IN THE SANCTUARY
The Road to Emmaus: A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Easter (Luke 24:13-35)
by Rev. Dr. Bobbi Dykema
The Road to Emmaus: A Sermon for the Second Sunday in Easter (Luke 24:13-35)
by Rev. Dr. Bobbi Dykema
Rev. Dr. Bobbi Dykema holds a Ph.D. in art and religion from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She serves as an interim pastor at First Church of the Brethren in Springfield, Illinois. Especially interested in the work of the artist in the community, she specializes in art and religion, the period of the Reformation, and the intersection of women’s studies and religion.
How many times in your life have you received communion? You can do the math if you want to: twice a year here at Whitestone plus at Love Feasts in the spring and fall, and any other communion service you’ve attended at another church, give or take being absent due to traveling, illness, etc. Let’s say you’re eighty years old. Four times a year for eighty years is three hundred and twenty times. If you compressed it all into one year, it wouldn’t even get into December.
How many times have you eaten a meal with another person? Your parents and siblings, your spouse and children, other family, friends, church potlucks, etc.? Maybe as many as three times a day every day of your life! Three times three hundred and sixty-five times eighty. . . . Well, it’s a lot.
I got to have dinner with Peggy at her house on Friday night. She made green bean casserole, roasted brussels sprouts, and this wonderful salad with about six different kinds of vegetables in it. She also offered bread, but I thought what she had would be sufficient, and it was.
And then, at one point, as we were eating and talking, she shared that on Sunday while I was speaking the words of institution for communion—which you may have noticed I don’t follow a script for—she realized that when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, he didn’t wait until the table was cleared and everyone had a tiny, fancy glass cup and a little piece of bread. No. He and his friends were eating a meal together, and at one point during the meal, he picked up the bread and explained what it meant, and gave them a gift—a way of remembering him—that they could continue using forever, generation unto generation of those who follow him.
Peggy said, "Something about the way you said it made me realize that every time we sit down and eat with one another remembering Jesus—that’s communion."
She’s right, you know. So if you pray before meals, even in restaurants, inviting Jesus to be present in your eating and conversing—that is a form of communion.
The disciples who lived in Emmaus and met Jesus while walking along the road home from Jerusalem didn’t invite the person they thought was a new friend over to their house to share communion. It was evening, suppertime, and they invited him in to share an ordinary meal with them. Maybe some broiled fish, some figs or dates, some very ordinary table wine, and perhaps some olive oil to dip the bread in—and the bread itself.
Scripture doesn’t tell us how Jesus came to be the one to bless the bread. He was the guest, remember? But Luke says that while Jesus was at the table with Cleopas and the other, unnamed disciple—perhaps Cleopas’s wife—he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. And suddenly, their eyes were opened, and they realized who he was. And then he vanished.
Assuming that Cleopas and his wife ate that bread, they had just celebrated communion. In their home, with whatever serving dishes and plates they had on hand, with just one another and the stranger they had invited into their home. They had been talking about Jesus and remembering him all day long, and so they could certainly be said to be eating together in memory of him, especially since they’d welcomed a stranger along the way—something Jesus commands us to do in Matthew 25. And in the ninety seconds or so that it took for Jesus to bless the bread, Cleopas and his wife understood that they had just participated in something holy that was also something very ordinary: sharing bread together with a hungry person.
What that means, for me at least, is that communion doesn’t even necessarily have to involve bread and wine or grape juice. I know that some Catholics may find this offensive, but I’ve had communion in the form of macaroni and cheese. One of the service projects my Seattle youth group participated in was bringing supper to a tent encampment of homeless people in the backyard of Richmond Beach United Church of Christ. We brought salad, cookies, juice, and big pans of homemade macaroni and cheese. When I made the arrangements with the coordinator over the phone, she encouraged me to have the kids join the encampment residents in the meal. We blessed the food and ate together. It was communion not just because we had blessed the meal, but because Jesus told his disciples in the gospel of Matthew, as often as you feed the hungry, you are feeding me. We sat down and ate macaroni and cheese with Jesus, in memory of Jesus. It was communion.
Does that just not change everything about how we look at eating together? Even a handful of trail mix shared with a hungry stranger or friend can become communion. It isn’t meant to be something we do only a few times a year, but every day.
