The Sermon I Did Preach: Walking the Road of Disappointment

Below is the sermon I actually did preach at two of our three worship services this morning.  It too is based on the Emmaus Road story in Luke.  Of course, since what I actually said at the time was pretty much ad-libbed, what follows is a fleshed-out version of the message.  I hope it is of help to others who have or are facing disappointment and disillusionment in their lives.  

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The date was March 28, 1992,
and I was in Philadelphia on a traditional dinner and a movie date.
We were eating dinner at one of those restaurants that has TV screens scattered all over the place.
Most times I hate this, but on that day it was okay.
In fact, it was better than okay because the University of Kentucky was playing a game in the NCAA basketball tournament,
and in case you don’t know this yet, I am a Kentucky Wildcats’ fan.
If you cut me, I bleed blue, Wildcat blue.

Now this was an important game for every Wildcat fan,
because it marked the return to national prominence for our beloved basketball program.
In the 1988-89 school year, Kentucky had suffered through it’s only losing season ever with a 13-19 record.
Even worse, the head coach had been fired and the NCAA had penalized the program because of rules violations.
UK basketball was at an all time low.

But then, Rick Pitino had been hired as head coach,
and after a 14-14 record his first year, and a 22-6 record the following year,
we were now 27-6 and playing in the East Regional Final for a place in the NCAA Final Four.
Only one team stood in our way - The Duke Blue Devils.
At halftime, the score was Duke 50, Kentucky 45,
But by the end of the game, the score was tied at 93 all.
And so the game went into overtime.
With Duke leading 102-101,
Sean Woods, a Kentucky player, connected with the basket.
UK was now ahead 103-102 and there was only 2.1 seconds left in the game.
Kentucky fans the world over were already celebrating.
We were finally going back to the Final Four.
But then, after a timeout, Duke’s Grant Hill inbounded the ball with a 75 foot pass to Christian Laettner,
who put down a quick dribble, turned, and then launched a 17-foot jump shot that swooshed through the basket.
With no time left, the score was 104-103, and Duke had won the game.

To say that I was disappointed with this outcome is a major understatement.
It was like someone had sucker-punched me.
I couldn’t breath, and I couldn’t believe that this had actually happened.
You see, I had hoped that this would be the team that would bring Kentucky it’s sixth national championship.
But now, that dream was gone.
I had thought that this would be the team.
But I was wrong.

In the spring of 1989, I was finishing my final year in Seminary.
I was also in my first year as a pastor serving a small rural church in southern Lancaster county.
The Admission’s director at Drew told me about a job opening he had heard about at Union College in Kentucky.
Union was looking for a college chaplain who would also be able to teach a few courses at the school.
It was the perfect job for me.
I could move back home to Kentucky,
I could preach and pastor without being tied to a local church (something I really didn’t want to do),
and I could teach one or two college courses a semester.
It was the ideal situation.

I flew down to Cincinnati, rented a car, and drove into the mountains of Kentucky where Union College is located.
I met the College President,
interviewed with various committees,
took an extensive tour of the campus,
and at the end of the day felt that I had made a very good impression.
Once home, I anxiously waited for some news.
It came in the form of a letter from the College President.
In it he told me that of all the candidate interviewed,
two of us stood out: a young woman from Vanderbilt and Me.

He praised us both and said that as far as he was concerned we were equally qualified for the position,
which, however, they were offering to the young woman, since in his words, “We’ve never had a woman chaplain before and want to try something new.”
And even though I am a died-in-the-wool liberal when it comes to equal opportunities for all, this was devastating news.
You see, I had already been formulating my moving plans,
and now, I was being told that I would be staying right where I was.
It took me a while to get over this loss, because, you see,
I had thought that this job was the one for me.
I had hoped that this was what God wanted (at least it was what I wanted),
I had thought this was it, but it wasn’t.

One more scene for you:
I am a sophomore in high school,
and my dad has been the pastor of a little store front church for 3 years.
Growth has been slow, but things are beginning to look up.
The pews are beginning to get a little crowded - all ten of them,
and there was talk of buying some land and building a new church.
Along the way, however, something has gone wrong in the relationship between my dad and mom.
Their life has never been easy,
but the pressures have been mounting for some time.
Every day they got up at 5 am to drive almost two hours to their jobs in an appliance factory.
Eight back-breaking and monotonous hours later,
it was two more hours back home.
After supper, my dad would go out for several more hours of church work.

I guess it all became too much,
and somewhere, somehow, along the way,
my dad lost his bearings.
He began an affair with a church member.
The night I realized this, my mom was in the hospital.
She was suffering from what the doctors called “nervous exhaustion.”
It was late, after eleven, and I am sure my dad thought my brother and I were asleep - but I wasn’t.

