Series: Life Together in Christ “Choosing To Walk Together” Lead Pastor Scott Field Luke 24: 13-49 Date: 4/3/2016

Low Sunday

This is called "Low Sunday". There is a very long tradition of Christians dividing the year into a pattern for spiritual focus, like Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany or Ash Wednesday, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. But the Sunday after Easter is often called Low Sunday. Among United Methodists the consensus seems to be that it is called Low Sunday because there is low worship attendance compared to Easter Sunday. Others of a more aesthetic sense call it Low Sunday in comparison to the festival atmosphere, music and pageantry that sometimes accompanies Easter Sunday. No matter what the size of the church or its resources, Easter Sunday is the time for whatever passes for extravagance and putting on our best. By comparison, the Sunday after Easter is "low".

Other parts of the Christian family, notably the Orthodox tradition, use the calendar to celebrate various saints notable for particular characteristics or qualities of faith and devotion. According to that calendar it is the Sunday of St. Thomas -- a day to recognize the role of doubt as sometimes a necessary precursor to genuine faith.

I would like to pick up the insight of our Roman Catholic friends -- most of whom may not be aware of their own tradition. This is Quasimodo Sunday. I know right now you are thinking of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but let me explain briefly.

Some Sundays in the Roman Catholic calendar take their name simply from the first words of the Latin Mass assigned to that day. Quasimodo Sunday comes from the first words of the mass for the Second Sunday of Easter:

Quasimodo geniti infantes, alleluia: rationabiles, sine dolo lac concupiscite, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

An updated version is carried over into the Novus Ordo (the New Order) in Latin and, in the current English version of the Roman Missal, is rendered like this:

Like newborn infants, you must long for the pure, spiritual milk, that in him you may grow to salvation, alleluia.

The word quasimodo is a compound of two Latin words (split in the Missale Romanum), quasi and modo, meaning “almost” and “the standard of measure.” Thus, the combination means “almost the standard of measure,” which in the new translation is reduced to “like.” The quotation takes its cue from 1 Peter 2:2, which in the RSV reads, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation.”

I think this is closer to the heart of the matter for us today. After recognizing through the victory of Christ celebrated on Easter that our salvation has been won, we are now to long for, desire, and want to grow up into full salvation.

Christ is Risen....So What?

On the way home last Sunday, whether you were going home alone or to an Easter Feast with family and friends, or maybe just settling into a movie or sports or some leftover items on your To Do list, the thought might have crossed your mind: with all due respect to the worship celebrations of Easter morning, so what?

If Christ has been raised from the dead, what difference does it make - really?

That is a great question.

The first and perhaps most obvious is that if Christ has been raised from the dead, the world isn't anything like we thought. What is truly true and really real is enormously different than what many of us have been led to believe.

If Christ has been raised from the dead, then the time of death, the era of destruction is winding down, on the run, death's OWN days are numbered.

And all of the ironies of God, the things we might have thought were just wishful thinking for the weak and wandering, turn out to be more true than we can even comprehend.

God speaks through the Scriptures: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent."

The Apostle Paul then asks, "So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world's brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish" (1 Corinthians 1:19-20).

Our hope in Christ is not a fantasy or fairy tale - but rooted in the historical and miraculous resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

So we have a firmly grounded certainty that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The person without faith in Christ is the one to be most pitied of all.

Christ is Risen...Now What?

You've heard that before. Many of us believe this to be true -- Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end and everything in between. But there is a pretty significant problem.

If the Bible tells us that "anyone who is in Christ Jesus, that is, anybody who has faith in Jesus, is a new creation, how come, for many of us, we're the same ol' us The gospel promise, at least one of the most amazing of the gospel promises, is that we -- you and me -- sin-scarred, confused, narrow-minded and hard-hearted -- us, can become like Christ. This is what the word "Christian" originally meant: "little Christs". The Apostle Paul uses the image of himself as a mid-wife working through a hard labor with the anticipation that Christ would be fully formed, would be born, in the Christian believers. Not born in just some sentimental, spiritual way, but we would become more and more like Jesus himself (Galatians 4;19f).