Roman Catholics, at least in bigger parishes, often have daily communion, usually early in the morning so that people can partake before going to work, and also because a more traditional understanding of communion is that you’re supposed to receive it on an empty stomach. But they also believe that the elements have to be blessed by a priest, and you’re supposed to have confessed any major sins beforehand, and so on.
I often think that we like to make things way more complicated than Jesus intended. For example, most churches require that someone who wants to be baptized take a class for new members and participate in other kinds of preparation. But in the book of Acts, at one point God prompts Philip to journey along a lonely road out of town, and he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot who has been reading the scriptures. Philip asks what he’s reading, and then if the eunuch understands, which he says he doesn’t. So Philip explains, telling the eunuch about Jesus—and then the eunuch exclaims, "Here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?" And the answer is nothing, because no more words are exchanged between the two. They stop the chariot, get out, and Philip baptizes the man. Simple.
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch is profound in a lot of ways—and emblematic of what Jesus had in mind when it came to building up the kingdom of God. First of all, the eunuch becomes the first dark-skinned Christian, as far as we know, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church actually traces itself back to this very person and his being taught and baptized by the apostle Philip.
But it’s even more profound than that. Acts tells us that the Ethiopian eunuch had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and was on his way home. He was an important person back home—a court official of the queen—but he most likely was not treated as someone important in Jerusalem. In fact, he probably wasn’t even allowed to enter the temple complex, because the levitical code is very clear that someone with damaged genitals could not do so.
So he’s on his way home, disappointed and frustrated at having made a wasted trip, and reading the scriptures to try to understand what just happened to him. He goes home along a lightly-traveled road, that from Jerusalem to Gaza. Acts calls it a "wilderness road." And God sends Philip along to intercept him.
I wish scripture had given us the eunuch’s name. We may very well know it, though, because the bishop Irenaeus, writing in the second century, refers to him by name as Simeon Bachos. In fact, doesn’t it seem to be the case that so many of the important people in scripture are not given names: the Samaritan woman at the well, the Syro-Phoenician woman who challenges Jesus, the woman who anoints Jesus, and so on? Not to mention all the people who had to have been present—the servingmaids, the cooks, the guy who owned the donkeys. They aren’t mentioned at all. It’s kind of tragically ironic, because Jesus makes it pretty clear throughout his ministry that it’s the unnamed and unmentioned people in particular that he’s come to minister to.
The seventeenth-century Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez must have also wondered about the unnamed and unmentioned people, both in Jesus’ time and in his own. His most famous painting, The Maids of Honor—the one that is reproduced in the humanities textbook I teach from—depicts the female dwarves whose lot in life was to entertain the Infanta Margarita and the other royal princesses. The writer Robertson Davies once described what it was like to be a court dwarf: "the dull, inescapable misery, of having to make oneself ridiculous in order to be tolerated, of feeling that God has not used you well." Velázquez captures this in his painting of Margarita’s dwarves. He shows us their humanity and their suffering. They are not unmentioned characters to the painter, but they are recognized as equal in importance to the princess herself.
Velázquez also considered an unmentioned character in the story of the supper at Emmaus—and he put her firmly in the foreground, the subject of his painting, while Jesus and the dining disciples are a messy smudge in the back. The painting is entitled Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. Like the Ethiopian eunuch, the kitchen maid is black, and like him, she seems to have an awareness of who Jesus is. Just as Cleopas and his wife describe themselves in Luke’s gospel, the kitchen maid’s heart seems to be burning within her, and she hasn’t even been privy to conversation with Jesus; she’s just seen him as she put the meal together.
The poet Denise Levertov, an English Jew who emigrated to the United States with her family after World War I and converted to Christianity, and who is buried in Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle, wrote a beautiful meditation on the serving woman in Velázquez’s painting, entitled, "The Servant-Girl At Emmaus (A Painting By Velázquez)":
How many times in your life have you received communion? You can do the math if you want to: twice a year here at Whitestone plus at Love Feasts in the spring and fall, and any other communion service you’ve attended at another church, give or take being absent due to traveling, illness, etc. Let’s say you’re eighty years old. Four times a year for eighty years is three hundred and twenty times. If you compressed it all into one year, it wouldn’t even get into December.
How many times have you eaten a meal with another person? Your parents and siblings, your spouse and children, other family, friends, church potlucks, etc.? Maybe as many as three times a day every day of your life! Three times three hundred and sixty-five times eighty. . . . Well, it’s a lot.
