Musical Prelude and Service.
Sermon – Based on Luke 24:13–35
So, imagine you are taking a long walk home with a friend. It’s warm and you are reflecting on recent events in your life. You are grieving the recent death of a friend, so you aren’t paying great attention to your surroundings.
Before you know it, a stranger is walking next to you and your companion. You strike up a conversation and as you near your home you suddenly decide to invite this stranger to come and eat with you and spend the night.
Does this sound like something you would do? Or upon first meeting this stranger would you slow down and let him walk in front of you, or speed up or perhaps cross to the other side of the street? Anything to avoid interacting with this newcomer?
Perhaps you provide a little banter, but what are the chances you actually invite this person into your home to share your meal?
Everything in our lives tells us don’t talk with strangers. We are told that from the moment we are enabled to leave our homes independently. Be wary of strangers, don’t trust them.
I don’t want to argue to place absolute trust in people we don’t know. As a middle age, middle class white man, my experience in the world is very different from women, people of colour, young people.
But I also think there is a difference between being cautious and viewing every stranger we meet as a threat.
In the story we heard this morning, these two followers of Jesus encounter a stranger. They enter into a conversation and invite this man into their home and share a meal. In doing so, they come to realize they are talking with and breaking bread with Jesus. They recognize the face of Jesus in this stranger.
We encounter the risen Christ in the people we meet the people we share a meal with; the people we get to know and the people we treat with love and compassion.
In recent days, the followers of Jesus saw their movement betrayed. They saw their leader arrested, interrogated, tortured, and executed in a violent and public manner. Many of Jesus’s inner circle are in hiding, afraid they are next. The concern they will follow Jesus into custody and possible death is real. These disciples on the road to Emmaus have every reason to be suspicious and perhaps paranoid. And yet they welcome this stranger into conversation and ultimately not their home.
These decisions and actions run counter to so much we are taught, either at home or by a culture grounded in suspicion, in fear and in paranoia. So much of our culture, our news, and our entertainment teaches us the stranger is malicious, seeking to harm us and steal from us.
This way of seeing the world is poisoning us, dividing us, and increasingly killing us.
Reading the news this past week while preparing for this sermon, the significance, or the critical importance of the message at the root of today’s scripture was made all the more clear.
An 84-year-old man, apparently fearing a home invasion, shoots a 16-year-old boy who knocked on the wrong door. A man, who knows what he was thinking, steps out of his home to shoot at a car
with young people who turned into the wrong driveway. In doing so he kills a young woman. Another teenager accidentally opens the door to the wrong car on her way home from cheerleading practise and she and her friends are shot. Two are wounded.
Absolutely, these incidences point to the danger of easy access to guns, but there is something else we need to confront going on here. I see a fear of the stranger; a refusal to interact with your neighbour and a willingness to immediately resort to lethal violence when confronted by those you don’t recognize.
It is also important to note that the young man who was shot while looking to gather his little brothers went to three different homes in that neighbourhood seeking help before someone finally responded. And then he was told to lie down with his arms held out in front of him. Even as he was bleeding from a gunshot wound, he was still met by fear and distrust.
Jesus tells us our neighbour is not just the people we know and like. Our neighbour is also the person who tries our patience or the person we were taught to hate – the person we never wanted to know. And God calls on us to love them, to welcome them and to feed them.
In today’s scripture reading, we are further told that when we take time to meet them, to feed them and to listen to them, we will see the face of Jesus, who was tortured and killed by those who despised him and feared him and yet rose from the dead.
So much of our culture encourages us, teaches us that we cannot trust those who do not look like us, do not talk like us or do not think like us. In fact, we are told – maybe not in blunt words, but in images and a constant drum beat of horror stories and cautionary tales – that we should fear those who seem unfamiliar. We are urged to not see them as human beings, but as a potential enemy poised to harm you or steal from you. Fear or distrust what is different, fight back against the spectre of change and don’t dare let compassion and a love of your neighbour interfere with living as sheltered and comfortable life as you desire.
To follow Jesus is to look for the face of the risen Christ in the people you meet. To follow Jesus is to hope for the new heaven and the new earth that Jesus envisions for us, and that God promises those weeping in pain at the violence and oppression that are so much a feature of this current world. To follow Jesus is to know and celebrate the fact that new life, new possibilities, and change are very much a part of God’s wondrous creation. Jesus encourages us to live life with courage and daring. To dare to love, to live with compassion and not let fear; fear of the unknown or the fear of a new world rule our lives.
And part of our call as the children of God, is to recognize that everyone we meet is a beloved child of God, and when we take time to look them in the eye we know we have just met the risen Christ.
Music provided with permission through licensing with CCLI License number
2701258 and One License # A-731789
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