Third Sunday of Easter Year A, April 30, 2017; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of our aching and burning hearts, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

This morning we hear the Easter story of two on the road to Emmaus – one named Cleopas and the other is unnamed, which gives me room to understand that the other was a woman. It’s a beautiful account of the art of resurrection, about how, even when we don’t understand it, we can’t imagine it, and we certainly are not looking for it, we can come to recognize that the Risen Lord can be walking along with us; the Risen Lord can be right in front of us without our knowing it. But before I go further down this Road to Emmaus, I must go back to our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

Those of you who are trained to mind the gaps in our appointed readings might have noticed that the lectionary calls for only the first half of verse 14 from chapter two, and then skips to verse 36. Those of you who are trained to notice slander against Jews in our Second or New Testament might wonder, couldn’t our lectionary just have skipped all the way to verse 38? I don’t know and I wish it had. Then the lesson would have started with, “Repent and be baptized, for the promise of the Holy Spirit is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away.” Why include the libelous and offensive verses addressed to the entire House of Israel? (I can’t think of one good reason.) The House of Israel consisted of millions of Jewish people spread all around the lands occupied by the Roman Empire, in Northern Africa, Western Asia and Southern Europe who certainly had never heard of Jesus. (By contrast, at the time the Acts of the Apostles was written, there might have been a few thousand Jewish and Gentile Jesus followers dispersed between Jerusalem and Rome in small groups that became known as churches.) They were the fringe of the fringe.

Why was Peter accusing his audience of being complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus, the gentle Rabbi from Nazareth? Wrestling with this, I recalled something that the gentle Rabbi from Newbury Street, our own Rabbi-in-Residence Howard Berman frequently says to us: We are all the children of Israel. We are the House of Israel. When I remembered that, I heard the text differently. My guess is that when you hear the words, “House of Israel,” (like me) you don’t automatically think of yourself if you identify as Christian. That is a tragic consequence of later divisiveness. In this scene in the book of Acts, Peter was addressing his own people, so we must hear the preaching of Peter being directed not at other people but at us. Peter was trying to wake people up to complacent participation in the government’s execution of Jesus, and to resist the corrupting occupying power of the empire.

Notice, Peter is not saying, “you could have done it.” He’s saying, “you did it.” Now, I know that when I read stories or watch movies that have good guys and bad guys, I generally identify with the good guys. Even if I can manage an empathic response to the bad guys, I like to keep my distance. I do know that I am capable of doing bad things – by accident and occasionally on purpose, but I usually have good reasons, and the bad things are usually not really that big of a deal, you know? (I mean, compared with Peter.) He denied that he even knew Jesus on the night that Jesus was arrested – three times in a row!

But then I think of that line in our prayer of confession (that we don’t pray during Eastertide) “We repent of the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf.” It’s that last part that stops me in my tracks and it apparently stopped Peter’s listeners in their tracks as well, because the story says that they were cut to the heart and asked what they should do. “Repent,” he said, and become completely immersed in the name of Jesus, because there is a spirit of holiness being offered to you as a gift – for you, for your children and for those who are far away. Peter knew something about the benefits of repenting. He was preaching about what he knew. He was testifying from his own experience.

“Repent” is not something that is customarily shouted from the pulpit in Eastertide; it’s usually reserved for Advent and Lent. But when (or whenever) we wake up to the evil that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf, it’s the right thing to do. And I want to suggest to you that the story of the Road to Emmaus is a story of repentance. The biblical idea of repentance is about changing your mind – changing your path – about taking a step in a different direction, toward God, toward Love. Repentance is about changing the direction of your next step and the Emmaus story shows us a way to do it.

The Gospels tell us that Jesus’ friends were terrified when he was arrested and sentenced. They fled the Garden of Gethsemane and found a safe house in or near Jerusalem in which to hide out, with the doors locked because they were so afraid. According to some accounts, the disciples hid there for at least several weeks. But on the third day after Jesus’ death, Cleopas and another disciple decided to leave that safe house and head to a village called Emmaus.

Biblical scholars have gone to great lengths to locate a place that might have been the Emmaus to which Cleopas and his companion were traveling on that third day. Scholars have argued on behalf of at least six different possible locations. In their arguments, they lay out possible time tables and distances, traditional sites and evidence of shrines, extra-biblical citations, archaeological evidence, etymological hypotheses, human walking speeds, even the possibility of (and I am not making this up) “responsive donkeys” (you know, donkeys who go when you want them to go). There are all these explanations for how the two on the road to Emmaus could cover, in the available time, a greater distance than they could have covered by simply walking away from and then back to the rest of Jesus’ disciples before and after a shared meal, when it was almost evening.

The arguments all focus on what a plausible distance would have been – it’s a little Monty Python-esque. (Do you know the Quest for the Holy Grail where the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is being debated throughout the movie?) It’s funny that the plausibility of the existence of Emmaus is debated as if the geographical distance is what is completely unrealistic about this story. The thing I love best of all is that the word Emmaus is derived from the Hebrew word that means both “earnest longing” and “warm springs.” In other words, they were headed for earnest longing and immersion in healing water (a hot bath), and they were risking being out on the open road to get there. Their repentance, I believe, was walking away from the locked room. The first step was the decision to walk away from the incubator of fear and shame and getting some fresh air. It was true then and it’s true now.

What is completely implausible in this story is not the physical distance that Cleopas and his companion could travel in one afternoon and after supper, with or without a responsive donkey. It is the spiritual distance they had to go to imagine that someone who had been crucified could be the savior they had been hoping for. What is entirely unrealistic is that new life could come from a shocking and most humiliating execution. What is utterly senseless is any divine meaning coming from Jesus’ death. Their journey has been through military and political oppression, through government and religious corruption, through grief and hopelessness, and into offering hospitality to a stranger. Cleopas and his companion were travelers who needed hospitality. They were grief-struck people who needed comfort. And yet it was they who offered hospitality to a stranger. They offered welcome and comfort and food and wine to a fellow traveler.

What is even more implausible in this story is that sharing a little bread and a little wine with the risen Lord could rekindle the flame in the hearts of two who were in desperate need of courage and compassion, and that with hearts set on fire, they could go back out to change the world. The next step of their repentance was, having recognized the Divine reality in sharing a meal, they returned to the scene of the crime – to Jerusalem — to tell the others. They were inspired to live into what one of my teachers called “obedience to our Lord’s perverse ethic of vulnerability and gain through loss.” [1]

Courage and compassion are what we need to return over and over again to a discipline of openness and exposure, especially when the stakes are high. And when we are truly following Jesus the stakes are always high and it is never safe. Living out discipleship of Jesus is costly. It’s demanding to relentlessly advocate on behalf of those who are lost, and least, and left out, and to acknowledge our own participation in evil, intended and unintended. It is expensive to forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive. It is costly to repent of our sins, to redistribute our wealth and dominance, to restore what is lost, to reconcile what has been shattered. And it is so worth it. It is how sorrow turns to joy.

Today, we are giving special thanks for the many blessings of the generous life and love of Allen Thompson, whose sudden death has left many of us reeling. Let us also give thanks for the strange grace in the reminder that Allen’s death gives us that “life is short, and we never have too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who make the journey with us. So be swift to love, and make haste to be kind.” [2] Let us repent and immerse ourselves even more deeply in the spirit of Love, sharing what we have with strangers. That’s how we will know (and show) that the Risen Lord, the mighty power of Love, is among us even today.

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