Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
We have one of those occasions in the Gospel lesson this morning, of which there are several, where people become very confused when faced with direct manifestations of the Holy in their lives. It is one of accounts of a Resurrection appearance of Jesus to the Disciples. The scene is similar to that in the story of Doubting Thomas that we considered last week. The Disciples are gathered together. They are talking about the experience of two of their companions on the road to Emmaus, where Jesus had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. All of a sudden, "Jesus himself stood among them...." We are told a couple of things about their reaction. First Luke says that "they were startled and terrified...." So far, no contradictory emotions. But a bit later on Luke says: "In their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering...." Now the contradiction appears. If they were disbelieving and wondering, where does the joy come from? Joy at the Resurrection and disbelief in the Resurrection at the same time? That’s what Luke says. At this unexpected, miraculous appearance of the Holy in the form of the resurrected Christ, they had these contradictory reactions.
Why is it that people in Scripture react so irrationally when the Sacred breaks into their lives like this? I think it is because these appearances of the Sacred in their midst are so unexpected. They had no doubt about the reality of God, but even so they didn’t expect God to show up in visible form. When God did, they got flustered. They were scared because something was happening that they couldn’t explain. Yet they were filled with wonder and awe at the splendor of the Divine in their midst. They felt both things at the same time.
And think of how much more true that would be of us! We, even more than the Disciples, live in the world of the everyday. We live in a world brought to us by our normal sense perceptions-the world that we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. It is a world of the material, the physical, the concrete. Our culture teaches us that only that which is material, only that which we can perceive with our ordinary senses, is real. Indeed, for Western culture today, only that is real which can be measured and tested using the tools of science. The material is the world dreamt of in our philosophy.
But as Shakespeare had Hamlet point out to Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. At least the Disciples did not doubt the reality of the Sacred, of the realm of spirit. We do, or at least the culture that produced us does. And yet, it seems to me, there can be no doubt that that realm of spirit, which is what we are talking about when we are talking about God, is real. Marcus Borg, along with a growing number of enlightened persons in our time, is convinced that the realm of the spirit is real. He notes that our modern worldview, derived from the Enlightenment, "sees reality in material terms, as constituted by the world of matter and energy within the space-time continuum." Yet, he says, there is more to reality than this. There is, in addition, "a nonmaterial level of reality, actual even though nonmaterial, and charged with energy and power." The modern, materialistic worldview, he says is one-dimensional. Reality, on the other hand, is multidimensional. Borg’s right about that.
When they saw the resurrected Christ, the Disciples were faced with an in-breaking of another dimension of reality into their lives. That direct manifestation of the Holy before their eyes shattered all of their expectations about how the world is supposed to work. It should shatter ours even more. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt in our philosophy. Spirit is real, which is to say, God is real. Human experience across all cultures and times establishes this truth. The “more that is” is not material. You can’t capture it in a scientific experiment. You can’t measure it. You can, however, experience it. Men and women of every culture known to us have done so. Even some of us have done so.
And we have come here this morning to experience it once more. We are about to celebrate Holy Communion. Our tradition teaches us that Christ is truly present with us in this sacrament. In this sacrament, something of that other, spiritual dimension of reality is brought to us in a very material way. The bread and wine, which we can analyze scientifically, become for us mediators of the Sacred, which is so far beyond capture and analysis. They make Christ present here and now, in this little church, to this little congregation of God’s people. The great theoretician of religious experience William James said that we are separated from the realm of spirit only by "thin screens of consciousness." If we don’t experience spirit’s reality, it is because we filter it out. So this morning, put aside your filters. Open your hearts and minds to the real presence of Christ among us. Let the risen Christ, present to us in the elements of the Eucharist, touch your heart and enter your soul. If you do, there is no end to wonders that can follow.