A Fourth Church Sermon by Keith C. Harris

April 10, 2005 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Road Most Traveled

Keith C. Harris
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 116
Luke 24:13–35

“While they were talking and discussing,
Jesus himself came near and went with them.”

Luke 24:15 (NRSV)

Understanding is the reward of faith.
Therefore seek not to understand that you may believe,
but believe that you may understand.

St. Augustine

O holy god, full of mercy, love and grace, I ask that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts might be open, holy, and acceptable to you.
Oh Lord, our rock, and our redeemer. Amen.

As a child, did you ever daydream about being a superhero? Or someone really famous who might change the world? Did you ever wish that you were Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman—able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, to be faster than a speeding bullet, or to be able to deflect bullets with really cool bracelets? My favorite, the hero who I wanted to be, was Spider-Man.

Child development experts say that the reason that children daydream is because they’re young and when we’re young we’re not in control. When we’re children, we don’t make the rules. We can’t always do what we want to do. There’s always somebody bigger and older and sometimes meaner.

As children we couldn’t do anything about some of our problems. So we daydreamed, and in our daydreams we were no longer helpless. We were heroes who punished the wrong, rewarded the good, and made everything right from that point on.

In our scripture this morning, we have two disciples who are doing anything but dreaming and certainly not daydreaming, for all that they had hoped for and believed in seemed to be all gone. They are crushed. They are discouraged. They are confused. They’re not looking to save the world. If anything, they’re running away or going home in discouraged defeat.

You see there seems to be something about us that, when our lives start to fall apart, we return to what was last really familiar, even if it wasn’t a positive thing. Maybe what lay for them at Emmaus was a reminder of what could have been or what was. Charles Dickens writes in A Tale of Two Cities about a doctor who was in a French prison for eighteen years. Unable to practice medicine there, he kept his mind occupied by becoming a cobbler and learning to repair shoes. So for eighteen years, in a small, dark prison cell late at night, he could be heard, tap, tap, tapping away, repairing the shoes of his fellow prisoners. Finally the French Revolution came and he was set free, but he couldn’t cope with his freedom. He was unused to the brightness of the sunlight, the openness of the world around him; he no longer knew how to respond to all of that.

Dickens writes that the doctor went home and had his servant prepare a room for him in the attic that would be exactly the same size as his prison cell. And every evening the servant would escort him to the room, lock him inside, and through the night hear him tap, tapping away.

It’s a sad story, but not nearly as sad as the prisons that we often find ourselves bound to, compelled to be in, on our roads of confusion and pain and anger. For many of us, that is a road most traveled.

I remember in my high school English class learning about the poem “The Road Less Traveled,” written by a man named Robert Frost. I remember being confused. I didn’t get it. A guy went to a forest, got inspired or really tired, and wrote this poem that doesn’t make any sense. Due to the love and diligence and patience of my wonderful English teacher, after several days I slowly began to get it.

I want to share the two last short stanzas with you:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

When we had those earlier dreams as children, we wanted to take that road less traveled. We wanted to change the world. We wanted to do something that meant something. Again, this morning, we have two disciples who aren’t sure where they’re going. They thought maybe they had taken the road less traveled, but for them and sometimes us, it leads to discouragement and confusion.

M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled begins with some words with which we all can resonate: “Life is difficult.” Peck goes on to say that somehow our culture’s talked us into thinking that life should be easy, so once you really accept the fact that it is difficult, then it’s no longer quite as difficult. I really enjoyed the book, but there was one part that was missing for me. In the end, it says the way that we transcend life’s difficulties is by our own self-awareness. And I thought, there has to be more. There’s got to be more than that, for some of us have been on our own roads to Emmaus for a long, long time.

Our scripture lesson this morning tells us that Jesus comes up beside the disciples as they’re running away or hiding out or returning back to what they knew. And it says that their eyes were kept from recognizing him. I need to confess to you that that always troubled me. It seemed that if God were really loving then and God had good news, why not just spring it out right away. Just pop up and say, “I’m here,” kind of like phasing in, like on Star Trek. Their eyes were kept from recognizing him. There are some scholars who believe that that was a divine prevention, that God didn’t want to reveal the plan yet. There are other Bible scholars who say that, because of depression and despair, the disciples couldn’t see what was familiar around them. And those of us who have struggled with deep, deep discouragement and significant depression know it can be hard to recognize all that’s around one, especially some of those things that are familiar and helpful.

