When was the last time you had heartburn? I don't mean the kind of heartburn you get after eating at a diner, of course, but the kind of heartburn the disciples felt after they had dined with the Risen Christ in Emmaus. When was the last time your heart was burning within you after hearing the scriptures opened to you? When was the last time your heart was burning within you as you shared in the breaking of the bread? Perhaps more importantly, what did this heartburn lead you to do?

For you see, I don't think it's enough simply to hear a heart-warming sermon or get the warm fuzzies from experiencing the presence of God in word and sacrament. Contemplation is necessary for spiritual growth, and these consoling religious experiences are important, of course (few of us would attend church if we didn't get something out of it), but when we find our hearts burning within us, it is a sign that God is calling us to action in the world around us.

Take John Wesley, for example. He was a priest of the Church of England, deeply committed to spiritual growth. At Oxford, he joined a group founded by his brother, Charles called the "Holy Club," which met to read spiritual classics such as The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying. They came to be nicknamed the "Methodists." But studying the spiritual classics wasn't enough. John Wesley wanted to do something with his life that would serve God. He even went to the colony of Georgia as a missionary, only to return discouraged and disheartened. Wesley didn't discover what he was truly called to do until he went to a Thursday night prayer meeting at the Moravian chapel in Aldersgate Street, where he heard a reading from Luther's preface to his commentary on St. Paul's epistle to the Romans. The date was May 24, 1738, and Wesley famously wrote in his journal, "And in that event, I felt my heart strangely warmed."

If Wesley had left that prayer meeting with a warmed heart but no impetus to action, to accomplishing the Church's mission in the broken and hurting world around him, he might have ended up a competent but unremarkable country vicar. Instead, what had started out at Oxford as an interior, spiritual conversion blossomed into an exterior, evangelical conversion, which led him to set up Methodist societies throughout the United Kingdom and the American colonies. These societies were officially within the Church of England, but the bishops were so threatened by Wesley's charisma and his followers' enthusiasm that they made life very difficult for the Methodists. Although Wesley remained a priest of the Anglican Church until his death, by ordaining a minister as a missionary to the newly independent United States, he precipitated the eventual parting of ways between Methodists and Anglicans.

Despite this sad division, Wesley's warmed heart was more than just personally heart-warming. Wesley's Methodists went where the established church barely deigned to go: among the poor and the oppressed, those who were slowly being crushed to death by the polluting machinery of the nascent Industrial Revolution. The Methodists fought alcoholism by promoting temperance, fought slavery as abolitionists, and were among the first to champion the cause of women's suffrage.

Looking at Wesley's life, I tend to think that he was employing classic British understatement when he wrote that his heart was strangely warmed. How John Wesley's heart must have been burning within him as Luther's commentary opened the scriptures to him, revealing Christ truly present in word and sacrament and propelling him out to serve Christ in the world!

We see this dynamic at work in Luke's story-in fact, these two disciples have been nicknamed "the first Methodists," for they don't just say, "Well, wasn't that an amazing spiritual experience!" No, they get up "that same hour" and return to Jerusalem. They must have practically run back to Jerusalem. After all, Emmaus was seven miles away, and the evening sky was already darkening. Once in Jerusalem, they announce the good news to the disciples, and as Luke tells us in Acts, they remained there until the Day of Pentecost, when, at the Holy Spirit's descent, Peter and all the disciples burst into the world, preaching the gospel in every tongue and bringing healing and salvation to people of many nations. This same dynamic can be at work in our own lives, too, but only when we allow Christ to meet us where we are, on whatever road we're on, and only when, like those two disciples, we invite Jesus to "stay with us."

The Road to Emmaus has become a metaphor for the spiritual journey. And why not? It's an apt one. But the danger in treating it as a metaphor is that we lose sight of the significance of the event itself in Luke's narrative. So I'd like to spend the few minutes remaining reflecting on a few notable details in this text, in the hope that by gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of this story's richness, we can begin to discern in it where God might be calling us in our own day. This sort of discernment is particularly appropriate as we prepare to gather this afternoon for our parish's Annual Meeting.

You see, I've always wondered: Why did Jesus appear to the disciples on the road to Emmaus in the first place? Why these two disciples, and why there? Didn't Jesus have better things to do with his time that Sunday morning than chase down two disciples headed out of town? I got a surprisingly satisfying answer to this question from my father when he called me the other day. At the end of our conversation, I mentioned in passing that I was preaching this Sunday on the "Road to Emmaus" story. My father is a retired Methodist pastor, by the way, whose own heart has been "strangely warmed," so the Emmaus story is one of his favorites. He said the best sermon on this story he ever heard pointed out that the disciples on that road weren't supposed to be headed out of Jerusalem, that, in essence, they were headed the wrong direction. The moral of the story being that Jesus meets us even when we aren't on a spiritual pilgrimage, even when we're running the other way entirely!

