How Are We Known?                                                                       7/16/44

 

Scripture:  Luke 24: 13-35

 

Text:  Luke 24: 35b;..“...He was known to them in breaking of bread.”

 

Perhaps some of you, like members of our household, like to listen to the programs of symphonic music coming over the radio on Sunday afternoons.  Have you known the tranquility that such splendid music can bring?  Do you know the longing for something better that follows that peace?

 

If you love that kind of music, you lose self, for a while, and all of the littleness that marks so much of our existence, as you listen to something great.  For a while, you are free from systems and routines and details.  The vision of beauty wrought by the symphony invites us to a fuller realization of living than we have know before.

 

What of the men who gave to us, and to all the world, such music?  How much do most of us know about the composers of these inspiring works?  The most I know of them is through their music (and that is little enough).  Of the details of their lives - personal appearance, likes and dislikes, the sound of their voices, their family life and background, their friends, the popularity they may have enjoyed (or been denied) in their lifetime, their hopes and disappointments - of all these things that might make them more real as persons, I know so little.  And yet every listener knows so much of a great composer when the eternal beauty of his composition finds its way to the ear.  We know that once upon a time a composer has known and talked with the Eternal face to face, and perhaps generations later, we may still “listen in” on the inspired conversation.  And when that experience came over us we turn away at the close of the symphony knowing that we too may “talk with the Eternal”, if not by music, then through some other expression; and we are richer.

 

Our minds are carried to Jesus - the one who entered the capital city of his people in triumph on a day that has come to be known as Palm Sunday: the one who was plotted against, taken, and done to death within the same week; the one to whom crowds shouted “hosannas” on Sunday and on Thursday, “Crucify him!” the one who died for a divine purpose rather than take to the woods to save himself.

 

We think of Jesus, and his meaning to the world and his influence upon the world.  After all, he was born nearly 20 centuries ago in a land distant and strange to most of us.  A few of our soldiers are now visiting that land, and tourists have gone there in other days.  But this is 2 thousand years farther on in time than the day when Jesus was born.  His home was humble, perhaps struggling, its head a craftsman of that day.  His home town, Nazareth, lacked any qualities of fame.  Others used to say, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” in that tone which a resident of Boston might assume toward Wood County, Wisconsin:  “Wisconsin Rapids - O yes, ah-h, where is that?”  (I shall never forget my irritation at a sophisticated Harvard University student who, as if to laud the little world in which he then lived, was holding forth on the “lack of culture” in the middle west.  And my irritation turned to outright disgust when I found that he had hailed from Milwaukee!)  Nazareth suffered from the same kind of brow-beating.

 

Jesus had the schooling of probably a very average sort of boy of his day.  He had no prospect of inheriting either wealth in property or social standing in the gates where prominent folk met.  It was He who remarked once that the “Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man hath nowhere to lay his head.”  [Luke 9: 58; Matthew 8: 20].

 

Jesus left no writings.  He has no place among the scholars whose books contribute to their fame.  We are told that he wrote something in the sand once, as he talked with some people about someone who was being accused of gross wickedness.  But who knows what he wrote?  The next foot that scuffed across the path, or the next puff of wind, obliterated the writing.  [John 8: 3-11].

 

What he said was trusted to the precious memory of his friends and listeners, some of whom finally wrote down that which they could never forget.

 

Jesus chose twelve particularly close disciples and lived with them for three years.  In the crucial moments near the end of that three years, one actually betrayed him and the others fled when he was taken to execution.  Sometime after his burial, his disciples said that he arose from the dead and they believed it.  And after these 2000 years, Jesus still seems very much alive.  George Bernard Shaw, whose alum-like tongue I do not usually admire, wrote to a fellow-author: “How do you explain that you, George Moore, and I are now occupying our selves with Jesus?”  Sure enough; Why?

 

People through generations have argued about Jesus.  They have formulated doctrines about his birth, his nature, his existence.  Sometimes they have made him remote - a face, once seen, and someday again to be seen, but in the meantime resident in another realm.

 

More and more we are coming to believe in his humanity; that the divine was shown through his humanity, that Jesus was humanity at its very best, with God in his soul.  We are coming to think of Jesus as a man through whom God came to earth.  And the more we know of life and the better we know Jesus, the more we see that God takes no other way to come to earth.

 

Devout people speak of the guidance of God, and of deliverance from evil, and the dawn of right upon them.  It is God at work through them.  When the American armies, forced down at sea on the way to Australia, were rescued (in definite answer to their prayers, they felt) it was through native fishermen who had the urge to turn aside from the trip homeward, thereby coming upon the liferafts of the drifting men.

 

One of the most vital truths many of us have yet to really learn, is that God chooses to make his people his feet and hands.  And when people refuse to be the mercy, the love, the justice of God, they stand in the way of the Eternal while the forces of evil have their way through the lives of others, if not through themselves.

 

Our concern with Jesus is what manner of person he was of whom it was said, “Cruel kings woke in fear when he was born ... Sages came from afar with royal gifts and knelt in homage.”

 

And yet with all of Jesus’ human manliness, with all the truth of his insight, with all the immortality of his influence, there are so few things by which he is known.  Our human friendships often take years of constant acquaintance to build.  Yet here is a friendship built on the fragments remembered by people chiefly through 3 years of acquaintance and preserved through the ravages of 20 centuries of time.

