Thank you for sending Dianna and I to the Alliance of Baptists Convocation in New Orleans, we had a great trip.  You have heard about the convocation, now for the rest of the story.  The weather was fantastic, 80 degrees and sunny, the dogwoods and azaleas were in full splendor, and at least the French Quarter, the Garden District, Downtown and Uptown have recovered nicely from Katrina.  However, Dianna and I drove through the 9^th ward where many poor and marginalized peoples lived and things there are not so good.  There are whole neighborhoods now plowed under, and many streets without a single resident.  We saw the signs of flood damage; we saw the ubiquitous holes in the roof where people escaped with their very lives, we saw stores and churches and community centers and schools all empty, parts of the city seem unlikely to ever rebound.  The people were gone, but so was the very fabric of their communities. You can rebuild homes with enough money, but rebuilding community is priceless.

            In a way, witnessing the hardships of others made it hard to enjoy ourselves in the French Quarter where living is extravagant and easy, if you have the money. And it was also tough to feel at home with the aristocracy in the stately St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church which is a world away from the 9^th ward as it is right in the heart of rich person city, USA.

However, we do know that part of bringing the city back is bringing back the tourists who add millions of bucks to the economy. We also know that New Orleans is about a good time and that is what the people there want to us have—it is the soul of the city.   If they lose that in New Orleans, then the city is indeed lost.  The Quarter is all about escaping reality, whatever your reality is, so we did in the end manage to enjoy ourselves immensely, especially the dining out part. 

            New Orleans is about food.  We even saw Guy Feiri of Food Network fame walking down the street one night, we got his picture.  It has been said that you can’t get a bad meal in New Orleans.   I don’t know if that is true or not, I do know that I have never had one.  We ate and ate and ate.  There was a big billboard when you entered town that said, “Give your diet a three day vacation,” which I did.  I totally blew my diet for three days and was OK with it.  Of course, the reason that I ate was to reassure my wife that I do not have an eating disorder; low-fat, low-carb down there would have scared her.  But I will admit that since returning home I have been very low-carb and have gotten my five veggies in every day and have already lost the three pounds I put on. Even so, the weekend binge was definitely worth it. 

            We ate at the famed Acme Oyster House and had the “Peacemaker,” which is a po’ boy with fried shrimp and oysters.  It clearly says on the menu that it was voted the fourth best sandwich in America in some high brow food competition whose name I cannot remember.  I can’t imagine what numbers one, two, and three must taste like.  We also ate at NOLA, which is owned by Emeril Laggasse.  The service was impeccable, BAM! The food was incredible, BAM!  We had the most extraordinary barbeque shrimp and cheese grits you can imagine.  We also had stuffed deboned chicken wings which were BAM awesome (sorry about that, I couldn’t resist). 

Are you hungry yet?  On Saturday night we actually ate supper twice, how bad is that?  I had a salad and two dozen fried shrimp at 7:00 and after the Alliance worship service we went out with new friends and ate again at 9:30.  I was sick of food; I didn’t think I would ever eat again.  But it was wonderful, and yes I did live to eat again, the next day in fact. 

My real bad was when we went to Café Du Monde, and I had Café Au lait and Beignets.  But in the end I did shake off all the excess sugar, even scraped it off, and I did leave my glucometer at home, and I did thoroughly enjoy every last bite of those three remarkable pastries.  I was a little concerned that my actions were akin to an alcoholic taking a drink, but alas, sugar has lost its grip on my life.  In fact, 30 minutes afterward I felt sick to my stomach. That fact notwithstanding, they were a treat.  Now when I have anything with a little sugar it taste sicky sweet to me and I am no longer tempted. But beignets are always sicky sweet to everyone, so they were more than tolerable.  There was a half pound of powdered sugar on my small saucer plate left over.  There was enough sugar left over to make a coconut cream pie.

So back to reality and the diet, I still have ten or so pounds to lose if I want to unpack my six-pack abs from their insulated cooler.  I ran two miles when I got back Monday night, and it felt like a marathon.  I thankfully didn’t do much damage in New Orleans to my waste line and more importantly to my blood sugar.

This gastronomical experience also reminded me how much food use to be a part of my life and how now it is just not that big of deal.  I am way more concerned with my health and well-being.  Now this fact might make Stanley a boring boy, but at the same time I feel like I am 30 again and that is better than any piece of pie. The truth is that eating has always been more a social event than anything else for me.  Sure, when alone or tired or stressed I would eat poorly to assuage my cares away, that is why they call it comfort food.  But that is not why I ate.

I ate heartedly because I am a social creature who enjoys good company.  Food for me is about relationships, about friendships and about family.  The sharing of a simple meal is the stuff that relationships are made of.  Eating together is the earmark of family, even though most families don’t do much of it anymore.  That Norman Rockwell Turkey dinner is an icon of family life and relatedness.  That is why big celebrations always involve food.  Try having Thanksgiving or Christmas with wheat germ and tofu, it just doesn’t cut it.   When someone is graduating, or someone gets a promotion or someone moves away or someone retires we eat.  The best times at church always involve a casserole, and most of us have had our best meals ever at church potlucks. Shoot we are feeding 200 of you a meal at Emily’s wedding reception next month. 

