Gather us now, O God, to be with you as you are with us. Quiet our fretfulness, release us from distraction, that we might be open to receive what you give, through the hearing and reading of your holy word. We ask it again, O God: Gather us to be with you, as you are with us. Amen.1

* * *

The twenty-fourth chapter of Luke’s Gospel just cannot seem to get enough of the resurrection. In the course of forty-nine verses, three Easter stories are told. The first is a riveting account of the resurrection itself. That story is followed by a description of an encounter of two friends of Jesus on the road to a little village called Emmaus. After the terrible events in Jerusalem—the trial and suffering and death on the cross of Jesus, their beloved—they were taking their sadness back home with them. As they walked, a stranger appeared beside them. He spoke to them of the scriptures, and as they came near the village, he accepted their invitation to come and stay with them. As they were sitting at the table having dinner, the stranger took a piece of bread, said a blessing, and broke the bread. In that breaking of the bread, the scales fell off the friends eyes, and they realized that the one who was with them at the table was none other than the risen Lord.

The two dashed back to Jerusalem, found the disciples and their companions, and told them what had happened. As they were talking about these very things, Jesus came and stood among them. In the midst of their conversation about the resurrection, he appeared. He had not knocked on the door. No one had let him in, and yet, there he was, surprisingly, unexpectedly real in their midst.2 What in the world did this mean? What in the world does it mean for us today?

I would suggest it means at least this: that there is no way to keep the risen Christ out of any situation. There is no hopeless heart, there is no barren relationship, there is no bruised or hurting place that is off limits for the resurrected Christ. As the poet John Donne put it so beautifully long ago, “All occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.” I have a little plaque on the mantle of my office. The words on the plaque read, “Bidden or unbidden, God is present.” That is what these post-resurrection stories want to tell us so desperately. Bidden or unbidden, the spirit of the living Christ is loose in the world and will come to us wherever we are.

That is a very good thought to hold on to when God seems far away and the shadows are deep. The disciples couldn’t believe that he was there. They were “startled and terrified.” They thought they had seen a ghost. Jesus asked, “Why are you afraid and why do you have doubts in your heart?” They said nothing. If they had tried to explain it, surely they could not have.

Why are you afraid sometimes? If you trust in God, if you believe that “all things work for good for those who love the Lord,” why are you ever afraid? But you are, and I am too. Why do you doubt? Why is it one day we can gather in this sanctuary and sing the Hallelujah Chorus with all our hearts and then a few days later, it all seems like a fairy tale, the promise of life after death, the assurance that love is the strongest force in the universe?

Madeline L’Engle is a lifelong Christian and a writer. I take comfort in something she wrote long ago. “Sometimes I just know that I am going to come down with an attack of atheism again. It’s like the flu. Spiritual flu, I call it. I get ready to endure three or four days of doubts and deep distance from God. Then through the grace of God, I find myself spiritually well again.”

Why do we doubt and why do we fear? We just do. The disciples had no better answer. Jesus said to them, “Let me show you. Look at my hands and at my feet.” A ghost doesn’t have hands and feet, flesh and bones. “See that I am here.”

When you are in conversation with someone and you get to the point where you understand what is being said, what do you say? You say, “I see!”—meaning that you get it.3 Jesus wanted those who loved him to get the immediate reality of new life, but not even flesh and bones could convince them. “In their joy, they were still disbelieving,” so Jesus moved on to plan B. Jesus asked, “Do you have anything here to eat?” Isn’t that one of the most amazing questions in all the Bible? They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he ate it in their presence. What a striking scene. It is not only here that Jesus eats food in the company of his disciples. In John’s Gospel, he has a huge breakfast barbecue on the beach on the Sea of Galilee. Earlier he had broken bread and shared it with the two friends on the way to Emmaus.

Barbara Brown Taylor, a wonderful preacher, has speculated that

maybe it is because eating is so necessary for life, and so is he. Or maybe it is because sharing food is what makes us human. Most other species forage alone, so that feeding is a solitary business, but human beings seem to love eating together. Even when we are stuck alone with a frozen dinner, most of us will open a magazine or turn on the television just for company. It is, at any rate, one of the clues to his presence. There is always the chance, when we are eating together, that we will discover the risen Lord in our midst.4

Why did he eat that fish? How did he get into the room? Who rolled the stone away? Where is he going to show up next? Easter asks a thousand questions, which is some indication of the inscrutability of the situation. This much we know: in mysterious and surprising ways, the risen Christ comes to us where we are.

