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“Breaking Bread” (The Gospel lesson for this sermon is found in the book of Luke Chapter 24: 13-35.)
Pastor Stan Larson Central Presbyterian Church, Russellville, Arkansas Communion Sunday, April 6, 2008
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How many of you like your lives to be stressful with lots of anxiety? Most of you would say you prefer it to be nice and calm and serene. Now, if you live in Arkansas, in the last month we’ve had tornadoes and floods, everything that makes people a little bit nervous when it looks threatening outside. And when it gets threatening outside, we tend to do one of those things that we saw portrayed in the movie, “The Sound of Music”. We go to a place of security. If you saw the movie, in the very beginning, as Julie Andrews has been introduced to the family, there’s the thunderstorm and all of the children come running. The younger girls come first and they’re saying, “Oh no, the boys aren’t going to come. They’re so strong and they are not going to be afraid;” and then the boys come in. Everybody comes to a place of security which they recognize in Julie Andrews. We, when we come to times of stress and anxiety, also tend to go to those places of security.
In our lesson today, we see two of those who were in the group of disciples around Jesus. This is still Easter morning; this is Easter day of that first Easter, and they had been very stressed. They had been together in that week that led up to what we call the Last Supper and the events of Good Friday, and Jesus being crucified on the cross and being put in the tomb. Even on that morning, even when the women had been to the tomb and come back and said, “We have seen a vision of angels and they say that Jesus has risen”; they had very different reactions. Last Sunday on Easter, we heard that on that evening that the great host of the disciples, at least the ten, were huddled in the upper room with the door locked because they were afraid. We heard that Thomas, the twin, was somewhere else. An then we hear that two of the disciples said, “Well we heard that Jesus was supposed to have been raised, but, you know it probably would be safer to go back to where we were before, to go back to the way it used to be, to go back to that nice secure place where we know that everything is going to happen in a good orderly fashion. They might even have been Presbyterian. You know they don’t like a lot of change; they don’t like a lot of things going on that are disturbing and upsetting to the system. So they were on their way home, probably, walking, talking, but going away from Jerusalem, away from the rest of the disciples, away from all that stress and anxiety, away from all of the threats that were there in Jerusalem; they were going away from the religious authorities, away from the Roman authorities; and this is how we may also like it to be.
We don’t like it to be stressful, with a lot of anxieties going on; we like to have everything nice and smooth. But sometimes in the life of a church, we have a pastor retire, or a pastor move somewhere else. Just because they have moved, it’s a little stressful. Things aren’t done exactly the way they used to be done. There is anxiety, people wondering, “Well is everything going to get done right; who’s going to be there to lead us and to guide us. Is everyone going to step up and do what they’re supposed to do”? In times like that, it is not unusual for people either to leave and go home, to huddle together in fear, or try to go back to the way it used to be done, because we like familiar safe places. We like to not have to deal with all of that stress and anxiety.
But God does not leave us there; that’s our reaction; that’s our reality. And into that comes our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who comes to us as we are walking, as we are going all these places. Jesus came to the upper room. He came back again for Thomas. He comes to these two men who are walking on the road and he says, “Don’t be stressed. What are you talking about”? He’s telling them it’s not as bad as it looks. "Didn’t you know you have to go through these times; to get from the one pastor to the next pastor"? Pastors come and go; churches stay. That’s a reality. Even if the pastor lives a good long life, they can be there only 35, 40, maybe 50 years, churches, hundreds of years. You’re going to have those transitions. So what are we to do? Well, we say, “That’s what supposed to happen. That’s what God said would happen; and we are not left alone; we are not left without resources. We’re not left all by ourselves. We have lots of other things to keep us going, lots of other things to support us in those times so that we don’t feel so stressed out that we have to just go run and hide.
One of those stories we have goes back to Martin Luther and the beginning of the reformation. You know, before that time all the reformers were killed. Martin Luther was the first one that started to reform the church, that actually lived. But his family had intended him to be a lawyer. One day he was traveling from one place to another and there was a thunderstorm, which is very unusual in Germany. Luther did a “smart” thing; he went and hid under a tree. The tree got hit by lightening; he had one of those what we would call a “battlefield confession”. He said, “Lord if you will save me, I will go into the ministry. And for some unknown reason, he kept his promise. He went into the ministry even though his family wanted him to be a lawyer. They wanted him to get ahead in society; and he had people who kept pushing him at him all the time, wanting him to do more. An then along came Calvin and all the rest of the reformers who followed in the footsteps of those before Luther, and after Luther, and he said, “There are some things we do that need to change”, even though it caused some stress in the Church.
Today, going through transitions, it would be nice to move quickly away and out of that stress and anxiety, to go back to the way we’ve always done it before, or if we were not always Presbyterians, to go back to the way we did it in the “other” church or another place. But God comes with some wonderful resources for us—our fellowship together, our gathering together is a way for us to share our fears, and our anxieties and know that God his here in our midst telling us it’s okay; you have to go through these things, but it’s going to be all right. We’re going to come through on the other side. But as we do that we also have to say, let’s don’t run away. And as we’re walking, we have to welcome new people because we never know who they are going to be. It could be Jesus, it could be another person that God has sent to be a part of us and help us on our journey as well. It is so easy to just huddle together, to be a little herd of cattle with our backs facing out, letting nothing in. It’s easy to leave people out unknowingly.