As Ruth Haley Barton puts it,

Salvation is not merely about knowing where we are going when we die; it is also about the possibility of kingdom living here and now. It is about being fundamentally changed in the depths of our being so that the will of God can be done in our lives on earth as it is in heaven. (Ruth Haley Barton, Life Together in Christ, IVP, 2014, p. 11-12)

God's purpose in reaching us is a life-transformation -- a lifelong process by which Christ is formed in us -- for the glory of God, the abundance of our own lives, and the sake of others.

So often we model spiritual transformation on a process of education. An expert -- the teacher -- imparts knowledge to a group of students. In the case of many churches, we focus on technical education: how to read the Bible, how to learn what is in the Bible, what to do when we come to worship. Even more -- and maybe even worse -- we get the idea that spiritual transformation is about moral improvement so we try to act better or act right and we're pretty fearful of looking to others like we don't have it all together.

This may be another one of those things that makes God laugh because the gospel is based upon our need for redemption. It arises from the poignant, tragic, and eternal reality that we are by nature UNABLE to accomplish what we are trying to accomplish -- try all we want, we will not be able to transform ourselves into a "little Christ". That is about as likely as a dog learning to fly.

The Barna organization, a well-regarded survey and assessment group, found that the majority of self- identified Christians today (52%) believe that there is much more to the Christian life than they have experienced. Nearly half say their life has not change at all as a result of going to church.

How about you? Maybe you are disappointed with church or disappointed with yourself because, well, for all the promise of transformation in Christ, you seem to be pretty much the same day after day and year after year. For many of us church folks, it's like we're always standing in line for Space Mountain without ever actually getting on the ride. Waiting for the experience but never actually experiencing the experience. A ride at Disney is one thing; we won't live better or be better necessarily one way or the other. But actually experiencing God's Kingdom life here and now -- well, that does and will make a world of difference between practicing for life and really living.

Christ in us, the hope of glory --- how?

Have you ever let your mind wander, let your heart dream: what would it be like to experience the love, and joy, and peace, the patience and kindness, the goodness, and the self-discipline the Apostle Paul describes as the accompanying fruit when the Holy Spirit is given access to our lives? What would it be like if the benediction, the blessing at the end of worship wasn't simply a statement of aspiration, but a real commissioning: that we are partners with God in the healing of the world. Well, that is something worthy getting up in the morning for!

How, then, might we experience this resurrection life here and now and, even more, participate in God's Kingdom that is coming on earth as it is in heaven? How do we get beyond talking about the Kingdom of God to actually experiencing life in God's Kingdom?

During this month we are going to focus on the journey of two disciples, begun on that day of Jesus' resurrection, as they left the city and headed toward the small town of Emmaus. This is recorded in the 24th Chapter of the Gospel of Luke. I know that many members and friends of First Church have gone on a retreat called The Walk to Emmaus. If you can, shake loose from your recollections of that experience -- as spiritually important as it may have been for you. We are going to give our attention to the dynamics of something painted on a larger canvas than a particular pattern of retreat.

The journey I have in mind, borrowing from the insights of Ruth Haley Barton, is not a journey of geography but of transformation. The journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus, is the journey between the now and the not yet. Those two disciples were in what Richard Rohr calls a "liminal space" -- a spiritual position where most of us hate to be, but where the God of the Bible is always leading us. The Latin root limen literally means "threshhold", that transitional place when we are leaving the tried and true (perhaps because our recent attempts at trying have not provided the outcomes we had hoped for) and we have not yet been able to replace it with anything else.

In the Bible it is Abraham leaving his home country and his father's house for a land he did not know. It is Joseph in the pit. It is the Israelites wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and the Promised Land. It is Jonah in the belly of the big fish. It is Mary weeping at Jesus' tomb It is the disciples huddled in the upper room. It is the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and the unnamed disciple, betwixt and between the life they had known and whatever was supposed to come next. (Barton, Op.cit., p. 24)

Notice that for all of these people in the Bible, living their faith, risking their trust in God didn't happen through reading a book, watching a DVD, listening to a sermon, or taking a class. Even more, and this is foundational, their experience of faith wasn't something they charted out like setting up your schedule for the spring semester of your junior year. The laboratory for experiencing their faith, for becoming more and more like Jesus, was not the routinized and ritualized liturgy of an institution. It was the living of life.

