Road To Emmaus: Guest Preacher, Tim Bowyer

Homily Recap:
Isaiah 42, Psalm 42 and 43, Luke 24:13-35

We opened with a question: What story are we telling when we worship on Sundays and when we
celebrate the Eucharist? We remembered that at the table, we tell a story. We all read a creed and
confession, we hear the words of institution and we get up together, share bread and wine, sit down, and
pass the peace. These acts tell a certain story - a story of a God of love who is reconciling the whole
world to himself through Christ - who has given us new life so that we might live in love with each other
and the world. But we reflected on what stories often race through our heads as we perform these actions
together. Depending on the day, and what has happened that week, or that morning, we may be speaking
the words and moving through the performance telling one story, while our minds are racing telling a
completely different one. Which one do we listen to?


The two psalms we read, Psalm 42 and 43, demonstrate a practice of telling a greater story over a lesser
story in the form of prayer. The Psalmist composed what we now call Psalm 42 and 43 originally as one
song with a beautiful refrain: “Why are you downcast, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.” We see this three times in the two
psalms. Throughout a prayer naming to God the depths of his longing from exile, and his deepest desires,
we find the refrain that reincorporates his forsaken despair into hope, into praise, and into a greater truth -
that God, though seemingly far away and indifferent, is yet God and a present help to the psalmist. This
kind of movement is all through the psalms - awful experiences that would otherwise crush the psalmist
do not, because he wraps them up in the praise and hope of God and God’s promise. We find this is
rather hard to practice. How do we allow that greater story to so wrap ours up, that in the midst of the
immediate circumstances, we might see and feel and trust in God promise?

The Director of Swiss Labri, Greg Laughery, comments on this matter in a recent reflection: “Feelings and
experience can often attempt to be our sole sources and criteria for assessing who we are and what the
world is like. Someone says, “I feel like I have to accomplish something in order to be liked.” Why?
“Because this has been my experience.” Another says, “I feel ashamed.” Why? “Because I have to hide
my real self from others and I experience this as my fault.” Both confirm, “This is the way the world
works.” While feelings and experience are valid dimensions of being human, the question of whether or
not we should trust or be suspicious of them cannot be solely based on feelings and experience. Why? In
themselves they offer no valid way to discern if the perceptions of ourselves and the world are accurate.
Unless we’re willing . . . to raise the difficult question of what is true, we will spin around in circles of the
same, never having adequate criteria for being able to evaluate which feelings and experience can be
considered trustworthy and which suspicious. Once we begin to focus on this explosive question and start
to answer it, trust and suspicion will function in better ways that will in turn lead to truer view of ourselves
and the world.”

Most of us have mixed opinions about truth. While we still have ties to Modernist assumptions about truth
- that it can only be discerned by the scientific method or by historical criticism or by objective analysis,
we also are inundated by postmodern voices - that what matters most is what we experience. And being
“true” to that experience is how we find meaning. The modernist arrogance is something that needed to
be called to question. We understand now that stories constitute meaning and truth far more than the
brute facts of life, the raw data. We know that stories are what make up our identity and meaning. But we
get a bit lost, wondering whether to let our experience and our emotion take control of our destiny or to
hold on rigidly to the supposed facts as if they are the lifeline to meaning or salvation.

The Psalmist names the history of God’s promise, his faithfulness, his love and the present-future of his
Kingdom as the story and Truth that frames his otherwise suffocating reality. That great and greater story
of God cannot be reduced into mere historical data, nor will it be itself as a meaningful story for some,
some of the time. It takes the whole of our lives into it, all people are held together in it, any and every
experience gets wrapped up into it, all emotion finds its end in that greater context – of forgiveness, of
hope, and of new life. The practice of faith is one that tells that greater story as a refrain, so that whatever
we are experiencing, be it poverty, injustice, suffering, rejection, failure, confusion, boredom, or struggle in
sin, though it be valid and true, finds itself wrapped up in the greater story of God reconciling the world to
himself through Christ.


For the homily, we reflected on Luke together, having seen and heard it read to us dramatically. We noted
that Luke has a great appreciation for history and for narrative, weaving themes of travel, conversion,
Eucharist, and the fulfillment of scripture into his gospel and the book of Acts. The experience of the
disciples and their sense of disappointment are slowly wrapped up in a greater story that Christ reveals to
them. Luke tells it in this way to reassure his audience that all the promises of God made to his ancient
people - read in Moses, the prophets, and the psalms - about saving the world through them - had come
to fulfillment, but in an unexpected way. It was not through the fury of insurrection, but in the humble life,
in the suffering and death, and now in the resurrection of Jesus. The story of despair the two disciples are
agonizing over is laid down for the shining truth of a larger story they yet had no imagination for.

This is what often happens when we meet Jesus. We have too many expectations to name and most of
them are let down. We are frustrated, tired, and disappointed. Our experiences in this life have
devastated us and on our emotions, whether we show that openly or whether we push it down, retreating
into ourselves. But we meet Jesus because he comes to us on the road. He joins us, lets us hash out our
own stories, gives us time. But he invites us into a greater story and a different way of imagining him, the
world, and ourselves. He is no failed prophet or a stranger, who is out of touch with reality. The world is
not a only a place of splintered stories without meaning. We are not absolutely forsaken. Rather, he is the
one who has gone before us into death and risen before us into life. All stories find their end and center int
that one. We find our experiences and emotions wrapped up in that greater truth. We need not close
ourselves off from others or from God in the story of our own experience or emotion. Our story can be
taken up into his as we participate in following after him. In this, as the disciples along the road too
discover, our hearts may just start to warm, and we may start to live in greater courage.

To help us imagine what this might entail for us, we told two stories: the story of my friend and the story of
the seed. My friend was raising her young children and her husband was suffering in severe depression
and without work. She would sit by herself after dark on the back porch, and through tears name the
things that she was thankful for - a roof, food enough, and friends. In a small way, she was telling a
greater story than her immediate severe pain. She said at this time that she couldnʼt believe in the gospel,
but she continued to be in a church. The people there would say to her, “Thatʼs just fine. Weʼll keep on
telling the story and weʼll stand next to you.” She did not dismiss her story and neither did the church, but
they TOGETHER, slowly, wrapped it up in a larger one. Planting, like theses stories, reminds us that the
veil of the immediate emotion or experience is not the end of the story. The dark soil, at first, would tell a
story of death, of wrapping all that falls to the ground in its arms, engulfing the seeds in a cloak they
cannot see past. Yet water and sun call them upward. By forces unknown to them, they are being drawn
into air and into new being.

Lent is a journey on the way to the passion of Christ. Since it entails self-discipline and identifying with the
suffering messiah, we may feel like we’ve been on a journey that is designed only to wear us down. Or
maybe life is enough to wear down on us and we didnʼt need Lent to remind us. We may have lost a
sense of the greater story. But the end is not suffering, not the cross, but the resurrection. That is why we
speak of resurrection on the 5th Sunday of Lent. We were never meant to journey without the memory and
hope of that future. Jesus is already walking beside. His story goes before us and after. His story
envelops our in grace.

 Questions:

1. Where do we look for and find meaning in our lives? Are experience and emotion valid ways of
determining meaning?

2. If you can share, what are the stories that interrupt, combat, or threaten to overshadow the story of the
gospel?

3. Do you have a practice, like that of the Psalmist, which weaves any and every experience and emotion
into a greater story through refrain? What might this look like for you?

4. How is the church to practice this kind of reincorporation of the lesser story into the greater? Can you
think of examples where this has been done well or poorly?