2018 Homecoming Homily

 Homecoming Homily
Memorial Auditorium
September 30, 2018
William Craft

Gospel Reading: Luke 24:13-32 (NRSV)

With Anne, I am so glad to be with you as we near the close of Homecoming Weekend.  We have been rejuvenated by reunions, revved up by games on the court, the pitch, and the gridiron, and inspired by the Concordia Orchestra, Band, and Choir.  I know you will join me in thanking all who have planned for so long and worked so hard to create this homecoming. 

There is a compelling American poem about a homecoming by Robert Frost.  A character in the poem speaks this line:  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.”[1]  I am deeply drawn by the sparseness and beauty of that line.  I’ll return to it at the end of this talk.

This is a curious moment.  I look out and I know that you will be heading back home soon.  Yet I know that in travelling to Concordia this weekend, you have come back home.   In 1991, Václav Havel, playwright, dissident jailed for his resistance to Soviet communism, and first president of the Czech Republic, published a meditation on the experience of home.  He speaks of home as one’s house, village, family, but also one’s profession, language, and spiritual experience: concentric circles that compose what home is for each of us.  “All the circles of our home,” he writes, “are an inalienable part of us, and an inseparable element of our human identity.”[2]

Luke’s account of the two disciples on Emmaus Road is a homecoming story.  It is one of the most radiant stories in all scripture, compressing sadness, blindness, recognition, and joy into a single short narrative.  

My friend David Lose, a pastor in the Twin Cities, says this story contains the four saddest words in all the New Testament: “But we had hoped.”  Had hoped.  Had hoped that Jesus would redeem Israel, would redeem their lives.  At the same time, it includes this yearning plea as they near their home: “Stay with us, for it is evening.”  Many of us will remember that Stay with Us is the final movement in Rene Clausen’s Passion of Jesus Christ, which premiered last year.  Stay with us, sung after the trauma of Jesus’ suffering and death.  Stay with us, for it is evening.  And near its close, Luke’s story contains the most wonderful question I can think of in the New Testament, when the disciples finally recognize the risen Christ and say to one another, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us” when he spoke to us on the road?

Such a good story. 

There’s a lot of walking in Luke’s gospel.  Mary and Joseph walk to Bethlehem, where Christ is born.  And the grown man Jesus turns his face to Jerusalem and walks there, where he will die.  The Good Samaritan is a road story, as is the Prodigal Son.[3] Roads in Luke, and in our lives, are in-between spaces where we are not “at home” but often in anticipation of what will follow.  In Luke, Cleophas and his friend are walking home, not in anticipation but in sorrow and loss.  The third day, the day on which Jesus had said he would rise, is almost over, and though they’ve heard a story of an empty tomb, they feel abandoned: “We had hoped.”  Jesus died.  To use Havel’s language, having lost the circle of their lives, they don’t know who they are.  They go home, as the scholar Sarah Henrich says,  because “there was nothing much left to do.”[4] 

They meet a stranger on the Emmaus Road.  (We know who it is, but they don’t).  Have you ever talked with a stranger on the road?  Sometimes it’s mundane, ordinary stuff, and sometimes you’d rather read your book than listen to the restless soul in the airline seat beside you.  Maybe it’s the person in the park who tells you your granddaughter is beautiful, the street dweller who asks you for food, or the city resident who gets you to the right metro car.  Road encounters stand out because they happen when we are out of our element; we’re less safe, less sure, and perhaps also, more open.

This particular encounter doesn’t seem to begin well.  The stranger asks the two what they have been talking about, and they—surely more than a little tired and close to the limits of their patience—ask him in return if he’s the only one who hasn’t heard of “Jesus of Nazareth, . . . a prophet mighty in deed and word . . .  and [of] how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him.”  The stranger, a little impatient himself it appears, responds by calling them foolish and reminds them that the scriptures say that the Messiah was supposed to suffer in exactly the way they have described.  (I sometimes wonder what the gospels would have been like if the disciples weren’t such dim bulbs, but that’s another story).  This road moment feels a little more testy than blessed so far.  Yet as they near home, and the stranger walks ahead as if to leave them, they implore him—Luke refrains from saying why—they urge him strongly to come home with them: Stay with us, for it is evening.  Maybe they simply seek to be hospitable; maybe they don’t want to be left alone with their dark thoughts.  We don’t know. 

But we know that he does stay.  Here it is once more:

So he went in to stay with them. 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. They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:29-32)

I distrust easy morals from sermons: Stop; Yield; Do Not Enter.  So no morals from me this morning, but each of us could make some observations now.  Here are three:

·      Christ is with the two disciples, miserable and distracted on the road, even though they don’t know it.

·      Christ is with them at home: in his blessing and breaking of bread, they know him for who he is.

·      The memory of his teaching sets their hearts on fire.

·      It is in the stranger, the unexpected real presence, that they see the face of Christ.

So Luke tells this road home story, and like all the others he tells, it reveals this thing: the love of God, stronger than suffering, stronger than human folly and blindness, stronger than loneliness, stranger than any division or bitterness, stronger than death.  And Luke tells us—you saw it, didn’t you?—a communion story in which Christ appears in the breaking of the bread.  

What are we doing here?  We’re at Concordia.  Some of us live here; most of us have come back.  Some of us who came back did so for friends, for football, for finding out whether we’re the only ones in our class who didn’t grow old.  All of us are here because—back then or now or both—our lives opened at this college, because at a time of uncertainty (in hope or fear or both), we heard someone say, Your life is good, your mind and your heart and your love of music or literature or discovery in the lab or your passion for justice: these are a blessing to you and to your neighbors. 

We are here, this Sunday,  at the same moment both at home and on the road of our lives, in communion, with one another where Christ is revealed in the breaking of the bread—and in the lives of those around us, friends and strangers.  Concordia calls us home to the ultimate questions we wrestled with here, and wrestle with still, and sets our hearts on fire with the revelation that we are beloved of God, and bold in faith to affirm—in the midst of suffering, in the valley of the shadow, in the mysteries of the road—the dignity and beauty of every human soul, and of the world God has redeemed. 

Frost writes in his poem that “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.” The beloved, the awkward, the insightful, the blind—everyone, even ourselves.  The good news from the Emmaus road and from the communion meal is that in Christ, in the unconditional, unearned, unshakeable, everlasting love of God, we are—all of us, wherever we walk, we are all of us, home.  Soli deo gloria.