Acts 2: 41-47
Luke 24:13-35
It has been another “Now what am I going to preach” week.
The health-care bill certainly calls out for attention. And Paul Waldman sounded almost religious when he wrote that it “is not just wrong, or misguided, or problematic or foolish. It is an abomination.” He added: “If there has been a piece of legislation in our lifetimes that boiled over with as much malice and indifference to human suffering, I can’t recall what it might have been. It is no exaggeration to say that if it were to become law, this bill would kill significant numbers of Americans. [And all of this in order to provide] hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for families making over $250,000 a year.”
On Thursday morning, before celebrating the House vote, the President said he wanted to hear from religious leaders, that we should speak loudly and forcefully about political issues. And Paul Waldman’s conclusion should echo from pulpits. So hear this: “No one who votes for something this vicious should be allowed to forget it — ever. They should be challenged about it at every town hall meeting, at every campaign debate, in every election and every day as the letters and phone calls from angry and betrayed constituents make clear the intensity of their revulsion at what their representatives have done.”
But that is all I will say about health care this morning. Another matter still weighs heavily on my heart—and on the hearts and minds of many.
A little less than a year ago I stood in this pulpit after the Orlando nightclub shootings and spoke of the difficulty of preaching in the wake of violence. I told you that while the need for such sermons seems to come with increasing frequency, the words for such sermons only get harder to find. I lamented about speaking: “Words, followed by death, followed by more words, followed by more death.”
Violence in our nation continues unabated. There are not enough Sundays, there are not enough sermons to respond to every egregious act.
I can’t do that.
But last Sunday morning I awoke—we awoke—to the news that Jordan Edwards, a fifteen-year-old African-American, an honor student described as “someone who did everything right,” had been shot and killed by a police officer in suburban Dallas on Saturday night. Jordan was “the youngest of more than 330 people who have been shot and killed by police this year. About 25 percent of those killed have been African-American, and about 7 percent were — like Jordan — unarmed.”[i]
Will this ever stop?
I agree with the editors of The Washington Post who said: ‘It would be irresponsible to use this case as a broad brush against all police officers, the majority of whom selflessly place themselves at risk to protect the public. But,” they continued,” it’s equally irresponsible not to recognize the issues with police training and policies that historically have put minority communities at risk and too long have gone uncorrected.”
But we had hoped…
An article in The Atlantic this past week pointed out that in Barack Obama’s second term there was growing popular pressure to stop police killings of young black men, and to improve both public and government oversight of police departments. From Ferguson to Cleveland, Baltimore to New York City, the deaths drove outrage and protests. The Obama administration was generally supportive of the reform movement, pressing for better statistics, use of body cams, and strict oversight of troubled police departments.
We had hoped…
President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has promised to reverse many of those stands. He has spoken about the damage he believes federal investigation does to police morale. As for the President, he was dismissive of the Black Lives Matter movement, and made alliances with some of its most strident critics.[ii]
We had hoped…
Hope is not—you know this—hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is the energy that we find in ourselves and among ourselves to do the kind of things I exhort you to do each Sunday: to strengthen the weak, to support the fainthearted, to seek the good even in the face of evil.
“We had hoped…” the two sad followers of the crucified Jesus tell the stranger who joins them as they walk toward Emmaus.
Certainly we know the despair, the bewilderment that Cleopas and his friend were experiencing on that Sunday after the crucifixion—for in spite of my weekly exhortations, hope can elude us.
The needless violence and death across our nation;
The racism that no one wants to see, the racism that strips us of courage and leaves us appalled and astounded;
The voices of white supremacy more and more entering the mainstream of political conversation;
The uncertainty throughout the land
Can all cause us to lose hope, to give up hope, to watch in sorrow as hope dies.
Two disciples travel the road long before us. It’s called the road to Emmaus, although no one is really sure where that village once was.
So one person suggests that Emmaus is “the place we go in order to escape—a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, ‘Let the whole thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.’ . . . Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and the bravest and loveliest decay and die; that even the noblest ideas that human beings have had—ideas about love and freedom and justice—have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish people for selfish ends.”[iii]
Hopes are dashed.
The one who was to redeem Israel is now three days dead. Some of the women say that this Jesus is alive once more. But . . .
We can easily fall into a cynical attitude that discounts any possible good.
In sorrow and grief, in despair and fear, even in self-pity we start walking that road to Emmaus, ready to give up.
And just then the unexpected and unrecognized Christ draws near.
So it has been said that “[The] Revelation [of God] happens not when we are secure—when our world is whole and fully painted with meaning. Revelation happens when we break—when despite ourselves, a space opens up—an emptiness that we cannot fill.”[iv]
Any time we ask questions like
“Where is God?”
“Where is the justice that we seek?”
“Where is common human decency?”
Anytime we worry about our future or the future of our children and other children or the future of our nation or the future of creation
The risen Christ draws near to us,
hears our doubt and despair,
listens to our confusion as we search for direction and purpose.
Much of the time this is hard to believe—which makes the Emmaus story so real and so relevant.
Much of the time this is hard to believe—and yet Christ is present in our lives.
There is something here that is like the “averted vision” of astronomy. If you want to see a very faint star, you should look a little to the side because your eye is more sensitive to faint life that way—and a soon as you look right at the star, it disappears[v].
Do you know what I mean? We get some small sense of God’s presence, some vague realization of meaning and purpose, some vision of the arc of the universe bending toward faint justice in the distance—and it is gone like the morning mist burning off over Iowa fields.
So instead of looking directly, we take bread and remember a life broken that we and our world might be made whole. We take a cup and remember a life poured out that we and our world might be filled.
We hear again the good news: “This is for you—in your brokenness, in your emptiness.
Our eyes are opened.
It happens at this table, but not only here.
It happens whenever we extend hospitality and welcome strangers. It happens anytime we reach out in simple or difficult acts of friendship or compassion. It happens when we find the courage to speak out and end our silent acquiescence to the ways of death. It happens anytime we find the grace to follow the new commandment that Jesus also gave when he gave this meal and love one another just as we have been loved by Christ.
The risen Christ comes to us—even in our despair and disbelief
Listening as we speak, as we search for meaning in the rubble of our lives:
Receiving our doubt and our grief:
Accepting our invitation to stay a little longer when the darkness seems to be closing in around us.
Once again our eyes are opened. By the grace of God we recognize the risen Christ. And we are called out of shadows into light, out of bitterness into love, and out of death into life.
It is an astonishing thing that we say. We say that we have seen Christ—in scripture, in the breaking of the bread, in welcome and hospitality and courage and grace.
This resurrection meal is not an answer to our fear, to our bewilderment, to our anger, to our despair. But this meal is a response. At the table, the wounded hands of the risen Christ offer hold out the bread of life and the cup of salvation.
Our eyes—even our eyes—are opened.
And because our eyes are opened, so too our hearts and our mouths are opened.
So again, Mr. President, Mr. Attorney General hear this. Hear these words of religious people. We will not keep silent. We will not look the other way. We will press for justice.
Even now, we hope—for in our brokenness, amidst the brokenness of our world, the risen Christ is made known to us in the breaking of the bread.
[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-black-boy-was-killed-by-police-its-time-for-more-than-hashtags/2017/05/02/03ced94e-2f66-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?utm_term=.47dc41804a78
[ii] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/the-shooting-of-jordan-edwards/525141/
[iii] Frederick Buechner, the Magnificent Defeat, pg. 85-86, quoted in NIB, Luke/John, pg. 482.
[iv] Randi Rashkover, “A Strange New World,” Cross Currentsi, Winter 2002, pg. 443.
[v] Complexity, pg. 319