So, how does this come together -- the persistent trajectory of growing in grace and the seeming randomness of daily living -- no matter our age or life situation? How does this resurrection life we celebrate on Easter really take hold of us?

Read all the spiritual self-help books you want. Go to all the seminars you want. Watch all the DVDs, TV preachers, and religious movies you care to take in. Unless God is actively involved in what is going on in your life, you will end up as better informed, perhaps a seminar groupie, and have a collection of DVDs, but you will not be transformed to become more and more like Jesus.

"Well, then, what's the use? How do I experience this resurrection life? "

Experiencing Transformation in Christian Community

Spiritual transformation takes place under the hand of God when we show up where God has promised to do the work of spiritual transformation.

Many of us have at least a rudimentary understanding of this. For example: • God's Word is provided as a means through which, as the Bible says, our minds can be transformed (Romans 12:1-3 • Prayer is a gift through which we can, through the Holy Spirit, enter into a dialogue with God. • The gospel good news itself is a gift through which we are awakened to our dead-end situation and invited to new life through faith in the Lord Jesus.

The self-starters among us jump on the bandwagon, buy a Bible and go to work trying to learn it. The not-so-self-starters among us attempt to muster up good intentions, but never seem to be able to crack the code on the book or engage the secrets of meaningful prayer. We're sort of stuck going to church and listening to sermons. But often all of us do our faith vicariously -- overhearing it from others or observing it in others.

The two disciples on the road to the village of Emmaus give us a clue when we are on the threshold of the life we have lived and the new life offered to us in Christ. It is the gift of God's work in our lives when we intentionally place ourselves in the community of other believers.

You may say, "Well, of course..." But community is something we often talk about but don't so often actually practice.

Many of us offer critique of the Christian community: whether the sermon was any good, the music was meaningful, or the children well-behaved. It is like we're going to faith as a performance, not a life. I fully realize that we set ourselves up for devolving into that kind of perspective, but it doesn't really do much of anything for helping one another become more and more like Jesus. We become like "Christian critics" who provide our "reviews" of various churches...as if others are waiting for us to publish our weekly critique. The critique, by the way, might be insightful and well-considered, but does it help us all become more and more like Jesus.

Others of us are religious consumers. We browse through churches like we browse through a newly opened grocery store. We like the fresh fruits and vegetables of this one, the other has a great variety of ethnic food selections, and the deli at this one is a cut above the rest. With churches it might be this one has a strong preacher and that one has a wonderful music ministry and this other one has an outstanding youth program or children's ministry, but the point is, despite our knowledge of the religious topography of the community, we ourselves remain unchanged.

Besides, when we affirm and look for community what a lot of us think about is "people like us who affirm being people like us -- we like the same things, dress the same way, drive the same cars, golf at the same course, work out at the same fitness center, go to the same movies, like the same food." I can find people like me all day long. Nothing against it -- like most of us, I like people like me. But while we all need our homies, what we desperately need and what the Christian community can provide if we love each other well, is the word of confrontation as well ass comfort, the challenge as well as the affirmation, the question of judgement rather than just accommodation. We worry so much about offending one another and hurting each other's feelings when we should probably worry much more if we are never offended or have our feelings hurt. Christian community is a discipline, a place of ordering our lives so God has access to change our hearts.

Last Sunday, Easter Sunday, I said that Jesus did not invite people to join a religion but to follow him. During April we will explore the challenge of following Jesus through Christian community. It will involve some choices for us: • The choice to walk together. • The choice to listen to one another rather than rush to fix each other. • The choice to discern Christ's presence among us rather than demand our way. • The choice to live a faith worth sharing rather than sell a religion no one may be buying.