I got to have dinner with Peggy at her house on Friday night. She made green bean casserole, roasted brussels sprouts, and this wonderful salad with about six different kinds of vegetables in it. She also offered bread, but I thought what she had would be sufficient, and it was.
And then, at one point, as we were eating and talking, she shared that on Sunday while I was speaking the words of institution for communion—which you may have noticed I don’t follow a script for—she realized that when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, he didn’t wait until the table was cleared and everyone had a tiny, fancy glass cup and a little piece of bread. No. He and his friends were eating a meal together, and at one point during the meal, he picked up the bread and explained what it meant, and gave them a gift—a way of remembering him—that they could continue using forever, generation unto generation of those who follow him.
Peggy said, "Something about the way you said it made me realize that every time we sit down and eat with one another remembering Jesus—that’s communion."
She’s right, you know. So if you pray before meals, even in restaurants, inviting Jesus to be present in your eating and conversing—that is a form of communion.
The disciples who lived in Emmaus and met Jesus while walking along the road home from Jerusalem didn’t invite the person they thought was a new friend over to their house to share communion. It was evening, suppertime, and they invited him in to share an ordinary meal with them. Maybe some broiled fish, some figs or dates, some very ordinary table wine, and perhaps some olive oil to dip the bread in—and the bread itself.
Scripture doesn’t tell us how Jesus came to be the one to bless the bread. He was the guest, remember? But Luke says that while Jesus was at the table with Cleopas and the other, unnamed disciple—perhaps Cleopas’s wife—he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. And suddenly, their eyes were opened, and they realized who he was. And then he vanished.
Assuming that Cleopas and his wife ate that bread, they had just celebrated communion. In their home, with whatever serving dishes and plates they had on hand, with just one another and the stranger they had invited into their home. They had been talking about Jesus and remembering him all day long, and so they could certainly be said to be eating together in memory of him, especially since they’d welcomed a stranger along the way—something Jesus commands us to do in Matthew 25. And in the ninety seconds or so that it took for Jesus to bless the bread, Cleopas and his wife understood that they had just participated in something holy that was also something very ordinary: sharing bread together with a hungry person.
What that means, for me at least, is that communion doesn’t even necessarily have to involve bread and wine or grape juice. I know that some Catholics may find this offensive, but I’ve had communion in the form of macaroni and cheese. One of the service projects my Seattle youth group participated in was bringing supper to a tent encampment of homeless people in the backyard of Richmond Beach United Church of Christ. We brought salad, cookies, juice, and big pans of homemade macaroni and cheese. When I made the arrangements with the coordinator over the phone, she encouraged me to have the kids join the encampment residents in the meal. We blessed the food and ate together. It was communion not just because we had blessed the meal, but because Jesus told his disciples in the gospel of Matthew, as often as you feed the hungry, you are feeding me. We sat down and ate macaroni and cheese with Jesus, in memory of Jesus. It was communion.
Does that just not change everything about how we look at eating together? Even a handful of trail mix shared with a hungry stranger or friend can become communion. It isn’t meant to be something we do only a few times a year, but every day.
Roman Catholics, at least in bigger parishes, often have daily communion, usually early in the morning so that people can partake before going to work, and also because a more traditional understanding of communion is that you’re supposed to receive it on an empty stomach. But they also believe that the elements have to be blessed by a priest, and you’re supposed to have confessed any major sins beforehand, and so on.
I often think that we like to make things way more complicated than Jesus intended. For example, most churches require that someone who wants to be baptized take a class for new members and participate in other kinds of preparation. But in the book of Acts, at one point God prompts Philip to journey along a lonely road out of town, and he encounters an Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot who has been reading the scriptures. Philip asks what he’s reading, and then if the eunuch understands, which he says he doesn’t. So Philip explains, telling the eunuch about Jesus—and then the eunuch exclaims, "Here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?" And the answer is nothing, because no more words are exchanged between the two. They stop the chariot, get out, and Philip baptizes the man. Simple.
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch is profound in a lot of ways—and emblematic of what Jesus had in mind when it came to building up the kingdom of God. First of all, the eunuch becomes the first dark-skinned Christian, as far as we know, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church actually traces itself back to this very person and his being taught and baptized by the apostle Philip.
