Easter 3: 2008 – Luke 24.13-35: St. Mary’s: Revd. Canon Dr. Alan Winton
 
There are just three words from our Gospel reading that I want to pick up to give a focus to our thoughts this morning, and they come in verse 21 on the lips of the disciples as they reflect on the events that have just taken place, they say rather hauntingly to the unknown figure accompanying them on their walk: “we had hoped”, “we had hoped”.

I received in the post this week a leaflet about something called ‘Back to Church Sunday’. This is a national initiative which has been running for a few years now and is being picked up and promoted this year in our diocese by Canon John Kiddle, our new Officer for Mission and Development. It’s an attempt to reach out to people who used to go to church but for a variety of reasons just stopped coming.

I wonder if you’ve ever thought about why people stop coming to church. Sometimes it’s because they move home and never quite manage to connect with a new church; sometimes it’s to do with a change in circumstances, illness is often a factor, or perhaps as children get older new activities tempt them away from church on a Sunday morning. More worryingly, it could be something that the Rector or someone from the church said or did, or didn’t say or didn’t do. And sometimes, and perhaps most difficult of all, it will be the result of events or experiences that have challenged a person’s faith.

‘Back to Church Sunday’ is an opportunity to invite people who have somehow got out of the habit of coming to church, to give it a try once more. Congregations are encouraged to invite friends, neighbours, family members and make a supreme effort to make them welcome, which would mean no-one under any circumstances saying to a returnee ‘you can’t sit there that’s my pew’. Not that anyone in this church would ever say that these days, would they?

As I go around the parish and meet people and talk to them, I am amazed at the number of people who talk about a strong connection with the church in the past, often a childhood spent singing in the choir, but there is no sign that they have come to church in recent years.

I think ‘Back to Church Sunday’ is an initiative worth looking at and hope the PCC will give it some time at its next meeting. There will be some people who will respond well to a friendly invitation, to come back to church with no recriminations, a kind of church amnesty, and I imagine there are people in church today who could tell a story about how they have done just that. And then of course the challenge is not just to get people through the door, but to do everything we can to help them feel that they truly belong, that this is their church as much as it is our church, that old members and new members are of equal standing.

But some people’s reasons for dropping away from regular church attendance are more intractable and making the journey back will be harder because their reasons for going in the first place had to do with events and experiences which really shocked them and challenged their faith.

I wanted just to think about this sort of situation through analogy with the experience of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, in this most detailed and thought-provoking account of a resurrection appearance of Jesus.  As the disciples walk and talk to the unknown stranger, it becomes clear that they have just been through a series of events and experiences that have really challenged their faith. They relate the expectations of Jesus that had been formed as they spent time with him and experienced the joy and excitement of being in his presence. And then they speak of the desolation that came upon them when his life ended not in the triumph they had anticipated but rather in suffering, death and apparent failure. And here we have those poignant words: “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel”.
 
And it seems to me this is often where some people who fall away from church attendance find themselves. Having come to church, often for many years, they had invested real hope and expectation in what their faith would do for them. And it is often in the suffering they experience or witness at close quarters that all of this begins to fall apart, and those words on the lips of the disciples might well be found on their lips: “we had hoped”.

Like the disciples who had mistakenly imagined that because of who he was, Jesus’ path to ultimate triumph and victory would be a smooth and simple one; it is easy for us to start to imagine that the promise of faith will mean a life where we are protected, free of suffering, for if God loves us how could he allow us to endure hardship.

What Jesus has to do for the disciples is interpret the events they have been through and help them to see that the suffering Jesus had to go through was not a negation of God’s presence and purpose, but was capable of being caught up within the overarching loving will of God. Faith didn’t promise the avoidance of suffering in the life of Jesus, but it did promise the ultimate victory would be God's, and that ultimate victory is embodied in the risen Christ who walks with the disciples on the road. It takes them quite a while to recognise him: hope can take a long while to dawn on us, but eventually things start to fall into place in the disciples’ minds and faith is stirred in them once more.

And Jesus would say something similar were he to walk along a road with those who have drifted away from his church on account of the suffering and hardship they have endured and witnessed. In our experience also, faith doesn’t promise the avoidance of suffering in our lives, but it does promise that the ultimate victory will be Gods, and that God will always be faithful and will be with us when we suffer.

The story of the road to Emmaus is a wonderful picture for us of the promise of the risen Lord, that he will walk with us along the journey of our lives helping to interpret the experiences and events that challenge and trouble us: his promise is that he will always be beside us through thick and thin; there is no hardship we will have to endure without his companionship, without his presence – and he will lead us finally to a place of greater understanding and a place of deeper peace.

For Christians who follow in the way of the cross, faith can never be a simple promise of the avoidance of suffering, surely the cross, the ever-present symbol of our faith, teaches us that, but the joy and wonder of the resurrection also teaches us that God’s goodness is not overcome on the cross or in our suffering, God will never desert us and we can confidently place our hope in him. But like those earliest disciples, we may also find it hard to recognise the hope that God gives us, it may take us a while to see the way in which God would help us and lift us up. Resurrection in its different forms is always strange and shocking.

For some people who need to encounter Christ on the road to Emmaus, what they will need is for us to take on the role of being his agents. Our role will be to travel alongside them as friends, listening carefully as they tell the story of the events they have been through, the experiences that have shaped and damaged them. And perhaps God will give us the words to speak to them of his enduring love, of the hope that isn’t defeated by suffering; or maybe our role will be to embody those truths through the practical love and support we can offer.

And maybe there will be others who can be encouraged back to church, to see more clearly and perhaps for the first time, the true nature of the faith we celebrate each week, when we share in Christ’s body and blood, so freely given for us on the cross; when we focus each week on the cross which is now empty because hope and goodness have not been defeated – Christ has suffered but has risen again, and makes himself known to us in the breaking of bread.

Maybe what the Church of England does need is a good marketing campaign, promoting ‘Back to Church Sunday’ with appropriate razzmatazz and spin. But we do need to remember what our ‘product’ and our purpose is. It is to present the Christ who walks on the road to Emmaus, accompanying us on our journey, meeting us with our fears and disappointments, our expectations that are sometimes a bit askew and haven’t been met, our sufferings that have caused us to question whether there is really ground for hope – it is this Christ whom we want people to come back to church to encounter, because he is the one who can open our eyes fully to see and to truly understand the nature of his promise, not simply so that the church pews might be filled, although we would love to see that, but so that people may embrace life in all its fullness. Amen.