Preached on Sunday evening, August 30, 2020, for the first in-person service at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington. The text for the evening is Luke 24:13-35, when the risen Christ appears to two disciples on their walk to Emmaus.
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Cleopas and her friend, the two who walked to Emmaus in the evening: They had had a hard week.
I think we can relate.
All their hopes had been dashed. “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they said.
“We had hoped.”
This past week — our hard week — began with another police shooting of a Black person, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. That shooting led to another one in Kenosha, on Tuesday, by a kid who decided to bring an AR-15 to a peaceful protest. He killed two more people. Our week ended with yet another fatal shooting, yesterday evening, this time in Portland. A hurricane slammed into Louisiana. A beloved movie star died of cancer. Forest fires are ravaging California. Several thousand more people died of COVID-19.
We have had a hard week. We had hoped. We do, I think, still hope.
But … hope for what? For an answer or two. For a realistic, visible, tangible pathway toward peace and justice, toward safety and reconciliation, toward a world that makes sense, a world where everyone is on equal footing, a world where kids don’t learn the ways of violence and hatred, a world where the planet itself, the skies and the seas, the trees and the rivers, can begin to heal.
Our friends on the walk to Emmaus — they had placed their hope in Jesus. But their hopes had been dashed so badly, they couldn’t even recognize Jesus when he appeared alongside them. So convinced that his death was final, so sure that his movement and all he represented had been destroyed, their minds could not believe their eyes.
I think we can relate.
I can’t put my finger on a specific date when I gave up hope that we will gather in person in 2020, or even before next Lent, or next Easter, or next fall.
And yet here we are, today, gathering in person. It doesn’t look like what I imagined, which is 200 people celebrating Eucharist in the sanctuary, no masks needed, plates of cookies waiting for us in Walker Hall, a festival of hugs and laughter and tears and singing. Today doesn’t look like that. But it is not not that. Here we are. I can see you! Hello, friends! Today we are on a path back.
Jesus didn’t look like what the two evening travelers imagined, either. Still wounded, strange and different, able to appear and disappear suddenly, he is not who they remember. And yet he is not not the One, or as they put it, “the one to redeem Israel.” He finally has a powerful enough impact on them that they walk a second seven miles that night, back to the city to share the Good News with their friends.
On this warm summer evening, we gather. We are not walking seven miles together, but now that I think about it, maybe that is exactly what we are doing. Seven: a biblical number of fullness, perfection, completion. We are walking the whole walk together, every last mile. We are walking with our children, who face online learning for months to come. We are walking with our friends who cannot be here this evening, but are nevertheless alongside us, the way the eleven and their companions back in Jerusalem were still close to the sad two friends on their long evening walk. We are walking with people on ventilators, with moms interlocking their arms in protest, with children at the border who are separated from their parents, with Californians evacuating their homes, with Louisianians evacuating their homes. We are walking every last mile. Together.
And it is on this walk that we meet Jesus. He comes to us when we walk together. He stays with us when we ask him to stay. Like the two Emmaus travelers, we can’t see Jesus, often enough. He is hidden from our sight.
But I can see him when I look into your eyes. You can see him when you sign up to stand in this field with your friends. We can see him when we hear the music you’re making. We can see him when we reach out to those who can’t be here this evening. We see him in the Word of our holy book, and not just at the table of bread and wine, which eludes us these days. We see him whenever two or more people claim one other as community, as family, in his name.
When we gather, even while standing apart, Jesus is among us. He does not offer hope that all of our problems will magically be solved. After all, Jesus himself was killed in an unjust, state-sanctioned murder. He offers us a deeper, stronger hope: we will never be defeated by despair. We will never be defeated by loneliness. We will never even be defeated by death. We come here tonight in our masks, with all our complicated feelings about this very difficult year, and we find companionship, we find an answer or two, and we find life, the life that God brings from death.
We pray to God who, in Jesus, went through death to defeat it. And that hope can never be taken from us. That hope lights our hearts on fire, burning with wonder.
That hope strengthens us on this long walk we are taking together.
Be of good courage. Jesus is with us.
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Art: Jan Wildens, Landscape with Christ and His Disciples on the Walk to Emmaus.