As Kingfishers Catch Fire (10,000 Places) 4.26.20

As Kingfishers Catch Fire (10,000 Places)

A Homily on Luke 24:13-35
by Griff Martin

For The Third Sunday of Eastertide (and the Seventh Sunday of Online Worship)

April 26, 2020 

*This document comes from an oral manuscript.

Can you imagine it today, you are a long walk and suddenly someone is there beside you, someone you don’t know, and you look at them strange… you notice they are not wearing a mask, they are not social distancing and even stranger than all that, the first question they ask you, “Hey, what is going on here? Why are people wearing face masks and walking so far apart and it feels strangely empty on the roads? What is going on?”

You would look at them confused that they had missed the news for the last 7 weeks. It would be at the very least a strange experience. 

This must have been exactly how Cleopas and his companion felt in the narrative we just read. They have been in Jerusalem for the last few days and now they are journeying back home, to their house in Emmaus, which is about 7 miles from Jerusalem and everyone on the road is in a strange daze of sorts, trying to figure out all that has happened -- it has been a strange couple of days in Jerusalem, Passover did not feel like Passover this year. 

So they are walking home and they are having the same conversation over and over and over…. Do you understand it? Do you think? What do you think about that? Doing that all too human thing we do when our minds can’t fully grasp something so we just mentally circle it over and over looking for a way to grasp it, to get it.

And then this stranger appears, now we have 20/20 vision with this text so we know who the stranger is, but they don’t. So stay with them. 

“What are you all talking about? The stranger asks.

This stranger seems to not respect social boundaries. He’s willing to join you anywhere, willing to butt into a conversation and he makes everything his business. 

Cleopas looks at him, confused and finally says, “Are you the only one around here that does not know what is going on?” And then Cleopas tells the stranger all about what has been going on in Jerusalem… this Jesus of Nazareth, he was something else -- incredible preacher, a prophet, someone who seemed to really love people, this Jesus who was doing religion a way people actually understood and felt empowered by and this last week the other religious leaders turned him over and he was killed…."

And then Cleopas’ eyes fill with tears, the kind that just sit there and blur your vision, they don’t fall or go anywhere, almost miraculous beyond gravity, they just sit on the edge of your eyelids for you to look through and the rest of the world to look in… and with those tears in his eyes Cleopas utters what I think are the 4 saddest words in Scripture, “But we had hoped….”

Notice the past tense…. It’s not "we are hoping," it’s "we had hoped…." We wanted this to come true and it has not, we wanted it to be like this and it’s not, we wanted this quarantine to be over and it’s not, we wanted to be back to normal life and we aren’t, we wanted Jesus to be this way and he isn’t…. We had hoped. 

And then Cleopas continues, “And if all of that is not strange enough…. Some of the followers, the women went to the tomb and they said the tomb was empty and that an angel told them Jesus was alive…. But all they saw was emptiness, not Jesus.” 

And then we move from the saddest words in Scripture, to the most frustrating words in Scripture: “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he [being Jesus] interpreted to them the things about himself in all of the Scripture.” And that is all we have of that.... Jesus explains Scripture, explains the mysteries that we are still working with and all that gets jotted down is a summary sentence. 

Which is probably because as soon as Jesus starts talking, they go back to their own mental spaces…. doing that all too human thing we do when our minds can’t fully grasp something so we just mentally circle it over and over looking for a way to grasp it, to get it… even if the answer is right there in front of us. 

They keep walking and going, 7 miles home to Emmaus.

And when they get there, they have grown fond of this stranger so they insist that he comes with them to their homes for dinner and a rest and the stranger obliges their request; it seems this stranger loves invitations to our homes. 

They go into the house, a quick wash of hands and feet, a change of clothing into something that has not been on for 7 hot miles, one of them begins to look around the kitchen for what they have at hand for a quick meal… a jug of wine that they are not sure if it’s red or white or it if has a date, some fruit, hummus and then that crusty bread they pray is not too old at this point. 

And they sit down, home from their journey and maybe for the first time, they have quit their thinking or at the very least quieted their thinking…. They have come to that moment at the end of the day that is just pure surrender, what’s done is done and what’s not done is not going to be done, their bodies are weary from the journey, their emotions are exhausted from the roller coaster trip they went on, their bodies and hearts and heads are tired….It’s finally time to stop, to be home and rest, to eat and fill up, to restore….

And they sit at the table as all of that washes over them and they take a deep sigh… and then this stranger takes the bread… and pay attention to verbs we get here, they seem to be some of Jesus’ favorite: took, blessed, broke, gave….

And it’s in that moment their eyes are finally fully opened to see exactly who is there with them -- it’s Jesus, the one they had hoped for, the one they hoped would join them, the one we hope will join us... or maybe better put, the one we need to open our eyes and see what is already all around us.

This week I have been reading the most extraordinary memoir, it’s titled “In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying.” It’s the true story of Yongey Rinpoche, a Tibetan master and abbot of 3 monasteries, who at the age of 36 leaves the monastery with the intent of spending 4 years as a beggar, throwing off his title and role in order to experience being a human being without anything like a title or worldly security.

One of the many things he learned in this journey was the difficulty of training our minds and not getting lost in our minds, that human beings have so much we are processing all the time and how that processing actually inhibits us truly seeing things. 

He writes, “Throughout the day we ask, Where are my kids? Where are my keys? Where is my phone? We tend not to ask,  Where is my mind? If we can train ourselves to slow down and watch our thoughts -- not to get carried away by them, but just to notice -- we will be amazed by the universe that we traverse moment after moment.” 

It’s the same thing every mystic has taught us over and over again: that God is everywhere, God is all around us, God is playing this divine game of hide and seek and God hides in the most obvious of places… we just have to have the vision to see it. 

And I think the vision has less to do with our eyes and more to do with our hearts and minds… we see what we are looking for and we pay attention to that on which our minds are centered. 

Where are my kids? Where are my keys? Where is my phone?

Where is God?

What are we truly looking for? What do we want to see?

You all know the practice… Close your eyes and think of a color, concentrate on it hard, now open your eyes…. You will see the color everywhere, it was there all the time but now it pops out at you in a new way…. You thought of red and now you see the red bird in that painting, the red edge of a book, a red toy car in the corner…. You did not make these things appear, you just opened your eyes to their presence. 

What are we looking for? What do we want to see? 

One of my favorite preachers describes herself as a “detective of the divine.” Another friend calls herself an "ordinary mystic." One of my favorite poets reminds us that “Christ plays in 10,000 places.” Our job, our call, our salvation is to look for God in the everyday, to see that God is everywhere. 

We join Cleopas and his companion this day in the fact that our minds are doing a lot of work, that our thinking and feeling are on overdrive and we are doing a lot of walking…. And we join them in the fact that we are at home in the place where we can hopefully find pure surrender, where what’s done is done and what’s not done is not going to be done, a place to stop, to be home and rest, to eat and fill up, to restore….

And a place in all of that, a place we can see Jesus, we can hear Jesus, we can experience Jesus, we can be in the presence of Jesus, we can experience Jesus blessing, breaking and giving us sustenance. 

In the space we have been given these days -- a strange verb, but perhaps very true -- in the space that we have been given these days, may we train our minds to see Jesus, the Jesus who is already here, already surrounding us, the Jesus whose arms are outstretched just waiting for us to experience his embrace.

Now is a good time to train our hearts and minds to see what is really real, that which we are hoping for. 

Amen and Amen.

*artwork: Road to Emmaus by Michael Torevell