Sermon at the monastery, May 4, 2014

"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.”  - Blaise Pascal

Our readings today all invite us to open our hearts to the message of Easter.  In the first reading, Peter tells a Jerusalem crowd about Jesus, and they are “cut to the heart.”  In the second, the author tells his readers to love one another deeply from the heart.  And in the third, Luke’s masterful story of two disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus, the disciples later recall that their hearts were burning while Jesus opened the Scriptures to them.  

The heart, we hear in these readings, is the royal road to God.

And yet, as Elizabeth pointed out to me, our Anglican heritage insists that we come to know God not only through the heart, but also through reason.   The heart has its reasons, but reason, we might say, sometimes explains the heart to itself.

This question of the heart leads us to a deeper mystery.  How is it, exactly, that we come to see Christ within and among us?  Is this a matter of the heart, or of the reason, or of some other faculty?  What leads us to see Christ, or to see new life, when we did not?

Each of the Gospel stories about Jesus’ resurrection  share a dynamic of struggle between heart and head, and between the individual and the group.  In none of the stories does Jesus appear first to the whole band of disciples, or even the eleven remaining apostles.  He appears to one person, to two people, at most to three.  

Those individuals are then faced with a dilemma: can I trust my own experience?  Can I go tell the group what I have seen and heard?  What will I do if they don’t believe me?  Should I ignore my experience and blend in, or should I stand alone and be ridiculed?

These are questions that each believer must face at some point.  We all must decide whether to listen to our burning hearts, our broken hearts, our loving hearts, or whether to turn away, explain them away.

Jesus meets Cleopas and his companion on the road.  The two companions think they know what has happened.  They are so familiar with it, so immersed in it, that they are shocked that anyone could have been in Jerusalem and not know all about it.  When Jesus asks them, they tell him the story as they know it.  He was a prophet.  They had hoped he was the Messiah.  He was crucified.  Now, his body is missing.  Some women saw angels, and heard he is alive.  Others went to the tomb and saw nothing.

Just the facts, ma’am.

And the facts as they know them, as the experts, say this is impossible.

The disciples cannot see Jesus until he reframes their story.  The story they tell has a Messiah, a prophet, a mighty one.  It does not have a suffering servant, or a divine child, or an incarnate God.  There’s no room in their story for the very person in front of them.  So Jesus reframes their story, opening the Scriptures in order to open their hearts.

So often it seems that what we think we know about God gets in the way of knowing God.  What we think we know about the Bible, or about doctrine, or about one another, gets in the way of knowing any of those, or knowing God.

In one of my learning communities, we refer to this already knowing as “already always listening.”  I’m already, always listening for some things, and so I miss things that don’t fit that shape.  I listen for criticism.  I listen for praise.  I listen for what is wrong, what needs fixing.  So when someone or something shows up that isn’t any of those, I might just miss it.  I might miss Jesus on the road.  

My assumption that I know about God is the greatest barrier to my relationship with God.

So God has to turn the tables, sneak up on us, and surprise us.

Jesus doesn’t just gently herd the two companions toward a new understanding.  He calls them foolish and “slow of heart” - that heart again.  He knocks them over the head, reframes their understanding of what they thought they knew.  He takes over their party and becomes the host.  

He breaks through their already always listening, and shows them something completely new and completely true.

Later, they can tell a new story.  “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road?”  Well, yes, they were, but that burning didn’t mean anything until they had a frame of reference for it.  Their burning hearts were still slow, until Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them.  Suddenly, in that way that reason can never get to, their hearts and minds opened to a new possibility.

And just as soon as they recognized him, he vanished.

Notice that Luke does not say that Jesus left them.  Jesus vanished from their sight.  But that doesn’t mean he’s not there.  It doesn’t mean he’s not here.  It means that we have to choose for ourselves whether to believe.   We are not forced to believe that a communion wafer is the body of Christ.  We are not even given good reason to believe it.  

We are invited into a mystery of presence in which the heart has reasons that reason cannot comprehend.

I know a wise man who says that if you aren’t surprised, it isn’t God.  Surprise is that glorious moment of epiphany when the world looks different and fresh.  

We step out of our stories, out of our already always listening, and stand for a moment in a garden by an empty tomb.

We can’t force those moments.  We can open to them through practices of silence, of opening the Scriptures, of breaking bread together.  We can be on the lookout for God among us.  But we can’t be too sure of how God will look, or we’ll miss Her.  

The best bet is to start with the possibility that everything, everyone we meet is God until proven otherwise.

In this season of surprise, may you discover God where you never knew to look.  May your heart and your head align in joyful awareness of what God is doing, and may you run to your companions and report, “The Lord has risen indeed!”