On March 13, the 1st Sunday of Lent, you will notice an addition to our sanctuary setting.

Our seating will remain in its normal front-facing configuration. But in the center of the room, in the midst of our congregational seating, a simple table will be placed, representing the sacred space we are symbolically opening in our lives for practicing a more continual awareness of the presence of God during the forty day Lenten season. God is in our intentional spirituality, and in our communal worship. God is in our workplace, and our homes. God is in our praise, and in our secret fears and failures. God is in the ordinary, as in the holy. Indeed, everything is holy, everything belongs to God.

During Lent, we will work to increase our awareness of God’s everywhere-presence in each of our own lives, exploring the theme: Altars in the World: spiritual practices in everyday life. Our sermon series themes will be drawn from conversations with Barbara Brown Taylor’s book “An Altar in the World: a Geography of Faith” We invite you to consider not “giving something up” for Lent this year; but rather, adding something to your own “Altar in the World” by joining us in worship each Sunday and after worship for adult learning around Spiritual Practices for Everyday Lives.

March 9 through April 17, Palm/Passion Sunday

Ash Wednesday Service, 3/9 7:00 p.m Taize and imposition of ashes

During the Sundays of Lent the preaching themes will be supplemented by adult learning following the service each Sunday, focusing on spiritual practices in our daily lives (Soup and bread will be served)

During the weeks of Lent, we will also share “Moveable Feasts” at homes in our faith community; as well as three Saturday morning opportunities to practice like St. Francis did, building our life together through labor and fellowship, as we build our prayer garden together.

The Practice of Encountering Others: gathering in community for friendship and prayer

Dinner/Moveable Feast Dates and Hosts:

1. Home of Chuck and Bonnie Hannemann (south) Saturday, March 19, at 6 p.m.
2. Church, Bible study and lunch, Wednesday, March 23 12:00 p.m. (noon)
3. Home of Belinda Vidal and Valerie Deville, March 29th, at 7:00 pm
4. Home of Doreen Ruggerio (north) Saturday April 2, 6:00 p.m.
5. Home of Pamela Armour (central) Sunday April 10, in the afternoon following worship
6. Home of Henry and Sandy Barrow (central) Sunday, April 17, 5:00 p.m.

Please call the church office or sign up for a dinner in the back of the sanctuary.

Lent 1, March 13 The Practice of Making Room in our Lives: emptiness

Text: Philippians 2 and Matthew 4
with Diane Shoaf, spiritual director and pastor, preaching & teaching
Adult Learning: the practice of centering prayer

Lent 2, March 20 The Practice of Walking on the Earth: groundedness

Text: Genesis 2 Laurie Kraus, preaching
Adult
Learning: lectio divina: listening with the heart

Saturday, March 26 8:30 to 11

The Practice of Carrying Water: physical labor
we gather for light breakfast, conversation and work in the prayer garden
John German and Laurie Kraus, hosts

Lent 3, March 27 The Practice of Getting Lost: wilderness

Text: Exodus 17: 1-7 symbol: water/baptism
Adult Learning: Labyrinth walking prayers—wandering in prayer

Saturday, April 2, 8:30 to 11

The Practice of Carrying Water: physical labor
We gather for light breakfast, conversation and work in the prayer garden

Lent 4, April 3 The Practice of Wearing Skin: incarnation

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14
1^st Sunday Lunch
Adult Learning: Praying in Color … drawing our prayers to God

Saturday, April 9, 8:30 to 11

The Practice of Carrying Water: physical labor
We gather for light breakfast, conversation and work in the prayer garden

Lent 5, April 10 The Practice of Paying Attention: reverence

Lenten Cantata by the Choir, communion
Adult Learning: “those who sing, pray twice” exploring praying through simple sung chants and breath prayers

Passion/Palm Sunday, April 17

The Practice of Feeling: breakthrough
Text:
Passion Narrative in Matthew
Adult Learning: Sleeping with Bread: Holding
What Gives You Life (the Daily Examen)

HOLY WEEK OBSERVANCE

Maundy Thursday April 21, 7:30 Service of Shadows and Communion

Good Friday April 22 7:30 pm Taize and Prayer in the Garden

Easter Day, Sunday April 24 The Celebration of the Resurrection

“Supposing he was the Gardener?”
This Lent, make some space in your soul:
Join us, work with us, gather and eat with us, learn and explore with us….

