In the Breaking of Bread

One morning we were in New York in the basement of Rockefeller Center in line at Starbucks and we noticed that Natalie Morales from the Today show was in line with us. The Today Show was still on, and she had run over during a break to get coffee. At first, she was just part of the crowd, but then her coffee didn’t come. And she stood waiting for someone to read “Natalie” off of the side of the cup. And 5 or 6 people who had ordered after her had gotten their coffee, and she went up and asked about her coffee. No one really paid any attention to her. And she stood longer. Then she went again, and actually got the attention of the barista who looked at her and said, “What’s your name?” NATALIE she replied. They didn’t trust her to believe that she had ordered and paid and not gotten her coffee, but they did finally make her a coffee.

Why didn’t they recognize her? They were busy. They were pre-occupied. They were focused on their own thoughts and work. Perhaps that is what happened to the two on the Emmaus Road. Maybe Cleopas and the other follower of Jesus were so focused on the events of the last two days that they didn’t see, didn’t stop to focus on this fellow traveler.

Or maybe why they didn’t recognize Jesus because Emmaus is West of Jerusalem, they were walking from Jerusalem into the setting sun. Perhaps the “setting sun so dazzled them that they did not know their Lord.” William Barclay says about this reason that whether that is physically what happened or not isn’t the point. “…it is true,” he says, “that the Christian…walks not toward the sunset but to the sunrise….The Christian goes onwards, not to a night which falls, but to a dawn which breaks – and that is what, in their sorrow and their disappointment, the two on the Emmaus road had forgotten.”

When they recognize Jesus, they were so transformed from utter despair to overwhelming joy that they got up…that same hour…in the night…and returned to Jerusalem to share the news with the others. Once they recognized Jesus, they turned and headed toward the sunrise.

Every time Jesus appears post-resurrection, he appears to people who know and love him, and they don’t recognize him until he speaks their name or puts out his hands to be touched, or eats with them. Clearly, he was physical – he ate and was touched by them. Clearly, they knew him – their whole lives turned around once they recognized him. Clearly, he was not simply resuscitated, there was something different about him after the resurrection, so different that people who had travelled with him and eaten with him and learned from him for years didn’t recognize him. He had not simply died and come back, he had been through death and come out on the other side. And now he is only recognizable as they are intimately in relationship with him. The same is true for us.

Carey Nieuwhof is a pastor and author on church growth and leadership. He wrote a blog a couple of years ago on some Barna research about why attendance at local churches is declining titled “5 Reasons People Have Stopped Attending Your Church.” The second reason particularly resonated with me as I studied today’s Scripture. The second reason is that God is missing in the church. “People go to church looking for God but are having difficulty finding him.”

I wonder if we have taught people what to look for. There were not herald trumpets and strings playing as they walked that road to Emmaus. They just talked together about Scripture and their lives. And then they sat down together and gave thanks for bread and broke it together. In that moment, they recognized him, and then he was gone.

Sometimes, I think we don’t recognize God because we aren’t looking for him. Like those Baristas at Starbucks not recognizing Natalie Moralis, we are focused on our work. “GOD,” he says to us, “I’m GOD”…and we try to please him by doing what we think he wants, but we never really look up to see and recognize him.

Sometimes, I think we don’t recognize God because we are facing into the sunset rather than setting our path into the sunrise. We focus on the coming darkness rather than the promise of the light to come.

Sometimes, we experience God in a moment, and when it is fleeting we dismiss it. It seems important to me that as he breaks bread and they recognize him, he vanished. Experiencing God is recognizing a moment of grace, a moment of community, a moment of love.

In her inauguration sermon as President of Columbia Theological Seminary last November, Leanne Van Dyke shared a story that one seminarian told about recognizing God, Gerlyn Henry shared this story: “I grew up in Canada but moved to India as a teenager for a few years. I lived in a society fragmented between the rich and the poor, living side by side. A huge house would be attached by a wall to eight or nine small huts. It was interesting but heartbreaking to watch the dynamics between the children who play on the street. I was watching one evening as all the rich kids gathered to play soccer because one of them bought a new soccer ball. I kept watching as one little boy from the hut tried as best he could to just touch the new ball. He had eyes of wonder!

“On noticing this, the other kids pushed him to the ground and ran down the street away from him. He started to cry. What happened next was amazing. One of the boys returned with another ball, not so new, and invited this little boy to play. Sure enough, the other kids came back. This story and others like it direct my ministry. We are called to break boundaries, cross boundaries and transcend boundaries. God was revealed through that boy who came back.”

In the summer of 2002, Lewis Smedes, a professor of theology and Christian Ethics at Fuller Seminary, and Rod Jellema, a poet and Professor Emeritus of the University of Maryland where he was founding director of the Creative Writing Program, were having an email exchange. During the course of that exchange, Rod Jellema wrote a poem that describes experiencing God. His description, I think, is the best I have ever encountered in words.

I have to look for cracks and crevices.
Don’t tell me how God’s mercy
Is as wide as the ocean, as deep as the sea.
I already believe it, but that infinite prospect
Gets further away the more we mouth it.
I thank you for lamenting his absences-
His absence from marriages going mad, our sons dying young, from the
inescapable
Terrors of history: Treblinka, Vietnam,
September Eleven. His visible absence
Makes it hard for us in our time
To celebrate his invisible Presence.

This must be why mystics and poets record
The slender incursions of splintered light,
Echoes, fragments, odd words and phrases
Like flashes through darkened hallways.
These stabs remind me that the proud
Portly old church is really only
That cut green slip grafted into a tiny nick
That merciful God himself slit into the stem
Of his chosen Judah. The thin and tenuous
Thread we hang by, so astonishing,
Is the metaphor I need at the shoreline
Of all those immeasurable oceans of love.”

The presence of God was known to them as he broke bread so that as evening fell around them, a slender incursion of splintered light flashed through the darkness and they recognized him. As we come to this table, we come to Christ’s table. May we recognize him here in the breaking of bread.