Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter – April 6, 2008
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Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter – April 6, 2008
“White line fever,” Merle Haggard sings in his distinctive, whiskey soaked cigarette voice; “A sickness born down deep within my soul. White line fever, the years keep flying by like the highway poles.”
Of all the images imbedded in American music and movies, few are as enduring as that of the road. Perhaps it’s the promise of freedom and mystery to be discovered just around the next bend; perhaps it’s the notion that a new life is possible if we just find a new locale; or perhaps it’s just the sheer exhilaration of tearing up a dark highway with the engine humming, the headlights shining and, of course, the radio blaring a suitable soundtrack, perhaps this, what many consider the greatest of all road songs:
“The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive. Everybody’s out on the run tonight but there’s no place left to hide.” Bruce Springsteen wrote these lyrics 34 years ago in what he has called a last ditch effort to make it big. His first two albums attained critical but not commercial success, but with this effort he struck a responsive chord:
“Someday girl I don’t know when, we’re going to get to that place where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun. But ‘till then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run.” Springsteen would go on to write more than one song essentially covering the same theme; all of them hits, but none as big as this one which would be named “New Jersey’s Unofficial Youth Rock Anthem” by that state’s legislature in 1979, something Springsteen found amusingly ironic because he’s always said that “the song “Born to Run” is about leaving New Jersey.
Leaving, that’s the essence – that’s the allure - of the road, as depicted in popular culture; it’s more about escaping someplace than going someplace. Indeed, the desire for something better is one, if you will, driving element of road songs and movies. (In fact, there is a movie starring a young Natalie Portman called, “Anywhere but Here”- the title being the best thing about this effort.)
As far as I know, this film is not listed in anyone’s compilation of classic road movies; a genre which a critic named Heather Johnson says is “a quintessentially American art form.” “The road movie,” Ms Johnson says, “typically involves one or more people in motion who face one or more challenges, and emerge either with newfound knowledge, a personal awakening, or, in the most tragic cases, death. These films often conclude with the protagonist reaching a destination… with either pleasant or unpleasant results.”
Consider the “Grapes of Wrath,” based on Steinbeck’s novel set in the early 1930s. Tom Joad returns from prison to discover his family’s home is in the middle of both a foreclosure and a fierce dust storm; time to pack up truck and head to California, searching for what Tom calls “a better life.” It’s not easy, but they manage to get there, traveling a long road to a promised land which fails to live up to its promise.
Indeed, failure is often the end point in the road song and movie. In 1964 legendary rocker Chuck Berry wrote “Promised Land,” describing his exodus across the country hoping to make it big on the west coast. Instead he ended up in jail, calling his family for help. The song ends with the narrator saying, “Los Angeles, give me Norfolk, Virginia, Tidewater four ten o nine. Tell the folks back home this is the promised land calling and the poor boy is on the line.”
A long way to go, only to end up no better off than you were before. The cure for such destination disappointment – as found in a sub genre of road movies – is not to arrive at all, but to keep driving along the interstate - the lights of the motels, diners and gas stations flashing past; the white lines swallowed up by the hood of the car. After a while, though, it begins to get old; the romance of the road fades into a loveless routine. “I’ve been from coast to coast a hundred times or more,” Haggard sings, “I ain’t found one single place where I ain’t been before.”
He could be on the road to Emmaus along with the two disciples today, a road that just keeps going, heading nowhere in particular; a road in which there is not even a glimmer of hope shining on the horizon. On the road to Emmaus, hope is fading along with the sun on that Easter Day.
The Christian writer Frederick Buechner says that Emmaus is not so much a place as it is a state of mind. And there is good reason for such a claim, for no one knows for sure just where on the map this town was; no one can find the road which led to it. It doesn’t matter, for the two disciples it was a road leading anywhere but Jerusalem, a road taking them far from the place where their hopes were dashed. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they tell the stranger; a stranger whom they do not yet recognize as the one who had promised them a place in God’s kingdom.
“We had hoped,” they say, employing what grammarians call the pluperfect subjunctive – and how often do you hear that phrase on a Sunday morning? All it means is that everything is in the past tense, even the hope. It’s gone. “We had hoped.” They don’t hope anymore.