Note: Church Picnic / Family Day is probably being rescheduled. New date TBA.

Read this part about love, I said. Then skip over this other part and read here, where it talks about love some more. Glancing at what I had omitted, Corey grimaced in agreement, then strolled up to the pulpit and read: beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

I have many friends in this church who remind me, often, that all of the bible is not so edifying; that some of the bible is too confusing to be understood, even by people with PhD’s in scripture or theology; and that hardly anyone, even people who go to church regularly, read the whole bible much anymore, anyway. So I can probably get away with a little sly micro-editing, Sunday by Sunday, in the service of a coherent spirituality, unless too many of you pick up the pew bibles and start to follow along.

But this week, never mind. The universe paid me back on Tuesday, when, after leaving my home at six am to get to an all day presbytery meeting by nine in Palm Beach Gardens, I settled into my seat to find that the first order of the day was a two hour bible study on ….the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd letters of John….with special attention to the parts I had in Thomas Jeffersonian fashion, sliced out of our corporate bible reading just days before. My little children, we read, it is the last hour!!!! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come!!!! From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us they would have remained with us, but by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 1:18-19)

Well, then. It’s my observation that there are two different kinds of people, when it comes to entertaining friends. One type cleans the house before you come—all of the house, even the parts you don’t see, and won’t have anyone over at all unless the house is clean. The other type says what you see is what you get, and shoves over a pile of washed laundry to make room for you on the sofa, and pulls leftovers out of the back of the refrigerator, and seems just to be glad you’re there, oblivious to the chaos revealed by their open-door life. If we’re still in confessional mode, I trend toward the former, as my mother did, and still find, occasionally, some forgotten pile of junk that I shoved under a pillow or behind a sofa in order to make order for an unexpected guest. The thing is, the face I thus am presenting to the world is not quite my real one…altogether. So it is with the bible, and especially with most of the little bitty books we hid in the back of the N.T., like dirty laundry we hope no one will notice we have not done, and the smell we have lit scented candles to disguise. The New Testament professor Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches at Union Seminary in Richmond and served on the Theological Task Force for Peace, Purity, and Unity, told us so on Tuesday morning while I sat by my absolute theological opposite in the world and listened to these enlightening words: Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ but goes beyond it does not have God…do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you and does not bring this teaching, for to welcome is to participate in the deeds of such a person. (2 John 9-10) Remembering how, down through the years of fighting over teachings relating to Christ’s welcome (or the church’s judgment) of homosexual persons, we each had suspected the other of not knowing the bible (or Jesus) if it (or he) had knocked him (or me) over the head in a dark alley, we (or at least I) squirmed. Taylor went on, in her mellifluous southern lady voice, to tell us that the only place in the bible where the “antichrist” is mentioned is in the letters of John…and the only persons to whom that hateful and fearsome appellation is assigned is…a member of the community of Jesus, a member of the family, with whom the Elder who wrote the letters found himself in irreconcilable differences.

It’s hard to work up a head of self-righteous steam about those who have called me an antichrist for my belief system…when sitting next to me is a friend whose positions, and sometimes whose personality, I have secretly—and sometimes not so secretly—denounced as the same. Gench had gone from preachin’ to meddlin’, and I didn’t like it so much as I thought I would.

Here’s the thing: the four books that make up the Johannine corpus—the gospel and the three letters that follow—were written to and about a community, a family, really, that had gone through a painful and difficult divorce. Many scholars agree that the gospel of John, written late in the first century, had such a heavenly, divine view of who Jesus was because that was the issue over which the church had reached irreconcilable differences with the synagogue. That is to say, the church, which had been a part of Jewish life and practice, eventually divorced over their differences about who Jesus was, whether an inspired human teacher, or the divine manifestation of God in human flesh. That family broke up over this issue, and the gospel of John was written to help those who had lost their kin and their home place over it to remember what they stood for, and what it had cost them. And the letters of John which followed….were written, a little later, from that same fraught and frightened place…by an Elder who needed to believe he was right, and whose fear that he might not be caused him to anathematize the friends and family who disagreed with him. So, out of the same mouth that says, beloved, let us love one another because love is of God, also comes the angry and shrill, we are from God, whoever knows God listens to us. (and not to them, by the way). Sometimes the bible’s best teaching is not taking at face value what is said, but in looking at how our convictions about what is most important to us lead us to behave exactly contrary to what we say we value the most. I believe in love, and if you don’t see it the way I do, then, to hell with you. Amen.

