Sermon February 18th, 2007 Luke 24:13-35

Week 2 in sermon series following "Growing to be Like Christ"

One of the writers from week 2 of this small group study many of you are participating in mentions the process by which he became a real estate agent. Now, it seems his father gave him some basic instruction before, so he had a chance to observe a bit what that practice looked like, but he says he learned the most from two mentors who took him under their wing when he first got started in the business. He says,

“I believe that this discipline (of submitting to their experience and expertise) taught me a lot about my walk with the Lord. God doesn’t expect me to go it alone. Nor does he expect me to find my own way and muster up enough inner strength to implement real and lasting change in my life. He gave me the Holy Spirit. He guides, leads, and empowers me to live the Christian life. I have to be willing to yield control to God and let him lead.”

Now, I’d like to highlight a point of emphasis I see in this short quote from the author that says something like this (in my words); Before I submitted myself to the mentorship of these men, I had no idea how to be an excellent real estate agent. And only because I recognized I didn’t know, admitted it, and submitted myself to learn, was I freed to learn what it meant to be an excellent real estate agent.”

In that same line of thought, a man that I carry a deep amount of respect for as a Christian leader once said, “North American Christians are trained to believe that they are capable of reading the Bible without spiritual and moral transformation. They read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic citizens who think their common sense is sufficient for understanding the Scripture. They feel no need to stand under the authority of a truthful community to be told how to read. Instead they assume that they have all the “religious experience” necessary to know what the Bible is about. As a result, the Bible changes to fit their lives rather than their lives changing to fit the expectations of God. I suggest the right reading of Scripture depends on having spiritual masters who can help the whole Church stand under the authority of God’s Word.”

Now, I recognize this sounds a bit weird to you right now, because it sounds a bit weird to me, and it might make you uncomfortable, because it does the same to me. The words “submit” and “authority” have a bad name today in our society, maybe primarily because we’re so individualistic, and we hate the idea of someone telling us what to do, but I also think it gives us a bad taste because it makes us immediately think of a cult where everyone shuts their mind off and blindly follows a leader. You guys remember David Koresh and the Heaven’s Gate cult? Some of you have been around for the multiple times Jehovah’s Witnesses have prophesied that the end of the world was coming. It happened the first time in 1873 when the leader William Miller got a bunch of his followers to stand on a hillside in white robes waiting for the end, and waiting, and waiting. And when that failed, they said it would come in 1874..that failed. Then they prophesied that 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1920, and 1925 when they built a house for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other faithful prophets in San Diego, and deeded the house over to the prophets when they finished building it! They then declared the end was coming in 1941, 1944, and 1975, and yet, in all this time, less than 2% of the total members of Jehovah’s Witnesses left their movement. Now THAT is unthinking following. So we’ve seen enough cults in this world to feel JUST A BIT uncomfortable when we hear the words authority and submission. But I’ve had a chance to be exposed to a lot of Stanley Hauerwas’ life and what he cares about, and the authority he’s talking about is not this unhealthy following of an institution where we shut our minds off.

In fact, he’s one of the most humble men I know… a country boy from Texas, and he tells a story often of his cousin Billy Dick. One Easter, when Billy was six, he was in Sunday School at Lakewood Methodist Church in Dallas, TX, listening to the story of the crucifixion. He suddenly realized that the crucifixion was a very unhappy experience. He waved his hand in a desperate attempt to attract the teacher’s attention. The teacher finally saw him and called on him. Billy stood up and blurted out, “If Roy Rogers had been there, those dirty SOBs would not have been able to do what they did!”…and Stan’s point in sharing that story was that it represents in a lot of ways what blue-collar folks in Texas are all about. They don’t think of ourselves as the elite of a society, but as a kind of simple people who do the right thing, year after year.

And I think that same sort of mentality exists here in the Shenandoah Valley. The things we care about run deep in the tradition of who we are as a people…the Valley clearly has folks that care about the way they live and want to protect that lifestyle. So we don’t mince words when it comes to all the subdivisions popping up in Harrisonburg and Fishersville, the massive development over at Harshbarger, and the possibility of a MASSIVE car manufacturing plant just a couple of miles away from here. We in the Shenandoah Valley, especially my grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation, are a people with some guts, who dig in against changes that make us uncomfortable and argue passionately for what we believe.

