Lost on the road to Emmaus

Mosaic from the Washington National Cathedral.

If this were a normal Sunday, people who gather in many churches would be hearing a story from the Gospel of Luke about two people encountering Jesus on the road to Emmaus. 

Of course, this is not a normal Sunday. People are not gathering in churches - although many may be gathering around a computer screen in their homes. They may still hear or read that same story. It’s a wonderful story for the moment we are in right now.

It’s a story of disorientation. It’s a story of loss, of grief, of discouragement. It’s a story of two people feeling adrift, lost on the road to a village that has no clear historical record of its existence. Yet it’s story of hope that emerges from hospitality.

For those who do not know this story, here it is in brief. Two people - perhaps a man and a woman, perhaps two men - who had been followers of Jesus are walking towards home having left Jerusalem after the execution of Jesus on the previous Friday. They presumably stayed put on Saturday, the Sabbath, and now were making the seven-mile journey home. They encounter a "stranger" on the road who asks them what they were talking about.

They tell him about this Jesus fellow, “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people” who they had hoped would be the one to redeem Israel - the Messiah - but he was killed through the collusion of the religious and political powers of that day. Then, before they left Jerusalem on that Sunday, some women who were followers of Jesus reported to the group that his body was no longer in the tomb where he had been placed after his death. 

You can feel their anguish as they tell the story. They don’t have any idea that the man walking with them is Jesus - a clue that there was a transformation that had occurred to him through the resurrection.  His transformation and their disorientation dominates the moment. 

I am writing this on about the 45^th day of my sheltering in place. Oh, there have been occasional trips to the grocery store (during senior hours) and for take-out at restaurants. There have been many, many walks through the neighborhood and lots of time in video chats on Zoom. But life as I knew it is totally disoriented - and it’s going to stay that way for quite some while - even if the world arounds me starts to slowly reopen. 

For me, this is a relatively mild disorientation compared to what so many others are experiencing - illness for themselves or the death (alone) of a loved one; economic dislocation; exhausted health care workers; educational setbacks; a home bursting at the seams with frantic children and overstressed parents. Plus there is the shared anxiety for all of us about what life will be like a month from now, a season from now, a year from now. 

All of that makes it pretty easy to identify with these two people on the road. It’s almost like this stranger who is walking with them is wearing a mask and his identity is lost in the midst of the chaos of their lives.

Mosaic from the Washington National Cathedral.

He talks with them, offers new ways they can consider the sacred stories that had guided their lives. Dusk is arriving. In the midst of their grief and confusion, they reach out to the stranger who seemed about to go on into the night that was not far away.

“Stay with us,” they say.

And he did.

They share a meal. A real meal, at a table. No social distancing at that time. The conversation continues. Then the stranger does something they recognized. Here’s how Luke describes that moment: “He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.”

Their hospitality offered them a path forward in their grief. His sharing opened their vision to a new way of being. 

On this disorienting path I am now on, one way to stay connected to those beyond the four corners of my dwelling is to be reaching out, to connect, to find ways to offer some form of hospitality, even when it seems to be from a distance. And then the second piece of the story - to watch for ways in the breaking of bread - metaphorically at this point - that I can recognize where God is at work in my life and in our world. 

Even sheltering in place, there are places where light and hope break through. Jesus and his friends arrived where they needed to be before the darkness fell. That’s the path I want to be on.

(If you want to read the actual Gospel story from Luke 24: 13-35, you can read it here.) 

A season full of Holy Saturdays

Holy Saturday - that day between when we remember the crucifixion of Jesus and the dawn of resurrection - can often seem like a lost day. Not this year.

On this Holy Saturday, I feel as though I am joining Jesus' followers in grief about what has happened, fear about what is happening and anxiety about what may happen next. 

For me, Holy Saturday holds within it so many of the emotions that are part of my life right now. Perhaps they are part of yours as well. And perhaps there are bits of wisdom we can draw from the ancient traditions in the Christian church about this day.

As the wise United Church of Christ minister Rev. Laura Everett wrote in a piece for Religion News Service this week, “I’ve never pastored through a plague before, but the church has.”

One vivid example of that was Pope Francis on March 27 using the image of Jesus’ followers terrified in a boat in the midst of a storm. He was standing near a crucifix taken  from the Church of San Marcello al Corso in Rome for the occasion. It was a crucifix that had been carried through the streets of Rome in 1522 in the midst of the black plague, offering hope - and perhaps some healing - to the beleaguered citizens of that time.

He knew that we have been through plagues and pandemics before. Pope Francis said this as he stood near that historic crucifix: “We find ourselves afraid and lost. Like the disciples in the Gospel we were caught off guard by an unexpected, turbulent storm. We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.” 

For Francis, Jesus sleeping in the boat in the midst of the storm carries two messages - trust in God in the midst of the storm and a reminder that “we are not self-sufficient; by ourselves we founder.”