Our bedrooms were separated by the thinnest of walls,
and in the quiet I heard my dad talking on the phone in hushed whispers.
He was telling someone that he loved her,
that he wanted to be with her and not my mom.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but there it was,
and a few short weeks later my family life had been shattered.
It was bad enough that my Mother, brother and I were now on our own.
Money, which had always been tight, would be even tighter.
Our lifestyle, already bordering on working-class poor would plunge further down the socio-economic scale.
But the sense of betrayal and loss was palpable,
and there was also a profound disappointment with my dad.
You see, I had thought of him, as not only my dad, but also as my role model in the faith.
I had wanted to be like him and had hoped to follow in his footsteps,
and now he had throw his life and us away.
I had thought that if anyone could be a Christian,
if anyone could be faithful to their calling,
then that person was my Dad.
I had thought this, but I was wrong.

Have you ever been deeply disappointed?
Have you ever experienced a major loss or betrayal.
Have you ever had your expectations and dreams crushed and destroyed?
If so, and I can’t believe that there is a person out there, who hasn’t experienced these things,
then you know how the two followers of Jesus must have felt as they traveled down the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way:
“The Road to Emmaus is the road of deep disappointment,
and walking it is the living definition of sad.
It is the road you walk when you lose a big game,
or your candidate for office loses, or you lose your job,
or you lose your loved one to death.
It is the long road of loss.
It is the long road back to an empty house,
an empty seat at the table,
an empty place in bed next to you,
piles of unopened mail,
calls on your answering machine from creditors demanding you call them back instead of friends or family offering you a cup of water in your misery.
The Road to Emmaus is real.
(Drawn from Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine, Cowley Publications, Boston, Mass, p. 20).

And it is on this road that we find two defeated disciples,
headed out of town toward Emmaus, toward nowhere.
These two followers of Christ are tired;
they have heavy hearts and leaden feet,
and they walk to Emmaus to forget,
to forget about Jesus and the great failure that was his life among them.
They are walking away and will try to pick up the pieces of their shattered dreams and start over.
And if we look hard enough we will see shadows of ourselves walking down the same road.

Cleopas and his companion, like many others, had trusted in Jesus.
They had put all their hopes, expectations and even their love in him.
And for awhile it had looked good.
Just a week before Jesus had been welcomed to the city as a conquering hero,
palm fronds waving and people shouting,
“Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord.”
And they had thought,
no, they had hoped, that he, that Jesus, would be the one.
They had thought and hoped this,
but they had been wrong.
And now they were simply trying to get away from their disappointment and despair by going to Emmaus.

Suddenly, however, on this God-forsaken road a stranger appears;
he walks and talks with them,
he draws out their hopes and dreams.
He slowly allows them to voice their fears and doubts,
and finally, at their table in the evening,
their hopes and dreams were renewed when they realize that the stranger in their midst is no other than Jesus himself,
their master, their teacher, their Lord - risen from the dead.

One writer has put it well:
Searching for resurrection signs and hope along a stone-strewn path,
amid the jumble of confusion, the rubble of lost dreams,
and the residue of Friday,
two travelers on a Sunday walk talk to a Stranger who takes time to speak,
break bread, pour wine and show his face and wounded hands, now healed.

The Sunday Stranger still walks and talks and tarries
with those who will invite him in.

The truth is that we will all travel the road to Emmaus at one time or another in our lives, and most of us will make many trips on it during our lives.
We may come to the road full of doubt and fear for many reasons-
a loved may have died leaving us questioning God.
our faith may waver in the face of overwhelming obstacles -
so many hungry, so many poor, so much hatred,
or perhaps love will seem to vanish -
a husband or wife may leave us, or a child reject us.
But regardless of the reason we come,
we walk down the road with heavy hearts and leaden feet.
But a stranger awaits us, and in the encounter with the stranger - our risen Lord - we soon know that fear and doubt cannot overcome hope,
darkness cannot overcome light,
hatred cannot win out over love,
and death can never, ever overcome life.

Now as a pastor/preacher I need to tell you that when I preach,
I preach as much to myself as I preach to you,
and so it is that I want to believe the words I say as much I want you to believe them.
I want to believe that Jesus meets us on our roads of disappointment.
I want to believe that hope overcomes fear and doubt,
and that love and life win out over hate and death.
I want to believe, but sometimes belief, sometimes faith is hard.

Let me explain by telling you one more story.
I hope you’ll indulge me.

In mid-January 2001, I received a call from our then District Superintendent telling me that “the Bishop has made an appointment.”
I was then informed that come the end of June I would be moving from my current church in Elysburg, PA to the First United Methodist Church in Pottstown.
I was ready for a move, and so I received this news with some joy.
After ten years of serving churches that had been in high conflict prior to my arrival,
I was ready for a change,
ready for a church that wasn’t fighting, wasn’t hopelessly divided, and was ready to do whatever it took to be faithful to its calling in Jesus Christ.
In addition, I had just gone through a painful separation from my wife of seven years,
and a change in scenery would also be appreciated.

So it was with high hopes that I came to Pottstown,
and for awhile everything seemed to go well, even great.
A little over a year after my arrival,
we began a time of discernment with a Vision, Mission and Action team,
which led to a report being presented to the church in the Spring of 2003.
Over a hundred people attended this meeting,
and we approved, without dissent, the implementation of its recommendations.
In turn this led to our hiring Jim Jannotti as our new full-time pastor of Community Life and Modern Worship.
Jim and his family joined us in July of that year,
leaving behind their home of ten years in Ohio.