This weekend, the Rev. Fred Phelps is in town, picketing some neighboring churches and a school in Key West. Phelps is the pastor of a Baptist church in Kansas that believes that God hates —let me just substitute the word “gay people” for the word he uses—and his church’s mission is to bus around the country and picket churches, the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan, or any public venue where he believes tolerance has led God to turn His back on America. He’s an easy, and I mean easy target. Especially if I read only the nice parts of the bible that I agree with and that describe my higher nature….and skip over the parts that show my own (as well as Phelps’) smelly, dirty laundry. I know it’s easier for me to be tolerant of some stranger who says a bigoted thing or supports a wrong headed view of politics or theology…than it is to embrace someone I love, or as Steve Sapp always says, someone I ought to love, who has disappointed or grieved me by not understanding that I am always right.

Some of the bitterest theological battles I have waged have been waged without mercy in my own parents’ living room. Some of the hardest words I have ever spoken have been spoken to my daughter, or my husband, or my little brother, because when those people get under my skin, or fail to support me when I need to know that I am right (and of course that means they need to admit that they are wrong) the only thing I can think of to do to save myself from the hurt is to shove my principled living into the closet and attack. The only people who deserve the title “antichrist,” after all, are those in whom we once saw Christ—that is to say, love—face to face, but in whom now, at least for a moment, we cannot see any good at all.

Well, now I’ve gone and revealed what a mess I am, and probably not a one of you has ever fallen victim, as I have, to what I call baaad love. It comforts me a little to know that the bible isn’t much less human than I am, so that when I fall back or fail to be the kind of Christian, friend, ex- , spouse, parent, and child that I want to be, others have been down the bad love road before me, and still got up and dusted themselves off and went on reflecting the path of Christ, in the end. Sometimes, when the temptation to thunder antichrist!! is the worst, I think about this old story:

Once upon a time, a vibrant community of monks was reduced to five squabbling and cranky old men. Day after day, they went about God’s business devoid of joy and despairing of attracting neighboring townspeople to their work and worship. One day the abbot, in desperation, went to visit an old hermit who used to be the town’s rabbi. “I don’t know what to do,” he cried. Is there not some ancient wisdom that can help restore life and love to our community? “No.” said the rabbi sadly, “but I will tell you this: the messiah is one of you.” The abbot went home, puzzled and confused. “One of us?” He looked at his members and shook his head. No way. He told two of the brothers, and they, too, laughed in disbelief…and began to wonder: which one of us is messiah? On the off chance that one would turn out to be, each brother began to treat the other as if he might be Christ, and as each one both gave and received that honor, the old cranky monks became known for their extraordinary respect and kindness toward others…and thus, the community was renewed.

Mark 16:1-8

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining
I believe in love even when I cannot feel it
And I believe in God, even when God is silent
I believe through every trial, there is always a way.

—attributed to a Jewish prisoner in the Holocaust

After the Good Friday service, as the evening darkened in the side yard where we few had gathered for worship, my friend said, Holy Week is almost over, and isn’t it a good thing, at least, that there have been no grave crises or disasters on top of everything else? Well, I said darkly, it’s still only Friday. And of course, I was joking, and we both laughed, and went our way. And then, Saturday morning, the phone rang and I heard the voice of my friend say my sister is dead. There was an accident, and her son called us last night, and she was my little sister and she’s gone. And today, it is Easter, and my friend is not in church, contemplating the empty tomb, but rather, on a plane flying to her sister’s empty home. A resurrection faith is not always easy to see, even on Easter.

The gospel of Mark ‘s version of the resurrection has always been an optional reading for Easter Day; its disturbing ambivalence usually passed over in favor of the more lyrical and celebrative story of the resurrection told in the gospel of John. Though the church has spent the entirety of the liturgical year following Mark’s urgent and powerful telling of Jesus’ story, the abrupt and, let’s face it, disturbing train wreck that is Mark’s last line—and they ran away, and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid—makes no sense to a people who have been primed by the good news of the gospel to anticipate a happy ending.

