Happy Easter, friends! Yes, I know it’s the Sunday after Easter, but we’re still in the Easter season! It’s the time of year where we celebrate the Resurrection and invite God to transform our minds and lives. Today, we’re kicking off a new sermon series, aimed to look at just that – The Resurrected Life – and this morning we’re tackling Despair to Hope.
I want to start off this morning with a story. If you know me at all, you know I love telling stories. And this is a story about a walk. It’s a walk that comes from profound disappointment, grief, and sorrow. It’s a walk that starts with the slow steps of the depressed and downcast. But!! It ends with the gleeful running of the redeemed, the joy of finding life transformed.
I think this is a story that speaks to all of us. It’s a story for a time in your life when you felt like you weren’t on a positive journey forward. It’s a story that speaks to us when both justice and peace seem far away. It speaks to us when we feel that we are retreating or walking slowly into a future that we dread or fear. It’s tells of when God comes to meet us, as we struggle to put one foot in front of another. It’s a story that’s very honest about hopelessness and loss, but also about how God comes to find us in those places. It proves how God walks beside us -- how God can transform even the deepest bereavement and loss into a journey of hope. This is a story that invites those who are deep in sorrow and despair to walk in hope again.
Get comfortable. Close your eyes, if you’d like. Let’s go for a walk on the Road to Emmaus.
It’s a long walk home from Jerusalem, but you’re glad for the exertion. The physical work of walking might ease, just slightly, the harder work that’s going on inside you today.
It is the work of grief. You lost a friend just a few days ago. Not only a friend, but your leader, your beloved teacher. And He didn’t simply die; He was executed in the most torturous, shameful way. You’ve seen a lot in your lifetime, but the memories of Jesus’ ordeal are forever branded into your memory. You close your eyes and see blood; you go to sleep but dream about someone suspended, gasping for air.
At least your friend, Cleopas, is with you — both of you followed the teacher, with equal conviction and enthusiasm. So, you bear your grief together now. As you walk and walk through the long, rainy afternoon, you encourage better memories. You remember all that teacher said and all the people Jesus healed. You can’t seem to stop talking, although several times one or both of you MUST stop talking because the tears flood down your cheeks.
All the sudden a stranger joins you while you are still several miles from home. Within moments, it’s clear that this person has no idea what has been going on in Jerusalem. With great heaviness, and some annoyance, you fill in the barest details for him. All you have to say is “crucifixion” and anyone in Roman territories knows exactly what you’re talking about.
But the stranger engages in the conversation with great energy. He must be some kind of teacher, because he launches into an explanation of how Jesus’ fate is actually a good thing and the proper fulfillment of what was predicted long ago. This is fascinating! You are all ears. Before you know it, you’ve arrived at home, and it’s getting dark.
You invite the stranger to have supper with you. And, if he’d like, he can spend the night. It’s much too dangerous to walk the road alone at night. You wouldn’t want him to risk injury or other misfortune. Also, you want to hear more of what he has to say! He graciously accepts your offer.
The first thing you do upon entering the house is prepare the evening meal. The three of you sit down to eat. Then the stranger takes the bread and blesses it. You feel a strange energy move through you and hover in the room.
Where have you heard this sort of blessing before?
The stranger hands each of you a piece of the bread. You take it, and the memories wash over you — a hillside with thousands of hungry people… a few loaves and fish being transformed in an instant to miraculous abundance. Suddenly, it is clear who this man is. You look into His face.
What do you see? What is His expression? What do you feel? What do you know in the truth of your heart?
You have barely gotten the words out — “Why, it’s the Lord!”— when the stranger vanishes.
The room still feels strangely warm. Waves of that energy, like lightning, are sparking all over the room. You stare at Cleopas, and say, “Weren’t our hearts on fire when He explained the Scriptures? Didn’t we know something even then — we just couldn’t identify it?”
You finish your meal. What a healing pleasure to eat the bread blessed by those hands! But then you look at each other and know what you must do.
You jump up with Cleopas, and race back to Jerusalem. You have to tell the other followers, who are still there in the city! You have met the Resurrected Jesus! Your hope is in the Resurrected Savior! Your lives will never be the same.
Friends, you likely recognize that story from the Scripture that Jamie Joyce read in Luke 24. But it’s a story that I can easily impose myself. I, too, can remember a particular time in my life when grief knocked me sideways. I’m sure you can, as well. I had known that loss was coming, but when it came, it was shocking in its impact. There were days I didn’t want to get out of bed; days when I felt that the weight of grief was too much to bear; days when I didn’t care about anything at all. As I read this passage, I can remember those very feelings very well. I can empathize with the two walking disciples.
The death of Jesus - His humiliating crucifixion and His burial in a cold grave - meant that something in them had died, as well. “We had hoped,” they said to the stranger on the road. “We had hoped.” They seemed to have no curiosity left to look carefully into the stranger’s face. Their grief was so deep that their eyes looked blankly out from tired faces. “We had hoped.”
