Dale Schrag asked those gathered for adult worship on Friday morning to imagine we were the “friend of Cleopas” in the Emmaus story in Luke 24.

“She may well have been his wife or he may have been a dear friend,” he said.

Schrag is retired director of church relations and campus pastor at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan.

Although Cleopas didn’t know immediately that the man he was talking to was in fact Jesus, Cleopas was “willing to engage the stranger and make himself vulnerable,” said Schrag.

However, if I was Cleopas or the friend, I would not have engaged the stranger, Schrag said.

He went to say he doubted many in the audience would have either, and he offered three reasons why.

First, the initial impulse of many cradle Mennonites of a European background is “social mistrust.”

C.J. Dyck, then professor at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, Elkhart, Ind., said he could tell which of his students were such cradle Mennonites without knowing their names or knowing them personally.

They were the students who hesitated to talk in class until they felt safe.

“Mistrust of the stranger appears to be the very DNA of cradle Mennonites,” he said, although we don’t have good reason.

Second, most of the audience is American, and we’re immersed in a fear culture.

Third, we live in a culture of certainty. “Certainty is in,” he said—for Mennonites and society.

“To change one’s position of acknowledge the other side has a point is to commit political suicide,” he said. But certitude has practical and theological problems.

First, it inhibits hospitality and breaks down community, he said.

Second, he asked, “Doesn’t a position of certitude make a mockery of those New Testament calls for humility?”

“We are not God. There’s always a possibility that we might be wrong,” he said. “That’s the human condition. Certitude represents a kind of heresy.”

He concluded with asking, Would Mennonite Church USA be in the current state of crisis if everyone would be a bit more uncertain?

“We need to be truly certain about only one thing—Christ,” he said.