William H. Willimon - "Hints of Transcendence" (April 25, 1993)
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| - | Luke's story of the walk to Emmaus. | 0:03 |
| That very day, two of them were going to a village | 0:09 | |
| named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, | 0:12 | |
| and talking with each other | 0:16 | |
| about all those things which had happened. | 0:17 | |
| While they were talking and discussing together, | 0:20 | |
| Jesus Himself drew near and went with them, | 0:23 | |
| but their eyes were kept from recognizing Him. | 0:26 | |
| He said to them, | 0:30 | |
| "What is this conversation with you are | 0:32 | |
| "holding with one another as you walk?" | 0:34 | |
| They stood still, looking sad. | 0:37 | |
| Then one of them named Cleopas answered Him, | 0:40 | |
| "Are You the only visitor from Jerusalem who does not | 0:43 | |
| "know the things that have happened in these three days?" | 0:45 | |
| He said to them, "What things?" | 0:49 | |
| And they said, "The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth, | 0:52 | |
| "a prophet mighty in deed and word before God | 0:56 | |
| "and all the people, | 0:58 | |
| "how our chief priests and rulers delivered Him up | 1:00 | |
| "to be condemned to death and crucified Him. | 1:02 | |
| "But we had hoped He was the One to redeem Israel. | 1:06 | |
| "Yes, and besides all this, | 1:10 | |
| "it's now the third day since these things happened. | 1:11 | |
| "Moreover, some of our women in the company amazed us. | 1:15 | |
| "They were at the tomb in early morning, | 1:19 | |
| "did not find His body and they came back saying | 1:22 | |
| "they'd even seen a vision of angels who said He was alive. | 1:24 | |
| "Some of those who were with us went to the tomb | 1:27 | |
| "and found it just as the women had said. | 1:29 | |
| "But they did not see." | 1:32 | |
| And He said to them, | 1:35 | |
| "O foolish men, slow of heart to believe | 1:37 | |
| "all the prophets have spoken. | 1:39 | |
| "Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer | 1:42 | |
| "these things and enter into His glory?" | 1:44 | |
| And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, | 1:48 | |
| He interpreted them to them | 1:50 | |
| all the scriptures concerning himself. | 1:52 | |
| So they drew near to the village | 1:57 | |
| to which they were going. | 2:00 | |
| He appeared to be going further. | 2:01 | |
| But they constrained Him saying, | 2:04 | |
| "Stay with us, for it is toward evening | 2:05 | |
| "and the day is now far spent." | 2:07 | |
| So He went in to stay with them | 2:10 | |
| and when He was at table with them, | 2:13 | |
| He took the bread and blessed | 2:14 | |
| and broke it and gave it to them. | 2:16 | |
| And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him. | 2:18 | |
| And He vanished from their sight. | 2:22 | |
| They said to each other, | 2:25 | |
| "Did our hearts not burn within us | 2:27 | |
| "while He talked with us on the road, | 2:30 | |
| "while He opened to us the Scriptures?" | 2:32 | |
| And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem | 2:35 | |
| and they found the 11 gathered together. | 2:37 | |
| And those who were with them who said, | 2:40 | |
| "The Lord is risen indeed! | 2:42 | |
| "He's appeared to Simon!" | 2:43 | |
| Then they told what had happened on the road. | 2:46 | |
| How He was made known to them in the breaking of the bread. | 2:50 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 2:56 | |
| - | Thanks be to God. | 2:59 |
| - | Their eyes were opened and they recognized Him. | 3:06 |
| Then He vanished from their sight. | 3:10 | |
| A year or so ago, | 3:17 | |
| a friend of mine died. | 3:20 | |
| One morning in his 68th year, he simply didn't wake up. | 3:22 | |
| It was about as easy a way as he could | 3:27 | |
| possibly have done it, | 3:29 | |