But it’s even more profound than that. Acts tells us that the Ethiopian eunuch had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and was on his way home. He was an important person back home—a court official of the queen—but he most likely was not treated as someone important in Jerusalem. In fact, he probably wasn’t even allowed to enter the temple complex, because the levitical code is very clear that someone with damaged genitals could not do so.
So he’s on his way home, disappointed and frustrated at having made a wasted trip, and reading the scriptures to try to understand what just happened to him. He goes home along a lightly-traveled road, that from Jerusalem to Gaza. Acts calls it a "wilderness road." And God sends Philip along to intercept him.
I wish scripture had given us the eunuch’s name. We may very well know it, though, because the bishop Irenaeus, writing in the second century, refers to him by name as Simeon Bachos. In fact, doesn’t it seem to be the case that so many of the important people in scripture are not given names: the Samaritan woman at the well, the Syro-Phoenician woman who challenges Jesus, the woman who anoints Jesus, and so on? Not to mention all the people who had to have been present—the servingmaids, the cooks, the guy who owned the donkeys. They aren’t mentioned at all. It’s kind of tragically ironic, because Jesus makes it pretty clear throughout his ministry that it’s the unnamed and unmentioned people in particular that he’s come to minister to.
The seventeenth-century Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez must have also wondered about the unnamed and unmentioned people, both in Jesus’ time and in his own. His most famous painting, The Maids of Honor—the one that is reproduced in the humanities textbook I teach from—depicts the female dwarves whose lot in life was to entertain the Infanta Margarita and the other royal princesses. The writer Robertson Davies once described what it was like to be a court dwarf: "the dull, inescapable misery, of having to make oneself ridiculous in order to be tolerated, of feeling that God has not used you well." Velázquez captures this in his painting of Margarita’s dwarves. He shows us their humanity and their suffering. They are not unmentioned characters to the painter, but they are recognized as equal in importance to the princess herself.
Velázquez also considered an unmentioned character in the story of the supper at Emmaus—and he put her firmly in the foreground, the subject of his painting, while Jesus and the dining disciples are a messy smudge in the back. The painting is entitled Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus. Like the Ethiopian eunuch, the kitchen maid is black, and like him, she seems to have an awareness of who Jesus is. Just as Cleopas and his wife describe themselves in Luke’s gospel, the kitchen maid’s heart seems to be burning within her, and she hasn’t even been privy to conversation with Jesus; she’s just seen him as she put the meal together.
The poet Denise Levertov, an English Jew who emigrated to the United States with her family after World War I and converted to Christianity, and who is buried in Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle, wrote a beautiful meditation on the serving woman in Velázquez’s painting, entitled, "The Servant-Girl At Emmaus (A Painting By Velázquez)":
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She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice is his—the one who had looked at her, once, across the crowd, as no one ever had looked? Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her? Surely those hands were his, taking the platter of bread from hers just now? Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well? Surely that face—? The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy. The man whose body disappeared from its tomb. The man it was rumored now some women had seen this morning, alive? Those who had brought this stranger home to their table don’t recognize yet with whom they sit. But she in the kitchen, absently touching the wine jug she’s to take in, a young Black servant intently listening, swings round and sees the light around him and is sure. By Denise Levertov, from BREATHING THE WATER, copyright ©1987; Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.; and Denise Levertov, New Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2003), reproduced also with permission of Bloodaxe Books. |
Jesus came to minister to the unnamed, the unmentioned, the unimportant, the forgotten, those who were shut out of the temple, shut out of the so-called "important" conversations and actions. Prostitutes. Tax collectors. Servants. Eunuchs. Dwarves. Lepers. Samaritans. The blind. The crippled. The lame. The very old. The very young. The dead and dying—and those who mourned them. And he informed his disciples, which includes all of us, that when we minister to those same sorts of folks, we are ministering to Jesus himself.
I’ve asked the kids in the Seattle youth group what they would do if they knew Jesus was coming to their house. They’d get it really clean! they exclaim. They’d make a terrific dinner, get out the nice plates and fancy silverware, the cloth napkins and the glass stemware. We want to honor Jesus as much as possible; after all, he is our Lord and Savior, the King of Kings! Nothing’s too good for Jesus! Okay, Jesus says. So here’s what you do. Share your meals, open your homes, offer your presence, your food and clothing and shelter, to the people most in need of them: the hungry, the homeless, the undocumented, the abused, the refugees, the sick and crippled, the lonely, the poor. And every time you do that, it’s really Me you’re taking care of.
