Discipleship at Human Speed (Luke 24:13-27)
Discipleship at Human Speed
May 11, 2025
By: Pastor Mike
Luke 24:13-27
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While we were out East, Sus and I traveled down to Durham, North Carolina for a few days to visit friends. We stayed with a friend named Sarah, who we’ve known since our time in graduate school, and who now is the director of prison chaplaincy services for the State of North Carolina. Among other things, Sarah is an ordained Baptist preacher, a Hebrew Bible scholar, and a first-rate gardener. For years, she has planted walkable garden in the shape of prayer labyrinth, accessible to her whole neighborhood.
Her personal spirituality and her spiritual roots run deep. I’ve known this, but the truth of it was impressed upon me again on this visit when a certain basket sitting outside her home office caught my eye.
It was a small rectangular wicker basket full of manila folders. The edges of the folders were worn with age, and I was struck by the labels written on them in faded Sharpie. Folders labeled Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Psalms. Folders for Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Folders named Revival, Evangelism, Discipleship. Nearly all the biblical books were represented, including some touchstone Christian themes.
I’m one of those people who can sometimes be nosy in other people’s homes. I’ve been known to do some light snooping, especially when the snooping is of theological interest. I pulled out of one of the folders and opened it.
Inside were old sermon outlines – that was obvious right away. The outlines were meticulously typed onto hand-cut half-sheets of paper with a typewriter. Each had a title at the top in capital letters. Under that was an introductory sentence. Then there was a roman-numeral outline, with main points and sub-points, charting a movement of stories, cultural references, and scriptures all typed out in shorthand. At the bottom of each half-sheet was the conclusion, the invitation or call to the congregation.
Each slip of paper was also marked up with pen, pencil, and marker. Underlining for emphasis. Arrows dictating rearrangement. Words added here and there in a language I didn’t recognize. On the back of each half-sheet were handwritten dates – dates that the sermons had been preached. Macedonia, North Carolina, 3/3/1965. Russey Keo, Cambodia, 3/26/1995.
As I said, that wicker basket was full of folders. The first folder I pulled out had at least two dozen papers in it, maybe more. And they were all like that. It was stunning. I was thumbing through one person’s lifelong conversation with God and the scriptures. I fessed up and asked Sarah about them.
The sermons were her grandfather’s. He, too, was a Baptist preacher, and for many years served as a missionary in the Philippines. That other language scrawled upon the whitespace of the outlines was Tagalog, the national Filipino language. Sarah’s grandfather pastored mixed-race churches, preaching simultaneously to Filipino and white folks. Sarah has childhood memories of her grandfather moving comfortably around the front of churches as he preached, Bible always in hand, switching between English and Tagalog with ease.
Until she inherited his collection of sermon outlines after his death, she had thought that he preached completely from memory. Turns out he had typed the scaffolding of every sermon onto these papers, which were cut to slip discreetly into the open pages of his Bible.
I just wrapped up another lay preaching class here at our church. There were seven students in it, and any of them would tell you how much attention and effort went into the one sermon that they prepared for the class. The time attending to the scripture passage – prayer, observation, research. The time unearthing the nugget of good news. The time wrangling with words, words to give clear expression and fitting timbre to God’s promises and invitations.
Sermons are conceived and proclaimed at human speed. To honor the craft and the call, there isn’t any other way. And a wicker basket full of sermons arrives at a steady pace over the course of a full human life, collecting slowly in manila folders like layers of new soil. Each sermon the fruit of one man’s focused attention on the Word that God is speaking to the congregation for the sake of the world.
I said that there isn’t any other way but the way of human speed. But that’s not exactly accurate. Do you know that, today, I could open my computer, access a generative artificial intelligence platform (say something like ChatGPT), type in a prompt, and the bot would generate a complete sermon for me in a matter of seconds? I want a sermon of a certain length, on this theme, using this scripture; I want it to open with an engaging, down-to-earth story and end with a call to conversion; I want it to be sprinkled with several references to other relevant Bible verses and have an authoritative tone. And without even cracking open a Bible; without even asking God what this scripture passage might be requiring of you as the preacher, to say nothing of the congregation; without having to feel the joy or the sorrow or the urgency of it, you’d have a sermon. AI can do this because it’s been “taught” to do it. Sermons, among countless other cultural artifacts, have been fed into its program. Already there are many news, academic, and literary publishers who have sold their backlogs of licensed content to AI developers who will those vast archives to further train their bots.
In fact, someone could scan all of Sarah’s grandfather’s sermons, feed them into a program like ChatGPT as examples to imitate, and then ask the bot to write a sermon in his exact style and form. And, make no mistake, it would.
But think about what is lost when a preacher has a sermon produced for him or her by the machine. The long night of wrestling the text for blessing. The longing to see and understand. Grappling with meaning and application. Honing one’s perspective and voice. We abandon the personal experience and local realities in which the Word resonates. We give away our integrity, our authority, our voice.
Yes, I could ask the bot to produce another sermon outline utterly consistent with Sarah’s grandfather’s style, but it would never be his sermon, with paper hand cut to the perfect size, with notes jotted down in another language. It would not be a sermon at all, because there would have been no conversation between God’s divinity and our humanity, no word becoming flesh in and through the preacher’s heart and spirit and body. Sermons come at human speed because that is the speed at which God moves among us in the person of Jesus Christ.
Let me say that again: Sermons come at human speed because that is the speed at which God moves among us in the person of Jesus Christ. For the Gospel says that it was “while they were talking and discussing, [that] Jesus himself came near and went with them, [though] their eyes were kept from recognizing him” (Lk 24:15-16).
Two men were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus on the day of Jesus’ resurrection. Their world was shattered. They had followed Jesus at human speed, listened to his words, come to believe in his power and hope in his salvation. Then they had lost him to the cruelty of crucifixion. “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they told the stranger who joined them on the road. Had hoped.