All that is going through the minds of the Emmaus travelers is getting as far away from their shattered dreams as they can; where they will end up does not matter. “We got to get out while we’re young,” Springsteen sings to his female companion, Wendy, in “Born to Run,” implying that there is still a shot at redemption. These two on the road today, Cleopas and his unnamed companion – whom some speculate may have been his wife – just have to get out.
“The state of mind is escape,” Buechner says, “Escape from pain, loneliness, longing, sorrow, bewilderment, grief. The Road to Emmaus is the place where we spend much of our lives, the place in our lives where we go to escape whatever it is we need to escape - whether it is our job, our ornery friends, a demanding ungrateful family;” a place where are likely to say, “It makes no difference anyway.”
And that, my friends, is the very essence of hopelessness. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” Dante places on the portal of that dreaded destination. It will do you no good; it will not make any difference, for there is no way out. (The only other place where hope is useless is heaven; but that is because there it is no longer necessary; all will be realized, all will be fulfilled at the end of that road.)
Cleopas and his companion are a long way from that destination, but the Kingdom of Heaven is about to come closer to them as they journey, the Texas songwriter Steve Earle’s “Nowhere Road” playing on the soundtrack. “I been down this road just searching for the end. It don’t go nowhere, it just brings you back again. Leaves you lonely and cold, standing on the shoulder. But you’ve come too far to go back home, so you’re walking on a nowhere road.”
That’s basically the mournful tune these two sing in what is the longest speech in any of the Gospels by someone other than Jesus. The mood shifts, though, as the stranger – who is Jesus – listens intently and then begins speaking; clearly he’s not a fan of such bleak material. “Oh how foolish you are,” he chastises them - sounding like that mean judge on American Idol – “and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared…Then beginning with Moses…he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.”
As evening descends, ironically, light arises, but they still do not recognize him. Acting as if he were about to leave them with nothing but his challenging words ringing in their ears, the stranger walks on ahead into the gathering night.
It is then that the dim light of hope begins to shine all the more brightly – not through some profound theological argument or even through some toe tapping hymn– but in a simple offer of hospitality. “But they urged him strongly,” Luke writes, “‘Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.’”
That’s Easter Day we’re talking about, remember. The sun is about to set and nothing seems to be any different; that is until two deeply disappointed people find a way to see beyond their own despair. “Stay with us,” they say, “share a meal with us,” and before they know it their guest is transformed into their host; before they know it, what they had lost on the road to Emmaus has been born anew. At the end of the day, in the shadows of the waning light, when their spirits were at their lowest, when they were not even looking for him, God found a way in; all it took was an invitation. “Stay with us.”
In Eucharistic language intended to instruct the early church, Luke reports that “When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.”
Like Mary at the tomb; like Thomas in the upper room; these two disciples on the road, whom we will never hear from again – who could be anybody, which is exactly the point – these two ordinary people have seen the Lord. They see him and he vanishes, only to return again and again whenever hospitality is extended. Indeed, says one theologian, “Hospitality to the stranger who may bear the presence of Christ was one of the earliest and most enduring Christian practices.”
When an invitation is extended to another, even when we are at our lowest, hope triumphs and God is reborn; when bread is broken and shared with another, even whenwe may not have enough for ourselves, the Word is proclaimed and the Risen One finds a way to feed even the emptiest soul and spark a flame in even the bleakest heart.
Here’s where the road to Emmaus ends – here’s where the song fades, the credits roll – not in an escape but in an embrace of all that can never vanish – an awakening. Here’s where one road ends – the one going nowhere - and another begins – the one which will lead us in the way of the living and enduring God.
Some fifteen years after he wrote it, Bruce Springsteen prefaced his signature song at a concert by saying that after he had put all those people in all those cars, he might actually have to figure out some place that they were born to go. He then introduced “Born to Run” as a song in which two people are “trying to find their way – home.”
Mary found it; Thomas found it; Cleopas and all those whose names we do not know found it. So can we. Answer the call; hear the Word; feed on hope and then hit the road, ready to do some inviting, some speaking, and some feeding on your own.
“Well my time went so quickly,” sings Tom Waits, “I went lickety-spickly out to my old ’55. As I drove away slowly, feeling so holy, God knows I was feeling alive.” Yes, when you think you’ve come to the end of the road, the bread of life will feed you as the years fly by until you find your way home at last.