Anybody with half a brain knows this is an awful way to end a story that was supposed to be good news. Even the other gospel writers figured that out, and embellished Mark’s stark announcement and disappointing failures with a soulful walk down the Emmaus road, a breaking of bread with a mysterious stranger turned risen Lord, a breakfast on the beach, and a be not afraid, touch my hands and see that it is I who stand before you.

That people of faith and good will are uneasy with silence and ambiguity should surprise none of us. When someone you know is suffering, don’t you try to offer comfort?, hope? A family stunned by sudden, inexplicable loss will sit around, sifting through clues and telling fragments of stories again and again, trying to make the senseless coherent . , as if understanding will somehow heal what has been shattered. If you are lost in a world of hurt in the present moment, afraid of what the future holds, don’t you try to tell yourself, if I just could know that everything will work out in the end, if I could find some hope to cling to, I could hang on a while longer. It is human nature to hope; indeed, some would say, it is the spark of the divine within us. But sometimes the divine impulse is not the easy one.

Sometimes the new life we pray for must wait for the hard and holy work of bearing with courage our terror and our awe, living with our fear, and holding our faith in silence.

The early church knew that there was something really wrong about the ending of the gospel of Mark, and they did their best to fix it, stitching in a couple of alternative endings to improve the product, like a movie producer who, having learned from pre-screening that his ending caused people to reject the film entirely, calls back the actors and shoots a different final scene. The problem is, changing the ending does, in fact, distort the storyteller’s original intent… .changing the ending changes the story.

The gospel of Mark is not a story about his followers performing miracles, as one ending suggests. Nor does it glorify a heavenly, divine Jesus at the expense of the one who taught and healed and believed that the kindom of God was being wrought by revolutionary change in human circumstance and human community, right here on earth. The gospel of Mark does not glorify those who believe, and condemn doubt and failure, as another ending suggests. The real ending of the gospel of Mark embraces the human, both in Jesus and in us. It is a gospel less about resurrection, and more about discipleship. It is a story about what it means to love God and to follow Jesus… even when, and perhaps especially when, you and those around you fail and fall apart.

But if the other gospels said too much, and the additions to the gospel of Mark got the ending wrong, betraying Mark’s experience and intent, with what are we left? What are we to do with a faith story that begins with good news but ends with its surviving characters stunned, afraid, and silent in the face of an announcement of resurrection? Does God show up even when, like the women, we are undone, stunned and speechless in the face of a hope we do not understand and are not yet ready to touch?

In Binding the Strong Man, a Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, Ched Myers writes: what do we say to brothers and sisters who in good faith did they best they could, despite all the mistakes and walked away empty-handed? Something has to be said, there is too much at stake.1 In this gospel, failure and faithlessness are not outside the horizons of believing. . .but at its very heart. And this must be good news to those of us who have been broken, in our faith or in our lives. Like Jesus and his disciples, we have been deserted… and we have deserted those we loved, and wept bitterly. Caught by challenges in our lives— joblessness, ill health, addiction, brokenness in relationship— do we not have good reason to question whether the “Way” we are following might not be a dead end? The sole witness to the resurrection in Mark—the young man dressed in white— is proof that our failures do not, in fact, lead us away from God… but into the heart of Christian witness and faithful practice. In the midst of the passion narrative, while the disciples run away and Peter denies Jesus, two verses in chapter fourteen describe a young man who, having followed his teacher into the garden, becomes terrified and tries to escape the soldiers gathered to arrest Jesus. As he turns to flee, he is caught by his clothing, but tears himself loose, and runs away naked. He meant to do the right thing; but was overmastered by his fear and by a danger he was not strong enough to face. He is never mentioned again in the scripture, except… some say that the “young man in white” at the tomb was no angel… but that same young man whom Jesus loved and forgave, a naked, ashamed deserter whom God re-clothed in love and mercy, and sent to the tomb to show comfort and faith to the three women, who, like him, were frightened, fleeing, and silent. God shows up when we come back from our own failures and frailties to stand beside a neighbor who is facing their own time of trial.

