with the manifest… the timeless with the time-bound… the heart of God with our hearts… is love… and I believe that that love is real…

I wonder how many of us take The Road to Emmaus…  or take The Road Less Traveled…  but I believe that whether we travel on either one of them…  Jesus meets us where we are…  on either one of them…  it is Easter…  late in the afternoon…  the day is nearly over… and it is almost evening…  will we invite Jesus into our home…  will our hearts burn within us…  will we recognize him in the breaking of the bread…  and let him feed us…  so that our eyes will be opened too…  and we can embody even more of God’s love…