| but it wasn't easy for the people he left behind, | 3:31 | |
| because it gave us | 3:33 | |
| no chance to start getting used to the idea, | 3:35 | |
| or to say goodbye. | 3:38 | |
| He died in March, | 3:41 | |
| and in May, my wife and I were staying | 3:43 | |
| with his widow overnight and I had a short dream about him. | 3:45 | |
| I dreamed that he was standing there | 3:51 | |
| in the dark guest room where we were asleep, | 3:53 | |
| looking very much himself in his navy blue jersey | 3:57 | |
| and white slacks he often wore. | 4:00 | |
| I told him how much we had missed him, | 4:04 | |
| how glad I was to see him again. | 4:06 | |
| He acknowledged that somehow, and then I said, | 4:09 | |
| "Are you really there, Dudley?" | 4:13 | |
| I meant, was he there in fact, in truth, | 4:17 | |
| or was I merely dreaming that he was there? | 4:21 | |
| His answer was that he was really there. | 4:24 | |
| "Can you prove it?" I asked him. | 4:27 | |
| "Of course," he said. | 4:30 | |
| And then he plucked a strand of wool out of his jersey | 4:32 | |
| and he tossed it to me, | 4:36 | |
| and I caught it between my thumb and forefinger. | 4:38 | |
| And the feel of it was so palpably real, it woke me up. | 4:41 | |
| That's all there was to it. | 4:47 | |
| I told the dream at breakfast the next morning. | 4:50 | |
| And I'd hardly finished when my wife spoke. | 4:53 | |
| She said that she has seen the strand on the carpet | 4:57 | |
| as she was getting dressed. | 5:00 | |
| She was sure that it had not been there the night before. | 5:02 | |
| I rushed upstairs to see for myself, and there it was, | 5:06 | |
| a little tangle of navy blue wool. | 5:10 | |
| Thus the writer, Frederick Buechner, describes a moment, | 5:18 | |
| a wistful intrusive | 5:22 | |
| moment of transcendence. | 5:24 | |
| Now, I ask you after hearing that, what was that? | 5:29 | |
| By the way, Buechner does not | 5:34 | |
| know what to make of such a moment. | 5:35 | |
| You say it was coincidence? | 5:39 | |
| Maybe, maybe not. | 5:42 | |
| I was on my way to speak in Chattanooga, | 5:47 | |
| and as I clung to the seat of the little airplane | 5:50 | |
| as we were bouncing over the Smoky Mountains, | 5:53 | |
| I remembered a breakfast. | 5:55 | |
| 10 years ago now that I had here at Duke, | 6:00 | |
| and I remember it was when I was being hired | 6:02 | |
| and there were to be some students to show up | 6:05 | |
| for the breakfast. | 6:07 | |
| I was told a dozen would be there. | 6:08 | |
| Well, it was eight o'clock, it was a breakfast, | 6:09 | |
| these were students, one showed up. | 6:11 | |
| (audience laughs) | 6:13 | |
| And I, all I remember of him, I remember two things. | 6:15 | |
| He was a law student and his name was Porter. | 6:18 | |
| But I also remember that, | 6:23 | |
| the only thing from the breakfast was, | 6:24 | |
| out of the conversation was, he asked me, | 6:26 | |
| now, what type preacher do you plan to be here at Duke? | 6:29 | |
| That was all. | 6:34 | |
| Now, to my knowledge, I had never thought about that | 6:36 | |
| breakfast or that law student from so long ago. | 6:39 | |
| It just flitted through the mind and then it was gone. | 6:43 | |
| Okay, I landed in Chattanooga, | 6:47 | |
| I spoke at the University of Chattanooga. | 6:49 | |
| Next morning, returned to Durham. | 6:51 | |
| Three days later, I get this letter, | 6:55 | |
| and it said, "Dear Dr. Willimon, | 6:59 | |
| "you probably don't remember me, | 7:01 | |
| "but I met you briefly, a number of years ago | 7:03 | |
| "when you were coming to Duke, and I am sorry | 7:07 | |
| "I never got a chance to be with you there at Duke. | 7:09 | |
| "But I heard that you were in town | 7:12 | |
| "and I went to hear your lecture last night, | 7:14 | |
| "and I couldn't speak to you afterwards, | 7:16 | |
| "but I wanted to write you to tell you I enjoyed it." | 7:18 | |