With hope emptied and drained from them, I imagine they decided to get out of the city. Maybe a change of scenery would ease their pain. They likely walked the seven miles to Emmaus with the slow pace of friends depressed and traumatized. I have walked like that. Maybe you have, too. Grief drains us of energy. Once hope is gone, there seems little point in moving from one place to another. Every step seems like the most unappealing and uncomfortable effort. And yet, we cannot rest where we are either. Anything is better than staying still, but every step is painful, too.
There’s no peace in grief. There’s no justice either; every life deserves to flourish. And these two pilgrims were bereaved not only of a friend, but also of a cause. Their lives had been shaped by a purpose, by good news for the poor, and hope for a new kind of world. All of that, all of that hope for a real change, had suddenly vanished.
Now, the only change they could imagine was a different skyline, a quieter place, a walk to pass a few desolate hours.
But! While this story speaks powerfully and movingly to grief and loss, it also offers hope for the future to those who think that hope belongs only in the past. At least the two friends had the courage to invite the stranger to dine with them. Even in the depths of their loss and trauma, they hadn’t forgotten the courtesies of hospitality and the central practices of faith. They welcomed the stranger. They kept the rituals going. They did what followers of Jesus have always done. And then as they listened to the stranger open the scriptures, as the bread was blessed and broken, hope returned to them!
Not only did the Resurrected Lord turn their despair to hope, but He also transformed their pace! What was a slow, 20-minute per mile pace is now a sprint for 7 miles! It’s not the Walk to Emmaus; it’s the Race to Jerusalem! Life is re-kindled. Jesus is not dead; He is risen! And this transformation happens because two worn out pilgrims are reminded to return to the source of faith and to the practices they had learned to cherish – 1) reading the scriptures, and 2) breaking bread with the stranger. In those very ordinary things, grief was overcome, and life was renewed. Just like John Wesley, their hearts were strangely warmed by the Spirit of God bursting into their lives.
The accompaniment of Jesus in our own lives can hold us through times of loss and grief. As I travel all over the world, I have learned that there is nothing so restoring to hope, nothing so energizing, as returning to the scriptures and the sacraments. With friends and neighbors, both near and far, God calls us to come and restore by remembering the acts of faith. The presence of God encourages us and quickens our steps. Didn’t you feel that on Easter Sunday? After a year of despair, a year of COVID, days and days of not physically being together, we celebrated our Resurrected Lord with 900 of our closest friends at this church! Hope. We find our hope in the King of Glory!
Lesslie Newbigin, a great missionary, was once asked whether he was a pessimist or an optimist. He simply replied that he believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Friends, many of us have experienced fear and death. Even this week, many of us have experienced the loss of loved ones. But fear and death are overcome, in Christ, by resurrection.
· The slow pace of grief can be turned into the dance of hope again.
· The painful walk of the bereaved can become a pilgrimage toward peace.
· The wounded feet of the traumatized will find justice again.
· From despair, we find hope in our risen Lord and Savior.
Amen and amen.
COMMUNION – Returning to the Sacraments & the Scriptures
Invitation
At Easter time, the space between heaven and earth grows thin.
Time and eternity are one.
Age old promises prove true.
Long held hopes become real,
and we can finally believe
that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven.
As so we gather
to celebrate and remember
in the company of the One
who names us and claims us, risen and present -
not controlled by history
not confined by texts
not contained by death.
One who has walked alongside us,
who has heard our questions and cries,
who has offered gentle wisdom.
One who invites strangers to be neighbors
and enemies to be friends around this table.
Christ invites us to this table:
for a deeper faith
for a better life
for a fairer world.
Know that you are most welcome here.
Narrative of Institution
On this day, we recall that Jesus broke bread
in that upper room with twelve disciples
on the night before He died.
Sitting at a meal table -
plates and cups,
conversations and jokes
friendship and betrayal -
Christ saying, take and eat.
This is my body broken for you take and drink.
This is a new covenant in my blood.
And then, in Emmaus, He broke bread a second time --
not in a city temple but in a country pub,
not with knowing friends
but with those who thought him a stranger --
just as He Had done before.
As a host, He offered welcome;
as a master, He served,
making strangers into friends,
making a meal into a holy moment.
So now we do as Jesus did.
We drink and eat,
simple food and drink,
yet in these,
Jesus Himself promises to be present.
Christ Himself offers to make us whole.
Thanksgiving
And so we gather in thanks
to the One who always welcomes us home to the table -
from the dawn of Creation
to the Easter sunrise.
Let us be still and know that Christ is present
to save and to serve
to guide and to call
to comfort and to heal.
For Your life which binds our living,
for Your love which shapes our giving,
for Your peace which mends our breaking,
for Your truth which guides our knowing…
We give You thanks.
The Breaking of the Bread
With this bread that we break and eat, Christ is present with us.
With this juice that we pour and drink, Christ is present with us.
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