The senior sermon of Martha Stebbins, Class of 2005 from the Diocese of North Carolina, delivered on April 14, 2005, in Christ Chapel

The Road to Emmaus. The Road to Emmaus is frequently read as a ghost story. It sounds like one, the kind that raises the hair on your arm but without the blood and gore so popular with today's ghost stories. The problem of preaching this as a ghost story is that it gives the impression that Jesus is just a shadow, a bodiless spirit that can talk to us but cannot touch us. Perhaps if Jesus had been more like today's stories, if he had cut the men's heads off at dinner and let their blood spill across the floor, he would have seemed more real. But then that would have been at variance with Jesus' message of love and grace.

When I was in college…the first time… I lived in an area where there were not a lot of students. Most of my neighbors were working class folk, some living on an economic knife edge. It was a great neighborhood, quiet and friendly. I shopped at the local grocery store, Big Star by name. And I have always had that uncanny knack of picking the lane with the slowest checkout person. A gentleman was in that same said line behind me one Friday afternoon. Fridays meant payday, so there was an extra long wait in line in the afternoon. Those waits gave me an opportunity to browse the Enquirer headlines (surreptitiously of course), to ponder recent clinical challenges, and to have those slow, desultory casual conversations with fellow patrons as we awaited our turn to dump our groceries onto the belt to be rung up. Anyway, this gentleman was an older black man. He was dressed a bit scruffily, maybe having finished a day's yardwork in the nearby mansions of Raleigh's economic elite. The five o'clock shadow hung on his cheeks as a medallion of an early rising and shaving in the dark.

It happened to be Holy Week and my thoughts turned to church instead of veterinary medicine. I had discovered the various Holy Week activities by accident only a couple of years before and was looking forward to them. I know longer remember how the conversation started other than the fact that the man began it. It began abruptly enough to startle me from my theological navel-gazing. I remember that for a brief moment I felt irritated by this interruption by him. But of course my Southern upbringing about not being rude to my elders, lawn-mowers or not, kicked in. Eventually the conversation shifted towards faith issues. Our conversation went deeper and deeper and I remember drinking in his words that sprang from his dark face like a bubbling desert spring. By the time that it was my turn to unload my groceries, we were deep into conversation, standing not a foot apart with our head bowed towards each other, as if daughter and father.

I felt the disapproving stares from the people around us. We were too close and too deep in what was no longer that polite conversation found in grocery stores. But my heart burned and my eyes shone with an intensity that would carry me through the entire week, all the way through Good Friday onto Easter Sunday. I never saw the gentleman again. You see, I did not see Jesus. He was just an old black man who worked hard for a living. What could he tell me about life in Christ, me who was educated and from an extended family who hired men like him to do the manual labor we no longer wished to do?

The question that we must ask ourselves on our own road to Emmaus is whether or not we can recognize Jesus walking beside us. We need to remember that Jesus was a peasant, not even a citizen of Rome. And, in Rome's eyes, Jesus was a non-person with no rights; Jesus was someone to exploit, or, especially if he was troublesome, to imprison, to sell, to torture, to kill. In the eyes of those whose eyes were blinded by their own religious assumptions and blinded by their fears, Jesus was a sinner, one who must hear others, but not be heard. It could be interpreted that he was killed as an example of the dangers of challenging the society's self-absorbed navel-gazing.

Our difficulty of recognizing Jesus in others, within our modern context is because our eyes and our ears are shut so much of the time. Jesus is just a shadow, a bodiless spirit that can talk to us but cannot touch us. Sometimes this is because we see only what we want to see and hear only what we want to hear. It as if we are looking at ghosts instead of the prophetic presences of others in our lives. You can stare straight at the ones who have been made into ghosts and see right through them. If you doubt this, just ask those who beg for change at our Austin intersections. Their voices are heard as incoherent, as if they are talking gibberish. Those who are the ghosts of our society sometimes become the ghosts found in today's horror films; blood is spilled, either implied or for real. The reply from those of us who are sightless before God is generally swift and brutal, until the ghosts either become harmless and invisible again or are exorcised from our presence.

Our road to Emmaus is filled with Jesus. Many times he is invisible because he is cloaked in a different skin color from our own, has different socio-economic status, is a different gender, is a child or an elderly person, perhaps he is an immigrant or a street person or a professor or a student. Jesus speaks from the edges and to the center of our hearts. How often do we ignore the gifts, the Christ incarnate within, of others who are not like ourselves? We are blind to people different from us or find those differences troubling or threatening. And yet, my own experience has demonstrated to me that when Christ is speaking from those of whom I am blind even though my face may burn with embarrassment, my heart burns with Christ's love growing within.

Sometimes the person has walked alongside of me patiently teaching me and modeling grace and love. But it is not until I demonstrate hospitality and allow that ghost-like other take the lead in demonstrating Christ's love and grace that my eyes are opened to the truth. It is when the other person blesses that which sustains me and breaks bread with me as a friend that I can see. And then there are no ghosts, there is resurrected flesh and blood and the gift of Christ incarnate in one another. The love and grace of this new relationship demonstrates the reality of the resurrected Christ.

The disciples did not recognize Jesus. They even seemed incredulous at his lack of knowing. But Jesus stayed with them and even though they did not recognize it at the time, their hearts burned within them as Jesus spoke. Finally, at the end of the day, "Stay with us!" the disciples urged. So he did and, 'when he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them." The disciple's eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus before them. And Jesus said no more words to them for the moment. When our eyes are opened to Christ, and we finally recognize that burning in our heart as our spirits responding to the words spoken to us, no more words are needed for the moment.

Christ is risen, alleluia!