Well, food obviously was very important in the Bible, when you stop and think about it.  The whole book of Leviticus is practically a guide to proper nutrition.  It does however prohibit shrimp and catfish, as well as barbeque, so it is not my favorite book in the Bible.  But it is hard not to notice that Jesus was a feaster as well, although we don’t always like a feasting Jesus.  He was always eating.  Just stop and think about how many important events in scripture were in the context of food.

In the gospel of Mark 2:16, we find Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners, after call of Matthew.  In Luke 19, after Zacchaeus meets Jesus, he invited him to his house for lunch. In Matt. 22:1-10 we find the Parable of the Marriage Feast, which tells of those who refused the Kings invitation (insult) or who came with the wrong dress (lack of respect) food was often used to describe the Kingdom of God. Also Jesus describes heaven when he says, “I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”  And of course the ultimate place of food is the Last Supper (Matt. 26:29, Mk. 14; Lk. 22) “I will not drink again until I drink it new with you in my Father’s Kingdom.”  There was also the only miracle to appear in all four gospels, the feeding of the 5,000.  Surely there was food when the water was turned into wine and in the book of the apocalypse we here of the marriage supper of the lamb. And at least in two of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus involved eating.

            All of which brings me to our lectionary text today. Here we find the strange post resurrection appearance known as the road to Emmaus.  Jesus appears to two unnamed disciples who evidently should have known who he was, but for some mysterious reason their eyes were “holden” or blocked so that they could not see him for who has was.  This encounter raises more questions than it answers about the resurrected one.  But this is a rare post resurrection appearance of Christ, so it has substantive significance in telling Christ’s story.  These disciples were walking along the road sadly talking about the demise of the Christ when he walked right up behind them and asked why they were sad.  They looked at him and said “buddy, what rock have you been hiding under, don’t you know what happened in Jerusalem?  We believed in this guy we thought he was the one and they killed him– that is ‘what’s the matter.’”  They put all of their eggs in the Jesus basket and then did not haven’t a clue.  Their hopes of what might have been had vanished. 

They told Jesus about the rumors of the body missing, and Jesus began to scold them a bit prophetically and gave them a primer in messianic prophecy 101.  They were all fascinated with this definitive Sunday School lesson, but when came time for Jesus to leave, and they begged the teacher to stay.  So he did, and as well all do when entertaining company they eventually got around to eating. It was when he broke the bread that they immediately recognized him.  And soon as they recognized him, he vanished.  So they told the others that they recognized the risen Christ not when he was walking with them, not when he was explaining the entire Old Testament to them, but when they sat down to eat and he broke the bread.

            It was in eating that they recognized the feasting Jesus.  This meal had the taste of home cooking to them, they had been there before.  It had a familial comfort to it.  And that fact is the most important fact in this story.  You see, there is nothing more intimate than sharing a meal.  Nothing more personal than sitting down to dinner with people.  It is hard to hate someone you are sharing a meal with, and there is a bond that develops when you share a crust of bread with your neighbor.  This table fellowship fills the belly but also fills our emptiness inside, and if but for a minute, it fills our soul.

            Table fellowship.  I remember stories like the one Dianna told me after one of her mission trips to Mexico.  She said that the people she was ministering to always insisted on feeding them a meal.  Now, this meal was not anything like what I had at Bayona or NOLA or even the Acme Oyster Company.  It was in a house with a dirt floor with no doors, with skinny chickens pecking at your feet, and mystery meat on the table.  She ate cactus and other delicacies that are worthy of that bizarre food show that is on the travel channel.  It was all she could do to swallow it without gagging on some of it.  To make matters worse, they feed the missionaries even if there was not enough to go around and feed their own kids.  They would save what little money and resources they had for as long as a month to make this a special meal to honor their guests.  So one had to eat it– it was the right thing to do.  It was their way of giving thanks to the ones who had come to help them, and it was their way of accepting the missionaries into their own community.  Can you imagine the harm to the missional efforts there had Dianna’s team been too good to eat with these folk?   Knowing their sacrifice made this meal a bonding experience, it was communion.  Table Fellowship.  There is just something about sharing of ourselves when we share of our food with another.  It is an act of acceptance and of caring for people at our most basal levels. It is the stuff relationships are made of. 

            And as the main ingredient in relationships, the passage of scripture here says something every important about our always feasting Jesus:  That our Jesus is known through relationships.  Personal relationships.  Now, we Baptist are quick to point out the need for a personal relationship with Jesus, but do we really understand the implications of such?  I think whatever it means it means this: that our faith is relational and not just informational.  The Emmaus disciple recognized Jesus in the context of eating.

