One thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten a little older is that we have some secrets in our culture that we don’t talk about much. A few years ago, after my friend Jeff (not his real name) and his wife had their second child, Jeff confessed one such secret to me. He loved his boys intensely. But as much he loved them, he confided that there were moments when their behavior stretched him nearly to the breaking point, when being a daddy was much harder and much less enjoyable than he thought it would be.

I know there are other secrets like that out there. I know that because one of them pertains to ministry. And that is that we preachers sometimes wonder about the value of our preaching. What does it mean to our listeners? What difference does it make in the lives of our congregants?

You preach the Good News as best you can and when the service is over, your congregants return to lives that are sometimes confusing, and sometimes difficult or disappointing or painful – as was the case for the two travelers in today’s story – and you wonder, does it make a difference? It’s a haunting question, really, given how central preaching is in the life of any given minister.

So I was cheered this week when I read this passage and discovered that this same question applied even to Jesus. His preaching and his teaching didn’t seem to make much of an impression on these two dispirited travelers. Beginning with Moses, Luke says, and then proceeding through all the prophets, Jesus himself unpacks the meaning of scripture for his two traveling companions. It would be like Paul McCartney explaining what it meant to be one of the Beatles. The ultimate inside scoop.

But they don’t seem to get it. They are no closer to discerning his identity after he’s done with his sermonizing than they were when he first joined them on their little road trip to Emmaus.

Maybe that’s because Jesus makes the same mistake here that the rest of us preachers sometimes make. He assumes they’re interested, that they actually care about what scripture says. Stay with me here – I don’t mean that in the may it may sound!

Here’s what I mean . . . the story we just read was really meant for last week, which happened to be a Communion Sunday. Indeed, it’s the very story from which we get part of our communion liturgy. According to Luke, when the risen Lord sat at table with his disciples he took bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to them, and then their eyes were opened and they recognized him for who he was.

But with Floyd Hand here with us last week, the Lakota spiritual leader, I felt the need to preach a different story, a story about sheep and abundant life and our deep connection to and our ongoing need for one another. It seemed more relevant than did this story.

So that left me to wonder if I could circle back and use this text today, even though this is not a communion Sunday and this is such an obvious Communion text. I voiced that concern out loud to my unfailingly supportive wife.

And she just sort of laughed. You know, honey, ordinary people don’t think like that. We won’t notice – unless of course you point that out.

Maybe that’s the mistake Jesus makes here. He presumes that these travelers think like he does, that if he just opens the scriptures to them, they will come to understand the events which they are currently discussing.

But they don’t. The best preacher the world has ever known, who also happens to have just been raised from the dead, the man whom the very stories are about – he offers them a private lesson on the meaning of life, offers them the key to understanding every theological question they have, and they don’t get it.

Why didn’t they get it? Why were their eyes not opened then and there, on the road to Emmaus?

The Christian Ethicist Mary Pellauer once wrote that, “If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them” (quoted in Dakota by Kathleen Norris, pg. 68).

Theology, in other words, starts with listening, not with talking. Maybe that’s why they didn’t get it at first. Maybe if Jesus had listened a little more closely, perhaps he would have understood a little bit more about how they were feeling.

In any case you can tell he’s a little exasperated with them and a little impatient. Clearly even the post resurrection Jesus has not fully shed his humanity. Come on guys, how often do I have to go over this?

Well, as often as it takes, apparently. For these two travelers were asking arguably the biggest question, the hardest question of all. What does Easter mean? Or more precisely what does Easter mean when nothing happens? What does life mean when your hopes die? When Easter doesn’t happen?

For that’s how they were feeling…. we had hoped that this man was the Messiah, the one come to redeem Israel, to help us throw off Roman rule and to live as free people, but I guess we were wrong. It seems he wasn’t. So the text tells us they stood still, looking sad.

You can’t help catch the irony. Fresh from the tomb, Jesus is standing right there, walking with them, and still they’re feeling sad because they don’t recognize him.

Maybe in fairness the problem wasn’t so much with Jesus as it was with them. Maybe at the end of the day they weren’t such great disciples. Maybe they were more like you and me than they were like Peter or James.

Maybe like so many of us they just never got too close to the action. Always stayed on the fringes. Never got close enough to see what was going on, to see his face, to actually hear his voice.

Perhaps they were afraid of getting sucked in. Afraid of getting hurt, of getting their hopes up and their hearts broken yet again, as had happened so many times before with all those other would-be Messiahs.

So when he does appear right beside them, they don’t recognize him.

As I pondered all this, I could help thinking how extraordinary this scene really is. And what a sweet story it is. And how true it must be, for this is not how fiction ordinarily works.

For this is among the last scenes in the gospel of Luke. And in his gospel, Luke has given us a hero for the ages. A social and theological revolutionary. A man who teaches and practices peace. A man who breaks every imaginable boundary in the service of love, who does nothing but good in the world.

And in the end, this same man is killed. It is one of the great injustices in all of literature. If this were a modern movie we would want justice to be served. We would want the bad guys to pay for what they’ve done.

Ordinarily you’d think that having just been resurrected, justice was coming. The hero has come back to life. To complete the emotional circle you would expect him to head straight for Jerusalem, to march right into the palace, or into the temple, and visit justice squarely on the heads of those leaders who sent him to his death.

But true to form, he doesn’t go to Jerusalem; doesn’t go to the palace or to the temple. Instead the risen Christ goes on a journey. He joins two nobodies on the road to nowhere. They’re actually heading away from Jerusalem. They’re leaving Washington D.C. and heading back where they come from, back to Mayberry.

And it’s to these two that Jesus appears. He comes not to Caesar or Pilate or Herod. He comes to two simple travelers, walking down life’s weary road. Because this is not, finally, an ordinary story, a story about Caesar and Pilate, about power or vengeance or justice as we normally think of that.

It’s a story about you and me, and it’s a story about love. Cause we’ve all had these questions, haven’t we? We’ve all felt from time to time like we missed it. We’ve all felt our hopes die. We’ve all wondered what difference Easter makes. What difference does any of it make for that matter?

Turns out that’s not new. From the very beginning the Gospel story is marked and framed by questions, just like our own lives are marked and framed by questions. Where is he that was born King of the Jews , the wise men ask in the first words of human speech in the NT. How can this be , Mary asks of the angels. Who do you say that I am , Jesus asks his disciples? Where have they laid the body , the women ask when they arrive at the tomb? And now, here, in this story, what does it all mean?

The Good News is that it was the questions themselves that brought the Christ to them. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them

But the risen Christ doesn’t come to give answers. Instead he offers the travelers, and he offers us, simply and profoundly the gift of his presence.

In the end it wasn’t words that revealed his identity to them. According to Luke, when the risen Lord sat at Table with his disciples, he took bread and after he had blessed it, he broke it and gave it to them, then their eyes were opened and they recognized him for who he was.

“ If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them.” It was the chance to sit with them, listening to their stories and cherishing them. And then feeding them with the gift of his very own life that revealed him to them.

May it be so for us.

Amen.