And so, when we read the Bible, we really believe that if WE had been at the crucifixion, we certainly WOULD NOT have let it happen. We are NOT the kind of people who let innocent people be killed. And I think most of us like Billy Dick’s appeal to Roy Rogers or Walker, Texas Ranger or Arnold Swarzenegger…we might say it differently, but we do NOT believe that we would have let Jesus be unjustly crucified. We’ve all got some Billy Dick in us, because (and all you have to do is go to the movies), here in America we like to side with the underdog. We daydream often about being heroes, where evil abounds and we can go into a situation with guns blazing and set the world right again.

We assume if we had just been there with Jesus, if we had just been able to follow him day in and day out- to witness his miracles, to hear his teachings, to see his confrontations with the leaders of his society – WE would have been faithful. WE would not have abandoned him at the Cross. We are even more confident that we would have recognized him if Jesus had joined us on the road to Emmaus.

That we think we would have never abandoned Jesus is an audacious claim that often doesn’t have a whole lot of reality to it. I’ll speak for myself here, but because I recognize I am so powerfully driven by MY self-interest, when I read of what Jesus said to the Pharisees, instead of scoffing at their self-righteousness, I try to intentionally read the story as if I am the Pharisee Jesus is speaking to, because I am more often self-righteous and puffed up than I am humble. When I hear the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector, I try to consider myself the Pharisee because I am greatly tempted to fall into the trap of considering myself more important than others because I “go to church, tithe, pray, sing.” Any of us who have been around the church for an extended period of time can fall into this trap.

And so that guides me as I encounter what seems to be the stupidity and deafness of the Pharisees, the stupidity and blindness of the disciples, and the crowds who one day declared Jesus to be King, and the next day shouted “Crucify him!” because I have all of this laid out before me today; who Jesus was about, how he responded to evil, how he used his power, how he cared about others, challenged others, and I STILL OFTEN don’t get it!

So what it comes down to is the reality that if we understand the revolutionary nature of the gospel, the way it turns what WE consider to be the good life on its head, it should become very clear to us that most of us would have been, at worst, in the crowd shouting “Crucify him! Crucify Him!” or at best returning home thinking Jesus’ ministry was good while it lasted, but it was time to get back to the “real world.” To claim that we would have recognized Jesus on the road to Emmaus is similar to the thought that in order to understand Scripture all we have to do is pick it up and read it. Both claims assume that everything’s there and easy for us to recognize, and reasonable folks can see the facts if their minds are not clouded.

However, the story of the Emmaus road makes clear that we will make very little spiritual progress or have any growth in understanding in our lives unless we engage in a disciplined practice of submission to learning that includes three main things. The first act of submission is to God. We yield our body, mind, and spirit for His purposes. When we wake up in the morning, go to sleep in the night, and live the 14 or 15 hours or so in between those two events, we surrender our body, mind, and spirit into the hands of God to do with us what he pleases. The second act of submission, deeply related to the first, is to Scripture’s authority to guide us in all matters of life. We yield ourselves first to hear the Word, to receive the Word, and obey the Word. The third act of submission is to the church, the body of Christ. And when I say the church, that has three dimensions; the historical, global church of the last 2,000 years, the heroes of the faith over that time who should be primary examples for in life as they followed Jesus, and Middle River Church of the Brethren here in New Hope, where we as a church family make decisions and live life together, not as a ragtag bunch of individuals with our individual lives at the center of reality.

If we focus on these three things first before anything else, and apply them time after time in our lives before we claim our individuality, we will have a beautiful and consistent foundation from which to build our lives in Christ.

The story of these two followers along the road to Emmaus should highlight this point. Why did they not recognize Jesus at first? Not only that, why didn’t they recognize him all the way as they were walking and talking, then stopped and sat down to eat?

I think part of the solution might be to think of these two as more fringe admirers; maybe they saw Lazarus raised from the dead, maybe they were there when Jesus cleansed the temple; or maybe they were around him the whole time, and just like everyone else, completely missed the point even though Jesus plopped it right down in front of them.