Jim set about chairing our newly formed Ministry Planning, Implementation and Evaluation Team (Ministry PIE Team),
and they in turn led a series of Spiritual Gifts workshops and helped to put into place several new ministries in our church.

In addition, we adopted new Core Value, Mission and Vision statements.
We spent thousands of dollars on advertising,
at one point calling every household in the area to introduce our new modern worship service.
And on the day our new service began we had over 100 people in attendance at it and over 200 for services that weren’t held on Christmas Eve or Easter.
It was an amazing start.
In 2004, we saw our first significant increase in attendance in over 40 years,
going from under 120 in worship to a 137 average.
Things were beginning to turnaround.
We built a new parking lot and made other improvements in our facilities,
and between 2003 and 2005 we spent over $200,000 above our regular budget to try a make a positive difference in our church and community.
And for awhile it all seemed to work.

But then things started to fall apart.
Our attendance began to decline once again.
Our aging congregation continued to suffer from the deaths of it members - over 70 deaths since I have been here,
and the small influx of new members could not and did not keep pace.
Our giving began to decline,
even when factoring in additional monies from our capital funds campaign,
and at the beginning of 2005 we had to cut almost $20,000 from a budget we had just adopted a few months earlier.
By the beginning of 2006, we had eliminated every paid staff position except for myself and our music director.
Gone were our all of our other part-time employees - our children’s choir director, the beginner’s handbell director, our janitor, and finally our church secretary (who had been with us for over 25 years).
And while Jim continued as our modern worship leader,
he had to find other employment in order to pay the bills.
Further, many of the programs and ministries we had either started or had continued from previous years have fallen by the wayside.
We are now basically a two day a week church - Sunday morning worship and Wednesday evening choir rehearsals.
Our attendance has declined from a high of 137 to a point where is hovers around 100,
less than it was when I arrived by almost 20% .
In addition, our financial situation continues to worsen.
Even with the additional income from our lease with The Lincoln Center bringing in almost $2,000 a month,
overall monies coming into the church are lower now than they have been in many years.
And after a one-year reprieve,
we could be facing a huge deficit by the end of this year.

All this bad news has left me feeling more than a little depressed, disillusioned and disappointed.
It probably leaves you feeling the same way.
It’s one thing to be a part of a congregation that has experienced nothing but continuous decline,
it’s another thing altogether to have experienced some hope and positive growth only to have that growth reverse itself and your hopes dashed.

You see, I had thought that this was the church –
that we could turn things around here,
and that we could be a vital and alive and thriving congregation.
Perhaps I had even thought that this was where I could put into practice all the things I had learned about church growth,
and that I could be an instrumental part of helping to renew a church that had been in decline.
And while I know that is more than a little egotistical,
I did really believe that we could do it.
I was confident of it.
And yet, by all appearances, it seems that I was wrong.
I had though, I had hoped that this church would be the one,
but so far, at least, it isn’t.

Do you know what the road to Emmaus is known as by many pastors and churches?
It is called an appointment change.
A church or pastor becomes disillusioned,
things go wrong and one or both request a change.
And they begin the walk the long, hard road to Emmaus.
But though this may be a disappointment to some,
I am not ready to start that road,
regardless of my own disappointment in the our church and in myself.
As far as I know,
I will be with you for the next year and hopefully for a long time to come.
And it is my hope that in my disappointment, in your disappointment, we just might encounter the risen Christ in our midst.
I really want to believe that,
and I will try with all my might to do so.
Will you join me?
Will you pray with me the prayer that all those with doubts and fears have prayed at one time or another:
“Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

When troubles come and our world begins to crumble around us,
we want to forget.
The disciples on the road to Emmaus had followed Jesus and now it was all over – it had all been for nothing – or so they thought.
But then Jesus appears,
he walks and talks with them,
he breaks bread with them,
and as he does, a breeze begins to blow across the ashes of their hopes.
And what was true for them is true for me.
And it is true for you as well.

For those of us who have experienced disappointment, brokenness and loss,
I offer to you, and to me, Jesus.
Jesus, our crucified and risen Lord,
who has come to us and shared our common lot,
who has conquered sin and death”
and who meets people on the roadway of disappointment, sadness and distress,
and who can bring us healing and wholeness and hope.
I give to you, and to me, Jesus,
who seems to prefer working with people whose hearts are broken,
whose dreams are broken,
whose lives are broken,
whose world is broken.
Jesus, who in his own brokenness,
takes bread and breaks it and gives it to us, saying,
This is my body.
Jesus, who promises to us that wherever two or more are gathered in his name,
he is there with them.
Jesus, who tells us that he will never leave us or forsake us.
Jesus, whose death and life we share in baptism,
and who calls us to share his love and grace with everyone we meet,
so that no one has to walk the road to Emmaus again,
let alone walk it alone.