Luke 24:13-35
No one has found the village of Emmaus. The scripture suggests it is about 7 miles from Jerusalem; other historical documents make no mention of a place with that name at that distance from the city. Archeologists have dug up evidence of several small communities within that radius, but they are all known by other names. The experts just don’t know where it is.
I know exactly where Emmaus is located. On Maple Avenue in Vienna, Virginia, a few blocks from my childhood home. Emmaus United Church of Christ, that is. I grew up walking the road to Emmaus several times a week–to church and youth group, even to my first job as church custodian.
Maybe that’s why I love this story so much. I heard it often as a child. Our youth choir sang an anthem called “Walking on the Road to Emmaus” which I still find myself humming. I remember my “ah-hah” moment as a teenager, when I finally “got” the church’s name. Emmaus was where the two disciples awakened to the presence of Christ, who was already with them. Maybe, I thought, that’s what church is meant to be: a place where we awaken to the presence of Christ, who is already with us.
This biblical story has shaped my faith. It is about a journey–faith is a journey. It is about people walking together–an apt metaphor for church community. The disciples encounter a stranger–which is often how I encounter God. They share a meal–one of the most powerful ways I experience the presence of the sacred in community.
Over the years, as I have preached on this text, I have told stories of my own Emmaus encounters. There’s the trucker who adopted my Malden church youth group when a snowstorm trapped us on the New York Thruway. There’s the woman at the New Delhi airport who asked me to pray for her when I was in such a funk I had forgotten to pray for myself. There are those awkward meals with neighbors in Framingham, in which all the words I’ve tried to learn in Spanish suddenly disappear from my brain, meals where grace amazingly breaks through our faltering attempts at conversation.
This year I don’t have a new Emmaus road story to tell. How can I talk about the gift of walking together when we’re supposed to stay 6 feet apart? These days, when I try to think of a life-changing encounter with a stranger, instead I think of how I cross the street when a stranger approaches. How can I preach about Christ present when we break bread together when it is not safe to share a meal with anyone other than immediate family?
If this biblical story happened today, we’d lift it up as an example of irresponsibility–those selfish disciple who ignore the stay-at-home advisory. And I bet they weren’t wearing masks!
My struggle to make sense of my favorite Bible Story in this very strange time has helped me name some of the grief I am feeling. It’s not just that I’m missing things I enjoy. I am missing some of the most profound ways I experience the presence of God. That feels like a terrible loss. Reading this story makes me sad.
Bible stories sometimes do that. They are about human beings struggling to be faithful in hard times like this–and so they touch our deepest emotions, including ones like despair and sadness and anger.
The Bible doesn’t leave us there. It challenges us to go deeper–to read the story again, to keep turning it over until we find a new perspective, one that points us toward hope.
So I went back and read the Emmaus story again. And again. Eventually new perspectives emerged–challenging me to see new possibilities for sacred connection in our current situation.
For me, part of the power of this story is the vivid reminder that our faith is not an abstraction. When I get lost in words, or trapped in my head, this story reminds me that faith is a full body experience. The moment of awakening for the disciples comes through the physical act of breaking bread together–bread that has texture and smell and taste.
In the past, this story has helped me revel in those embodied expressions of faith–walking together, tasting bread with a stranger. Right now, this story challenges me to broaden my repertoire of those embodied expressions of faith. I cannot take a walk with a friend–but sending a card she can hold in her hands is a meaningful expression of my caring. I hate having to put on my mask when a stranger comes near; maybe, though, I can reframe my action as an embodiment of my concern for his well-being. And while I miss the connection that happens when we share a meal together, I am busily researching germ-free ways to deliver homemade chocolate chip cookies. I cannot offer hospitality to a neighbor right now, and I am grateful to be part of a church that helps provide meals to others–enabling a local restaurant to feed workers at Metrowest Medical Center this past Monday, offering our otherwise unused Sue Dickerman Hall as a staging area for CASA to prepare food bags for 250 immigrant families. This story conveys a powerful truth–our faith is an embodied faith. Our challenge is to find new ways to embody it when the old, familiar ones are not safe.
I found myself thinking more about the moment in the story where Jesus breaks the bread. It is a physical expression of God’s promise to nourish us–body, mind and spirit–,and it is a physical expression of the promise that God nourishes us when we offer one another hospitality. This week I’ve come to claim another layer of meaning to this bread-breaking as well.
The disciples didn’t invite the stranger to a fancy dinner. Jesus didn’t pick up an elaborate pomegranate honey cake to break–just a loaf of everyday bread. God was made known to the disciples through an ordinary act.
Right now, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have a brand new definition of ordinary. This story challenges me to ask how I might awaken to the presence of God in the midst of my new set of everyday actions. How might I experience the holy in the mundane routines in this stay-at-home time? How might God be revealed in the now all-too-ordinary experience of a Zoom gathering?
Once I started asking these questions, my eyes and my heart began to open to ways God is breaking in, surprising me with hope.
Maybe that ubiquitous chorus of people calling out “unmute yourself” to a novice trying to speak in a Zoom gathering is a revelation of God’s yearning for each of us to be heard. Maybe our self-conscious laughter at the length and lack of style of our hair is holy–a reflection of our effort to trust that beauty comes from within, from being God’s beloved. Surely the moments when we dare to admit we are struggling are moments when Christ is made known, for when we reveal our deepest need, we discover the holy truth that we are not alone.
I entitled my sermon “Breaking Zoom,” a play on “Breaking Bread.” I am not advocating that we break Zoom; we need it too much. A better title might be “Breaking Into Zoom”–for if we are open we will discover how God is breaking in to our new ordinary–in and beyond Zoom.
Every Sunday morning we open ourselves to the holy in the ordinary when we claim our homes as our sanctuary. The gardeners in our midst awaken us to an opportunity to use this time to restore God’s wondrous creation. Wider Missions members are using phone and twitter and email to advocate for people who are incarcerated; they remind us of our sacred calling to care for the most vulnerable. Those who are spending their days at the sewing machine just may be creating a new kind of sacrament–face-mask-making as an outward and visible sign of an inward grace.
This week I have found myself struggling, as I have tried to accept what I’ve wanted to ignore–that we will be living with the reality of COVID-19 for too long. In the midst of that struggle, something shifted. My old favorite story has helped me claim new ways to express the embodied nature of our faith. It has helped me awaken to God breaking into the new ordinary, everyday things of my life.
I invite you to join me in going deeper into this story. What is your new ordinary? How might God be breaking into your ordinary, awakening you to hope, calling you to new life? When it happens, phone a friend and tell them, type it into a chat for celebrations and concerns, open your window and shout it out! Let us know, so we can rejoice together. Amen.