So obviously these guys have been impacted by Jesus, but they just haven’t understood the meaning of Jesus’ life and death. And that reminds me of a story I read in a book here recently that talked of an encounter between two brothers. One’s name was Clarence Jordan. Clarence and his wife and two other folks founded what was known as Koinonia Farm in Americus GA in 1942, where they had a vision of an interracial community where black and white Christians could work side by side and live in a spirit of unity and equality and mutual respect. Through the 1950s and early 60s, Koinonia’s simple commitment to this life brought them subject to firebombs, bullets fired into their houses repeatedly, KKK rallies, death threats, property damage, excommunication from churches for their racial stances, and economic boycotts. Needless to say, it was a tough situation. His brother’s name was Robert, and he was a lawyer who later became a state senator and justice on the Supreme Court. At one point in a particularly rough time, Clarence approached his brother Robert, and asked him to legally represent Koinonia Farm as they fought for justice in the 1950s.

Robert responded to Clarence’s request, saying:“Clarence, I can’t do that. You know my political aspirations. Why, if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I’ve got.”

Clarence responded, “WE might lose everything too, Robert!”

Robert said back, “It’s different for you.”

“Why is it different?” Clarence said, “I remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the church the same Sunday, as boys. I expect when we came forward the preacher asked me about the same question he did you. He asked me, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?’ And I said ‘Yes.’ What did you say?”

“Well,” Robert said, “I follow Jesus, up to a point.”

Clarence said back, “Could that point by any chance be- the cross?”

“That’s right,” Robert said, “I follow him TO the cross, but not ON the cross. I’m not getting myself crucified here.”

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple,” Clarence said. “You’re an admirer of Jesus, but you’re not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer, not a disciple.”

“Well now,” Robert fired back, “if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t HAVE a church, now would we?”

“The real question then,” Clarence said, “is, Do you have a CHURCH, or somethin’ else?”

I think these men on the road to Emmaus are a lot like Robert Jordan here; they were admirers. They had thought that in this man Jesus they had found the long-expected Messiah. They knew Jesus was powerful. In fact, they used to think he had the potential to set Israel free. The redemption of Israel is after all the political freeing of the people of Israel from being under the thumb of others. So they throw up their hands and give up…until Jesus links up with them here and begins to explain to them what they had seen in Jerusalem. He starts ALLLL the way back at the beginning with Moses and runs through the prophets to tell them about how he was the fulfillment of all this. He points out to them that they had missed the meaning of the prophets about what the Messiah would look like and care about, where I’m sure he quoted Isaiah 52 and 53 along the way that showed God’s servant being bruised, beaten, misunderstood, and ultimately killed instead of riding a wave of public acclaim to destroying the Roman Empire and putting Israel at the top of the heap...

What we’ve got here is Jesus pointing them to Scriptures they PROBABLY were already familiar with and had NO IDEA had anything to do with him. Their PROBLEM HERE was grasping the meaning of Jesus in these words. They had not received the teaching and training that would transform the Scriptures from a bunch of dusty words on a page into life and truth exploding in their faces, tearing their lives limb from limb, exposing them for who they were without him, and giving them life! You see, Jesus had to lead them to unlearn what they thought the Messiah would look like so they could learn what he was really all about.

And this is why we gather as a church Sundays for worship, and why we’re gathering to talk about these things in small groups over the next six weeks, and why we call ourselves disciples of Jesus; because we’ve committed ourselves to unlearning the “good life” as the world defines it to figure out the “good life” as God defines it. And we struggle to grasp this lesson because we and our friends assume that Messiahs and Kings are people of power, not suffering servants like we find in Isaiah.

But our Savior comes not as the world knows power figures. He comes instead offering us the practice of forgiveness and reconciliation necessary for us to be a people capable of living, without envy or selfishness or destructiveness in the world. Instead of a kingdom that crushes its enemies, we are a part of a kingdom that is instead about choosing to suffer and die rather than destroy others that God has made.

Instead of a kingdom that offers easy fixes and hyped-up emotions that deny reality, we are called to trust God through everything life throws in our faces. You see, this is process of growing to be like Christ. We have to submit fundamentally and daily to the reality that he knows better than we do. We have to submit to unlearning the things the world tosses at us that are in fact destructive and twisted for the vision of life shown us by Jesus. And while this can and will be deeply painful at times for us, as we wrestle with the Scriptures and with God, and live life together as a church, we find out of this struggle something rooted, something life-defining, something of beauty. But in order to achieve this, we have to make the move from being admirers of Jesus to being disciples of Jesus.