            We make our faith about everything but relationships sometimes.  We make it about information, about knowing certain facts or propositions, we make it about spiritual knowledge, and we make it about “truth” whatever that is.  But Jesus was not just about information, he was never about just knowing the right stuff, he was always about relationships and right actions. Even in his most didactic of moments like the Sermon on the Mount, he was all about proper relationships in and the ethic of living together in the Kingdom.  And it seems to me that our faith and practice ought to be about such.  Our church ought to be about family first and foremost.  And you know how families are, we have all kinds of folk we are kin to, some are real characters, but that always is secondary to thanksgiving dinner, because we are family.

            But church is often about everything but family, everything but relationships.  There was one small controversy at the Alliance meeting this week stemmed from an article written in the Alliance Newsletter by Chris Copeland.  In fact there was plenty of people steamed by his remarks:

I have found my church over the last 18 months have not been in church buildings. Communing with compassionate and gifted people in coffee shops, yoga studios, a film festival, and cooking classes has been nothing less than the manifestation of the Spirit. You may be curious, frustrated, or even offended to discover that as your Minister for Leadership & Congregational Life I am not drawn to church. Truthfully, this has been a hard truth to claim for myself, and somewhat of a risk to name to you . . . I have one last truth to share. I hope the day will soon come when I am drawn back to church again.

Now to be fair, I understand the point that he goes on to make in the article that the church needs to be transformed to stay relevant.  Young people are not beating down the doors of the church any more; one reason is that what we major on seems oft too trivial to them, such as fighting over the free expression of opinions such as Copeland’s.  It is all too true that heresy is just a religious term for freedom of speech.  And I think there is truth in what he says, although probably if your paycheck comes from a group of churches it might be best to temper your remarks a little.

So if I feel this way as well, why go to church, why go to Providence?  All you have to do is get on my sermon email list or read my sermon blog to get at least the content of our church service, though you miss our wonderful worship, so what is the motivation to still do church? 

I believe that the answer lies in relationships.  It is relationships that make or break our churches and our faith.  I know people sitting in churches this morning who are listening to innocuous sermons at best to down right stupid and manipulative ones at the worst, yet they endure it all because of relationships. It is that simple.  It is that profound.  I come to Providence not to hear my own brilliance or the lack thereof every week, but to be related to significant people who are all on a journey with God.  People who are accepting and tolerant and open and loving first and foremost.  People who are not perfect but as the old cliché goes are forgiven.  And people who know that other people are fellow strugglers in life and it is our job to help bear each others burdens in the process, not shoot them down, not look down on them and not judge them.  And the thing we have to understand if we are to know Jesus and if we are to have a personal relationship with him is that we must know him through other people.  It is the only way to get to God, it is the only way to know Jesus, it puts the personal in a personal relationships with Christ.  The only way, the author of I John confirms this when he writes this in chapter 4:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

Did you catch this treatise on relationships? We are to love one another because it is the only way to know the love of God.  If we do not love, then we cannot know God.  But the slam dunk comes in verse 12: “no one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is complete in us.”  My friend, you will never see God, you will never know God, you will never experience God, you will never have a personal relationship with God UNTIL you put into practice this loving of one another.  John says that is how and when we see God, when we love others. When we invest in relationships with people, we see God for the first time.  It is as plain as day in verse 12: the way we see the unseen God is through our relatedness to each other.  That is why we still do church. That is why I come to Providence.  I find God here every Sunday morning.  Sure, Copeland was right, this is not the only place God lives but I promise you this– God does live here and I see him in all of your lives.  When I see your faces, I see the face of God, and the only place that we ever do so is in the lives of others.  You just can’t see God anywhere else.

Jesus saw it in others, that is why the gospels are mostly one story after another with just a little teaching and preaching to hold them all together.  Stories of real people, ordinary people who reflect even in their darkness an incredible light.  Who in their most human of moments maybe especially in these moments are still made in the image of God.  People with both fatal flaws and saving graces. The woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, Nicodemus, the rich young ruler, the man born blind, the paralyzed man on the mat, the bent over woman, those clueless disciples, both Marys, Martha and Lazarus, the man with demons named legion, Simon Peter, the man at the pool of Bethesda.  There were the countless and nameless mourners at Lazarus dirge, those that he cried over in Jerusalem, and even the Pharisees and Sadducees whom he forgave and also died for.

            You see, the problem with our faith and subsequently our churches is that we worship the written word instead of the living word of God.  We do the easy thing and reduce faith to a formula instead of the hard thing of loving one another as Christ has loved the Samaritan woman, Nicodemus, the man born blind and as he has especially loved us.  As an Easter people we are to be about the business of people, for Jesus Christ lives and so desires to live in us through other people.  We are to be about relationships.  We are to be about the business of telling them that no matter who they are, no matter what they have done or no matter where they have been we have Good News.  And we so relate to the least the lost and the last, we strangely enough see the face of God where we otherwise would least expect to see it, and we realize the Good News of Jesus Christ in our own lives as well. News that will really transform our planet when we finally get it, beginning with the transformation of our own selves.  Thanks be to God. Amen.