The Appearance on the Road to Emmaus -- Georges Rouault
It's Sunday, isn't it? We last worshipped with our congregation on March 15th and following that service the decision was made to suspend gathering until Palm Sunday on April 5th. We wish!When will we be allowed to come together as faith communities again, and who feel confident to attend, a least initially?
Week by week pastors and priests have been figuring out how to celebrate God's presence from a socially responsible distance. For the most part they are doing an impressive job, often choosing different formats than replicating a church service within an empty sanctuary. They've even figured out how to offer spiritual communion/Lord's Supper/eucharist without being in physical communion.
I love many of the scripture readings for the Easter Season of 50 days and I see that it is the Road to Emmaus story found only in Luke. A couple of bewildered followers of Jesus (male and female, perhaps, husband and wife?) encounter the resurrected Christ as they walk back to the village of Emmaus on resurrection day. I can't imagine they were six feet apart. They are still enveloped in loss and mourning, but Jesus unfolds a story of hope grounded in scripture as they walk together, and he is revealed to them when they stop to break bread together. It's wonderful after Jesus disappears they say "were not our hearts burning within us", as though they had an inkling all along.
Rowan LeCompte (American, 1925–2014) and Irene Matz LeCompte (American, 1926–1970), Third Station of the Resurrection: The Walk to Emmaus (detail), 1970. Mosaic, Resurrection Chapel, National Cathedral, Washington, DC. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones
I'm hoping that this hugely disruptive and disquieting time in which we're living will reveal things which are murky at the moment because we aren't quite sure how to put one foot in front of the other. Will this strange, un-Eastery Easter season break some of our familiar but unhelpful habits of "doing church" which can be more about hanging on than living abundantly? Will we notice what has happened to air and water in the midst of a global sabbath and expand our horizons to celebrate Creator and Creation? Who knows?
I went back to sermons I've preached through the years on this Luke 24 passage and found this quote in one of them from Christian Century writer Steve Pankey way back in 2011:
Lots of things get us hung up.
Hopes dashed, budgets trimmed, taxes raised, life altered.
We get stuck when there isn't enough.
We get stuck when the power of evil gets the edge over the light,
but if Easter teaches us one thing, it is that light always wins.
In word and sacrament, in the exposition of scripture and the breaking of bread,
God's glory is revealed again and again and again,
helping us to get unstuck again and again and again.
Amen.
Supper at Emmaus -- Caravaggio
I know we all need to be responsibly physically distanced from others during these strange days of quarantine, but there is something to be said for encountering Jesus, the Risen Christ, outside and on the move. Today's Groundling blog
https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2020/04/walking-with-jesus.html
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