 

But by those few things, Jesus is known to us - by a star and an angelic song; by a little while at the temple; in the carpenter shop; at the shore; on an inland sea; in ships, storms, waves; among little children; in a garden; at a cross on a hill outside a city wall; in bread and cup.  It is by these things that we know him and catch our clues to his living and his power.

 

You remember now the account of his walk toward Emmaus.  The story is that he joined two of his own disciples, downcast and discouraged, with the tragedy of his crucifixion still fresh in their minds, as they walked toward Emmaus - and that they walked on together through the day without the two disciples knowing him.  They invited him to stay with them overnight when at evening they arrived at their destination.  Then as they sat down to the evening meal, they knew him in the breaking of bread - perhaps they knew him because of his deep gratitude for all the blessings of living.

 

It is amazing how much we can know through a little thing.  Jesus was known to these two men just by the way he ate - the attitude he had toward his daily food.

 

An American business man in London had difficulty in finding his way through a street to an address where he must call.  Perhaps the city was blanketed with one of its “pea-soup” fogs.  A cheery-voiced boy offered to help him, went to the desired address with him, politely refused a tip for the favor, answered when questioned that he was a scout and that the scouts never accepted tips for good turns.

 

The man knew that boy only for a few minutes of his life.  But what he had seen made him so well acquainted with that boy that he determined other boys should be offered the training that might make them so fine.  And so he came back home to the United States and got the Boy Scout movement organized in his own country.

 

Who was that boy?  Where did he come from?  What did be become?  Did he enter the coal mines?  Did he become a tradesman or an industrial executive?  Did he go to Parliament?  Was he later a soldier, a clergyman, a barrister, a shop keeper?  Who knows?  But he was known in a cheery good turn to a stranger.

 

How do people know us?  Those who betrayed Jesus are known by their treachery; those who crucified him by their stupid cruelty, false choices, short vision - by their fickleness that could call him a king one day and a blasphemer the next.

 

Peter is remembered by a denial, and by a repentance so sincere that for the rest of his life he could never again deny his Lord.  Pilate is remembered for spinelessness.  Judas is remembered for 30 coins fouled by a traitor’s bargain.

 

Washington is remembered by willingness to serve his new and struggling country; Carver by scientific genius devoted to the welfare of his needy people; Jane Adams by Hull House.

 

I knew my father as a man of unusual personal integrity, and as one whose tongue was never heard, to my knowledge, to have uttered a foul word.

 

I wonder by what I am know to others.  By what are you best remembered?

 

While I lived in Hawaii, the Belgians made arrangements for the removal of a priest’s remains from a little Catholic cemetery on an isolated delta-like plain at the foot of the cliff on the windward side of Molokai.  Years after his life and death the earthy remnants of this Belgian were returned to his native soil and it was said that his church, after its own customs, was in the slow process of elevating his name to sainthood.

 

Most of us know very little of this Belgian except that he gave his life to the service of some of the most miserable people on the earth - people stricken with leprosy.  And we also know that Father Damien himself died of the dread disease.

 

When the body of Abraham Lincoln was being brought to Springfield from Washington, the train went by way of New York and then Albany.  At Albany, it is said that a Negro mother lifted her baby up above the crowd and said, “Take a good look, honey, he died for you.”

 

So might any fatherly prophet of our day lift you or me up above the crowd to see a figure on Calvary and say “Take a good look, my son, my daughter; he died so that you might know what true living is like.”  Perhaps it is by a cross that we best remember Jesus.  How shall we be remembered?

 

I rather suspect that some of the men in the service at the battle fronts know Jesus now as well as any do.  Probably many of them never understood Gethsemane so well as now when, with death screaming toward them, and bursting about them, their souls cry, “God, don’t let this happen to me!”  And at the same time, devoted to duty at every cost and determined not to flinch, they know the meaning of “Not my will be done, but Thine.”  And they go ahead with their costly struggle and giving of self.

 

Here and there are those who will be remembered for the hurts they have caused.  Think what the very word Hitler yet means to the ears of millions!  And despite the grim war time triumph of our ally, Russia, by what cruel hardness is the name Stalin yet remembered in countless hearts?

 

If people shall say of me - “he helped one person” - how wonderful!  If they say of me - “he hurt one person” - how terrible!

 

Now we may go one long step further.  If life is a symphony, it is an unfinished symphony, hanging on an unresolved discord.  We cannot hear a bird’s song, look into a friend’s eyes, know and accept the loyalty of men without knowing that there is melody even though it be broken melody.

 

Something tries to lay hold upon us.  Something seeks entrance into our lives in order to be felt and heard.  God is looking for his hands and feet and voice in this world.  The world aches with the desire for His speech, the movement of His will.  It’s tongue is tied, as in one of those interminable sort of nightmares, when we do not hear and heed and say, “Why yes, here am I; use me; send me.”

 

Now and then we see for a moment the vision of a face, perhaps in the distance, veiled in beauty, yet coming nearer - the face of the future man, the Christ-man who will be gentle, just, heroic, happy, free.  Perhaps a boy or a girl in this room will be known for his or her effort to make plain that Face of the future.  The chance is good if Christ can get into our hearts this morning.

 

How shall we be known?

 

----------------

 

Dates and places delivered:

 

            Wisconsin Rapids, July 16, 1944.

            Wisconsin Rapids, February 13, 1949.