| And, it was signed, Porter. | 7:22 | |
| It was on legal stationery. | 7:25 | |
| He was a lawyer in Chattanooga. | 7:27 | |
| Now what was that? | 7:32 | |
| Some glitch of the brain, you say, coincidence? | 7:36 | |
| Maybe, but then maybe not. | 7:40 | |
| The odds against such occurrences | 7:46 | |
| have got to be astronomical. | 7:48 | |
| And yet, I wonder, | 7:50 | |
| if we had the courage to speak of them, | 7:53 | |
| I expect that we would find | 7:57 | |
| that events like that happen all the time. | 7:59 | |
| And it's not so interesting that such moments should occur, | 8:03 | |
| for they certainly do. | 8:07 | |
| And I am sure as I recall that incident, | 8:10 | |
| you recalled others in your own mind. | 8:13 | |
| It's not so interesting that such events should occur, | 8:17 | |
| but what's interesting is what we make out of them, | 8:21 | |
| or refuse to make out of them. | 8:25 | |
| Because there's something about us that is | 8:29 | |
| fearful to make too much out of them. | 8:31 | |
| I know that I squirm as I read Frederick Buechner saying, | 8:34 | |
| telling about his dream and the tufted blue wool | 8:39 | |
| on the carpet. | 8:42 | |
| He says, "Maybe my friend really did come to me | 8:44 | |
| "in my dream and the thread was a sign to me that he had." | 8:47 | |
| Maybe it is true that God's grace, | 8:52 | |
| that by God's grace, the dead are given | 8:55 | |
| back their lives again, and that the doctrine | 8:57 | |
| of the resurrection of the body is not just a doctrine. | 9:00 | |
| I don't know, maybe, maybe not. | 9:06 | |
| Maybe these moments, and I know that you've had them, | 9:11 | |
| maybe they're just a coincidence. | 9:15 | |
| A fluke, a quirk. | 9:19 | |
| And then maybe | 9:22 | |
| they are sort of playful intrusions | 9:25 | |
| into our so commonsensical patterns of thought, | 9:30 | |
| a blue thread on the carpet, | 9:34 | |
| a face, a name plucked deep | 9:37 | |
| from the past sent by heaven | 9:40 | |
| to disrupt us. | 9:43 | |
| Maybe it's a peek | 9:46 | |
| behind the curtain of external reality, | 9:48 | |
| a whisper in the ear from providence, | 9:52 | |
| a hint of transcendence. | 9:56 | |
| Just a suggestion | 10:02 | |
| that there is more to death than death. | 10:04 | |
| That there is more to my past and my present | 10:09 | |
| than a trip to Chattanooga. | 10:13 | |
| Maybe we should not make too much a fuss over such moments. | 10:17 | |
| Maybe they mean nothing beyond the, | 10:22 | |
| a kind of glitch in the electrical impulses | 10:25 | |
| going through the brain. | 10:27 | |
| Or maybe, they mean everything. | 10:32 | |
| Connect us with a reality that is too deep, | 10:38 | |
| too real, too wonderful, | 10:42 | |
| that if we were to stare at it straight | 10:46 | |
| in the face, it would blind us | 10:48 | |
| with its glory. | 10:51 | |
| So, all we get is just the curtain | 10:55 | |
| pulled back just briefly, just a peek, just a glimpse, | 10:57 | |
| just a hint, maybe that's all. | 11:00 | |
| And I would really hate to see you | 11:03 | |
| make too much of such hints of transcendence. | 11:05 | |
| I would hate for you to bet too much of your life | 11:09 | |
| on such events. | 11:12 | |
| Like a blue thread on the carpet | 11:15 | |
| or a note from a lawyer in Chattanooga. | 11:17 | |
| Because behind the curtain, | 11:21 | |
| there may be only emptiness. | 11:24 | |
| And the voice you think you hear | 11:28 | |
| may be the wind and nothing more. | 11:31 | |
| Of course, let the point be made that you are | 11:36 | |
| betting your life on something. | 11:39 | |
| And such moments may be too fragile, too momentary, | 11:42 | |
| ambiguous for you to stake your life upon them. | 11:45 | |
| And most of us have learned to live quite nicely, | 11:50 | |
| thank you, by what we can touch | 11:53 | |
| and hold and chew. | 11:56 | |
| Not on what may be dismissed as mere coincidence. | 11:58 | |
