A SENSE
OF AWARENESS
April 6, 2008
TEXT: Luke 24:13-35
This ghost story from Luke’s gospel has to be one of
the strangest of all the resurrection appearances. The risen
Jesus walks alone the road to Emmaus while Cleopas is discussing
the events of the day with another disciple. Jesus asks, “What
are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” And
Cleopas answers, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem
who does not know the things that have taken place there in these
days?”
And after Cleopas tells him what had occurred, Jesus turns the
question back to him, “How can you experience these things
and not know their meaning?”
Jesus has a point. Events occur throughout our lives and we fail
to recognize their significance and their meaning. We often don’t
understand the significance of another’s life in relation
to our own. And often a very brief encounter with a stranger
can be a life changing event.
Marilyn Leuty, a missionary to South Africa, told this story.
Mark was walking home from school one day when the boy ahead
of him tripped, dropping everything he was carrying: books, two
sweaters, a tape recorder, bat and glove. Mark helped pick up
the scattered articles. Since they were going the same way, he
helped to carry part of the burden.
As they walked, Mark discovered that the boy’s name was
Bill. He loved video games, baseball and history, was having
lots of trouble with his other subjects and had just broken up
with his girlfriend. They arrived at Bill’s home and Mark
was invited in for a Coke and to watch some TV. The afternoon
passed with a few laughs and some small talk, then Mark went
home.
They saw each other around school, had lunch together sometimes,
and had brief contacts over the years. Three weeks before graduation,
Bill asked Mark if they could talk. Bill reminded him of the
day years ago when they had first met. “Did you ever wonder
why I was carrying so many things home that day?” asked
Bill. “I had cleaned out my locker because I didn’t
want to leave a mess for anyone else. I had stored away some
of my mother’s sleeping pills and I was going home to commit
suicide. But after we spent time together talking and laughing,
I realized that if I had killed myself, I would have missed that
time and so many others that might follow. So you see, Mark,
when you picked up those books that day, you did a lot more—you
saved my life!”
An encounter on the road and an invitation to share hospitality
transformed Bill’s life, literally saved his life. So often,
God’s love is made real to us in such simple ways as a
chance encounter.
If you look at any of the ancient maps of Israel you probably
won’t find Emmaus. There are three different places in
the Holy Land that claim to be the village of Emmaus, yet the
only place in all the ancient writings is in Luke’s gospel.
Frederick Buechner says that Emmaus was not so much a place as
a state of mind. “The state of mind is escape—escape
from pain, loneliness, longing, sorrow, bewilderment, grief.
It is the place where we spend much of our lives, the place in
our lives where we are likely to say, “Let the whole thing
go to hell, it makes no difference anyway.” The road to
Emmaus is that place where we go to escape whatever it is we
need to escape—whether it is our job, the people we have
to put up with in our daily lives, a demanding, ungrateful family,
or that horrible gnawing grief over life and lost love.
It is into these moments of life that the Christ is likely to
enter—when life is most real and inescapable. God’s
grace does not usually come in a blaze of heavenly light or the
sudden revelation of a dream or even in the midst of worship—God’s
grace falls in on us in the midst of the supper table or walking
down the road, trying to get away. God’s grace falls in
on us in the midst of the everyday and ordinary moments, in the
plain and simple struggles to understand, in the middle of common
conversations on long walks, during phone calls and driving in
the car to pick up or deposit kids.
The sacred moments of our lives are the everyday moments in which
we can learn to open our spiritual eyes and see the redeeming
grace of God moving along the road with us. The road, the conversation,
the meal, the friends, even the stranger—all ordinary,
but made incredible through the grace of God.
“The world does not lack for wonders,” Chesterton has written, “only
for a sense of wonder.” The burning hearts of the disciples were the
sudden realization of the wonder of the grace of God in their lives.
Did not our hearts burn within us, when we met him on the road?
