Recognizing Jesus: A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter
I love the fact that the two churches of which St. Christopher’s is a part celebrate the whole church year. I love it that we change the colors and the music and the mood of worship throughout the year. Advent and Christmas, Epiphany and Lent and Easter and Pentecost each have their own times and their own rhythms, and I love it that they do. I think my experience of the faith is far richer for these seasons and their variety.
But the truth is, for all that changing of seasons, I think we basically always live in the second Sunday of Easter. We live in this time when the news of the resurrection has been announced, the messengers have told us that the tomb is empty–and yet the adrenaline of the celebration has likely worn off, the trumpets have stopped their fanfares, and we’re left with the big question: so what difference does it make this week? What does Easter life look like right here and right now? How will that front-page headline of the Christian faith make a difference in what I do, what I love, what I care about?
Our reading this week is a perfect story for those second-Sunday-of-Easter sorts of questions, even though it actually takes place on the evening of that same Easter day, the very same day the tomb was found empty.
Luke’s account of the finding of the empty tomb leaves more questions than answers. We tend to imagine that first Easter morning as being all glory and praise and certainty, but the way Luke describes it, the news was baffling and confusing, and it took the disciples a good long time to make sense of it. I don’t know about you, but I find a lot of comfort in that fact.
Our reading opens as two of Jesus’ followers are headed to the town of Emmaus. It’s a town no one can locate today: we know it was small and not too far from Jerusalem, but that’s about it. Maybe it’s enough to say that it was a very ordinary place. These disciples may have been on their way home, shoulders sagging a little with the weight of the past week’s events, trying to make sense of their lives now, when a strange figure joins them on the road.
The film Babbette’s Feast takes place in a tiny Danish fishing village during the early 19th century. The village is all but totally empty of color – the skies, the tiny buildings, the inhabitants are all gray, and the people are all members of a conservative Lutheran sect that sees all worldly pleasure and joy as suspect and potentially threatening to the soul. It’s a cheery sort of place.
One dark night, two sisters in the village hear a knock on their door, and they open it to find a stranger standing alone in the rain. They learn that she has fled Paris during the French Revolution–she has lost everything and is looking for a safe place to stay. The sisters allow Babette to stay with them, caring for their home, cooking their bland suppers, and generally assisting the community in exchange for a place to live.
The sisters ask no more of Babette’s past, and life moves along quietly in the village, until one day, years later, when Babette receives notice from Paris that she has inherited a large sum of money. She asks the two sisters if–instead of the usual food–she can prepare a French feast for the community’s celebration of its founder’s 100th birthday. And while they would prefer that she just make tasteless beat soup like always, Babette has never asked anything of them before, and the sisters consent to her request, allowing her to prepare the meal as she wishes.
The feast Babette prepares takes up the entire second half of the film. You might think that 45 minutes of footage of people eating wouldn’t be fun to watch, but it’s actually pure magic. The community gathers for the meal–preparing themselves to gulp down the food without tasting it, lest they enjoy it too much. And amidst the sour-faced villagers is a retired general from the Danish army. He’s a well-traveled man, and he knows his food: from the first bite of the turtle soup, he knows that something very special is being served, something worth savoring.
One course after another is brought out, each accompanied by a perfectly paired glass of wine, and finally the main course arrives. The general knows it by name: it’s a famous and much sought-after dish, and it’s served only at the finest restaurant in all of Paris. The general’s eyes are opened, and suddenly the mystery of Babette’s past is solved.
The story of Babette’s Feast is not so different from the story of those two disciples and their companion on the road. They walk and they talk, they journey and share life together for a time. The mysterious stranger listens patiently as the disciples recount their dashed hopes that their teacher Jesus would have been the one to redeem Israel. He listens and then he speaks, and while it’s clear that this guy knows his scriptures, the disciples still have no idea who it is they’re journeying beside.
They invite this stranger in for a meal as night begins to fall–and that’s when everything changes. They invite this ordinary stranger in for an ordinary meal in an ordinary town, and that’s when the scales fall from their eyes.
The general knew Babette by the famous dish that only she could prepare. But really, it was more than the dish that gave her away: it was the actions behind it. It was the careful preparation, the delicate folding of pastries, the skillful pairing of wines and food. Most of all, it was the lavish generosity: her entire inheritance was spent on a single meal for the community, treating them to a feast of color and richness and flavor beyond their imaginations.
And that’s how it is with Jesus. The actions give him away. We recognize Christ’s presence where Christ is acting through others, doing the things Christ did: blessing bread, breaking it, and giving it for all.
We recognize Christ’s presence in individuals and communities who bless–who lift up what they have and give thanks for it. Who recognize that the resources in their care are gifts of God and are there to be celebrated with gratitude. Who know the freedom of being thankful for what they have, rather than envying the gifts of others.
We recognize Christ’s presence in individuals and communities who break bread–who set the table and invite others to come. Who show hospitality with a sort of holy abandon. Who break up what they have, because it goes farther that way. Who know that when you break bread, it seems there’s always enough to go around.
We recognize Christ’s presence in individuals and communities who give. Who live their lives with their hands open, their arms stretched wide. Whose first thought isn’t Will I have enough? but rather, Who doesn’t have enough? Who know what it means to give not just when it’s comfortable, but also–maybe especially–when it pinches a little.
The disciples recognized Jesus when he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. It’s what Jesus did–it’s what Jesus did when he fed five thousand with a small boy’s lunch, it’s what Jesus did at his last supper with his disciples, and it’s what he told his disciples to keep on doing in his memory. We do these same things here at at the Communion table every week with the promise that Christ is here to be found, present in grace for you. That’s more than reason enough to do it every week–but I don’t think it’s the only reason we do it.
We also celebrate Communion to remind us how to recognize Jesus out there. Where do you see individuals and communities doing these things–blessing bread, breaking it, giving it for all? Where do you see people living as Jesus lived, with hands open in blessing, in generosity, in faith in the radical abundance of God?
We need these moments of recognition, and we need to share them. Because life in the second Sunday of Easter is not all blazing glory and trumpet fanfares and deep, unshakable certainty. It’s the life of faith — “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” — and we need others to help us see the presence of the risen Christ where Christ has promised to be found: in simple, brave actions of love, in words of truth, in ordinary, world-transforming grace.
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Image: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1606-1669. Supper at Emmaus, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=54706 [retrieved April 8, 2013].