| The lives thereby produced in most of us may be flat, | 12:06 | |
| but at least they are unequivocable. | 12:11 | |
| And having bet our lives so comfortingly on the unambiguous, | 12:15 | |
| there is something about us that's just downright annoyed. | 12:21 | |
| Yes, annoyed. | 12:25 | |
| When the mysterious vertical intersects | 12:27 | |
| the predictable horizontal. | 12:31 | |
| And we're aggravated that God | 12:35 | |
| may be a tease. | 12:38 | |
| A coincidence might be, just may be, | 12:43 | |
| God's way of remaining anonymous. | 12:46 | |
| Picking at us, | 12:51 | |
| or on the other hand, it may be | 12:53 | |
| just a coincidence. | 12:54 | |
| A dream may be no more than | 12:58 | |
| sort of wishful thinking. | 13:00 | |
| Or on the other hand, it may be a kind of privileged peek | 13:04 | |
| into the inner workings | 13:08 | |
| of what's really going on in the world behind the curtain | 13:09 | |
| of what can be seen and touched and. | 13:13 | |
| Maybe God really does want to come out and meet us. | 13:18 | |
| But maybe it's always gonna be on God's terms, | 13:22 | |
| not our terms. | 13:25 | |
| Maybe God is a flirt. | 13:27 | |
| Just loves to tease us towards reality, | 13:29 | |
| reality that we locked in our facts | 13:32 | |
| and figures and empiricism and suburban good common sense. | 13:35 | |
| We routinely walk past | 13:39 | |
| without even a twitch of curiosity. | 13:41 | |
| One of the students in my freshman seminar, | 13:46 | |
| as we were talking about psychotherapy, and | 13:49 | |
| one of the freshmen said, | 13:53 | |
| "It makes you wonder, maybe modern people | 13:56 | |
| "have so many psychological problems, | 13:58 | |
| "because psychology is the only language | 14:02 | |
| "we've got left to talk about our problems." | 14:05 | |
| Maybe we all sort of resemble spiritually the kid | 14:11 | |
| who wore earphones so long, | 14:15 | |
| volume turned all the way up | 14:16 | |
| that the heavy metal music he listened to | 14:18 | |
| rendered his eardrums impervious to Debussy | 14:21 | |
| or even a romantic whisper. | 14:24 | |
| Maybe we don't see God so much because we've lost | 14:29 | |
| the capacity to look. | 14:32 | |
| So there are messages that are slipped to us | 14:36 | |
| from the other side that | 14:38 | |
| are reflexively dismissed as, oh gosh, a coincidence. | 14:40 | |
| So that the divine voice is heard | 14:46 | |
| only as some kind of unresolved conflict | 14:49 | |
| with your parents or either a case of indigestion. | 14:52 | |
| Ned Arnett of the Chemistry department told me once | 14:57 | |
| that the best research chemist he ever knew | 15:01 | |
| was a man, a Catholic, | 15:05 | |
| who would jump out of bed every single morning, | 15:08 | |
| look out the window and ask, | 15:11 | |
| "What is going on out there today?" | 15:15 | |
| So maybe the trouble with contemporary chemists | 15:21 | |
| is it they think they already know something. | 15:24 | |
| They think they come to the lab to confirm what they already | 15:26 | |
| have got figured out. | 15:29 | |
| They go to the lab without expectation | 15:32 | |
| of shock or surprise. | 15:34 | |
| Even science dies for lack of imagination. | 15:37 | |
| I took an art history course | 15:44 | |
| and I remember the day that the art history professor | 15:47 | |
| showed us slides of Masaccio's frescoes | 15:49 | |
| in the church of the Carmine in Florence, | 15:53 | |
| and she told us that these were special. | 15:56 | |
| But when I first saw them, | 15:59 | |
| I couldn't see anything special about them. | 16:00 | |
| But after she talked, after she talked about the way | 16:04 | |
| the figures were modeled, the use of color, | 16:07 | |
| the play of light on shadow, | 16:09 | |
| I saw. | 16:13 | |
| And those paintings came alive for me | 16:16 | |
