Hearts afire
Sermon 3 Easter a 4 26 20
Acts2:14a,36-41;Ps116:1-3,10-17;1Pet1:17-23;Lk24:13-35
Does it seem to you like your life has slowed down in this coronavirus quarantine time? I don't have kids in the house, so maybe I have a skewed view. But it seems to me that I and many of the people I check in with --some of them parents of young children--feel that time has slowed down, like it or not. There's time to notice what's going on around me because, frankly, not as much is going on around me.
I'm looking out the window longer. I'm thinking more about what I've seen on tv and read in the newspaper. I think it's good and I think it's good for those I've been communicating with.
Molly and I have been taking walks a lot more regularly than before. When we first moved to Poughkeepsie Dr. Oz recommended on PBS that a half hour of walking every day was the best thing we could do for our health and for our longevity. Well, if it's on PBS who could doubt it? Except that Dr. Oz has been pretty much discredited of late. Nonetheless...
Molly and I are taking walks more. On Wednesday we were at the Vassar Farm, walking down a gravel and dirt road, wearing our facemasks and marveling at the winds and the beauty of nature at the farm. I kept thinking about it after we got home.
The rocky road at Vassar Farm got me thinking about the road to Emmaus. This story of disappointed believers encountering a stranger who opens their eyes to deeper truths is a marvel of evangelism and hope. I especially love the story because the road can be a metaphor for so many aspects of our lives and of the world.
It can also represent --don't be shocked now-- a road. In one of my previous sermons on this Gospel lesson I said that the road to Emmaus from Jerusalem was about seven miles, more or less the distance from Poughkeepsie to Hyde Park. When I got started on this sermon I thought I'd check up on myself. You know, factcheck myself.
It turns out it is 7.7 miles from my home to the Vanderbilt. It's 7.1 miles from St. Paul's Church.
If we imagine ourselves on a day's walk from Poughkeepsie to Hyde Park we can be sure we've got plenty of time to think or chat or sing or marvel at nature. We should make it in 2-3 hours, depending on our speed.
If we were walking together, you and I, we might want to talk about the impositions of the virus or our faith or our friends or something else. All the while maintaining appropriate social distancing and wearing face masks, of course.
But two thousand years ago Cleopas and a friend were walking along and they were joined on the walk by a stranger who was Jesus. He elicited from them their version of Easter and all its grim disappointments. Gradually Jesus opened their eyes to the fullness of the Easter miracle, notwithstanding the horrible death dealt to our Savior.
But they still didn't realize who was walking with them. As they neared the inn and Jesus headed on they asked him to join them. As they broke bread together they realized not just who their fellow traveler was, but also the meaning of all that had taken place that led up to this day.
That wonderful line, "
Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us
on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" gives me goosebumps every time I read it, aloud or to myself. It reminds me of all the stunning facts of my faith that have opened my eyes, that have been noticed when I recognized that my heart was afire inside me--and I'm not talking about heartburn. I am talking about a special joy, a thrill, a realization that these people two thousand years ago could tell me what's going on with me.
This road to Emmaus is alive in our hearts and imaginations as we find our own way, make our own choices, decide how to interpret the things happening around us.
After Molly and I had walked the Vassar Farm road for maybe the hundred and fiftieth time the image of the road stuck with me. In our newsletter the headline on the Road to Emmaus article was titled 'On the road again.' The song by that name Willie Nelson sang a couple of decades ago might be construed as just a musician's life or it might represent the joy of fellowship with others or even evolving self awareness. When Jack Kerouac wrote the book 'On the Road,' the Bible of the beat generation and the beginning of the counterculture in the late 1950s and early 1960s he, too, was figuring out where he was going, where the road was leading him.
Because no matter what, the road will take us somewhere. The road is not a vehicle in a logistical sense, but it is an instrument, an avenue, a path, to something new and different.
What if Jesus had talked to Clopas and the other disciple, had dinner at the inn with them, and their eyes had not been opened? What if they really couldn't track the scriptural interpretation Jesus provided on their walk? Would we even have Easter? Would we have learned about it?
That's a big part of the joy of discovering personal connection to the readings we digest each week. We realize that like us the men trudging the road to Emmaus had not absorbed the message of Easter yet. Then with Jesus' help, they did. They got it!
That's the way it works for us, also. We hear a story and wonder, 'what's this mean?' We think about it for a while, maybe ask a friend. Maybe we see enough import in the story to pray about it, to ask God to reveal what the meaning of the scripture should be for us. And POW! Hearts burning, goosebumps, and so on.
These Bible stories aren't just dry lessons from the past. Today's Gospel relates the encounters of the disciples with their own spiritual hunger, their own need to know why Jesus died for us. The appearance of the resurrected Jesus was good enough evidence of the Resurrection that Cleopas and the other disciple were prompted to return to Jerusalem to share the joyful news with the other disciples.
Wouldn't it be something if we started talking and asking questions like the disciples on the road with Jesus before they knew who he was? Wouldn't it leave us with burning hearts if we testified to our own experience of Jesus being with us in our daily lives, especially when needed, especially when the chips were down, so to speak? Wouldn't it be fitting if hearing the story of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus helped us to focus on our own road, our spiritual path, and to find the words to talk about our faith, inspired by Jesus in the breaking of bread? To be evangelists, that is?
Perhaps that's why we prayed in the collect, "
O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work." Amen
A sermon preached on zoom on the Third Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2020,
by The Rev. Tyler Jones, Rector, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Poughkeepsie NY.