Has your heart ever burned within you? For me, a burning heart
is the feeling you have when you know you have broken from darkness
into spiritual light, when something once painful and meaningless
becomes profoundly significant because there is some truth revealed
to you in the moment.
And life is filled with these moments when our hearts could burn
within us. Grace abounds along the road of living, no matter
if we are trying to escape; God comes to us and breaks through
to us in the most common ways in the midst of the most mundane,
breathtaking moments.
Life is really a search for awareness, of discovering the presence
of God in the ordinary. The Buddhist religion emphasizes attention
to the details of living—“mindfulness” as Thich
Nhat Hanh describes it. In Christianity we call it the mysticism
of ordinary experience, of seeing God revealed in the common
things of life such as the breaking of bread.
Jazz is also a music of awareness, of a recognition of what is
in the soul of the composer. The music of jazz evolved from the
music of the church, most notably the black church. Unfortunately,
the sophisticated white aristocracy couldn’t understand
this. Princeton professor, Henry Van Dyck, said that “jazz
was the invention of the devil for the torture of imbeciles.” He
said it is “not music at all. It is merely an irritation
of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of
physical passion . . . an unmitigated cacophony, a combination
of disagreeable sounds in complicated discords, a willful ugliness
and a deliberate vulgarity.”
Henry Van Dyck never sought to understand the meaning of jazz.
He could not feel the rhythms and harmonies that Charlie Mingus
felt in his Holiness church where he said it could “transport
people spiritually” to a greater awareness of who they
were in relation to their God.
Blues singer Alberta Hunter said blues are especially spiritual. “When
we sing the blues, we’re singin’ out our hearts,
we’re singin’ out our feelings. Maybe we’re
hurt and just can’t answer back, then we sing or maybe
even hum the blues.” Saxophonist Ornette Coleman believed
that a dedicated performance was “just showing that God
exists.” Listen with all seriousness to the music of the
legends of jazz and you will become aware of the presence of
God in their hearts and souls.
The two travelers of the road to Emmaus asked Jesus, “Are
you a stranger in Jerusalem that you don’t know what’s
going on.” And Jesus asks us, “How can you live in
this world and not know the meaning of what is happening to you?”
How could we not be aware of what is happening to us; of what
meaning our lives have; of what expression we give to that meaning?
Years ago when I had more time—or should I say, I took
more time—for quiet walks in the woods, I would come across
a human construction that dated back to the last century. Perhaps
it was part of a foundation of an old house or a footing for
bridge that no longer existed. But it would be the only thing
in the natural environment that would give me a sense of time,
and therefore a yearning for a past that I never experienced,
a nostalgia for a time unlived. There are pieces of music that
arise from our national soul— plaintive, nostalgic melodies
that have a certain ring of familiarity as though they had come
out of our collective consciousness, and says, “yes, you
belong here. You are home.”
When Antonin Dvorak was invited by Jeanette Thurber to visit
this country in 1892, she had hoped that he would compose an
American opera based on Longfellow’s Hiawatha. Dvorak never
did, but in his own longing for his Czech homeland, he studied
a certain number native melodies which he described as “beautiful
and varied themes . . . a product of the soil. They are American.
In the Negro melodies of America, I discovered all that is needed
for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender,
passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay,
gracious, or what you will. . . .” When he composed his
symphony, “From the New World,” he never used those
actual melodies, but rather Czech folk tunes. And yet the Largo
from his New World Symphony evokes what we would call a distinctly
American flavor, full of homesickness, wistfulness, and the raw
power of the new world. To both Czech and American listeners
it conveyed a sense of belonging.
We are not “poor, wayfaring strangers traveling through
a world of woe” as one spiritual would have it. Rather
God has created this earth as our home and told us “You
belong here. Now take care of it.” We are no longer strangers
in the universe. When we become aware of God’s presence,
even in all the broken places of life from Baghdad to Kutztown,
we know we are at home. The risen Christ has broken bread with
us and we are strangers no longer.
-Harry L. Serio
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