Heart Burn
First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Communion Meditation for the 3rd Sunday of Easter – April 6, 2008
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: 1 Peter 1:17-23/ Luke 24:13-35]

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him;”

This text from Luke is my personal favorite of all the Resurrection stories. The story of the Lord’s appearance on the road to Emmaus, because they never really get there, speaks to the reality that Christ is right there with us and if we’re not attuned, not open to the Divine presence, we’ll miss it. What we really must do is cultivate a condition that is far more desirable spiritually than it is physically – heart burn. Shortly after what Thomas Merton called “the blaze of recognition” the two disciples realized that their hearts had been burning all along as the stranger explained the Scripture to them.

John Shea makes an interesting point. Jesus is the most important person in the Bible, but nowhere is there a physical description of him. I was reminded of this by the PBS special that was replayed not long ago called “The Face.” The program focuses on images of Christ is art across the centuries. It points out that the only written description we have of Jesus is very likely Medieval and very likely not authentic. Nevertheless, it did affect how artists in the West have depicted Jesus – including the chestnut colored hair parted in the middle, and so forth. The truth is that since we don’t have a description it has given artists over the centuries the freedom to reflect on how Jesus would look like from various cultural and ethnic angles. My own thought is that we don’t have a description because we’re not supposed to get caught up in that, but in the interior, spiritual image of Jesus that is to be written on our hearts and formed in our own lives.

Storyteller and theologian Shea comments in this way, “There is a spiritual reason for this failure to tell us his height, weight, bearing, and, of course, the color of his eyes. Physical descriptions apply to individuals, but not to persons. Persons are not human by description, but by action. The reason the two do not recognize Jesus is not because their eyes cannot pick up his physical characteristics. They do not recognize him because they have forgotten his characteristic gesture. The person of Jesus is summed up and symbolized by an action, an action he did with them and told them to do with one another, an action that is the key to the mystery of his suffering. They have forgotten this Eucharistic action. Therefore, they do not recognize him.” [On Earth as in Heaven p. 167] What Shea is saying is that what matters isn’t our interpretation of Jesus, but rather Jesus’ interpretation and transformation of us. After all, Jesus was a corporate person, he was God and human and in taking on our nature he didn’t just become an individual – he became, literally ‘every man.’ In Jesus God has taken our humanity into God’s very self and in so doing has shared personhood with us.

The two disciples wanted to interpret Jesus only in sociopolitical terms. They lamented to the stranger on the road about all the events that had happened. How they had hoped Jesus was the promised liberator and how disappointed they were. This has become an ongoing problem in the life of the Church; we want to reduce the living Lord to neat, definable and even manageable terms. As I think about this my mind immediately shoots to Dostoevsky’s “grand inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov. Jesus comes back and gets arrested by the Inquisition. Sentenced to death, again, he’s told by a cardinal, a prince of the church, that he is no longer necessary. In fact, he gets in the way. The mistaken understanding of who the Risen Lord is and what he comes to do is there in spades. The delight in the story – and the ambiguity – is that Jesus just walks away, as he does in the story we read from Luke.

In Luke’s account there is no question that Jesus is more than a little disappointed, some would go so far as to say he’s “ticked off.” He calls his two companions “foolish” and in so doing refers to Psalm 14:1, “the fool has said in his heart there is no God.” They don’t get what God is about here, what God has been trying to do in Jesus’ life, teaching and even in his suffering, death and now resurrection. God is seeking to transform creation from the inside out. Their hearts weren’t attuned and so their eyes couldn’t see – what they needed was heart burn, not the old “Mamma mia, that’s some spicy meataball” kind of heartburn, but the kind they got after they sat at table with him.

The whole purpose of the Bible is really to give us heart burn – to awaken our spiritual centers so that we can see and know the reality of God’s presence and God’s purpose in Israel, which leads to Christ and, subsequently, what our role is in this whole great unfolding of purposeful love. That’s why classical Christian thought, and that of the Reformed Churches in particular, places an emphasis upon the dual roles of Word and Sacrament. We first break open the Word, look for what God has to teach us so that we might grow and then find it confirmed in Sacramental action. That is why our Puritan/Congregational forebears refer to the Sacraments as “the gospel made visible” and the “seals of the covenant” (reflecting their dependence both upon the great teachers of the early church and John Calvin). What we read in the book we see put into action by what we do at the font and at the table.

The table, though, is an action that draws us again and again to the welcoming hospitality that Jesus shared with his disciples when he would sit at table with them and teach them. We come to the table so that we may be refreshed, renewed, and joined again with our Lord. This is a moment of spiritual nourishment that feeds us with far more than just a tiny bit of bread and a tiny drink of the juice of the vine. The nourishment here is the reminder that we are joined together, at one, with the Lord who invites us to the table and who meets us here again and again. There is a reason why the early Church, Calvin and even our Pilgrim forebears, at least while they were in England and in Holland, celebrated the sacrament weekly. It was here that the Lord was met and this is not something that we just want to do on special occasions, but rather it is to be the norm of our life together.

Likewise, it is to mark our life together. Jesus models a life broken open and shared so that others might live and so it is to be with us. Jesus’ love was multiplied when it was given away. That’s the nature of love, isn’t it? Somewhere I’ve heard the phrase, “love isn’t love until it’s given away.” Love can’t be hoarded, it must be shared. Jesus showed us the reckless, wondrous generosity of his hospitality when he opened his life so that all of us might have life and, as he said, “have it more abundantly.” The life Jesus has shared with us – and of which we are reminded each time we come to this table – is meant to be offered concretely to others, for others through the lives we lead. This is what the First Letter to Peter says, “Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. 23You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God.” I once heard it put this way, we are to become Eucharist for each other; in other words, as we are welcomed and nourished, so we are to do for others.

Augustine, the great teacher of the early Church, preached just that when he said, “Just as we are distinguished from others by faith, so let us also be distinguished by morals and by works. Let us be on fire with charity, which the demons never had. It is the fire those two also were burning with on the road. When Christ, you see, had been recognized and had left them, they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’ Burn, then, in order not to burn with the fire the demons are going to burn with. Be on fire with the fervor of charity, in order to differentiate yourselves from demons. This fervor whirls you upward, takes you upward, lifts you up to heaven. Whatever vexations you suffer on earth, however much the enemy may humiliate Christian hearts and press them downward, the fervor of love seeks the heights.” [Sermon 234.3]

The heart burn of recognition leads us, then, to live lives on fire for God; loving others, welcoming others, forgiving others as God has loved, welcomed, and forgiven us. This is heart burn for which we want no remedy, no pill, no magic drink. Rather, we want our hearts to burn so that we might see and know the Lord right here among us and live accordingly. Practically we seek to do this by opening and spending time in the Scripture – even a few moments a day can make a huge difference. Also, come to this table with eyes and hearts wide open. The Lord will meet us here, just as he met those two disciples on the road on that long-ago Resurrection day and every day since when earnest seekers have gathered, as we do know, to break open the Word, break the bread and share the cup. Today I invite you to get heart burn, perhaps in a way that you’ve never had it before. Open the eyes of your hearts; see the Risen Lord present in Word and Sacrament. Open the heart and feel the burn and you will never live the same way again. Amen.