I wondered why I'd missed that fact, and thought maybe the preacher my dad had heard was using a bit of poetic license. So I did a little sleuthing in the text, and I found that, indeed, in Luke's gospel and in the sequel he wrote to it, the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus put a special emphasis immediately after his resurrection on the disciples' staying in Jerusalem. In Luke 24:49, a mere four verses from the end of the gospel, Jesus instructs the disciples, "stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high," referring to the gift of the Holy Spirit who was to descend at Pentecost. In Acts, which picks up where Luke left off, chapter one, verses four and five read: "While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. 'This,' he said, 'is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.'"

The interesting thing to me is that there's no evidence elsewhere in Luke that Jesus gave any such instruction before he died, so those disciples on their way to Emmaus probably had no idea they were supposed to stay in Jerusalem. Indeed, they had every reason to believe that the show was over. When Cleopas speaks, he is clearly heartbroken, as he says, "We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel." But who was this Cleopas, anyway?

The only other reference to anyone with a name like "Cleopas" in the New Testament is an indirect one, found in John 19:25, where we are told that at Jesus' crucifixion, "standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene." If the "Clopas" of John's gospel and the "Cleopas" of Luke's gospel refer to the same person, then it is likely that the reason only one of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus was mentioned in this story is that Luke's original audience would have known that Cleopas was on the road with his wife, Mary, the sister of Jesus' own mother, Mary. And if this is the case, then it means that Jesus chose to appear not merely to two random disciples, but to his own aunt and uncle!

If it's not just two recent converts who fail to recognize Jesus, but two intimate relatives who would have known Jesus from infancy, then why in the world didn't they recognize him as soon as he showed his face? Maybe this is Luke's way of indicating that just as they had failed to recognize who Jesus really was before the resurrection, they weren't able to recognize his true identity after the resurrection. It's ironic, isn't it, that at first Jesus plays dumb with them:

'What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?' They stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, [wink, wink, nudge, nudge] answered him, 'Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?' He asked them, 'What things?' They replied, 'The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.'

It's clear from Cleopas' statement that he still thought of Jesus as a prophet and political messiah who would liberate Israel from the Romans, but that Cleopas had no notion whatsoever that Jesus was the one who would take away the sins of the world. It's ironic how Cleopas tries to set the "stranger" straight, when it is the "stranger" who ends up setting Cleopas straight: "Then [Jesus] said to them, 'Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?' Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures."

Poor Cleopas and Mary. Here they were, trying to get away from it all, and some know-it-all stranger comes along and starts pontificating to them about something they thought they already knew. Who did this guy think he was, anyway? But then, strangely, they find their hearts burning within them. At the beginning of their walk, they may have wanted the stranger just to go away-he was a nuisance, intruding on their private grief. No wonder they didn't recognize Jesus; they were too pre-occupied with themselves and their profound loss. By the end of the walk, though, they can't get enough of this guy. They still don't know who he is, but they know they want more of him in their lives.

Yet, just at the moment that their eyes are opened and they recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, what happens? He vanishes.

What's up with that? In John, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene not to touch him, and in Luke, Jesus doesn't even give poor Cleopas and Mary the chance. Why does he vanish? I don't have any definitive answers, but again, maybe it's Luke's way of telling us that just as we can't recognize the true Jesus while holding onto false notions of who he is, we can't hold onto the true Jesus when we do recognize him because Jesus is not someone we can possess. Rather, it is the Spirit of Christ who possesses us. This is why Luke keeps pointing ahead to the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Luke points to the Spirit because his point is that Jesus cannot be possessed any more than he could be kept sealed in a stone cold tomb.

So, too, we cannot possess Christ, but we can meet him on our own road to Emmaus. We can recognize him in word and sacrament, as the scriptures are opened to us and as we come together in the breaking of the bread. Our hearts can burn within us when this happens. But we should take care not to let that burning heart be merely heart-warming, or worse, turn into heartburn. We must be willing to take the risk that, having let go of the Jesus we might prefer to see, and having seen the Jesus who may at first appear as a stranger to us, we proclaim in our lives what we profess in our faith, as we await for the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.