On the Road --- Again: Reflections on Luke 24.13-35 (Easter 3A, 26 April 2020)

On the Road --- Again

Reflections on Luke 24.13-35

RCL Easter 3A

26 April 2020

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

            If you take the modern four-lane highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, you will pass the pace that some Christians, centuries before the Crusades, venerated as Emmaus.  Nearby this ancient pilgrimage site is a community of Jews and Christians who, decades ago, committed themselves to inter-faith dialogue and shared witness to religious reconciliation among all three Abrahamic faiths.

            From this place you drive up into the steep hills that rise between the Mediterranean coast and the city of Jerusalem.  Even today the road requires careful driving and traffic accidents are not infrequent.

            When I think back on my own trip from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem some eight years ago, I marvel at the journey undertaken by the two disciples.  In their day the journey down from Jerusalem would have been more difficult.  The many twists and turns of the road as well as the many gullies and rock outcroppings would have given thieves and brigands ample cover.  What prompted them to leave the relative security of Jerusalem for this risky trek to Emmaus?

            Frederick Buechner, an American writer of fiction and religious essays, offers one of the best interpretations for this trip that I’ve found.  He writes

            [Emmaus is] the place we go to in order to escape --- a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang.  It makes no difference anyway.” . . . Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one.  Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday.  Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred:  that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that [people] have had --- ideas about love and freedom and justice --- have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends. [i]

            Cleopas and his unnamed companion were running away.  They had to escape the pressure cooker that Jerusalem had become over the last week.  They could not bear to believe what the women had told the apostles that Sunday morning.  To believe it would make such a claim on their lives that they would never be the same.  So they threw up their hands, gathered their belongings and skedaddled down the road to Emmaus.

            But Jesus would not let them run away without giving them a choice.  Though their hearts were troubled and their hopes crushed by the rock that had sealed his tomb on Friday afternoon, Jesus comes alongside them on the road and begins a conversation that will put before them the choice to run away or to become witnesses to the risen life God reveals in Christ and offers freely to every human being.

            Right now I feel that every Christian and especially those of us who have chosen to follow Christ as practised in the Anglican tradition are on the road to Emmaus.  As difficult as this pandemic is for us and as unclear the future that lies before us is, Jesus comes beside us in many familiar and unfamiliar guises. Sometimes Jesus comes beside us in the guise of those people who reach out to help their families, their friends and their neighbours in unspectacular but essential ways.  Sometimes Jesus comes beside us when a familiar passage of Scripture is read and we suddenly hear the words in a new way that sets our hearts on fire.  Sometimes Jesus comes beside us in this familiar ritual of the breaking of the bread of life and the pouring of the cup of blessing, especially at this time when we are so conscious of our unity in Christ and of our physical separation from one another.  Jesus never allows us to travel the road to our Emmaus alone, wherever or whatever it may be.

            And when he walks beside us, the conversation we have with him on the road brings us face to face with a choice.  We can continue our escape, our flight from the realization of how costly and life-changing the life of discipleship is.  Or, we can acknowledge that our hearts are on fire and that we are ready to set out into the night and back up the hill to Jerusalem with the news that we have seen the Lord.

            Lord knows, and we all know, how tempting it is to hang around in Emmaus.  Being a disciple of Jesus is hard work.  We all need times and places for refuge.  But such times and places are not for concealment or avoidance; they are places for renewal and recommitment.  The road back up the hill to Jerusalem beckons us all and we will not travel it alone.

---

[i] Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (New York, New York:  Seabury Press, 1966), pp. 85-86.

Rise Again! An Easter Sermon Amid COVID-19

Rise Again!

An Easter Sermon Amid COVID-19

RCL Easter A

12 April 2020

Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral

New Westminster BC

I have seen the Lord.

            She rose early that morning surrounded by the pre-dawn darkness and the darkness of the memories that flooded back as she moved from sleep to wakefulness.  She remembered the trial and the tortured journey to the place of his execution.  She remembered the agony of watching him die even as she remembered every word he spoke from the cross.  She remembered the moment of his death and the hasty way Joseph and Nicodemus arranged his burial in a nearby tomb.

