"Breaking Bread on the Road of Life"	April 25, 2010
I Corinthians 11: 23-26, Luke 24: 13-35	3rd Sunday after Easter
Colesville Presbyterian Church	Rev. Ken Eimer, Pastor (Interim)

Summer isn’t far away now. It’s a time when many people travel. If you’ll be doing that, it may be through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, across the United States or to another part of the world. I meet people who like to talk about their travels. For many, travel is a form of education and recreation. It may also be a necessity if you have family living out of state. In some cases, travel is a status symbol in that it becomes part of a person’s personal resume, something to talk about over cocktails, at parties and during other social occasions. Travel can be a way to impress people, to let them know that you’re a world citizen of sorts.  

 

In Scripture, we have this on-going theme of travel. Notable personages, or entire people, uproot themselves and it’s not for recreational purposes or bragging rights.   

 

Cain kills Abel and travels to the land of Nod, east of Eden

Abraham and Sarah leave their home in Ur to fulfill God’s promise of a land flowing with milk and honey. 

Jacob, one of Israel’s founding fathers, journeys east and meets his wife, Rachel, by a well. 

The Israelites are freed from Egyptian slavery and travel through the wilderness for forty years

The prophet Jonah travels to Ninevah in the belly of a whale

 

Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem to register for the census

Wise men travel from the East to see Jesus

Mary and Joseph travel to Egypt when they find that King Herod wants to kill their son.

Jesus and the Twelve travel from town to town to heal the sick. 

Jesus travels to Jerusalem to be crucified

The apostles travel through the Mediterranean establishing Christian churches

 

The word ‘journey’ is used 78 times in our Bibles and ‘travel’ is used 32 times. The phrase, “go down into” is another way in which the Bible talks about moving from one place to another.   

 

Maybe you travel a lot for work. I travel a lot in my work – every couple of years or so. My job title is interim pastor but what I do falls into the larger category of itinerant ministry. The meaning of itinerant becomes clear if we think about the word, ‘itinerary.’ An itinerary is a detailed plan for a journey, a description of a route, or a written account of one. An itinerant then, is someone who is mobile for a particular purpose. Traveling nurses are itinerants. An itinerant construction worker is someone who goes from his home to different locations for the purpose of completing a job, at the conclusion of which he goes to find work somewhere else. A spiritual pilgrim can be an itinerant, traveling from place to place in search of a mystical experience with God.

 

Our New Testament lesson is a travel story. Two men, one named Cleopas, and an unnamed friend, were heading to a village called Emmaus, located about seven miles from Jerusalem, and were talking to each other about what they had heard regarding the empty tomb. They met a stranger on that road and confessed that their hopes for redemption were shattered when Jesus died. But he who had died was alive and Jesus made himself known to them in the context of a common meal – the breaking of bread.

 

The kind of travel depicted in our Gospel lesson is not vacation travel. It’s not educational travel. It’s not family travel, as if we’re going to Iowa to visit our children and our grand kids for a couple of weeks. It’s ordinary travel, like traveling to work, or to the super market, or to the donut shop, or to worship on Sunday morning. In our ordinary travel through life, Jesus invites us into a relationship with him in the breaking of the bread.

 

When we break bread together, we reveal to each other the story of Christ’s life and our lives in him. Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to his friends. He did so when he saw a hungry crowd and had compassion for them. He broke bread on the evening of his death. And he did it with two disciples whom he met on the road to Emmaus. The Lord taught us to pray, saying, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In the Gospel of John, Jesus calls himself living bread. And in an effort to bring unity out of chaos, the Apostle Paul reminds a divided group of Christians that we’re one in Christ because we share in the one bread.

 

*                      *                      *                      *

 

I’m talking about the Lord’s Supper on a day that we are not participating in it but our Gospel lesson led me here. We’ll participate in the sacrament next week – next week is Communion Sunday – so it not that farfetched that we dwell on this theme this morning.   

 

When we come to worship, we usually do so because we want something that’s relatively immediate. We want an answer to a prayer request, for example, or greater peace of mind or we want to feel ‘up’ because we’ve had a ‘down’ week. We may be in worship to fulfill a family obligation or to find something in Scripture to help us live in a better way. There’s no wrong reason to be here but by and large the focus of our attention is largely on ourselves in the sense that we approach worship from the perspective of, “what can I get out it for myself?”

