This sermon was preached for the third Sunday of Eastertide
for online worship on Sunday, April 26. The readings for this sermon were: Acts 2:14a,36-41, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35, and Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17.
So I have to say that in Lent, the feeling of being wilderness, of sacrifice and fasting…that all made sense and seemed to fit. But now that we are on the other side of Easter, I find myself drawn to Peter’s language of exile from our epistle today. Peter addresses his letter “to the exiles of the Dispersion” and refers to “this time of exile.” With this language, Peter invokes the times of trial when the People of God were expelled from their temple, their homeland, wrenched from their normal patterns of life and worship.
Exile’s not off the mark these days. We are all exiled from, in some way or another. Exiled from our school community, our jobs, our friends, our own place of worship—the places many of us feel closest to God. But we are also exiled to. Our own homes and neighborhoods and grocery stores have become strange and more dangerous lands. In this new world, the things that felt secure – jobs, health, relationships, any plan or dream for the future – are all uncertain to a degree they’ve never been before. Many of us are living more and more in the foreign landscape of virtual platforms: school on Google Classroom, work on Zoom, friendships over Facetime, worship and prayer on Facebook and YouTube. Each of these lands are inhospitable to so much of what gives meaning and fullness to life, and faith. Communal singing is impossible, sacraments are forbidden, our beloved friend silence is now uncomfortable and anxiety-producing.
Numerous articles and studies have certified what many of us have felt to be true: socially isolated living is physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically exhausting.
Everything is harder in this strange land. I hear the echo of Psalm 137, the exiled voices in Babylon, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
When generations of the People of God have found themselves in exile, that was when they learned and re-learned that their God was with them, wherever they were. They discovered that God does not need formidable temple walls and gold-leafed arks to dwell among them. In the wake of the first destruction of the temple, when the people of Jerusalem found themselves in Babylon, this was when Ezekiel saw the vision of the resurrected dry bones, the shepherd going out to seek the lost. And in the wake of the fall of the second temple a few decades after Jesus’ death, Judaism accelerated its shift to faith practiced in community synagogues and in the home. And here at the end of Luke’s Gospel, at the destruction of Jesus’ body on the cross, the early Christian church turns to find him at their side on the lonely, grief-stricken road. Within the locked doors and walls of their houses, at their dinner tables.
The loud and clear Good News of the story of the Emmaus Road is that Jesus walks with us. We can invite him into our homes, he is made known to us in the breaking of the bread – not just in the Eucharistic host at the high altar, but also in crumbly toast at the breakfast table. Whatever bread you have in front of you right now that we’ll share in a moment in the agape feast.
This is the Good News that I need to hear, I’m sure. The eternal, comforting truth of God’s presence in the every day. But if I’m being perfectly honest that’s not the Good News that grabbed me this week. The good news I’ve been coming back to again and again is that the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus. Not at first. I have found grace in that part of the story all this week.
It is okay if you are still walking on the Emmaus Road and God is nowhere to be found. It is good and true if the absence of God, if the uncertainty and doubt in the power of the resurrection, is the loudest thing in your life right now. Keep walking.
It took the disciples, who had known and lived and talked with Jesus, it took them a whole afternoon to recognize him. It took the people of God generations, and fiery prophetic visions, and entire books of scripture, to truly trust that God was with them, that God could still hear them in this strange and foreign land.
The disciples kept walking. And when God asked them what they were worried and sad about, they told God what God already knew. That’s quite possibly all prayer is: telling God what God already knows. After all, it’s God who’s asking. Even if it looks like a stranger, our friend, our priest.
Keep walking, keep telling God what God already knows.
The other day, I had a Zoom meeting (my fourth of the day) with a few colleagues from our Deanery. We talked at length about all that was happening in our parishes and towns, all that we couldn’t figure out and how difficult it all seems. And by the end of the call, of course we hadn’t solved anything. But just as we were signing off, the little squares of people vanishing one by one, my friend said to us, “It was so good to see your faces.” And it was.
Were not our hearts burning within us? There’s no indication that the disciples really absorbed anything that Jesus had to say, or whether all his explanations and explications made any sense. But they pause, at the end of the story, look at each other and say, “That moment on the road - It was so good.”
So that’s what’s been true for me, what’s been keeping me going. The little moment at the end of a phone call with one of you, or a Zoom call with friends, when we take a breath and say, “It is good to see your face, it was good to hear your voice.” Nothing’s changed, nothing’s fixed. No grand Alleluias have burst forth. At least, not yet for me. I’m still on the exiled, grief-stricken road.