In the storm of our day, there is grief, fear and anxiety all around us.

Let’s start with grief. Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, writes in her book The Liturgical Year, that within church life, this is a particularly empty day. She notes that in monasteries, they might sing “the morning chant of Tenebrae, a series of psalmic lamentations that punctuate the emptiness with grief.”

In many churches, this day would be the day when people arrive to decorate for Easter, to arrange the flowers, to make things ready for joy. But that is not happening this Saturday. We are left with that emptiness and the grief of our time - grief over deaths, grief over the stress health care workers are facing, grief over the horrible impact COVID-19 is having on African-Americans and people living in poverty or clustered in nursing homes. And yes, grief over the fact that people cannot gather together on this Easter Sunday.

Here, then, is an image of hope in the midst of this emptiness and grief. On that Saturday after Jesus died, the Gospel writers tells us, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Joanna and other women were gathering spices and cloths they would take to the tomb to anoint Jesus. They were preparing in the midst of grief and they discovered unexpected hope.

Fear, however, accompanies grief on this Holy Saturday. Fear for ourselves - what if I get COVID-19? Fear for those we love. Fear for a world thrown into panic. Fear for the disorder that accompanies such dislocation. Fear for our democracy as we see elections disrupted by both health concerns and political maneuvering.

Like Pope Francis said, we are all in the same boat, but we fear those whose actions increase our risk, whose selfishness could sink the boat. We retreat more and more to self-preservation in the midst of our fear.

That Saturday after Jesus was killed, his followers surely were living in fear as well. They knew one of their members had betrayed Jesus. They knew that others had drifted off to sleep as the forces were coming to arrest him. They knew Peter, their leader, had denied ever knowing Jesus. They knew the Roman authorities would be looking for them to quash any remnant of the Jesus movement. So they stayed inside behind locked doors. They may not really have trusted each other much at that point.

It would not be until the women who made the brave journey to the tomb came back and said “He is risen” that anyone else dared go out. It was not until the transformed Jesus entered that room that they began to regain their courage. 

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells the women at the tomb. “Peace be with you,” he tells his followers in that locked room.

With the grief about the past and the fear about the present comes the anxiety about the future.

We each know the anxieties we hold in our lives. New York Times columnist David Brooks captured those across the nation when he wrote on Thursday about responses from readers who wrote to him how they were faring in the midst of this. “What you sent gutted me. There have been over 5,000 replies so far, and while many people are hanging in there, there is also a river of woe running through the world — a significant portion of our friends and neighbors are in agony.”

For college students, there is deep worry about the future. One wrote: “My future, which seemed so bright a few months ago as I anticipated graduating in May, now seems bleak and hopeless: How will I find a job with the economy tanking? How will I pay hundreds of dollars per month when my loan bills kick in during August?”

For the elderly, there is anxiety about whether this disease will kill them, whether they will wind up dying alone, whether they will ever get to see their grandchildren in person again. 

For workers, they do not know when or if they will get their jobs back or how they will pay their bills. For restaurant and bar and small shop owners, there is no certainty the businesses they have built will survive this. 

For all of us, we have no idea what our worlds will look like next month, next fall, next year. We know it will all change. We don’t know what that will mean for us. It is totally a sense of Holy Saturday anxiety.

Back to Sr. Joan. She wrote: “Every human being who has ever walked the earth has known what the emptiness of Holy Saturday is about…We will all know the power of overwhelming loss when life as we know it changes, when all hope dies in midflight…Holy Saturday faith is not about counting our blessings; it is about dealing with darkness and growing in hope.”

See if her description of Holy Saturday matches what you are experiencing now:

“Today, the church is empty. Today, the loss finally sets in. We sit in the empty pews, pass the empty churches, heavy-hearted from the reality of yesterday, of Good Friday and its dashing of our securities. Today, alone and bereft, we come face-to-face with the question we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of Light?”

Grief. Fear. Anxiety. 

They are all around me these days. They are all around on what seems like an eternal Holy Saturday. The followers of Jesus in his time had no idea that Easter would arrive with the next sunrise. We have no idea when we will get to the other side of this pandemic and what that will mean to us. 

But we do know that as we watch new life emerge from the earth that spring follows winter. We do know that as the sun creeps over the morning horizon, another day emerges from the darkness of night.

We do know that grief and fear and anxiety are part of our lives but they are not the only parts.

So I look forward to this Easter - whether that means Sunday, April 12 or some day farther in the future.

I look forward to the hope that it holds, the recognition that joy and sadness can co-exist and hold to the belief that ultimately, goodness is stronger than evil and life is stronger than death. 

One of my favorite traditions on Holy Saturday evening is to listen to this six-minute piece of music that ends Marty Haugen’s musical “That You May Have Life.” It’s the story of resurrection. It is the story of hope. May this be our future.