Easter 3A, 23 April 2023. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

• Acts 2:14a, 36-47. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away.
• 1 Peter 1:17-23.  Love one another deeply (or constantly) from the heart.
• Luke 24:13-35. Were not our hearts burning within us?

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.

In today’s Gospel portion, we heard the Easter story of two on the road to Emmaus – one named Cleopas and the other is unnamed, which allows me to understand that the other was a woman. It’s a beautiful account of the art of resurrection, about how, even when we doubt it, we don’t understand it, we can’t imagine it, and we certainly are not looking for it, we might come to recognize that the Risen Lord can be walking along with us when we are overcome with grief and deeply afraid. The Risen Lord can be right in front of us without our knowing it. The Risen Lord can be in the midst of us when we share our food. Before I go further down this Road to Emmaus, however, 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 our lectionary includes only the first half of Verse 14 from Chapter 2, and then skips all the way 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 wish it had, because 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. 

In the first century of the common era, the “House of Israel” consisted of somewhere between four- and seven-million 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 near the end of the first century, there might have been a few thousand Jewish and Gentile Jesus followers dispersed between Jerusalem and Rome in small communities that later became known as churches. They were truly the fringe of the fringe.

Why was Peter accusing his audience of being complicit in the crucifixion of Jesus, the teacher and prophet from Nazareth? I recall something that the former Rabbi from Newbury Street, Howard Berman, used to say to us, that we are all the children of Israel, also known as Jacob. We Christians must understand that we are a part of the House of Israel, which Peter is addressing. The fact that we don’t automatically think of ourselves that way is a tragic consequence of later divisiveness and, frankly, a lot of bad behavior by people who have called themselves and still call themselves Christian. 

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 encourage them to resist the corrupting power of the occupying empire. Notice that 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 usually identify with the good guys. Even if I can manage an empathic response to the bad guys, I generally 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, I think, 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! Then I think of that line in our prayer of confession: “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 goes they were cut to the heart and asked what they should do. “Repent,” he said, “and become completely immersed in the name of Jesus” (that’s what baptism in the name of Jesus literally means), because there is a spirit of holiness being offered to you as a gift for you, your children, and even those who are far away. Peter knew something about the benefits of repenting; he was preaching what he knew; he was testifying from his own experience and at his own expense.

“Repent!” is not something that is typically shouted from the pulpit in Eastertide; it’s usually reserved for Advent and Lent; and we Episcopalians rarely shout. 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.  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 the mind, changing the path, about turning around and taking a step, however tentative, toward God, toward Love. Repentance is about changing the direction of our next step, and the Emmaus story shows us a way to do it by loving one another and strangers deeply from the heart, as our reading from 1 Peter says. 

Repentance is about the Risen Lord being made known in the sharing of a meal with a stranger. Biblical scholar Alan Streett explains that, like a Passover Seder, the Lord’s Supper in the first century was an anti-imperial, non-violent act against the Roman Empire. When compared with the political and social function of wider meal practice in the Roman Empire, the form of early Christian weekly meals didn’t look any different from the outside. On the inside, however, they were acts of resistance, in which they read letters and other words of encouragement, sang protest songs, shared a full meal (not just bread), and raised “a toast to a man whom Rome deemed worthy of a criminal’s death” because of his radical teachings and behaviors that the government considered sedition. Streett says: [1]

By failing to recognize the anti-imperial nature of first-century Christian meals, the modern church has eviscerated the Lord’s Supper of its political significance…[doing] little to contest the policies of modern-day tyrants who rule their empires for the benefit of the few and to the detriment of the oppressed masses.

When we prayed in the opening collect, “Open the eyes of our faith,” I thought of our own lack of vision with regard to our practice of the Lord’s Supper, whenever we presume to come “to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.”

The Gospels tell us that Jesus’ friends were terrified when he was arrested and sentenced to die by crucifixion. They fled the Garden of Gethsemane and found a safe house in or near Jerusalem in which to hide out, with the doors barred because they were so afraid. According to some accounts, the disciples hid there for at least several weeks. On the third day after Jesus’ death, Cleopas and another who had learned from Jesus, decided to leave that safe house and head out of the city for a place called Emmaus, which comes from a Hebrew word that means both earnest longing and warm springs. In other words, they were headed for 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, that incubator of fear and shame, and getting some fresh air. 

Last week Lisa Faber Ginggen preached about doubt and faith, of doubt leading to engagement, about doubt being fertile soil for the growth of belief. For me, one of the marks of a good sermon is that it starts conversations that continue beyond the 15 or 20 minutes in the pulpit, into the next week and beyond. After Lisa’s sermon, that happened to me. I’ve been thinking a lot this past week, “Doubt what? Believe what?” For me, when I imagine myself being among Jesus’ earliest followers, it’s doubting that someone who had been crucified could be the kind of savior anyone had been hoping for. For me, it’s doubting that life could come from a shocking and most humiliating execution, or that any divine meaning could come from the death of Jesus. For me, in our own time, it’s doubting that any amount of repenting, particularly by white people, could repair or reconcile the violence perpetrated and damage done to others in the name of the Church. For me, in our own time, it’s doubting that the White Church can repent fully enough to make reparations for our role in enslaving and mistreating Americans of African descent, not just our historic role but our current role. I struggle to believe it’s possible.

Cleopas and his companion were traveling through dangerous territory, through military and political oppression, through government and religious corruption, through grief and hopelessness. 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, comfort, food, and wine to a fellow traveler, who was a complete stranger. As former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote, “Don’t imagine that the Bible is full of comfortable and reassuring things about the life of belief and trust; it isn’t. It is often about the appalling cost of letting God [or Love] come near you and of trying to trust [God or Love] when all the evidence seems to have gone.” [2] The next right step of their repentance was to return to Jerusalem, to the scene of the crime, in spite of the danger, to tell the others.

What we are being encouraged to give our hearts to (which is what credo means, after all), is the practice of what one of my teachers called “obedience to our Lord’s perverse ethic of vulnerability and gain through loss.” [3] We are encouraged to give our hearts to the described reality that none of Jesus’ closest companions recognized the Risen Lord when they first encountered him various places and circumstances. The Risen Lord never said, “Look at my face; look into my eyes.” He said, “Look at my wounds…. Do not be afraid….Give me something to eat….Feed my lambs….Tend my sheep.”

Courage and compassion are what we need to return over and over again to a discipline of openness and vulnerability, especially when the stakes are high. 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 put down and put 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, power, resources, and access, to restore what has been stolen, to repair the breach. I often doubt that what we can do will do any good or make any difference; and yet, more often, I find that when we can muster the courage to be brave and the compassion to open our hearts, it is so worth it. As the Mishnah wisely teaches, we are not obligated to complete the work of repairing the world, but neither are we free to desist from it. The work is so often how sorrow turns to joy.

1. R. Alan Streett, Subversive Meals: An Analysis of the Lord’s Supper under Roman Domination during the First Century (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2013), Introduction.
2. Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (London: Canterbury Press, 2007).
3.  Witness magazine editor, the late Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, who died in 2005.