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.”

A few of us stand right now on a particular plot of earth, several acres of dark and rich soil. This soil gives life to green and growing things. Tall trees stretch their legs deep into this lush ground, drawing power and strength and beauty from it. Birds nest in the arms of these trees, and creatures both majestic and homely come here for shelter, and nourishment, and rest.

When I was a small child, I began to contemplate the deep mysteries of creation. Specifically, I would gaze up at a wooden plaque hanging above our family’s kitchen sink. It was a decoupage, a plank of wood decorated with color crayons and construction paper, covered in clear shellac. I was the fifth kid in what eventually became a set of seven children, so it did not surprise me that this object was created by one of my older siblings. From my perspective, my older sisters and brothers loomed. They possessed many wondrous powers, including the creation of original art.

“Whom are you looking for?”

Jesus likes to ask this question. He asks it this morning, of his friend and follower Mary Magdalene, who got to see him and interact with him because she stayed by the tomb to weep. I wonder if this conversation honors not just Mary Magdalene, then, but grief itself, too. She is at the tomb for a while this morning, not to do anything really, but simply to weep. (But that alone is doing something.) Jesus has already shown that he knows about grief, and in particular he knows about grief at burial sites. He joins Martha and Mary in their grief for their brother Lazarus, and he shares their outrage about the vicious bite of death. And here he is again: Jesus, near a grave, connecting with a woman who is there to grieve.

I want to bring spices to the tomb. I know about tombs. I have seen death.

I have watched people take their last breaths. I have suffered the death of relationships. I have spent months, I have spent years, feeling distressing sorrow about loss. Heartbreak is no joke. It comes at you at all hours, including the hours you used to relish. I love mornings, especially early mornings, when all is quiet except a spring bird outside, and the dog is snoozing nearby, and it’s just me and my coffee and all the blessings of my life. And that’s the kind of time when heartbreak just walks in the door and announces itself. So yes, I know about tombs. I know about death. I know about sin. (Sometimes the heartbreak is about something I did, or something I left undone.) The coronavirus has changed a lot of things, but as a death-dealer, COVID-19 is nothing new.

(Spoken from the imagined perspective of Judas Iscariot.)

I am Judas Iscariot. Do you want to look at me?

If so, I think I can endure your gaze. I think I have endured worse.

This was the week when I noticed, beyond a doubt, that the trees are coming back.

You are likely more observant than me about the world around us. I sometimes get so lost in my thoughts and feelings that I do not notice beautiful things, quietly beautiful things. So this week I have deliberately tried to look around, and to look up. Venus has been dazzling all week, did you know? She emerges after sunset, fairly far up the western sky, the evening star. And of course the supermoon will not be ignored. I walked the other evening with my friend Pete, who observed that the moon was literally painting silver linings on the passing clouds.

I want to tell you a story.

My uncle Ray had many stories to tell, and I want to share with you one that he wrote, a true story, a story of love and of sacrifice.

This is the story of Dr. J.B. Thomson, who served as the doctor of Worthington, my birthplace, a town in the southwest corner of Minnesota. Dr. Thomson died in the summer of 1899. At that time, Worthington was a tiny village not yet 30 years old, a little dot on the high, windy prairie.

Have we ever, in our lifetimes, wanted Jesus to be with us more than we do right now?

One of you, ten of you, maybe all of you could identify a day or a week or a year in the past, or you could imagine a time in the future, when you personally needed Jesus even more. A day of immense loss. A week of harrowing tragedy. A year of awful disappointments. A long season of sorrow and heartbreak.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

There are moments in our Holy Book when someone just tells the truth, hard and hurtful as it may be. Nathan confronts David, who had committed adultery and murder, and Nathan—whose name means “he gave,” or “gift”—Nathan gives the gift of harsh honesty directly to his king: “You are the man,” You are the one who did these things. Jesus confronts Peter after the resurrection and does not gloss over Peter’s betrayal. The two friends have a hard talk.

Since the Lutherans in the ELCA are in communion with us, and since I was a Lutheran myself for 35 years of my life, I enjoy reading and sharing the writings of Martin Luther. Luther was not a mellow personality. He did not inspire neutral responses in people. People tended to love or hate him. He was forceful. He liked to fight for a good cause. He was not always moderate in his anger. But he also had a good head on his shoulders, and like St. Augustine—fun fact, Luther was an Augustinian monk—like Augustine, Luther was a prolific writer and he loved to apply the faith, to address the many concerns of his day with the help of Scripture, doctrine, and tradition.