            Now that the Passover feast was over, Mary of Magdala was determined to go to Jesus’ grave.  With all the pent-up emotional and political energies of the past week still seething throughout Jerusalem, it was not safe for a woman to go out alone, but she was willing to take the risk.  It would give her a little comfort just to sit near him even if the stone of the tomb intervened.

            As she walked through the deserted streets, the few people she did see hid their faces or slipped quickly through the doors of their homes.  The Roman soldiers and the Temple police who were patrolling the streets took little notice of her.  Perhaps they saw that she was a woman on a mission and that she posed no threat to the good order of the city.

            But they were wrong.  Mary of Magdala would soon be the first witness to an event which would eventually shake the whole world.  Nothing would ever be the same.  Jesus of Nazareth had not stayed in the tomb.  God would not permit it.  Those who witnessed the empty tomb would not keep silent.  those who experienced his risen presence through the message of the Resurrection as proclaimed by the earliest Christian missionaries could not be suppressed by any government no matter how extreme the methods used to quiet them.

            Five words from Mary’s mouth would come to be our message to every generation:  “I have seen the Lord.”  And nothing would be normal again.

Can these bones live?

            The streets are not as crowded as they usually are and commuting to work is less onerous.  People are keeping their distance except for those who must be living in the same household.  Some folks hide their faces with one kind of mask or another, while some go barefaced.  Some people are walking in a hurried almost furtive way as if they dread every moment they’re out and about.  They rarely make eye contact and greetings go unanswered.  There are folks who seem to take the moment in stride, physically and emotionally.  Their heads are held up, eyes meet and greeting are returned.

            True, we are surrounded by the signs of the present danger.  Billboards and other electronic signs remind us to keep two metres apart, to stay home as much as possible and to wash our hands frequently. No matter which media we watch or read, there is only one story worth reporting and it goes by the acronym COVID-19.  A new phrase has entered our vocabulary --- ‘flattening the curve’.  Medical doctors and other health experts have become media celebrities.

            But things are not ‘normal’.  All places of worship are closed.  Many of the social ministries exercised by our faith communities have been suspended.  Even our halls, where we have hosted twelve-step groups, ESL programs and coffee hours are idle.  Like the dry bones of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision, our buildings ask the question, ‘Can these bones live?’

Rise again!

            When Paula and I first came to Canada almost thirty-three years ago, Paul and Valerie Borthistle, then a student family at Vancouver School of Theology, took us under their wings.  They became our guides into the world of Canadian culture, a world that at first seemed familiar but then proved quite strange.

            One night at a shared dinner, I told them about a story on CBC I had recently seen.  A mariner had found himself adrift in a rough and stormy sea after his ship had sank.  He was able to find a half-swamped lifeboat and pulled himself aboard.  But the ferocity of the sea led him to believe that he was soon to die.  Just as he reconciled himself to this, the refrain from a song came unbidden into his mind:

Rise again, rise again!

Though your heart it be broken and life about to end.

No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,

Then like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!

Within seconds Paul pulled out every Stan Rogers’ CD he owned and I was hooked.  Rogers sang of joys and sorrows, of disappointments and lost futures, but he never sang about hopelessness.  Often I choke up when I sing one of his songs, no more so than the chorus to ‘The Mary Ellen Carter’.

            My friends, these are extraordinary times.  The waves caused by COVID-19 will continue to buffet our world for months and years to come.  We have and we shall suffer loss.  Whatever ‘normal’ we return to in the near future, it will not be the ‘normal’ we knew before the pandemic.

            But we share the same message that Mary shared with Jesus’ frightened and disheartened disciples two thousand years ago --- ‘I have seen the risen Lord.’  And now death, whatever guise it may take, has no more power over us.

            We have seen, more times than we may be able to number, the valleys of dry bones that the prophet Ezekiel saw.  And we know the answer to his question --- ‘Can these bones live?’  ‘Yes,’ we can say, we dare to say, ‘yes, they can live and new possibilities will take shape as the Spirit puts new flesh upon them.’

            My friends, wherever you are, whatever you fear, however rough the seas that threaten to swamp this boat we call ‘church’ may be, we can face the wind and the waves and dare to sing 

Rise again, rise again!

Though your heart it be broken and life about to end.

No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend,

Then like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again!

We shall rise again because we have seen the Lord.  We shall rise again because dry bones can live.  We shall rise again because Christ is risen.  The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!