The disciples, myopic as usual, cannot see him for who he is, not even after watching him eat his supper. So he tries still another tack. He says, “Remember how it was when we talked together about the promises of the scripture? The prophets foretold that the messiah would suffer and die and then be raised again from the dead.”

“He opened their minds,” Luke tells us, to understand the scriptures of old and how they had applied to him, to his suffering and death and resurrection. I love this thought that Jesus opened their minds. I find it amazing that so many in our day preach and live out a Christianity that does exactly the opposite, a Christianity that closes minds, hardens hearts, and shrinks imaginations. Jesus opened their minds, and then when their minds were opened, he brought it all home directly to them, saying the message he had brought about repentance and the forgiveness of sins was to be proclaimed to all nations and they were the ones to do it. “You shall be my witnesses. I am entrusting the entire enterprise to you.” That surely was the most astonishing thing he had said to them all day. Who—us? The doubters, the fearful, those who have very limited credentials? You are going to leave this all in our hands? Indeed he was.

At the beginning of my ministry, I often told a story that I am about to tell to you. It is a story that has two significant flaws in it, and it took me a while to realize it. Listen, and see if you can identify the flaws in the story. It’s an old, rather sentimental story about the day Jesus ascended into heaven and was greeted with gladness by the angels and archangels. “Tell us how you left things on earth,” they ask him, and he tells them how he had entrusted his followers with the responsibility to proclaim the gospel and to carry on the great work that he had begun. The angels were incredulous.

“You can’t mean it,” one of them said. “What if they fail?”

Jesus answered, “I have no other plan.”

The great thing about that story is that it leaves you and me with no place to hide, but the problem with the story is that it is incomplete. It says nothing about the gift of the power of the Holy Spirit. “I am going to send you what my Father sent me. Stay where you are in the city,” Jesus said. “You do not have to do anything until you have been clothed by the power from on high.” In other words, God will give them everything they truly need to be his witnesses.

Then there is the story’s failure to take into consideration the fact that God is God and that God’s kingdom does not finally depend on anyone’s cooperation. If every Christian church in every land collapsed tomorrow in a heap of faithlessness, Christ’s great kingdom would still come on earth, the kingdom of love and light.5 Why? Because God is God and the great purposes of God can never ever be thwarted. The final outcome of the story does not rest on the shoulders of the tellers of the story. The outcome rests with God, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. As a friend of mine once told me when I was feeling overwhelmed with the responsibilities of ministry, “Don’t worry, Joanna. God had already done all the heavy lifting.”

In the meantime, here we are with Christ’s work to do, empowered by the Holy Spirit, as was Jesus Christ. We proclaim the good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, the good news of repentance, which means the ability to change and turn from that which makes death and hopelessness to that which makes for life and hope (Luke 4:18–19). We preach forgiveness of sins, that there is nothing that we have done or will ever do that God cannot forgive. That is the message to which we are to bear witness.

Here we are, a congregation that “stays in the city” full of Holy Spirit power with a lot of work to do for the sake of Jesus Christ. What an awesome gift. What an awesome responsibility.

Last summer, a friend of mine who lives in Minnesota told me about a trip he had made to Chicago. He was coming to town to attend a meeting of a national committee for the church. The committee meeting was to be held, as a matter of fact, at Fourth Presbyterian Church. My friend flew into O’Hare airport and caught a cab. He said to the cabbie, “I want to go downtown.” The cabbie said, “All right” and pulled away from the curb. As my friend looked at the cabbie, he saw the driver looked a little worse for wear. He was a man who had obviously stared down more than a few doubts, fears, and demons in his time. My friend said, “I am going to that church across the street from the John Hancock building. Do you know that church?”

The cabbie laughed a little and then said, “Of course, I know that church. Those people down there, they once saved my life.”

I ask you this morning, what more would it take to make you believe in the resurrection than that? God has already done the heavy lifting through Christ Jesus, but getting the word around about it, that is our responsibility. May the work we do, may the mission of Fourth Presbyterian Church, and may the lives that we live bear witness to the living hope that is released in the world through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Amen.

1. Adapted from a prayer by Ted Loder in Guerrillas of Grace (Innisfree Press, Inc.: 1984).
2. Robert Farrar Capon, The Foolishness of Preaching (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), p. 117.
3. Ibid, p. 123.
4. Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Cowley Publications: 1995), p. 87.
5. From the hymn “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations”