On the Road

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Easter III, Year A
April 26, 2020
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
A while back, I spent a whole month in the Holy Land.  As anyone who has been there will tell you, it changes everything about how you encounter stories from the Bible.  To see the hillsides by the Sea of Galilee, it is not a stretch to see how Jesus could use them as natural amphitheaters for preaching and teaching.  To see the gates into the Old City of Jerusalem, we can see how people could pack in together for Jesus to parade in on a donkey.  In the bustling, narrow streets on a busy Friday, we made the same walk that Jesus did from the Praetorium to Golgotha, only he carried a weighty cross.  There is something about the sensory and visual experience of a place that fuels imagination and memory gives the narrative a different dimension.
 
We do not have to go to the Holy Land to claim sacred spaces of memory.  Lots of places are sacred: our childhood homes, school campuses, and generational home places.  Our family has been going to the same beach in South Carolina for most of my life.  We have built memories there even as it has changed, and we have changed.  Our little kids ran around on the same beach in swim diapers where we once brought our now spouses to meet the family.  With the wind and the waves as a persistent soundtrack, and the sand as common ground in the passage of time, we reflect and remember.  It is a place where we can look back, look around, and look forward and see the shapes our lives have formed.
 
Church is one of those places for many of us.  Church is where we marry, bury, and baptize.  It is where we go to pause, to ponder, and to pray.  It where we go to be changed and become who we hope to be.  Kathleen Capshaw recently Facebook shared a 2008 video of Emmanuel’s Vacation Bible School.  Many of the children in there are young adult high school graduates and current college students.  It is an incredible timepiece.  No matter when we came to it, our church place is a container for valuable memories and visions of who we are and how we are.
 
Even though we cannot be in that space together right now, the place is still there.  We are taking care of it and keeping it ready for more life and memory.  If you miss it, take a drive through and walk the grounds.  The dogwoods are in full bloom and the spring flowers are at their peak.  If we cannot have Easter together, we can see Easter life happening as the earth awakes and makes itself new again.
 
On our last day in the Holy Land, we studied the Gospel story we read today.  And like we had done with many of the Jesus stories, we set out to experience the place see the context of the narrative.  There was only one problem.  Nobody knows where exactly Emmaus is.  Its location has been lost in history.  We read that it is about seven miles from Jerusalem.  That’s it.  We went to some places seven miles from Jerusalem, and found a monastery, a vineyard, and the ruins of a Byzantine church.  They were all nice places, but did nothing to connect us to the story or its context. 
 
As we prepared to leave the Holy Land, the ambiguity of this journey served as a valuable object lesson.  We were preparing to go our separate ways, and make our way of faith in our own places and spaces.  And we reflected, we realized that Jesus did not appear to the disciples in Emmaus.  He joined them on the road to Emmaus.  He met them along the way.  As they walked, he taught them about the power of God’s word to some truth.  When they rested, Jesus’ identity came clear.  When they fed their hunger and quenched their thirst, Jesus blessed it all as he had done before.  Symbols became reality.  A risen and refreshed relationship with God came into being.
 
With all kinds of energy, they ran back to Jerusalem, covering all of the distance they had traveled all day in an hour of urgency.  There, they met the others, compared stories, and found that Jesus had met them all in their various places.  He had shown up, refreshed and alive in their lives.
 
It really isn’t about the place after all.  A trip to the holy Land is great, but with the risen Christ, whatever ground we inhabit is made holy.  We can woe and lament about missing out on sharing the sacraments, and that is a loss, but a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.  Jesus feeds our hunger and quenches our thirst as we recognize God’s presence and activity wherever we are.
 
I do not mean to say that we don’t need our precious sacramental gifts.  We need the milestones of baptism and Eucharist to help us remember and sanctify life.  But holiness can break into anyone’s life, and any time, and in any place.  The realization we are given today is that all of life is grace.  God is not contained or limited to properly appointed spaces or churchified wording.  We do church to sharpen our vision of the rest of our life.  We do church to remember to remember.
 
So, in your own home place, for now, break some bread.  Drink deeply remembering the well of God’s love.  In doing so, we might quiet and order whatever fears we have in our hearts, touch the heart of God and lift up our lives to hope.
 
Even now, we are on the road, together.  Amen.