 

The Lord’s Supper broadens out the reasons as to why we’re here. To quote one author, there are very few places left in our world where our common humanity can be lifted up and celebrated. But by gathering around the common signs of bread and wine, we can tear down walls and understand God’s love for the entire human family. You see, when we break bread, we not only get in touch with our own broken condition, but with people we might recognize on the road of life. Through prayer and the breaking of bread, we can become the sick child, the single mother, the distressed father, the nervous teenager, the searching student and the struggling professional. When we break bread, we reach out to people across our nation and the globe who have no food or shelter and whose bodies have been broken by torture, imprisonment and death.[1]

 

Similar to the sermon, by participating in the Lord’s Supper we’re called to do something. In sermon and supper, we take God’s good news of a second chance and communicate hope? How will this week be different from the last? Where sermon and supper differ is that the first is individual while the second is communal. Preaching is a singular act and we tend to listen individually. But the Lord’s Supper is an act of the entire community. It’s something we do together.

 

*                      *                      *                      *

 

Everything we come into contact with is the result of someone’s dream or vision. The cars we drive were created in a design studio. The buildings we enter – office structures, restaurants, museums, grocery stores and churches -- were developed by an architect or teams of architects. The clothes we wear were created through the eyes of those who work in fashion. Even the most common things we take for granted, like zippers, are the products of inventors. 

 

Sometimes, our dreams and visions come true but sometimes they don’t. Our business hasn’t seen success. Our work is filled with meaningless routine. Our kids make choices that haven’t worked out. We get divorced. A son or daughter is killed in war. Unexpected illness takes its toll.

 

Rev. Harold Warlick tells us that the New Testament knows a lot about broken dreams. It begins with a massacre of innocent children, is centered in the execution of its hero, and it ends with the martyred saints in the Book of Revelation saying, “How long, O Lord?”[2]

 

The crucifixion of Jesus, in particular, raises serious questions. There on the cross was a man who loved his enemies; a man whose righteousness was greater than the Pharisees; a man who gave his robe to those who took his cloak; and who had no interest in the acquisition of property or the advancement of power. Yet society executed him. So we have to ask, “Is life set up to be one of love, sacrifice and service? Does this design work? Does it pay off? Is it rewarding? 

 

This may have been what Cleopas and his companion were thinking as they traveled on the road to Emmaus when their despair was interrupted by the presence of a stranger. At first they didn’t recognize him but as they continued to fellowship, he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread and this is when bad news becomes good.

 

If we dream of one life and find that we live another, then the way our dreams are repaired has to be the greatest news in the whole world. How can this Christ stranger, who comes to us in the breaking of the bread, help us live with hope? 

 

In 1944, Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was the minister of the largest Protestant congregation in southern Japan. It was located in the city of Hiroshima. One day, a large flash came and a powerful blast of wind and fire blew over him as he dove instinctively into a garden. When he regained consciousness and got on his feet, the city was as flat as a desert. Sixty eight thousand people were killed instantly and only thirty members of his 3,500 member church were still alive. 

Rev. Tanimoto began to rebuild his church. He arranged for the spiritual adoption of five hundred Hiroshima orphans by North American families and created a Peace Foundation.

 

In the Foundation's museum, a girl named Sadako placed two bird cranes made of folded paper. She believed that if a person who was ill made these paper cranes, they would return to health. After ten years of suffering, Rev. Tanimoto died and so did Sadako. Two people who loved their enemies, and who were killed by forces that they didn’t understand, cause us to ask, ‘What happened to the dream?’ They believed in love when they could not feel it, and they believed in God when God was silent. Naked, bleeding, hairless and with skin hanging loose, they went to their early graves. They dreamed of one life and were forced to live another.

 

Today, years after their death, a statue stands in Hiroshima. Built in memory of their deaths, it portrays two children on the right and left and another child on top, their arms outstretched, to express their hope for a peaceful world. Even today, Japanese children keep the center of the statue filled with many-colored paper cranes. God’s design of goodness and love holds true and stands as a witness that darkness and death will not defeat it.[3]

 

That life conquers despair and death, in this life and the next, is the meaning of the resurrection.     

 

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