And then the women had come to them earlier that day to say that they had gone and found the tomb empty. They had seen angels who told them that Jesus was, against all conceivable possibilities, alive. Madness, surely. It was all so confusing. They couldn’t make heads or tails of it. So they went for a walk.
They could have ridden on animals for those seven miles, I suppose, but they chose to walk. One foot in front of the other. The body moving forward while the heart and mind spun in circles. They walked and they talked “with each other about all these things that had happened” (Lk 24:14). Moving at human speed, they were joined by the God of love moving at human speed. Jesus drew near to them and walked with them. Jesus entered into their conversation with a question: “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” (v. 17).
‘Doesn’t he know?’ we might ask ourselves as readers. ‘He’s God after all. Can’t he, like, mind-read?’ But Jesus doesn’t want that kind of relationship with us. Jesus prefers – and in his flesh binds himself to – the journey. To the slow, authentic unfolding of life. The God who spoke creation into being with imperatives humbles himself to the give and take of dialogue.
When Jesus asks them what they’re talking about, the two disciples stand still, “looking sad” (v. 17). Then the conversation begins. They tell him about their disappointment. They tell him about the things they don’t understand. And Jesus responds by pointing them to the scriptures: “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (v. 27).
This was not a chatbot spitting out synthesized, fabricated answers. This was not Jesus rapidly downloading interpretive facts into the two men’s brains. This was a conversation about the words of God conducted over the course of a long walk.
It happened at human speed.
Thanks be to God that the content of that conversation was never written down, that Jesus’ own interpretation of the scriptures to Cleopas and his companion is not available for us to memorize and parrot. What is here for us to see is the living conversation, the reality that, when we walk and talk together about the challenges and confusions of life, Jesus joins us, and reveals his life and love to us.
Even as the walk came to an end, Cleopas and his companion still did not fully realize who it was that walked and talked with them. Only later, after sharing a meal with Jesus, did they realize it was him. Luke writes, “And they said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us’” (v. 32). The conversation with God at human speed touched their hearts; it lit something in them. Joy, hope, love. Curiosity, longing, epiphany. These whole-self, visceral experiences cannot occur when we hand over our long dialogues to the split-second calculations of the machine.
AI is rapidly and radically transforming the world we live in, particularly the economy and the internet, though it’s also beginning to intrude on spirituality. My point here is not to say that you’re bad if you use AI for some things; most of us are already engaging with it here and there even if we don’t realize it. Some of you might think AI has very little to do with you. I realize I’m straddling generational perceptions of an emerging issue.
But here is the heart of the matter: Many of our current political conflicts, personal anxieties, and social sins are a result of our refusal to move at human speed – which, I will say again, is God’s speed. We want to go faster. We want our relationships, our work, our leisure, and even our spirituality to produce results. We want answers to our prayers. Maximize. Optimize. Career hacks. Life hacks. Faith hacks. Get rid of the friction, please. Let the waiting, the suffering, the in-between times diminish.
And that temptation to move fast, to bypass the cultivation of patient endurance and simple presence, is aided and abetted by the technologies structuring how we encounter one another and perceive the world.
The good news of the walk to Emmaus is that, even before we know it, God is with us.
God joins our questioning and questing. God comes to us for conversation. God will redirect us, no matter how long it takes, toward fullness of life and deep and abiding hope – so long as we keep walking and talking with him.
But! – If we aren’t willing to stick with the journey while God is still unrecognizable, it is possible that the recognition of his presence will never come to us.
Christian life is a journey. It is a relationship. It is what the great pastor Eugene Peterson once called “a long obedience in the same direction.”1 These things proceed slowly; they make their way by trial and error. There is no technology that can produce the wisdom, generosity, steadfastness, and lavish love of Jesus in us. These virtues require time and attention, silence and suffering, daily prayer and communities of conversation.
Even before we know it, God is with us. If you are hungry for a living faith – keep going. Don’t accept digital substitutes or cheap answers. Keep walking and talking with others at human speed until your eyes are opened. If you are navigating the landscape of grief, journeying toward deep inner healing – keep going. The God of life and love is with you before you recognize it. Keep walking and talking with others until your eyes are opened. If you are asking God for a sense of belonging, of rootedness, of purpose or calling, and you’re finding that these clarities are slow to come – keep going. Jesus walks among you already, even if you haven’t seen him for who he is. Trust that your human pace is also his pace.
Hey, even if you’re drafting a mundane email, or writing what feels like a pointless paper for finals, or preparing for an interview, don’t turn to a voice that’s not your own. Don’t give over your powers of reason and association or the thrilling struggle of articulation to the machine. You have been made in the image of God. And each of us decides in every moment whether we will obscure or retrace the lines of that image.
Christian discipleship happens at human speed. It happens at the speed of the body. We take food to those who are grieving. We visit those who are sick or in prison. We sit with those who don’t want to be alone. We listen with the heart. We give to those who can give us nothing in return. We march for justice. We gather for worship, lifting our voices and breaking bread. We walk and talk together about all the things happening to us, in us, and around us – all the painful, confusing, shattering things – and we discover, slowly, with hearts burning, that where two or three are gathered, the Spirit of the Living Christ is among us.
For one man in North Carolina and the Philippines, the slow work of Christian discipleship meant waiting for the next sermon to come. It meant cutting the paper, typing the words, making notes. It meant considering the nuances of multiple languages, the needs of diverse hearers.
You hold those sermons in your hand and understand the logic of a life, a life listening, receiving, and sharing. It’s the logic of discipleship, life lived and shared at human speed.
May we, too, slow down enough to give Jesus time to join us. Perhaps then the way would not seem so lonely, or the horizon so dark.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.