Easter 3 2010 | Acts 2:14a, 36-41 | Ps 16:1-4, 12-19 | 1 Pet 1:17-23 | Lk 24:13-35
To hear a recording of this sermon, click on: www.apocryphile.org/downloads/nanak.mp3
So, the last time God appeared to you in power, the last time you had a major epiphany that shook you to your core, what did you do? Isaiah, you might recall, fell on his face and started mumbling about his unworthiness until God force-fed him a flaming coal. Peter likewise fell on his face during the Transfiguration, and started mumbling about tents. The first time I had a major vision, I cried for three days straight. But what did YOU do? And more importantly, what did you do after that?
Nanak was a ne’er do-well shepherd in India, put out to pasture with the sheep by his family—a boy’s job—because he was considered inept at everything else and not to be trusted with important things. Nanak was a dreamy, mystical guy who really struggled over which religion was the right one. Was it the Hinduism of his family, or the Islam of the rulers? He’s dabbled in both, and they had each left him a little cold.
One day he left the sheep intending to take a bath in the river, but while he was there, standing in the water, God appeared to him, and Nanak just stood there in the river, awestruck and trembling. For a couple of days. During his vision, God told him to adore the Name—the Divine Name that could never be spoken or explained or comprehended.
When Nanak finally emerged from the water, he spoke cryptically, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim,” and he walked away from the sheep forever. He began to practice Name Adoration, and taught it to anyone who would listen to him. Then he decided to take it on the road. He asked his best friend, a Muslim musician, to accompany him, and together, they travelled far and wide, throughout India and beyond, singing love songs to God.
And these songs were so sublime, so interfaith, that they were welcomed by villages that were Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, and even Jewish. Everyone listened, and everyone sang along.
Nanak didn’t just REACT to his encounter with the Holy—he RESPONDED. He didn’t just fall on his face and convulse, then go back to business as usual. His encounter changed everything. He left his family and his job behind, he began a serious spiritual practice in a public way, and he told everyone he met about what had happened to him.
This is exactly the template for response given in our readings today as well. In the book of Acts, the people who heard Peter preach were deeply moved, scripture says they were “pricked in the heart,” and their immediate REACTION was anxiety. “What do we DO?” they ask Peter pleadingly, in essence, asking him, “How should we RESPOND to this news that has moved us?”
Peter tells them to do three things. First, he tells them to “Repent.” Here, Peter isn’t saying, “Feel bad about yourselves,” which is the shallow way that we often view repentance in our culture. The Greek word Luke uses for “repent” is “metanoia,” which means to change your heart, or to change your mind, to orient yourself differently. The clear implication is that this results in a change of life.
Second, Peter tells them to “be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ,” in other words, ritualize this change in a public way. If you just keep this change secret, you may begin to doubt it, the impact may slip away, you might go back to your old way of living. Instead, Peter says, do something CRAZY: go public. Ritualize it, ground your memory of the experience in the body, make yourself accountable to a community of people who can guide you and support you in your new way of life.
Third, Peter says, “receive the gift of the Holy Ghost,” which seems a little obscure until you look at the next sentence, “for the promise is unto you and to your children and to all who are afar off.” The gift of the Holy Spirit isn’t just something nice for me—it’s not like a locket or a stuffed animal, you know, sweet but useless. What does the Holy Spirit DO? She EMPOWERS us to go forth and proclaim the good news we have received to the world. 1) Change direction; 2) Ritualize it; 3) Tell it.
We see this same pattern in our Psalm. The Psalmist was in some major kind of dire trouble, and God delivered him. He says, “the sorrows of death encompassed me, and the pains of hell got hold of me; I found trouble and sorrow.” He calls upon God in his despair and distress, and—although the action takes place offstage, God delivers him.
But now what? Again, three things: first, he becomes God’s servant—a change of life. Second, he makes sacrifice at the temple—a public and ritual acknowledgement of this change. And third, “I will pay my vows unto the HOLY ONE in the presence of all God’s people”—he tells others what happened to him.
Strangely, these passages were paired with our Gospel reading, and here, the pattern is not so obvious. Or is it?
The story is both beloved and familiar: It’s later in the day of Jesus’ resurrection. Two disciples, perhaps a man named Cleopas and his wife, are walking to a village called Emmaus. They’re distressed by all that’s been happening in and to Jesus’ community: Jesus was publicly executed and buried, and what’s more, now his body is missing, and some of the women in the community say that Jesus is alive again. Is it crazy talk, or just another tragic event? They’re so numb they can’t process it. No wonder they’re getting away from it all.
But then a profound encounter with the Holy begins. Jesus himself draws near to them and walks with them, but they just think he’s a fellow traveler—they don’t KNOW it’s Jesus. And he asks them, “What are you talking about? Why are you so sad?”
And they say, “Have you been living in a cave? Don’t you know what’s been happening in Jerusalem?”
Jesus says, “Assume that I don’t and tell me about it.” And so they pour out their hearts to him, all their confusion, their fear, and their frustration.
And Jesus, still disguised, replies, “O you fools!” because apparently, it wasn’t INSULTING in the first century to say something like that. But then he begins to explain all of the events in the light of the prophesies in the Jewish scriptures.
When the couple stops for the night, they implore their mysterious fellow traveler to remain with them, to which he agrees. As they’re eating dinner, he broke the bread, and in that moment, their eyes were opened and they realized who it was. And just then, he vanished.
