“Stay with Us!” (Luke 24:28-35)
“Stay With Us!”
May 18, 2025
Easter Season
Luke 24:28-35
By: Pastor Mike Conner
“Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking
of the bread” (Lk 24:35).
***
The road between Jerusalem and Emmaus was not a paved asphalt highway. People did not zoom down it in the safe enclosure of cars. This road was made of hardpacked dirt, or perhaps of Roman stone. The people moving along it moved either on foot at human speed or at the speed of their cart-pulling animals. This road was therefore a place of potential encounter.
A road is an in-between place. To walk the road is to be unsettled, exposed, and on the move. Throughout the Bible, roads, like desert wildernesses, place question marks beside the ideologies and identities of characters. But one crucial difference between the road and the desert is that people go into the wilderness in large part to be alone, seeking the voice of God and the voice of their heart in solitude. On the road, however, one expects to meet and be met, and God uses roads to reach into our world and wake us up through encounters with strangers. Like the man beaten by robbers, helped by the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:25-37); or Blind Bartimaeus yelling at full volume for Jesus to stop and heal him (Mk 10:46-52); or Philip running up to join the Ethiopian eunuch in his royal chariot (Acts 8:26-40).
In this resurrection story from Luke’s Gospel, three men walk together down an ancient road. Two disciples – at the story’s opening they might’ve said former disciples – and their teacher, Jesus. But they did not recognize him and they thought him a stranger. The three of them walked and talked, sharing stories of things hoped for and things lost, and turning over the meanings of the Hebrew scriptures. The road was doing its work.
On one level, we can read this story as a call to linger with strangers for as long as it takes us to recognize something familiar in them – that is, until we can see Jesus as we behold them.
On a deeper level, this encounter between strangers not only gave way to recognition. It also radically reoriented the lives of those involved. After Jesus disappeared, the two disciples went back to Jerusalem. They reunited with the eleven apostles and bore witness to the
Resurrected Christ. The road, and the one who met them on the road, changed them.
They recognized Jesus at last when they sat around the table and shared a meal with him. He took bread, announced God’s blessings in the midst of everyday, ordinary broken things, and fed them. Then they knew. Yes, their hearts had burned in their chests while they were talking with him about the scriptures on the road. They sensed that they were walking with someone special. But that shared reflection upon the scriptures, even with Jesus himself involved in the conversation, was not enough to awaken faith. For that, they needed the table, the meal, the physicality of shared life and food and spoken blessings.
From its earliest days, the Church has linked the proclamation of scripture with gathering at the table. The relationship is one of promise and fulfilment, call and response, announcement and experience. The Bible and the Church describe this relationship in many ways: word and sacrament, faith and works, hearers and doers, God and neighbor.
The table brings the Gospel home, because, as human creatures, we hunger. We hunger for bread, for community. We hunger for gifts and blessings that aren’t contingent on achievement or the external appearance of things. At the table of God “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for [we] are all one in Christ Jesus”
(Gal 3:28, NIV).
A new form of community is created at the table. The first Christians cared for social pariahs and outcasts, for women and children. They welcomed people from every nation and language and economic reality. This was scandalous and revolutionary in a world where power flowed down the channels of privileged bloodlines. Firstborn. Male. Roman Citizen. But the Christians lovingly violated these boundaries of identity. They even sold their possessions and brought the proceeds to the apostles, who distributed them to others according to need (see Acts 2:44-46). It was – it is – the logic of the table.
Lena has asked you to recognize the Christ in her, and the Christ in our neighbors – local and global – who are increasingly vulnerable because of their status as refugees or inhabitants of a warzone. And you can act on that recognition by participating in World Refugee Day, and by advocating for moral policies at every level of government. She’s asking you to inscribe the logic of the table on your mind and heart and body.
The United Methodist Church’s current social teachings say this: “As United Methodists, we acknowledge that love requires responsible political action and engagement aimed at the betterment of society and the promotion of the common good. …We affirm the dignity, worth, and rights of migrants, immigrants, and refugees, including displaced and stateless people. …We recognize that displaced people are particularly vulnerable, as their in-between status often provides them with few protections and benefits, leaving them open to exploitation, violence, and abuse. We urge United Methodists to welcome migrants, refugees, and immigrants into their congregations and to commit themselves to providing concrete support…We oppose all laws and policies that attempt to criminalize, dehumanize, or punish displaced individuals and families based on their status as migrants, immigrants, or refugees.[1]
And, in the Bible, James chapter 2 says, “Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
The two disciples who walked with Jesus along the road managed to say all this with three simple words, as evening came and their companion seemed to be moving on:
“Stay with us,” they pleaded (Lk 24:29). Stay with us, stranger. You’ve lit a flame in us, and we are on the cusp of knowing you. Stay with us. Let’s continue this conversation and share a meal together.
Stay with us.
We could build a whole moral politics upon that. At the very least, each of us must chart a Gospel-shaped life. “Stay with us.”
The beloved Twenty-third Psalm says that God “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies” (Ps 23:5). We might say that the work of the Church is to prepare a table before our neighbors in the presence of their enemies, to pass on freely what God has so generously done for us.
May Jesus use his table to teach us his way. Amen.
[1] “The Social Principles,” from The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, 2020/2024, 135, 144.