Jesus asked the disciples a question: What’s going on? What were you talking about? And I’m not sure that our English translation of the Greek adequately captures the way that they responded to him. The translation is this nice prim and proper, “Are you the only one that doesn’t know?” Probably a more accurate translation for us in 2005 would be, “Man, are you crazy? How could you not know what’s going on? It’s on the front page of everything!” Jesus shows a model for us. He doesn’t go into a long lecture or sermon, but he listens. You know sometimes when you’re really confused, when you’re on your road to Emmaus; it’s just good to know that someone cares enough to listen.

And so Jesus listens to them pour out their hearts about what they had hoped. Then he talks to them and gives probably the best and briefest total overview of Old Testament scripture in history, known to humanity, starting in Genesis and going to the present day, about why and how what happened to the Messiah needed to happen. As the disciples reach the end of their journey, or so they think, Jesus acts as if he’s going on. Again, a little strange to me, especially when he had such good news to tell them. Perhaps this is a powerful reminder for us, a reminder that although God could, God never invades our lives but always waits for an invitation. Perhaps it is through being ready to invite that we’re really ready to see and hear what God has.

The disciples invite Jesus in. He goes in, the bread is broken, he is recognized, and then he vanishes from their sight. And they say to each other, in retrospect, “Weren’t our hearts burning as he talked to us and revealed scripture to us,” revealing this great psychological and, I believe, biblical truth that hindsight is 20/20. It is sometimes only when we look back that we see and understand that that one set of footprints in the sand is not ours, but God’s. It is sometimes in looking back that we understand that although something was painful, God was able to redeem it and us and that there indeed is a divine pattern in our lives.

You see, the reality is there are many roads that we travel. Many of us have traveled the road to Gethsemane, where we have prayed the prayer that Jesus prayed: “Lord, if there’s another way, can we do it that way. Lord, I don’t want to do it that way.” And sometimes we arrive at that same place where we say along with Christ, “Not my will, but your will be done.” Some of us have found ourselves on the road to Calvary, where we, like Christ, cry aloud, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” because we indeed feel very forsaken and alone. Some of us have even found ourselves on the road of resurrection, where miracles that we could have never dreamed of happen, with new life and new circumstances and new hope. I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, we also travel most of us, more of the time than we’d like to admit, the road to Emmaus, when we’re angry, when we’re confused or discouraged, when we’re depressed. Oh we’re good actors and actresses, but many of us find ourselves on that road. What is it this morning, that has you angry, that has you depressed or anxious or discouraged? For most of us, that is a road that is most traveled.

I want to close this morning with a true story. In his book The Dance of Hope, William Frey, retired Episcopal bishop from Colorado, recalls how he volunteered to read to an older student named John, who was blind.

One day, Bishop Frey said, I just had to ask him, “How did you lose your eyesight?” “A chemical explosion,” John answered, “at the age of thirteen.” Still curious, Frey asked John, “How did that make you feel?” John responded, with brutal honesty, “Life felt like it was over for me, I felt helpless and I hated God with all my heart. For the first six months, I did nothing but stay in my room and I ate all my meals alone, by my choice. Then a curious thing happened. One day my father entered my room and said, ‘John, winter’s coming and the storm windows need to be up. That’s your job. I want those hung by the time I get back this evening or else.’” The John’s father turned and walked out of the room and slammed the door. John reported that he was so angry that he was thinking, “Who does he think he is? Who does he think I am? I’m blind.” He was so furious, he decided to do it. “I’ll show them. I’m gonna try to do it and I’m gonna be not only blind, but I’m gonna be paralyzed, ’cause I’m gonna fall. I’ll get them.” He felt his way to the garage and found the windows and located the necessary tools. He found the ladder, and all the while he was muttering under his breath, “I’ll show them. I’ll fall, and they’ll have a blind and paralyzed son. That’ll be great payback.” Eventually, he did complete the goal, the assignment; he did get the windows up before evening. But the assignment achieved more than that. It achieved the father’s goal as well. John reported that it was at that point that he slowly realized that he could still work and even more so that he could begin to reconstruct his life.

As John continued to tell Bill Frey his story, John’s eyes, his blind eyes began to mist. “Seven years later, I learned that something else important had happened that day, that the entire day my father was no more than three or four feet from me.”

If we as earthly parents know how to love our children, how much more so does our heavenly parent know and care for us and is with us. You see the central truth is this: the road most traveled in our lives is traveled from God’s heart to the places where we are. Amen.