​26 April 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
III Easter
 
“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road …” (Luke 24)
 
            Last week, we looked at the story of “doubting Thomas” through the lens of stress, and talked about how in these times we might better understand him as “stressed out Thomas.”
            Today, I’d like to take a similar tack with the story of the Road to Emmaus, reading it as a story of feeling disoriented. Like the story of Thomas, it is a familiar Easter episode. Two disciples are walking on Easter afternoon along the road to Emmaus, a town just outside of Jerusalem, talking about all that has happened in the city – Jesus’ arrest, his trial, and of course his death. I imagine that their reasons for going are that they are trying to escape it all, leaving the chaos of the city for a greater calm in the country. But now new rumors are circulating that some women have been to the tomb and there had a vision that Jesus is alive. These disciples’ heads must be spinning: the text is pretty insistent that they are “talking and discussing,” trying to make sense of it all.
            And then suddenly, Jesus himself catches up with them along the road, but in their disoriented frame of mind they don’t even recognize that it is him. They unburden themselves to this stranger about all that they have seen and heard. And then, starting at the beginning, Jesus tries to explain to them how all of the scriptures have been fulfilled in him. And yet – they still don’t realize that it is he who is with them.
            You know the outcome already: only when the three of them stop at an inn for supper, and he breaks bread with them, do they suddenly realize who it is—but in that moment he vanishes from their sight, and they race back to Jerusalem to share the news of their encounter.
            If Thomas could not believe because he was under such stress, it seems to me we might think that these two unnamed disciples could not recognize him, because they were feeling so disoriented. So much has happened that has turned their world inside out and upside down, that they just aren’t able to see or think very clearly.
            That, too, is a feeling many of us share right now. We wake in the morning, not sure of what day of the week it is. We think we ought to get to work, but are not sure of what that looks like while we are confined at home, or with so much of society closed down. We listen to the news, and hear wildly conflicting reports of what is and isn’t a safe way forward. We long for companionship, but must remain distanced, for how long, we’re not sure. And our heads feel as if they are spinning.
            Or, perhaps we are among those who continue to perform the essential tasks that keep the rest of us going. But there to, the sense of isolation from so much of the community, and the disruption of so much of life undermines our mental equilibrium.
            So being in a similar state of mind, what happens to the two disciples is hardly surprising, Their encounter with Jesus is all part of their disorientation, until they experience something that is familiar and intimate: the breaking of bread. In that moment, their confused hearts and minds are given a new sense of bearing, and suddenly the meaning of all that has happened falls into place with complete clarity.
            But what they discover, is more than the simple fact of Jesus having been with them: they discover that Jesus’ presence, paradoxically takes the form of absence. Recognizing him, they also lose sight of him, except that even then they continue to feel his presence in the space that is between them. So it isn’t an absence of emptiness, but an absence of filling, enveloping them with the sense of purpose through which they are again able to understand their own life.
            Jesus’ presence, you might say, is a bit like the empty space in one of those images of two faces looking at each other, which in silhouette form a cup [hold up the image]. The space would be nothing at all, without both faces framing it. But with them, it is a clear shape that holds the promise of something social and mutually binding between them.
            We are accustomed to thinking of finding Jesus in the Other, and that is true enough. But the story of Emmaus also suggests that we find Jesus in the space between ourselves and the Other: a space which we both contribute to shaping and occupying. Without the presence of an Other (whether that is a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or a lover … or a stranger), it’s hard to know what the space is that we ourselves occupy, hard to know who we are.
            In this time of being distanced from one another, we might think of the space that separates us not as a burden or pain to be born, but as a sacred space, a space which by honoring it, we together shape into a vessel of care, hope and solidarity. Perhaps the space we keep between us, is filled more than ever by Jesus himself.
            Playing off of the image of the two faces that I showed you a moment ago, the poet Rowan Williams penned these lines in his poem, “Emmaus”:
 
Between us is filled up, the silence
is filled up, lines of our hands
and faces pushed into shape
by the solid stranger, and the static
breaks up our waves like dropped stones.
So it is necessary to carry him with us,
cupped between hands and profiles …
 
            In short, our lives are given their orientation by one another – or rather, by the presence that is in the space that is between us, that mysterious presence that fills the gap, as present at this very moment as the air we breath—even now, when so much of life otherwise seems distant, shut off, and disorienting. Amen.

​19 April 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
II Easter
 
 
“Unless I touch the wound in his side, I will not believe.” (Jn 20)
 
 
            The context in which we read scripture always uncannily affects the way we hear it. Today, for instance, when we encounter so-called “Doubting Thomas” (as we always do on the Sunday after Easter), it suddenly occurs to me that perhaps what was going on for Thomas was not a struggle with doubt, so much as coping with stress. What if we thought of a stressed-out Thomas, rather than a doubting Thomas?
 