A gospel that ends so abruptly in silence begs for someone—anyone—to jump in and carry on. If the women never spoke up, how was the story of the resurrection told? If fear was the final experience, how did the church at last find its voice of reconciliation, love, and welcome? Who carried on? In the early eighties, a German novelist, Michael Ende, wrote The Neverending Story, which concerns a boy, Bastian, who is so alienated from his family and his community that he escapes into a book. His world becomes that story in a place called Fantastica. Bastian loves this story, until he begins to discover that the characters in it are beginning to seek his help in order to resolve their crises. He tries to remain in his fantasy of perfect detachment. . .but comes to understand that the story he is reading is doomed unless he gets involved. Like the women at Jesus’ tomb in the gospel of Mark, Bastian waits, remains silent, paralyzed by fear: and then to his horror, he finds the story turning back on itself, dragging his name into the unfolding disaster. Finally, because he can do nothing else, he jumps into the story, where his presence gives the story new life, a resurrection. And when he leaves the Story at last, he learns that his life and his relationships in the real world have been renewed and transformed. On Friday morning a man was commuting to work on the Palmetto Expressway. In front of him, another car was cut off in traffic, swerved to avoid an accident, and flipped, hitting the median. The car burst into flames. It was someone else’s tragedy, and the responsibility of Fire Rescue, but the man and three others stopped their cars, ran to the burning vehicle, and working together, pulled out the driver and then his wife, removing them to safety. Not one of those disciples ever learned the others’ names… but when the man walked into work a half hour late, sweaty and covered in blood, someone’s story had not end in tragedy, and another’s story was transformed forever.

In this gospel, the end does not answer all questions, but asks the most important one of all, in the absence of the Risen Hero, in the face of fear and silence, who will take up the story with his or her own life?

Mark’s gospel does not end in Jerusalem with an empty tomb, pointing the church us toward heaven where the risen Christ waits to save us. It does not end with a Resurrection, but rather with a man whose own hope was resurrected pointing his friends back toward Galilee, where it all began, where they can begin again. “Galilee” is a border town, a rough and chaotic place. There, believers mix it up with people whose world view and experience is alien to their own. There, one language is spoken on your street, and another is spoken one street over. Fragile ties are created between people who are different as enemies live side by side. Everyone fears, everyone fails, everyone must get over themselves in order to get along, in order to live. Fifteen years ago this month, the country of Rwanda blew itself apart when tribes who had lived as neighbors engaged in a bitter war of genocide. Today, in the faces of children who were born out of the violence of rape in wartime, the necessity of finding a way to live in the borderlands can be plainly seen. John Rucyhana, who had fled Rwanda as a teenager, returned to his homeland in the midst of the violence because, as he said, I needed to have the grip of the horror and then be part of the solution. He is an Anglican bishop now, just another failed disciple jumping into the story and returning to Galilee, where it all began. He founded a school in 2001 called “Sonrise,” for the orphans of the million who died, because the son of God rises into the misery, into our darkness.

On the borderland with Hutus and Tutsis and their children, he is building villages of reconciliation, to bring victims and perpetrators together. One resident is Jeannette, who lost seven family members in the genocide. What is it like for her to live side by side with a neighbor who admits to killing women and children? In the beginning it was very difficult. But now, I forgive him. Rwandans cannot afford to wait until the pain is over, Rucyhana says. In this small country, he sees a parable of reconciliation, as if God is using the brokenness, the ashes to set an example for others. . . if Rwanda can recover from this, other nations can recover.2

Reading Mark’s gospel reminds us: finishing Jesus’ story is no easy matter . . if it were, they would have done it long ago, and we would have long ago forgotten its pat and happy ending. In the end, there is only one genuine witness to the resurrection: for each of us to follow in discipleship where Jesus has already led, into and through the borderlands, those hard places where most of life unfolds, where a faith rooted in ambiguity, earthiness, and a living human community is being built, and we ourselves are being raised by one another and by God, again and again, to new life.

1 Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: a Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, p 456.

2 Quoted in Newsweek, 4/13/09; from ‘Against the Odds”, a radio documentary of Ellis Cose Inc., debuting on Public Radio stations this week.

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.