America Walks the Emmaus Road: Brian Zahnd on the Secular and the Sacred

America Walks the Emmaus Road: Brian Zahnd on the Secular and the Sacred March 28, 2016

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Brian Zahnd’s brand new memoir Water To Wine. Brian has been gracious enough to let me share portions from each chapter every week for the next couple months. Chapter 7 may be the fullest exposition of Bishop BZ’s central thesis: that more secularism is precisely what the church doesn’t need (and more sacredness is precisely what we do need). And it starts with a timely illustration:

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A sense of the sacred may be what we need most of all right now. The church in Western Europe and North America is struggling with deep disappointment. We are disappointed with the failure of the Christendom project.

The grand attempt to produce continents of Christian civilization through the apparatus of the state is either dead or dying. It appears that cultural secularism has already won in Western Europe and will win in North America (despite the determination of conservatives to fight to the bitter end in the ugliness of the “culture wars”). So we either deny what is happening, which is more easily done in America, or we angrily blame scapegoats, or we simply trudge along a bit sad about it all.

The church in the post-Christendom West is walking the Emmaus road, confused and disappointed, just like those two disciples on the first Easter (see Luke 24:13-35).  Of course, the point of the Emmaus road story was that the two disciples had misread everything. Their disappointment was the result of their wrong expectations. They expected a conventional king after the model of the Pharaohs and the Caesars. They expected Jesus to be a war-waging Messiah like King David or Judah Maccabeus.

With those expectations they saw Jesus as a “failed” Messiah – a peace-preaching Messiah who ended up being executed by the Romans. Instead of kingdom come, it was Christ crucified – a dead end. As far as Cleopas and the other disciple were concerned, the movement in which they had invested their hopes and dreams had failed. There was nothing to do now but go back home.

So they walked the Emmaus road carrying a load of soul-crushing disappointment. 

This is when Jesus came and walked with them in another form.


 

the-christian-calendar-advent-brBrian Zahnd is the founder and lead pastor of Word of Life Church, a non-denominational church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He is also the author of several books, including A Farewell To Mars and Beauty Will Save the World, and the brand new memoir Water To Wine. Follow him on Facebook & Twitter.


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