Jesus also told Martha not to worry so much about scrubbing the house and getting out the fancy plates and her most complicated recipes. Cleopas and his wife—and their servant—got to sit down with Jesus and presumably just offered him whatever they were going to eat themselves: a little bread, some oil, a small piece of fish. And Jesus turned it into communion, partaking with and of Jesus himself. And they got it.
My friends, while I think it is lovely that we celebrate and remember Christ together in this space twice a year with the starched white linen and the fancy cups, I implore you to consider every meal an opportunity for communion, an opportunity to remember and eat with Christ. The popcorn and apple slices and tea that Mariann and Peggy serve at gatherings to study the Bible—communion. The potatoes with butter and cheese that we eat together here once a month or so—communion. The macaroni and cheese that the kids and I brought to the homeless in Richmond Beach—communion, as were the peanut butter sandwiches, potato chips, and apple juice that we shared together every Thursday.
Look at the people you are breaking bread with carefully when you sit down to eat. Your husband or wife—even if you had a terrible argument with them that morning, Jesus is present in her, in him. Your kids, your grandkids, your church family, your friends and neighbors, and especially, especially, anybody you invite to come eat with you because you know they are going to go without otherwise. Look at the ordinary food you are eating together—a sandwich, a bowl of soup, a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast—that’s communion.
I think the key point of the spiritual teachings of every religion, in a lot of ways, what they all boil down to is this: the sacred and the ordinary are one and the same. And as soon as we get that, and live as though we understood it, we are blessed, we are enlightened, we are part of the kingdom of God. We don’t need to break out the fancy plates and the complicated recipes and wait for the honored guests to arrive. They’re already here.
I’ve asked the kids in the Seattle youth group what they would do if they knew Jesus was coming to their house. They’d get it really clean! they exclaim. They’d make a terrific dinner, get out the nice plates and fancy silverware, the cloth napkins and the glass stemware. We want to honor Jesus as much as possible; after all, he is our Lord and Savior, the King of Kings! Nothing’s too good for Jesus! Okay, Jesus says. So here’s what you do. Share your meals, open your homes, offer your presence, your food and clothing and shelter, to the people most in need of them: the hungry, the homeless, the undocumented, the abused, the refugees, the sick and crippled, the lonely, the poor. And every time you do that, it’s really Me you’re taking care of.
Jesus also told Martha not to worry so much about scrubbing the house and getting out the fancy plates and her most complicated recipes. Cleopas and his wife—and their servant—got to sit down with Jesus and presumably just offered him whatever they were going to eat themselves: a little bread, some oil, a small piece of fish. And Jesus turned it into communion, partaking with and of Jesus himself. And they got it.
My friends, while I think it is lovely that we celebrate and remember Christ together in this space twice a year with the starched white linen and the fancy cups, I implore you to consider every meal an opportunity for communion, an opportunity to remember and eat with Christ. The popcorn and apple slices and tea that Mariann and Peggy serve at gatherings to study the Bible—communion. The potatoes with butter and cheese that we eat together here once a month or so—communion. The macaroni and cheese that the kids and I brought to the homeless in Richmond Beach—communion, as were the peanut butter sandwiches, potato chips, and apple juice that we shared together every Thursday.
Look at the people you are breaking bread with carefully when you sit down to eat. Your husband or wife—even if you had a terrible argument with them that morning, Jesus is present in her, in him. Your kids, your grandkids, your church family, your friends and neighbors, and especially, especially, anybody you invite to come eat with you because you know they are going to go without otherwise. Look at the ordinary food you are eating together—a sandwich, a bowl of soup, a bowl of cereal or a piece of toast—that’s communion.
I think the key point of the spiritual teachings of every religion, in a lot of ways, what they all boil down to is this: the sacred and the ordinary are one and the same. And as soon as we get that, and live as though we understood it, we are blessed, we are enlightened, we are part of the kingdom of God. We don’t need to break out the fancy plates and the complicated recipes and wait for the honored guests to arrive. They’re already here.
Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), 1656–1657, oil on canvas, 10.4 ft. x 9.5 ft., Museo del Prado Accession number P001174
Diego Velázquez, La mulata (La cena de Emaús); Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus, date unknown, oil on canvas, National Gallery, Dublin