And so today I will share with you what Martin Luther had to say about how to behave in a pandemic. He wrote these words some 200 years after the bubonic plague, a pandemic that killed as many as 200 million people in Europe and Asia. He may have written these words before anyone had trained a microscope on a slide and seen microorganisms. He wrote these words in a time when germ theory—the now universally-held theory that disease is caused by microorganisms transmitted from host to host—competed with “miasma theory,” or the theory that disease is caused by “bad air” or other environmental conditions. You may have seen Luther’s quotation on social media over the last couple of weeks: it is meme-ready. Lots of church folk on my Facebook feed have liked it and shared it. Here is what Luther has to say about how to behave in a pandemic:

Jesus and the Samaritan woman clearly were not complying with the rules about social distancing.

We are well aware of these rules in our own world right now. We have strengthened our literal rules about social distancing, and paid a whole lot more attention to them over the past few weeks. How long does the coronavirus live on surfaces? How far do you need to be from someone who’s been infected and not be infected yourself? If I drop off groceries or laundry at your house, will I get the virus if I just put everything at your door and scamper back to my car?

There is so much we do not know.

In the first hours and days without our brother John, we realize yet again that we do not know “the day nor the hour,” as our Lord says. We do not know the day nor the hour when each one of us will die.

But there is so much more than that, lying outside our knowledge, outside our awareness, outside our understanding.

Can you hear the sound of the shofar? It is the trumpet of ancient Israel. It calls the assembly together on high and holy days.

This trumpet, this shofar … it is sometimes quite hard to hear. You may have to get quiet, and I mean really get quiet. Silence your phone, and your watch. Notice your breathing. Let your breathing slow down, and get deeper. Notice the deep fatigue that makes itself known at the exact moment you stop moving, stop talking, stop multitasking, stop over-functioning. If you sit long enough in silence, you may feel droopy, sleepy. You may want to nod off. You may also feel the urge to check your phone, or just get up and fiddle with something. Notice that fatigue, and that restlessness, and greet them in peace. They are your friends, even if you can’t or shouldn’t do what they want you to do. Try to gently set them aside. Try to sit still for a while.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia.

Maybe we should do that every week. After all, every Sunday of the year is a feast of the Resurrection. Martin Luther said that we should never take the word “alleluia” out of our worship, not even during Lent, because every Sunday is, in its own way, Easter Sunday. We should not deny the joy that is in us because of all that God in Christ has done for us.

I am sometimes angry about a great many things.

And so I struggle with the instructions we hear today from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

We hear four instructions this morning, and they are daunting. They begin the same way, with this formula:

“You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…”
“You have heard that it was said… But I say to you…”

Is there someone in your life who understands things? This is a person you can trust to hear anything you say, and know what they are hearing. You can admit something embarrassing to them, or something that makes you feel vulnerable. You can tell them about a complicated situation, or a vexing dilemma, and they are able to hear what you are saying, and respond without judgment. If you messed up, they can offer you wisdom and insight without asking unnecessary, awkward questions. They are simply there for you.

Almost two years ago, I became a superfan. I met someone and within minutes of knowing her, I decided that she was my role model, my teacher, my guide. She had been a professor on sabbatical when I started at Virginia Seminary in the fall of 2017, so I knew nothing about her until the first session of her Wednesday-morning systematic-theology class in February 2018.

Who is this Jesus we worship? What is his purpose? What is his work? If he is our savior—something we often say that he is—then what, exactly, is he saving us from? Who is he?

God spoke to Joseph.

Joseph listened, and responded.

And maybe that is why we know so little about Joseph. We know more about people to whom God spoke but they did not listen, or they responded in complicated ways. Moses resists God’s voice, pushes back on God’s plan, and so we have a chapter and a half in Exodus about Moses angering God while the thornbush rages in flames. And then we get just two little sentences about the call of Aaron, the brother of Moses: “The LORD said to Aaron, ‘Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.’ So [Aaron] went, and he met [Moses] at the mountain of God and kissed him.” (In a Bible full of sibling rivalry, Aaron immediately embraces his younger brother!) And so we know considerably less about Aaron than we do about Moses.