I know a lot of you are asking about how Kris and I are doing with the tornado. The reality is that I wasn’t there. On Thursday when the tornado hit in the Benton and Bryant area, I was in Tulsa at my sisters’ because we were on our way to memorial service for my aunt in Nebraska. I drove to Tulsa on Thursday and then we drove to Lincoln, Nebraska on Friday, and had a family dinner. Now churches never have dinners, do you? As we gathered for our family dinner, there were people there that we had never ever met, because my aunt had grown up in Canada. We had never gotten to know her side of the family from Canada; and several of them were there.
They had been wintering down in Arizona and were coming through Nebraska, making a detour, going back to Alberta, to be with us. We had almost all of the family there, because we planned it that way. My aunt died in December, right before Christmas, and we said this is not the time to gather the family. She was cremated and we said when it is an appropriate time, when everybody can be there, we will gather them together. You see, her children were in Hawaii, grandchildren in California, children in Montana, children in New Hampshire, relatives in Canada, my sister and I from Arkansas and Oklahoma and those in other places; you know you don’t just gather everybody on just 2 day’s notice. But we gathered together, not always knowing one another, but getting to know one another, gathering around a meal as we do for fellowship dinners here, and saying, “Let’s get together and know one another; let’s find out the stories about this person who brought us here together”; for our family, it was my Aunt Vi. For us here, it is Jesus Christ. We can share how Jesus has impacted our lives and how we can, by sharing our stories, come to support one another from our experiences, from the things that we have been through.
There may be people, when you have a disaster say, “You know I’ve been through a hurricane; I’ve been through an earthquake, I’ve been through tornadoes, and you know—you get through it”. If you live anywhere in the United States, you are probably going to experience tornadoes. If you’re a Christian in a church, you’re going to go through the transitions of having to go from one pastor to the next pastor, having to go from times of change and stress to where it gets to be a little less at times; where we hope that it levels out, that you’re not paying on a building, that you’re not worrying about repairing the roof. We know that in all of those places, God goes with us because it is Jesus who came to the disciples, who sent the angels to the tomb so we would know he had been raised from the dead. It was Jesus who came to the upper room and came back to Thomas. It is Jesus who came and walked on the road with these two men. It is Jesus who comes here and invites us to the table, to gain strength from our time together, from our experiences together, from our faith together and from the meal that God has prepared for us. For God invites us to gather, to say that when we gather together; we can face those times of stress and anxiety; we can share the experiences of getting through those kinds of times with God’s help. God invites us to this table; God invites us to this time, and says, “Yes, together we can come through these times”.
But we have to be open to God’s Word, when God explains what is happening; we have to be open to new people coming into our midst because they bring new insights and new gifts and new talents. And where we want to stay huddled together and not allow anyone in; we find we have to. One of those places where at times we huddle, because our imprint is there, is in our pews. One of those stories that was told in one of our national magazines was about the pastor in a church in New York, I think. You know, where the people knew where their pews were. One of the older ladies in the church who had raised her family in the church and her husband had died, had her own pew; it was in a particular place in the sanctuary and everyone knew that that was her pew. They knew that she had been through so many things, that possibly she was a little bitter at times, not the most hospitable and welcoming of persons. One Sunday morning a new young couple came in with their children. They had been greeted properly at the back by the ushers, who had pointed them into the sanctuary. And they went up and they sat in her pew. The ushers were on their way to tell them where to sit; but that lady got there first. They were wondering, well when is the bomb going to go off? When is she going to explode? She promptly sat down behind them; and then everybody thought it would probably happen after the service.
They were listening in after the service or during the passing of peace, whichever it was, and this lady said, ”It is wonderful to see you sitting where my husband and I and our children sat, to see a young family where we sat as a young family. Please come and sit here again; I don’t mind sitting behind you because I love to see the same kind of family that I had in that pew”. Can we be that welcoming ourselves, to allow people into our pew, into our lives, into our church, to allow them to come in and bring the gifts that God has given them to share with us? In times of stress and anxiety we want to keep things out; and in those times it is God who comes to us and says, “I am here. Here is what’s happening. Here is someone who can walk with you and explain things”. Then we begin to recognize who that is when we break bread together, and see that it is God who has provided all that we need, who has provided this meal, and who makes himself known. God makes himself known in the breaking of bread and bids us come, be nourished for the days and times and the journey ahead. That is God’s invitation to us today as well, to come at the breaking of bread, to come to God’s table to come to be strengthened and nourished by God. Amen.
It is much easier though at times to hide, to hope that someone else will deal with the stress; and unfortunately, or fortunately, God says, “You are the one”. We are the ones, the leaders and the members of this church, we are the ones to welcome, to handle the stress and anxiety, not alone, but with God. God invites us to share our faith and our experiences.
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