Breaking Bread
Luke 24:13-35
Emmanuel Baptist Church
May 3, 2020; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Kitchen Scene with Supper at Emmaus by Pieter Cornelisz va Rijck, 1605
A recording of the service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/5zXqiheG2Bc
Once, when I was serving a church in Indiana, I went on a weekend retreat about 40 minutes from where we lived. There were several other groups using the common dining hall. I had just put away my dishes and was walking back to join my group, when I found myself hugging a woman I hadn’t seen in 10 years.
Grace was a friend from seminary. We had lost touch after graduation. It was a complete shock and a wonderful surprise to run into her. I learned that she was also serving a church in Indiana. After that, we stayed connected. We lived about 90 minutes apart, but every couple of months, we would each drive halfway and meet at a restaurant, where we would talk about our work and our families. Then I moved to New York. Meeting halfway for lunch didn’t work anymore. But Grace had another idea. So in those first months that I was here, when I didn’t really know anyone, we would set a date, and I would call Grace at lunchtime. I would sit out on the front steps of Emmanuel with my lunch and my phone, and we would talk about our work and our families. And even though I couldn’t see her face, the sound of her voice reminded me of the way that she tilted her chin and the way she held her fork and the particular expression that she always had when she leaned in to say “Kathy, tell me how it is with your soul.”
So much happens around meals. The gospels record over 20 instances of Jesus at meals. He had a reputation as a lively dinner guest. His detractors called him a glutton and a drunkard. Over meals, he deepened friendships and made some enemies, he told stories and challenged assumptions.
The meal in today’s story comes at the end. The set-up for the meal is a journey. It is on the long walk to Emmaus that two of Jesus’ disciples encounter a stranger. He doesn’t seem to know anything about what is happening in the world. The disciples react like we might if someone showed up and got very close to us and asked why so many stores are closed and what’s with the face masks?
The disciples don’t recognize Jesus as he walks along with them. Luke says that their eyes keep them from recognizing him. They have a perception problem.
Maybe you have perception problems lately. I have quarantine brain. I’ve learned to read texts and e-mails at least twice because my eyes are not picking up all the words. I’ve learned to ask Jim to repeat himself because I don’t remember what he just said. There’s nothing really wrong with my ears or my eyes or my brain, but the situation we find ourselves in has altered some of my perceptions.
The disciples were in the midst of sorrow and bewilderment and fear. The tomb was empty. Just that morning the women had told them that Jesus was alive. They were perplexed by this news. Whatever it might mean, it was a let-down. It didn’t fit with what they had believed about Jesus the Messiah. Their sorrow and disappointment is summed up in three words – we had hoped. “We had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem Israel,” they say. Its in the past tense. They are no longer hoping. Their sorrow and disappointment cloud their perceptions and they do not recognize Jesus. He is a stranger who seems completely outside their lives.
But then he tells a story. The kind of story that can happen at a meal or on a journey. A long family story, the kind that might begin “when your great-grandmother was just a little girl . . .”
Jesus tells a long, long story, a story that begins with Moses and ends with the events of the last few days. He tells their story back to them. Their family story, their faith story. But he reframes it so that it becomes bigger and deeper and richer. “When Jesus tells the story . . .he grounds it in memory, in tradition, in history, in Scripture. He helps the travelers comprehend their place in a narrative that long precedes them, a narrative big enough to hold their disappointment without being defeated by it. When Jesus tells the story, the death of the Messiah finds its place in a sweeping, cosmic arc of redemption, hope, and divine love that spans the centuries. When Jesus tells the story, the hearts of his listeners burn.”[1]
By the time he is done with that story, their journey is over. The stranger is going on, but they ask him to stay with them. The one thing they get right all day is extending hospitality. What if the disciples had not greeted the stranger on the road? What if they had not listened to his stories? What if they had let him go on his way? They might have missed this sacred encounter.
A Dutch artist known for his large kitchen scenes entitled this drawing, “Kitchen Scene with Supper at Emmaus”.[2] It shows a busy kitchen in a wealthy household in the 17th century. The title of the drawing with the word Emmaus is the only clue that we should look very carefully. The people in this kitchen are intent on many tasks. The disciples also undoubtedly had things to do at the end of their trip. But something prompted them to ask Jesus to stay. Holy moments, encounters with God can be elusive. Sometimes they can be happening in the room where we are without our notice. Have you found it yet? The Emmaus part of this picture?
For those on the phones, let me describe the picture. There are about 10 people in the main part of the kitchen which is quite large. There are three hunting dogs and a mother dog with pups which a girl is playing with. One woman is peeling carrots. Another is tending a fire. I can see a dead rabbit and a goose waiting to be skinned and plucked. There are also live chickens. A man with an ax is leaving; his companion seems to be chatting with a woman instead of coming with him. The scene is busy and I imagine noisy. But at the very back of the picture there are a couple of steps leading up to a smaller room and in that room, we can see three people sitting around a table, apparently oblivious to the bustle of the kitchen. The suggestion of this picture is that God comes to us in the midst of the ordinary, that perhaps “every meal has the potential of being an event in which hospitality and table fellowship can become sacred occasions.”[3]
Jesus takes the bread, the regular bread that is part of their meal. He blesses and breaks it and gives it, as he had done when he fed 5,000 people, and probably at the supper table in the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus, and when they celebrated the Passover. Suddenly, they recognize him in the breaking of the bread and everything falls into place because of that long story he told on the road.
Extending hospitality to a stranger, they recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread and realize that God was with them all along. This forms the pattern of early Christian worship: two or more gather together, they tell stories that recall Jesus’ presence, reflect on scripture and break bread together. [4] What has evolved into our church communion celebrations began when believers gathered in homes on the first day of the week to enjoy an ordinary meal together. Rachel Held Evans says, “They remembered Jesus with food, stories, laughter, tears, debate, discussion and cleanup. . . . According to church historians, the focus of these early communion services was not on Jesus’ death, but rather on Jesus’ friendship, his presence made palpable among his followers by the tastes, sounds and smells he loved.” [5]
The story of Emmaus reminds us that God meets us in the guise of the stranger, at the most unlikely moments. And God meets us in the most ordinary moments. God meets us in the text we receive from a lonely friend, in the patience we struggle to find when stir-crazy children and adults are in the same house all day long, and also in the silence of an empty apartment. God might meet you in the neighbor who waves when you walk your dog or the person who rings up your groceries behind a plastic shield. God can meet us in a phone call lunch with a friend and in a breakfast worship gathering shared across Zoom.
God meets us at the most unlikely moments and in the most ordinary moments. If your ordinary moments are also your most unlikely moments right now, then hear the good news: your story, with all of its moments, is part of a bigger, deeper, richer story of divine love and hope and redemption, and God is meeting you there. Thanks be to God.
[1] Debi Thomas in her essay But We Had Hoped at https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2616-but-we-had-hoped
[3] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp 480.
[4]Sharon H. Ringe, Luke: The Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p.287.
[5] Rachel Held Evans, Searching For Sunday: Loving, Leaving and Finding the Church, (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2015) pp. 125