The Divine DeLorean

The Divine DeLorean--August 5, 2016

"As they came near the village to which they were going, [the risen Jesus] walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, 'Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.' So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to one another, 'Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?'" [Luke 24:28-32]

Jesus is like a DeLorean that leaves flaming tire tracks on your world.

You surely know that iconic image from the Back to the Future movies--the time machine that good ol' Doc Brown (played with perfect absent-minded kookiness by Christopher Lloyd) made out of a classic steel-gray, gull-wing-door, DeLorean.  And I'll bet you can picture in your mind any of the moments in the trilogy of movies where Doc Brown's invention gets up to the magic number of 88 miles per hour (generating, as the movies keep reminding us, the necessary 1.21 gigawatts of power for time-travel).  And you can probably picture in that instant how the DeLorean disappears, but leaves behind a set of burning tire tracks moving forward in the direction the car had been going. 

As movie-making goes, that's a great image--it gives us, the moviegoers, the unspoken cue that the time machine worked (since we've never seen a functioning time machine in real life to know what it "should" look like, of course), rather than just disappearing or slowly dissolving in a cloud of smoke.  That image says, "The car wasn't destroyed--it has traveled in time.  It's not really lost--it can come back to you at any time."  And for the other characters, the flaming tire tracks are a sort of reminder to them that something just really did happen--there really was (in the world of the movie) a time machine there just a second ago, and it really did just seem to vanish into thin air.  They know that they didn't just hallucinate it--and we in the audience know that we are not supposed to take it as a dream or a hallucination--because of the flaming lines heading off into the horizon.  They last.  They remain.  They tell us that something really has happened, that we are witnesses of it, and that everything is somehow different, even if the object in question is no longer visible to our eyes.

Jesus does that same thing to us.  Like the flaming tire tracks, the risen Jesus leaves marks behind him on the whole world... and indeed, on our hearts.  That's how those two disciples describe it on that first Easter evening--it was like, well, it was like their deepest selves were on fire.  It was like Jesus himself had blown right through them and left a pair of fiery tracks on their hearts. 

They had been heartbroken, despairing, and on the verge of falling off into bitterness--because they had seen the cruelty of the empire at its worst, killing their teacher Jesus.  They had seen the worst in themselves, too--because they had seen that even Jesus' inner circle of close followers all turned chicken and left Jesus to face death alone.  And they had seen the worst in well-meaning religious people, too--because they watched as crowds of people who all claimed to be good, upstanding, righteous folk all fell for the empty bluster of an authoritarian (the Roman governor Pilate) rather than the actual self-giving love that Jesus announced as the Reign of God.  You would have been crushed, too, if you had been let down so badly all around.  You would have thrown in the towel and started the long, slow walk home, too, like these two disciples.

And into the midst of that disappointment, that disillusionment, that sadness and loss, here comes the risen Jesus.  And like the time machine from the movies, Jesus leaves a mark behind him.  It's not even that he does a miracle--the "burning hearts" are from Jesus' opening the minds of his disciples up to the Scriptures and just walking with them, talking with them, and breaking bread with them.  But something about Jesus' gracious presence--his willingness to be delayed (from wherever he was going) to take the time and share a table with these followers who were too consumed with grief that they couldn't even recognize him.  Jesus shows up--grace walks with them along a dusty road on a sad Sunday night--and the next thing you know, their hopelessness is broken open like bread and there is new hope.

Grace does that to us.  When we are at points of our lives that seem like utterly hopeless dead-ends, the God we meet in Jesus meets us right there in the deadness of the dead-end and brings about Easter Sunday.  And we are different for it. The first followers of Jesus were changed because they came face to face with life beyond the grip of death.  There was no rule, no requirement, that a resurrected Messiah "had" to keep showing up to encourage his people--nobody was "owed" a resurrection appearance.  But graciously, Jesus keeps showing up to find us in our hopelessness.  And he doesn't deny the reasons for our despair. Nor does he try to just put a positive spin on the things that make us sorrowful or feel at the end of our rope.  He just meets us in the midst of them, and his very presence breaks open the despair. 

Awful things still happen in the world, yes--but death has been broken because Jesus is alive.  Human beings are still quite capable of horrible things that arise from our greed, our fear, and our hate... as well as from our indifference--but Jesus has taken the worst of those impulses, absorbed them all the way into death, and has come out the other side to meet us and say that the Reign of God is just more powerful that they are.  Our hearts, too, may be teetering on the edge of bitter despair--but Jesus keeps showing up and setting those hearts on fire, leaving flaming tire tracks in his wake like a divine DeLorean.

And Jesus is doing this same thing still.  It happens in ordinary walking and talking.  It happens in the shared journey.  It happens at regular looking tables with ordinary bread and plain old wine.  It happens when we least expect it.  But it happens.  Take a look--Jesus is leaving fiery tracks on your heart right now.  It is real.  You will be changed.  Grace does that.

Lord Jesus, leave your mark on us so that we will be changed with the hopefulness you give us by your presence and your risen power.