| and they were imprinted on my brain forever | 16:17 | |
| and it was revelation. | 16:20 | |
| I'm telling you that sometimes there may be | 16:24 | |
| something there which we don't see. | 16:26 | |
| Our eyes are dull, because our vision is so unformed | 16:29 | |
| and uninformed, and uninstructed, and undisciplined | 16:33 | |
| to look with appropriate intellectual curiosity. | 16:37 | |
| What would it take for us to see? | 16:44 | |
| 'Cause I tell you if there is a living God, | 16:48 | |
| we shouldn't expect to see that God too clearly. | 16:51 | |
| Why it couldn't be God if we couldn't | 16:57 | |
| explain it some other way. | 16:58 | |
| 'Cause a living God has got to be large, | 17:02 | |
| thick, ambiguous, | 17:05 | |
| if God be God. | 17:08 | |
| Well, it was Sunday. | 17:12 | |
| Couple of the disciples walking down the road | 17:14 | |
| to the little village of Emmaus, | 17:16 | |
| trying to make sense out of what had happened | 17:17 | |
| in their world in the past three days. | 17:19 | |
| Jesus was dead, they knew that. | 17:23 | |
| Well, they had seen Him die. | 17:25 | |
| One of them said, | 17:29 | |
| "Well, I was standing sort of toward the rear, | 17:30 | |
| "but from what I could see, He was dead." | 17:33 | |
| Finished. | 17:37 | |
| It was a good campaign | 17:39 | |
| while it lasted, but we didn't get Him elected Messiah | 17:40 | |
| and it's dead, | 17:43 | |
| it's over, finished. | 17:45 | |
| And as they were walking, there was this stranger, | 17:48 | |
| this walking beside them on the way. | 17:50 | |
| And the stranger said, | 17:53 | |
| "What are you talking about?" | 17:55 | |
| "You people look sort of depressed." | 17:56 | |
| "Are You the only person in Jerusalem | 18:00 | |
| "doesn't know what's been going on the last three days?" | 18:02 | |
| And the stranger says, "No, what's been going on?" | 18:04 | |
| "Jesus of Nazareth, wonderful prophet, | 18:08 | |
| "we had hoped He might be the One to redeem Israel, but, | 18:11 | |
| "some of the women, | 18:17 | |
| "some of the women came back from the tomb. | 18:19 | |
| "And they told about a stone rolled away, | 18:22 | |
| "of visions of angels. | 18:25 | |
| "We call it grief reaction, coincidence, | 18:29 | |
| "traumatic stress syndrome, | 18:33 | |
| "wishful thinking, feminine hysteria." | 18:36 | |
| And then beginning with Genesis, | 18:40 | |
| this stranger takes the Bible and works | 18:42 | |
| all the way through it, | 18:45 | |
| verse by verse and explains everything to them. | 18:46 | |
| And, true to form, the disciples don't understand anything. | 18:49 | |
| Now why couldn't they see? | 18:56 | |
| Why couldn't they see? | 18:59 | |
| They arrived at Emmaus. | 19:05 | |
| The sun was setting. | 19:07 | |
| They said, "Stranger, stay with us, eat with us." | 19:08 | |
| And they were at table and the stranger took | 19:13 | |
| the bread and He blessed the bread | 19:15 | |
| and He broke the bread. | 19:18 | |
| And their eyes were opened | 19:21 | |
| and they saw. | 19:24 | |
| Back to Jerusalem to tell the others. | 19:36 | |
| Weird news, the Lord has risen, | 19:38 | |
| He's risen indeed, He's appeared to Simon. | 19:40 | |
| And they told 'em about the moment that, | 19:43 | |
| that moment when they, He broke the bread | 19:46 | |
| and their eyes were opened and they saw | 19:48 | |
| that curious connection | 19:53 | |
| when the eternal broke into the mundane | 19:54 | |
| the way the stranger had sort of teased them | 19:58 | |
| back on the road. | 20:00 | |
| The way the curtain had been drawn back | 20:02 | |
| in one stunning moment of transcendence at the table. | 20:04 | |
| And some believed, but the majority of those polled | 20:12 | |
| said it had to be some kind of coincidence, | 20:17 | |
| something in the wine, male hysteria. | 20:21 | |
| Maybe, | 20:30 | |
| but maybe not. | 20:33 | |
| (organ music) | 20:42 |
