These travelers on the road to Emmaus they believe it has all ended. The journey of Jesus on this earth is over. The hoped for redemption of Israel is a hope denied once again. They are going back to the place from which they came, to resume the life they had before they met Jesus. This part of their journey is over. They are grieving.

But their journey will not end as they expect it to. They will not be going back to their previous lives after all. They will become part of the new community that gathers in the days after Jesus death in Jerusalem and becomes alive and on fire with the Holy Spirit so that Jesus life, death and resurrection come to be the way the truth and the life for generations of men and women on a journey from birth to death in this world- and from death to life in God’s kingdom.

I would like to invite us to see the Emmaus Road journey of these travelers as one possible paradigm for our own faith journey. Christian conversion has often been interpreted bythe Damascus Road experience of the apostle Paul. Conversion occurs with sudden, dramatic deliverance from one’s past life of “sin” into life as a faithful disciple. These stories, of course, make for compelling testimony to the power of God. And they are very often true and valid.

But they are not my story. Perhaps they are not your story either. My story is an Emmaus Road story. I walked with the scriptures, with the stories of Jesus, and with the people of God for decades – my whole life. I recited the liturgy scores of times before it came alive for me as an outpouring of grace. I had been on the road a long time before I realized that Jesus had been there all the time. My eyes were opened, and the scriptures and the liturgy of the church and the power of the community to feed my spirit came alive for me over time. It is a journey, and by the grace of God, my eyes get opened only as much as I can bear – a little at a time. I have never been blinded by the light- but awakened by it.

It’s not just that I doubted – though the gospel resurrection narratives are quite tolerant of doubt. It’s just that I didn’t see what was right there in front of me all the time. And that was that the church that I was often dissatisfied with (and still am), and the people I was often judgmental toward (and still can be) and the liturgy I found stale and outdated (and don’t anymore), and the worship services I found boring (because I wasn’t paying attention) – all of these were offering me the living presence of Jesus Christ. My eyes were focused on other things. And I never saw it. When I did focus, on a three day Walk to Emmaus Retreat in 1987, it sent me back to Jerusalem. Back to my congregation. To be in community with other Christians. To study and learn the scriptures. That is, after all, where the Risen Christ is alive – if the Emmaus story is to be no idle tale.

The very next Sunday, in the very same church I’d been in weekly for years, with the very same words, from the very same old hymnal, I saw and felt the power of the risen Christ.

We are all on a life journey. There is a time when we are not – not yet conceived. And then we are. And we enter this world – we are pushed into it whether we want to be or not. And we spend the early part of our journey getting what we need – food and comfort. And then we learn to get what we need and what we want. And we spend a good deal of our life getting and securing what we need and what we want. And then, as our journey continues through time- and the world is designed so that it does – unavoidably – continue through time – the things that we worked so hard to get start to get taken away from us. Mandatory retirement comes, technology passes us by, one day we can’t drive at night, and then we can’t drive at all. The car keys we spent all those moments of our lives looking for are gone forever. Then someone else is telling us when to get up, what to wear, when to eat, what to eat, when to go to bed. If this is all there is to this journey, it’s futile.

But the Road to Emmaus is a resurrection narrative about our spiritual journey. We are people being invited to faith in life beyond this life. Call it what you will: eternal life, resurrection life, life after death. We are being invited to have our eyes opened to the truth that nothing, not even death, can separate us from the grace of God in Jesus Christ. And when we see that connection, when, as one who has been on this journey for awhile wisely said, “we pay attention, there comes a time when it seems appropriate to say yes,” then our journey is not a journey into endings, but every ending becomes a beginning. And when we have been on that journey for a while – those life-endings that seem so desperate to us reveal to us a most amazing truth: we are born into eternal life just as we are dying from this life. The letting go of the things of this world, if we are wise, becomes the opportunity to begin to live in the world of spirit and truth and light and life that never ends. Our spiritual life becomes our real life. Food and clothing and even the people around us begin to fade away – because there are arms waiting to receive us- not to slap us and jar us into life in this world – but to embrace us with love that expects nothing from us other than that we have lived and will always live.

This is not only about death and life. It’s about the little deaths that occur all through life – most of which don’t seem so little when you are experiencing them. Your job has been eliminated. Your marriage has failed. Your home is in foreclosure. Your hopes have been dashed. Your future is in jeopardy. A loved one has died. Hope is a stranger and despair is your constant companion. You doubt that there is a purpose. You doubt that there is a God. You doubt that God was doing anything special with Jesus. After all- who’s seen Jesus lately?

The Emmaus Road travelers are said to have treated the resurrection news as an “idle tale.” Isn’t that how we treat it much of the time? Isn’t that how I really treated it the many years I went to church, studied the Bible, participated in the sacraments, and lived my life without any attention at all to anything other than getting what I wanted (even from the church) and working desperately to keep alive the very attitudes, thoughts, fears and insecurities that were, in fact, killing my spirit.

If we believe that God has nothing more for us on this journey other than “you are born, life is hard and then you die,” or “all there is is what you can get and you better get it for yourself before someone else does.” If we live as though what we can see and taste and touch and own and control are the most important things in life; if we cling to endings because we do not trust that they give birth to new beginnings, are we not just treating the resurrection as an idle tale?

But we need resurrection, we need new beginnings – because life is full of endings. Here is the Good News! God has provided new beginnings. God is a God of resurrection. That is what we testify to when we say, at Easter, “The Lord is Risen. Alleluia!” There is new life for you. That’s our message here.

How do we find it? How do we see it? How do we claim this new life? We stay on the journey with the Emmaus Road travelers!

We keep coming to hear the words of scripture read, and we keep coming to eat the bread and drink the cup that proclaim Jesus life for us, and we keep coming to be in the community that is the church. We must pay attention, and ultimately, we must say yes.

This is the testimony of scripture: from resurrection onward, Jesus physical presence is manifest not in his earthly, historical life, but in the gathered community breaking bread together, and interpreting the scriptures together. Today, because we gather to do this, the Risen Christ is here in plain view – that’s my testimony, and it is God’s gift to us today:

Here – spread before us on the table- a bible with the Word of scripture- an effort from me, I hope and pray, empowered by God’s Holy Spirit, to open up a story about resurrection life so that it is life giving – some morsels of bread and a taste of juice, which, when blessed with a remembrance of Jesus words become his very presence to us.

Here, then, is life. (Martin Luther’s words). This life is not an idle tale. It is the life that really is life – and I am grateful to be trading daily- by the grace of God- my life for this life. Thanks be to God!