Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington and Holy Cross, Seend
Acts 2.14a, 36–41; Luke 24.13–35
“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!”
How weird! God revealed Himself to us by becoming a human being and still makes Himself known in a ritualised meal. Christianity is a very strange religion.
Most of my atheist or agnostic friends think Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations invented by Bronze Age primitives and perfected by Victorian prudes – basically some mix of not having sex outside marriage, not swearing, and not drinking.
But Christianity is much stranger, and we shouldn’t shy away from that. A generation is coming of age in this country who can’t win if they do the conventional, sensible, responsible things. If they work hard at school and go to university, they’ll incur debts they’ll never be able to pay off, to earn not much more than they would otherwise, and might never be able to afford a family home unless their parents are well off. If you’re thirty years old today, you were twelve when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit – since which wages in this country have stagnated – and your adult life has been the era of Brexit and Covid, of wars and energy shocks.
This is a generation which has seen the conventional, sensible leaders do badly – and the edgy radicals who promise to stand up for the people against the system perform even more poorly. I don’t usually say things that are too directly political from the pulpit, but this morning let me say that our Prime Minister is currently exemplifying everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be sensible – their strange mix of presumption to moral superiority and visionless incompetence – while the President of the United States, and the unwinnable war and uncalculated risks he has backed himself into, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be tribunes of the people.
“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”, Peter warns the pilgrims in Jerusalem – in some ways, little has changed.
I don’t think a worldly Church, obsessed with the affairs of the world, has much to offer in a country where the Churches are weak, and the people are hostile to their involvement in politics – with a degree of justification – and where the Churches often act as defenders of a system that looks broken beyond repair.
But a Christianity which owns up to its weirdness, by the lights of sensible society, might have something to offer. In that light, there are some weird things about our faith I want to highlight.
The two disciples on the road to Emmaus first recognise Jesus when He eats with them. God is recognised by an activity that is both essential to our survival, and one of our greatest pleasures and something which brings out human creativity as few other activities do; something that connects our mortality and the pleasure we take in this life. Eating together is also, obviously, a communal activity rather than an individual one. We can’t be Christ’s Church as isolated individuals. We need to meet together, share with one another.
“He took bread”, says our Gospel reading, “blessed and broke it, and gave it them.” Did you notice that the sequence of actions that Jesus performs is the one at every Holy Communion service? Take, bless, break, give. Those are the four actions that caused the disciples to realise they were in the presence of Christ at Emmaus – so these four actions should also show us that Christ is truly present when we celebrate Holy Communion. The mechanism by which Christ is present at and in Holy Communion has at times been a matter for division between Christians and even violent hatred – which is scandalous. But the reality of His presence with us as we break bread and share wine, as He did with His followers at the Last Supper, is an experience that goes back to Emmaus. So often Christianity breaks down when we try and seize control of it, and rationalise it. I can certainly give you a confident statement of my own theology of the Eucharist if you’d like – but is it perhaps enough to say that in the act of celebrating Holy Communion, we recognise God who is Jesus Christ and He feeds us with His own body and blood? And beyond that, to remain in this beautifully weird mystery?
Now, why did God come to us as a human being? One reason is because we aren’t very good at keeping rules – and even when we keep them, we usually manipulate them to suit ourselves – God gave His people simple commandments, and they still did wicked things. So He came to us Himself in human form, not to give us rules for being good, but to deal with the consequences of the fact that we often aren’t good. God came to us as His Son, because the Father and the Son are the same God, albeit different persons. And He came to us to lead us home to heaven with Him, because we could never have managed that journey on our own, and He did that by allowing Himself to be put to death and then rising from the dead so He could destroy death for all who put their trust in Him.
Strange stuff, isn’t it? This season of Easter is when we celebrate this strange victory over death. Let’s stop trying to domesticate it, stop trying to make it a tool for one or another political or cultural agenda, stop trying to make it safe for us and our lives here. Let’s embrace the weirdness.
Let’s finally talk about the third person who is the same God. On the night of the encounter at Emmaus, Peter and the disciples were cowering, terrified, in an upstairs room, even after they’d seen the risen Christ. Our first reading took place exactly seven weeks later, and it has Peter out in public in Jerusalem, without fear, pulling no punches in his preaching. The reason for this is that Jesus’ few remaining followers had received the Holy Spirit, who is wisdom and love and fire and sword and makes all the weird things we’ve said about the Father and the Son look conventional, and is also the same God, although also a different person.
The Bible doesn’t give us a simple statement of facts about the Holy Spirit’s arrival, either. This speech of Peter’s comes from Luke’s account of it in the Book of Acts; John’s account of the Holy Spirit coming is different in almost every possible way. If you take the divine inspiration of Scripture seriously, and I do, then you need to embrace that God didn’t give you a neat history without holes and some simple lists of rules, but something much odder and harder to tie down.
When people try to quarry the Bible for the bits they happen to find useful at a particular moment, somehow the essence is lost and they often become quite awful as Christians. The same goes for the Christian faith as a whole. We can’t strip it down for parts. When we try to make it into a series of tools, it stops working.
“Oh, how foolish you are”, Christ tells the disciples as they walked, “and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!”
We want Christianity to be a simple formula that will help us to be nice and make everyone else nice and make the world perfect. The first disciples were like us. Jesus has to remind them, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things?” God gives us something far richer than a collection of rules – a vision, a meal, His real presence; hope for Heaven and assurance of judgement; and the freedom to work out what that implies for yourself.
It’s odd stuff. Embrace the weirdness and allow Jesus Christ to nourish you with His very self as He leads you homewards.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
