The Road to Emmaus
A Sermon by the Reverend Shearon Sykes Williams on the Third Sunday of Easter, April 23, 2023.
“…When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him…Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road ? …”. Luke 24:13-35
Today is such a blessed day! In just a few minutes, we will baptize, Andrew Perry Keydel and Benjamin Everett Glenn. Andrew is just 5 months old. His mother Elena has been a faithful member of Saint George’s for about 15 years. She has held many key leadership positions, including Senior Warden and Renovation Co-Chair and she is now our Director of Communications. Benjamin is three years old and his parents Jennifer and Darren, and sister Lucy have been at Saint George’s just a few months and they have jumped right in with Catechesis of the Good Shepherd . The Glenns are a Foreign Service family and they are leaving next week to serve at the Hague. It has been a gift to have them and we really hope they will return one day.
The Keydel and Glenn families are a microcosm of Saint George’s. We have members who have been with us for years and years, and intend to be here indefinitely, and we have people who join us for a short while for training or work or graduate school and then move on to the next place. The longtime members provide much-needed stability, continuity and hospitality, and the new people provide new energy and fresh perspectives. We welcome newcomers every Sunday and that is a tremendous blessing. We invite whoever walks through our doors to journey with us, some for a lifetime and some for just a season. We all enter as strangers and we quickly become friends.
In our Gospel story today, some of Jesus’ friends are on a long journey when they are joined by a stranger. It is Easter evening and they are walking along trying to process and come to terms with the harrowing week they have been through. They are enroute from Jerusalem where they have been through the worst week of their lives. They have seen Jesus betrayed, condemned, beaten and mocked and then hung on a cross to die the worst death imaginable. Since then, the disciples have been locked away, grieving Jesus’ death, and terrified that they could meet a similar end because they were his followers. And then several of the women had run to tell them that Jesus had appeared to them and that he was alive. They wanted to believe them, but how could they after all they had witnessed with their own two eyes?
The story of the Road to Emmaus is only in the Gospel of Luke and it has as long been understood as Luke’s reflection on how his community experienced Jesus after his Resurrection. It’s about how they came to know Jesus through worship when they gathered each Sunday. Luke was writing about 175 to 100 years after Jesus’ earthly ministry. His community was in a diverse, urban environment. And Luke wrote his account using a variety of stylistic and linguistic techniques so that his readers who were from different religious, ethnic and social backgrounds could find a point of entry into the story of Jesus and his mission to bring universal salvation to humankind. There is a level of sophistication to Luke that is unique to the Gospels. It was possibly written in Antioch or Rome, but it could have been written in any major urban center in the Mediterranean. The people in Luke’s community in their day were a lot like us in 2023. We come from a variety of backgrounds, experiences and cultural reference points, just as they did. Many of us are from other places. Some of us grew up in the Church and some are new to faith. And all of us are trying to navigate a very complex social, economic and political landscape. All of us share a common spiritual longing. We all want to make meaning of our lives and to find what is enduring, what is life-giving, what is foundational.
We are all on the road to Emmaus. We come through the doors each week, having dealt with family challenges, work stress, relationship issues, the chaos of the news, fears about the future of the planet. And we come together to listen for God’s voice in the eye of the storm.
In the road to Emmaus story, the disciples walk along and are so distracted and consumed by their troubles that they can’t even recognize Jesus at first . Sometimes its hard for us to settle into the service when we first get here because of all of the stresses we are dealing with. But we are here. We are seeking connection rather than isolating ourselves. We pray, we sing, we listen to Scripture and we listen for God’s voice to calm us, to bring clarity and to help us find a way forward. Jesus is with us, speaking to us through Scripture, just as he interpreted Scripture for the traumatized, self-absorbed disciples. And when we celebrate the Eucharist , just as Jesus broke bread with the disciples and gather around the Altar to receive his Body and Blood, our eyes are opened. We leave the service and we are different than we were when we came in, whether we are consciously aware of it or not. Our hearts burn within us and we know that God truly is with us and for us through thick and thin.
That is the Eucharistic life. That is what Andrew and Benjamin are being baptized into. They are just beginning their journey with Jesus today. And it is a journey that will continue for a lifetime. Their parents will bring them to church and the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection will be the defining narrative of their lives. They will be able to weather the joys and challenges of life because they will know that new life is always coming out of the disappointments we experience. Because Jesus was resurrected from the dead, death no longer has power over us. Faith, hope and love live in us and cannot never be taken away, by virtue of our baptism.
Faith, hope and love were also at the center of the confirmation service last Sunday. We had 14 Saint Georgians, 6 teens and 8 adults, who were presented by RevMo Crystal and confirmed or received from other denominations by Bishop Stevenson at Saint Paul’s in Alexandria. We will recognize them after the baptisms today and celebrate with them during coffee hour. There is a direct link between baptism and confirmation. In baptism, we are brought into the fellowship of faith to begin a lifelong journey with Christ. Baptism is about becoming aware of our belovedness as a child of God. Confirmation and reception are about making an adult profession of faith. The bishop lays hands on each confirmand, asking God to continue the work of the Holy Spirit that was begun in the person’s life when they were baptized. It is also expressing the person’s desire to continue to develop their Christian faith specifically within the Episcopal understanding of our faith. That means that we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and we celebrate diversity, we strive for the full inclusion of everyone, without exception, because like Luke’s community we see that Jesus’ death and resurrection all happened to bring all of us into the wide embrace of God’s love.
We are one human family. And as Christians, we are called to love others as Christ loved us and strive to see God’s image in everyone we meet. So today, as fellow sojourners on the road with Jesus, we celebrate the Eucharistic life that we share with him and with the soon-to-be newly baptized: Andrew and Benjamin, and with our teens who were confirmed: Sam, Abby, Nick, Elisha, Nicholas J.S., and our adults who were confirmed or received: Victoria, Ariel, Nick, Maccoy, Esther, Victor, Christine and Matt . We are all on the journey of faith together, welcoming the stranger who becomes our friend.
“…When he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him… Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road ? …”. Luke 24:13-35