But it is good to see your faces. It is good to have you walking with me.
Amen.
So I have to say that in Lent, the feeling of being wilderness, of sacrifice and fasting…that all made sense and seemed to fit. But now that we are on the other side of Easter, I find myself drawn to Peter’s language of exile from our epistle today. Peter addresses his letter “to the exiles of the Dispersion” and refers to “this time of exile.” With this language, Peter invokes the times of trial when the People of God were expelled from their temple, their homeland, wrenched from their normal patterns of life and worship.
Exile’s not off the mark these days. We are all exiled from, in some way or another. Exiled from our school community, our jobs, our friends, our own place of worship—the places many of us feel closest to God. But we are also exiled to. Our own homes and neighborhoods and grocery stores have become strange and more dangerous lands. In this new world, the things that felt secure – jobs, health, relationships, any plan or dream for the future – are all uncertain to a degree they’ve never been before. Many of us are living more and more in the foreign landscape of virtual platforms: school on Google Classroom, work on Zoom, friendships over Facetime, worship and prayer on Facebook and YouTube. Each of these lands are inhospitable to so much of what gives meaning and fullness to life, and faith. Communal singing is impossible, sacraments are forbidden, our beloved friend silence is now uncomfortable and anxiety-producing.
Numerous articles and studies have certified what many of us have felt to be true: socially isolated living is physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically exhausting.
Everything is harder in this strange land. I hear the echo of Psalm 137, the exiled voices in Babylon, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
When generations of the People of God have found themselves in exile, that was when they learned and re-learned that their God was with them, wherever they were. They discovered that God does not need formidable temple walls and gold-leafed arks to dwell among them. In the wake of the first destruction of the temple, when the people of Jerusalem found themselves in Babylon, this was when Ezekiel saw the vision of the resurrected dry bones, the shepherd going out to seek the lost. And in the wake of the fall of the second temple a few decades after Jesus’ death, Judaism accelerated its shift to faith practiced in community synagogues and in the home. And here at the end of Luke’s Gospel, at the destruction of Jesus’ body on the cross, the early Christian church turns to find him at their side on the lonely, grief-stricken road. Within the locked doors and walls of their houses, at their dinner tables.
The loud and clear Good News of the story of the Emmaus Road is that Jesus walks with us. We can invite him into our homes, he is made known to us in the breaking of the bread – not just in the Eucharistic host at the high altar, but also in crumbly toast at the breakfast table. Whatever bread you have in front of you right now that we’ll share in a moment in the agape feast.
This is the Good News that I need to hear, I’m sure. The eternal, comforting truth of God’s presence in the every day. But if I’m being perfectly honest that’s not the Good News that grabbed me this week. The good news I’ve been coming back to again and again is that the disciples didn’t recognize Jesus. Not at first. I have found grace in that part of the story all this week.
It is okay if you are still walking on the Emmaus Road and God is nowhere to be found. It is good and true if the absence of God, if the uncertainty and doubt in the power of the resurrection, is the loudest thing in your life right now. Keep walking.
It took the disciples, who had known and lived and talked with Jesus, it took them a whole afternoon to recognize him. It took the people of God generations, and fiery prophetic visions, and entire books of scripture, to truly trust that God was with them, that God could still hear them in this strange and foreign land.
The disciples kept walking. And when God asked them what they were worried and sad about, they told God what God already knew. That’s quite possibly all prayer is: telling God what God already knows. After all, it’s God who’s asking. Even if it looks like a stranger, our friend, our priest.
Keep walking, keep telling God what God already knows.
The other day, I had a Zoom meeting (my fourth of the day) with a few colleagues from our Deanery. We talked at length about all that was happening in our parishes and towns, all that we couldn’t figure out and how difficult it all seems. And by the end of the call, of course we hadn’t solved anything. But just as we were signing off, the little squares of people vanishing one by one, my friend said to us, “It was so good to see your faces.” And it was.
Were not our hearts burning within us? There’s no indication that the disciples really absorbed anything that Jesus had to say, or whether all his explanations and explications made any sense. But they pause, at the end of the story, look at each other and say, “That moment on the road - It was so good.”
So that’s what’s been true for me, what’s been keeping me going. The little moment at the end of a phone call with one of you, or a Zoom call with friends, when we take a breath and say, “It is good to see your face, it was good to hear your voice.” Nothing’s changed, nothing’s fixed. No grand Alleluias have burst forth. At least, not yet for me. I’m still on the exiled, grief-stricken road.
But it is good to see your faces. It is good to have you walking with me.
Amen.
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