Most of my stories about strangers in the dark are not comforting ones. I could tell many, as could you, but here is one:

The day my brother died, everyone I met was a stranger. My senses blurred by shock and grief, I staggered from the city alone, but in every way pressed uncomfortably by the indefensible presence of strangers. Stopping to withdraw cash from a bank window, one stranger asked for spare change…and I, stunned into rage by the intrusion, thrust a five dollar bill at him, yelling and only barely quelling a sudden, unfamiliar urge to strike with my fist. At the gate, the crowd pressed me uncomfortably, and, like the disciples, I had to withdraw to a place only I inhabited. On the plane, the woman sitting next to me in the aisle, ritually popping the air pockets on a shred of bubble wrap seemed menacing, obnoxious. In the quiet corner of what remained of my “before” soul, I was vaguely aware that two days earlier, she would have inspired kindness in me, not fear. Grief had transformed me into a stranger to myself.

Thinking about that time, and about the many stories I have heard, or read, about encounters with strangers, I read with wonder this old story of ours, in which friends whose hearts have been shattered by grief and threat find a way to open their hearts and minds to a stranger, and in so doing, find God. How can such a thing be possible?

It is a simple, and powerful story. Two men are friends. They share a heritage, an experience, a loss. They walk along, suffering but comforted by the familiarity of friendship. A stranger passes by. They have a choice: to stay by themselves, or to make room for another.

They choose to make room, even though their world is presently shaped by grief and threat. In the gathering darkness, they share the story that has shaped their lives, its satisfactions and its sadness. The stranger listens, and responds. The friends listen in return, and the story they have told takes on a larger, more vibrant shape in the stranger’s telling. The story—the same story– that so destroyed the hope of Cleopas and his friend fills this stranger instead with a powerful sense of the movement of the Spirit of God. He doesn’t have the answers to their grief, but somehow, he places their private and bitter loss into a larger context, a different arena.

As they talk, a small flickering light begins to dawn in the faces of the friends while they walk in the dusk—a small flame begins to warm up their cold, sad souls. When they come to the place where they are to stay, they cannot bear to let go of this stranger, this light bearer, and they urge him: stay with us, because it is almost evening, and the day is now nearly over.

His words have made a difference—the world he sees is more hopeful than the world they know, and they need a larger vision. Stay with us. The stranger cannot change the tragedy that has befallen them, but he has changed its meaning. And so the stranger stays. And then Luke tells us, that although they had expected nothing except the slight comfort of three men finding shelter from the night and telling their stories, the stranger they had befriended took bread, blessed and broke it and their eyes were opened and they recognized him.

The theologian Henri Nouwen reflects: I have many memories of encounters with people who made my heart burn but whom I did not invite into my home. Sometimes it happens on a long plane trip, sometimes in a train, sometimes at a party. . .Interesting, stimulating, and inspiring as all these strangers may be, when I do not invite them into my home, nothing truly happens. I might have a few new ideas, but my life remains basically the same. Without an invitation, which is the expression of a desire for a lasting relationship, the good news we have heard cannot bear lasting fruit.

It is one of the characteristics of our contemporary society that encounters, good as they may be, don’t become deep relationships. Thus our life is filled with good advice, helpful ideas, wonderful perspectives, but they are simply added to the many other ideas and perspectives and so leave us ‘uncommitted.’ Only with an invitation to ‘come and stay with me’ can an interesting encounter develop into a transforming relationship.1

Increasingly, we are living in a culture that fears and avoids encounters with the stranger, rejecting possibilities for transformation. Our political discourse struggles to be more than diatribes about race, gender, and the politics of estrangement and entitlement. Our borders are closing. “Guest workers” are welcome to clean our homes or make our hamburger, but their children are not welcome in our schools, nor their languages in our marketplace. The “global village” is a city besieged. And the Church, which carries in our religious DNA the absolute obligation to welcome the stranger and to practice hospitality, is so overwhelmed with unmet need and declining influence that we can scarcely see our way out the front door, let alone invite some strangers to worship and break bread with us. We need the comfort of familiarity, so we prevent ourselves from seeing our house the way strangers see it, and we do not take the time to spruce things up, physically or spiritually, so that people who are not us, or who are not like us, will come in and be welcome. We tell ourselves we would be transformed if we could, but only….

We who are friends walking along the Emmaus Road because the community of Jesus has shaped us, must fight to reclaim and practice the openness and hospitality that once made our country great and still makes our faith worth practicing. Not just for the gracious welcome such openness may provide to strangers…but because our life of faith depends on it. It was not merely that those disciples on the Emmaus Road were too sad to recognize their Lord. It was not that twilight shadowed his familiar face.

It was in fact that the risen Christ was a stranger to them. Luke teaches us that if we do not seek out and welcome the stranger; if we do not share our story with her, or walk alongside him, we will not meet Christ along the road. If we do not listen as a stranger’s perspective is offered to change our own viewpoint; if we do not allow these new ideas to make our hearts burn within us, we will not understand our own story and how it is a part of God’s work in the world. If we do not invite new ideas, new ways of hearing and telling our stories, new people and strangers into our homes, our church, and our hearts, we will never, in Nouwen’s words, move from interesting encounter to transforming relationship…and we will not find the risen Christ.

The Christ of Emmaus is the stranger we least expect. The one who shatters our notion of why things are and what things are. He is One who cannot be pinned down, One whose absence is as comforting as his presence—whose Presence is as challenging as his absence—

The Maundy Thursday service is not generally for strangers. It is, like the event that shaped it, a time for friends to break bread and to comfort each other in the gathering dark. This Maundy Thursday, when some forty friends gathered here at Riviera, a stranger was met along the road by a disciple, and invited in to share our meal. I was glad to see them, because I was a little troubled that our attendance that night was so small. When communion time came, the disciple bent over to whisper to the stranger, communion is open to everyone, please join us, and thought nor more of it. As bread and cup were passed in the flickering candle light. and the familiar story was told, the disciple noticed that the stranger was weeping. After the service, she listened, and her heart burned within her.

I go to church regularly, the stranger said. But I never made my first communion. All these years, I have sat at the table but never been invited to share the meal. It meant so much to me to be part of what everyone else was sharing. And the disciple said to me: all along I have taken the bread and the cup as though they were mine, and I never thought about it, I never knew. And then my heart caught fire, and I remembered with thanksgiving the song we had sung:

Come and bring light to a people in darkness,

come set us free from the chains we have made.

We are your people, the flock that you tend, Lord,

open our eyes once again.