The Emmaus Road - Easter 3

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?” Luke 24.32

You know what it’s like. You’re invited out to supper and you gladly agree and put the date of the Friday night in your diary.

But when that Friday comes, you’re exhausted. It’s the end of a long week. You just want to get home, open a bottle of wine and settle down to watch Coronation Street and CSI and wake up half way through newsnight.

The last thing you feel like doing is dressing up and getting back on an overcrowded tube train again.

But, you can’t get to supper without making a journey.

So in today’s Gospel, it’s Easter Sunday afternoon. It’s been a traumatic three days for these two disciples of Christ, Cleopas, and perhaps his wife, Mary. (Cf John 19.25)

But they can’t get home for supper without making a journey.

They are despondent, confused, disappointed and exhausted as they set out on the two-hour walk from Jerusalem to Emmaus, hoping to arrive home before nightfall at about 7.

A stranger joins them on the road – nothing too surprising there. There’s safety in numbers on a dangerous road.

But he must be the only person in Jerusalem who seems to know nothing of the events of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the rumours which flew about this morning that some women had found the tomb of Jesus empty with angels telling them he was alive. Clearly they were deluded and confused.

So Jesus gives them a Bible study for an hour or two. He explains to them what Scripture says about the Messiah – about himself.

But they still don’t get it.

At last they reach Emmaus and Jesus looks as if he’s travelling on beyond the village. Cleopas and Mary are unwilling to see this stranger go off into the dangerous night and press him to stay for supper and sleep on the couch.

And then there’s the famous revelation; the subject of a thousand paintings, of sculptures and stained glass windows and the Caravaggio on the front of today’s Service Sheet.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he disappeared from their sight. (Luke 24.30f)

They met with Jesus in the breaking of bread. (Luke 24.35)

The breaking of the word, his explanation of the Scriptures, had not been enough. They had not understood it until his actions took them back to the scene in the upper room on Thursday a few days ago – his Last Supper. They had been talking with the other disciples about it all since his death on Friday.

For many people, doctrine and dogma and Bible verses are not enough. Indeed, they sometimes obscure the presence of Jesus. He is not recognised in them.

It is in the mystery of the Breaking of Bread that he is both recognised and disappears from our sight: the hiddenness of God; the Cloud of Unknowing; the believing and seeing and hoping; yet doubting and wondering where God is and why he seems so silent.

In our Anglo-Catholic tradition, we know that liturgy and music and symbols take us beyond words.

I am afraid to admit that I knew Pavlova as a tooth-pulling, meringue dessert long before I knew she was a ballerina. She died far too young some 20 years before I was born.

After one of Anna Pavlova’s great performances, one of her admirers, who had been moved to tears, asked her what the dance meant.

Pavlova replied simply, but profoundly: “If I could have said it, I wouldn’t have had to dance it.”

Today’s Gospel is about journeying, and those we meet along the way, and understanding what we have learned when we stop for supper.

CS Lewis has always been a great inspiration to me in the intellectual pursuit of God, faith seeking understanding in Anselm’s memorable phrase.

In the year that Anna Pavlova died, 1931, CS Lewis was on a journey with his brother Warnie, travelling pillion on his motorcycle to Whipsnade zoo.

In a now famous passage of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis related his final step into real joy, for his intellectual conversion two years earlier had been a miserable affair and he described himself as “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

This is how he describes the journey that was to change his life:

I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.

That journey to Whipsnade Zoo was Lewis's Emmaus Road.

Writer Terry Lindvall, in a fascinating article Joy and Sehnsucht: The Laughter and Longings of C.S. Lewis, explains Lewis's conversion like this:

C.S. Lewis was drawn into the kingdom of God by joy - by a taste of this blessed fruit and divine gift. Joy was the divine carrot that persuaded such a self-proclaimed donkey as Lewis to plod down the road toward Jerusalem. It was the soft, disturbing kiss of God that unmade all of Lewis's world. Joy compelled Lewis toward the resurrection laughter of Easter…

Early Christians were called the people of The Way. Even the fact that you have travelled to church today is a symbol that our meeting and understanding of Christ is in travelling as well as arriving.