The couple is so shocked that before the hour is up, they’re back on the road to Jerusalem to tell everyone what had happened to them.
So that’s the story. It’s a GREAT story. It’s a multivalent story. It occurs only in the Gospel of Luke, so we must assume it has great significance to the gentile Christian community. But what could that significance be?
This passage gives us the pattern for public worship in Christian churches. The Jewish Christians don’t need this, because they continue to worship in the synagogues, but the gentile Christians have no pattern for common prayer, and as you can imagine, this is a very great need and an important question: What does worship that is specifically CHRISTIAN worship look like?
The story lays out the pattern for worship in clear but symbolic terms:
First, the church is like these two believers: they are companions on a spiritual journey that must stop every now and then to be refreshed through public worship.
Second, whenever two or more are gathered in the name of Jesus, Jesus is among them, even if he isn’t seen or recognized.
Third, when Christians meet, they should use the events of the life of Jesus to interpret the Jewish scriptures. They should read the scriptures critically and imaginatively.
Fourth, they should gather at the table of the Lord, where Jesus will be made visible to them in the breaking of the bread.
But wait, there’s more! They should be so energized by their encounter with the living Jesus that they go forth to tell others about their experience. The religious experience doesn’t stop when church is over, it just changes form from a passive to an active mode. As my friend pastor Tony at Arlington UCC says in his Benediction, “worship has ended, let the service begin.”
So why did the Lectionary compilers pair this story—a post-resurrection account that is also a template for Christian worship—with the other readings for the day? Because this complex reading also speaks to the pattern of response given by Peter, although, again, in a highly symbolic form.
After their encounter with the Holy, the two disciples change DIRECTION—a metanoia. Their experience with Jesus provides the pattern for ritualizing Christian experience for all time—the interpretation of scripture and the breaking of bread, the Liturgies of the Word and Table, respectively. And they are moved to go and tell others about their experience immediately, with some urgency, in fact. All three responses—Change direction, ritualize it, tell it—are present in this story.
Which brings us back to my original question: The last time you had a major epiphany that shook you to your core, the last time—in the words of the Holy Qu’ran—“your breast expanded” and “your burden was lifted from you,” the last time God saved you or revealed himself in power to you—what did you DO? AFTER you picked yourself off the floor, stopped crying, and got ahold of yourself, I mean.
Did it change you? Did it change your life direction? Nanak cried out, “There is no Muslim, there is no Hindu!” St. Paul cried out, “In Christ Jesus there is no Jew, no Greek, no male, no female, no upper class, no lower class,” and he MEANT it. It turned their lives around. How did YOUR experience change YOU?
And did you ritualize it somehow? Did you tell others? It isn’t too late. The great thing about God is that we’re not just given one chance, one experience, one epiphany, and then, “sorry, that’s all for you!” Instead, God comes to us again and again, like the wronged woman in Jesus’ parable, seeking justice until she gets it. God is persistent. God doesn’t give up on us. God keeps giving us glimpses of glory, epiphanies and insights, experiences of grace and salvation.
Half the time we don’t recognize them as such. Jesus might be walking with us, but we don’t see him. But the fact is God is ALWAYS walking with us, ALWAYS whispering to us, ALWAYS revealing salvation to us, if only we had the eyes to see it. And largely, this is a matter of being open to it, to looking for it, to not explaining away every mystical experience as “an undigested bit of potato” as Scrooge does. But these experiences are not rare. Most of us have them, often again and again. And we’ll keep having them until we respond.
God is a relational being, who wants nothing quite so much as intimacy and relationship—not just with humanity in general, but with YOU in particular. And healthy relationship means reciprocity. There are things I want out of my relationship with Lisa, and things she wants out of her relationship with me. The same is true for God. God gives us light, hope, salvation, ecstatic experiences of mystical unity, all in the hope that it will lead us to make a response: to turn toward him, to walk toward him, to seek a deeper, more intimate relationship with him.
Ritualizing this grounds us in commitment, in community, and gives us a support system for this journey. And finally, when we grow and deepen our relationship with God, we want others to experience the satisfaction and reward that we have, and we’re moved to talk about it, to testify to our experience, to invite others into this new way of living as well.
Yes, the resurrection was great, but our RESPONSE to it is important. Yes, our mystical experiences are neato and profound, but they’re given for a reason, to provoke a RESPONSE, a movement towards God, a commitment to the life of faith, and concern for others. This is the normative pattern for Christian life. It’s a good one. We have been led here by some experience of God, and here we ritualize our faith in community, now let us go forth in the power of the Holy Spirit to sing love songs to God, to testify to what God has done in our lives—to help others make sense of THEIR mystical experiences, to invite them—not just to church—but to a deeper and more intimate relationship with the Holy. Let us pray…
God, you are a bit of a stalker, you follow us around, declaring your love for us, revealing yourself in shocking and upsetting ways until we get it: you love us, and you’re not giving up on us. Now if WE did that, we’d get arrested. You get away with a lot. But your heart is in the right place. We see that. Help us to respond in the way that is meaningful to you. Help us to respond in ways that are life-giving to us. Help us to respond in ways that search out others who are lost in despair, and give them hope as well. For we ask this in the name of the one who sought us out and declared your love to us, even Jesus Christ. Amen.