For Christ is not only the destination, but he is the Way, the journey and our travelling companion helping us to understand all that has happened to us along the winding path of our life.

And sometimes, when we come to this supper; this breaking of bread; this opening of our eyes; this mass; we look back on the ups and the downs of our life journey so far, and although we did not recognise the presence of Jesus with us at the time perhaps, we can now reflect with those early disciples:

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?” Luke 24.32

Trinity Sunday 2006

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables them... to dance with the angels.” St Basil the Great On the Holy Spirit (Divine Office Bk II p.670)

This reading in the Divine Office comes up each year as we move from rejoicing in the Resurrection to welcoming the Spirit at Pentecost and then on into the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Each year it strikes me afresh.

I went to the sort of old fashioned grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. We used to get together with Worthing High School for Girls. The Amanda Foxtrot was the nearest we ever got in those days to sex education. We tried to be bolshy and to dislike it, but it was quite fun.

There is something immensely enjoyable in the social patterns of dancing: the partnerships, the community, the shared knowledge, the complementarity of the steps, the public intimacy.

Wherever we turn in the world, in whatever age, there is an instinct to worship and to dance. With the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Episcopalian joke puts it well: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex standing up? Because it may lead to dancing!”

So St Basil’s contends that “This grace of the Holy Spirit enables us... to dance with the angels”.

In the early discussions of the church fathers, one of the words used to describe the interrelatedness of the Trinity was ‘perichoresis’: the inter-animation of the persons of the Trinity.

The ‘choresis’ of perichoresis, comes from a similar root to choreography - the mapping of dances.

The dynamic of the Christian God, whom we honour today as Blessed Trinity, is the loving dance of eternity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit caught up in the powerful, yet wordless communication which we mimic in all our human dances.

It is no wonder that over the centuries the divine Liturgy has become a stylised dance. The synchronisation of movements, the courtesies, the communication beyond words, which even the congregation is drawn into through music and symbolic gestures; through the spiritual vibrancy of knowing they are playing their part.

You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, have you ever noticed the words of the second verse as Christ talks about his incarnation?

Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance;
Thus was I knit to man’s nature,
To call my true love to my dance.
Sing, O my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

Or here is Evelyn Underhill writing in the middle of the First World War in Theophanies:

Heaven’s not a place…
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.

Then of course there is that old Shaker favourite, Lord of the Dance… "Dance then wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the dance says he…"

And as we are drawn into the sacred choreography, so we take on the characteristics of the other dancers in the Trinity. Dancing is a great act of solidarity. (It’s part of the buzz of clubbing.)

The fruit of the Spirit produces the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

The charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce the works of the Father and the Son. So together as the people of God we bring healing and wholeness, wisdom and truth, freedom and justice to a world that remembers how to dance, but has forgotten why it dances.

I had lunch with some of my old students the other day.
One of them was Gammy Gordon - the affectionate name the other students gave him because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us.

We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of the girls pulled him into the dance - and he danced!

And he realized that we all look a bit gammy when we’re dancing. And he didn’t look too gammy at all! It worked wonders for his self-esteem.

The God we worship, the Holy Trinity, is a loving fellowship of three in one. He is not remote and alone, but an intimate community. They are so wrapped up in each other, that they are indistinguishable. One in three and three in one.

But not so wrapped up that they have no time for us. Easter was when Jesus the Son, came to call us into the dance of the Trinity.

And although we feel all unworthy, and spiritually akimbo, gammy, in comparison, yet God the Father’s love draws us into the fellowship.

By the indwelling Spirit we take on the Divine. St Basil goes on with great theological daring, dancing on the edge of heresy, to describe the work of the Spirit in Christians who venture to dance with the angels:

“So is their joy unending… so do they acquire likeness to God, so - most sublime of all - do they themselves become divine.”

Don’t sit around the edges of the dance floor, or locked, like the disciples, in an upper room, waiting and watching. You have been baptized! Christ has given you his Holy Spirit! The Father has invited you to the dinner-dance at his Table!

You are called to partake of the Godhead in bread and wine and so to enter into life in all its fullness.

This is the mystery of our participation in the Blessed and Most Holy Trinity.

Or as St Basil put it:

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”