            We’re all under a lot of stress just now. It shows up in all sorts of ways. An unexpectedly sharp word to a spouse, or a child, or a pet. Strange, menacing dreams that we cannot begin to decipher. Low-grade feelings of depression. Tight, sore muscles. I hear it in my own voice. I feel it in my own body.
 
            Which makes me more attuned than before, to seeing the multiple and vivid signs of stress in the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Peter’s lapse into denying himself, by denying Jesus. The disciples’ flight, and then their hiding out of fear behind closed doors in a kind of self-quarantine. The self-preoccupation of the disciples on the road to Emmaus that blinds them to recognizing Jesus when we walks alongside them. And, of course, Thomas’ own irritable dismissal of what the others tell him: “Damn it!” you can imagine him snapping, “here we all are, afraid for our lives, and now you’re telling me you’ve seen Jesus. Give me a break!”
 
            Stress has a funny way of bringing out the worst in us. You might think, that when things get difficult, we would resort to our best selves as a coping mechanism. But often it’s the other way around. Our thinking gets muddied, rather than clarified. Our temper grows short, rather than patient. Our imagination gets dulled, rather than inspired. Our confidence goes limp, rather than girding itself up.
 
            And that, I think, is where Thomas was at on Easter Day. Confused, ill tempered, narrow minded, wilted. And it’s where many of us are at as well right now.
 
            In this week’s New Yorker, David Remnick writes about the phenomenon that has taken hold in the quarantined city of New York of nightly cheering at 7 pm. In one sense, the cheering is itself a sign of stress, and of the need for some cathartic release from it.
           
            But the cheering is also a communal experience of coming together out of self-imposed isolation, to recognize those who are helping to make this pandemic bearable, by continuing to labor (sometimes at great personal cost) for the rest of us: ER doctors and nurses, grocery clerks, deliverymen, sanitation workers and pharmacists—even artists, musicians, and actors who though unemployed, create and post their work online as encouragement.
 
            And perhaps with the release that comes from that nightly cheering, also comes a reminder that we are not merely enduring individual loss and isolation: this is also something we are in together, and we are giving collective birth to the future that will come after this trauma is over. Our individual isolation, also becomes a new social solidarity. So even those who are most shut in at this particular moment, are in some way contributing to a great, shared delivery of a future that has not yet come, or perhaps even at yet been imagined.
 
            I hope that is a perspective we will all take to heart: that our isolation is not pointless or merely necessary, but pregnant with possibility. Imagine the potential of an entire nation—globe, really—forced into a period of Sabbath reflection and recalibration, even while there are many others who face intense struggles of life and death every day that have a way of forcing life’s priorities to the forefront.
 
            Perhaps this is what happened to Thomas, on the second occasion when Jesus appeared to the disciples, when he was able to hear Jesus’ greeting: “Peace be with you.” In those words, there was hope for a future that without Jesus, had seemed infinitely remote and unattainable—distressingly so. But in Jesus’ un-extinguished life, here again was hope for a future yet to be built, the New Creation of Jesus’ promise. Thomas’ stress over what had happened, turned in that moment to a hope for what might happen.
 
            So in these stressful days—and let’s not pretend that they are not, whether we are at home alone, with our children, or on the front lines of the fight—let your thoughts turn to what lies ahead, at least from time to time. What is it that makes resisting this plague worth the effort, and what future do you imagine is being birthed by the pangs of the current day? What kind of world is it that you believe is worth fighting for, even now? Is this a great turning point in history, at which we will fail to turn? Or will it be a rekindling of our common identity as human beings, and of our sense of oneness with creation?
 
            The words we read today from First Peter might inspire our response: “By God’s great mercy God has given to us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable … and unfading.”
 
            We are all prophets of a future not yet our own. Amen.
 

​12 April 2020
Pastor Joe Britton
St. Michael’s Church
Easter Sunday
 
“The women left the tomb with fear and great joy.” (Mt. 28)
 
             When stress is applied to a system, the cracks are quickly revealed. A dam, for instance, breaks under pressure from a flood; or a bridge collapses from the burden of too heavy a load. That such failure is revelatory of underlying weaknesses is a truism that has been often repeated as of late. We recognize all to well that the stresses placed on our social system by the coronavirus have revealed some deep cracks within: the consequences of inadequate health care, for instance, or the gap between rich and poor, or the neglect of facts in pursuit of ideological purity.
            But that is not the point I want to make here this morning. Rather, I want us to use that image of structural failure resulting from internal flaws, to consider the effect of the stress that was placed on the human condition by the execution of Jesus, the one who spoke only of love. To put Jesus to death, placed a great and unbearable stress on what we all know as the fallen system by which human society functions. Evil and corruption simply could not sustain themselves, brought face to face with  his mercy and love — and the effect of that stress, it turns out, was that the system cracked and fell apart.
            Out of its ruins, came the new life we call the resurrection — not as a miraculous interruption of the ordinary laws of nature, but as an emergence from the ruins of a corrupted creation of the pulsating, vibrating life that was already within it, and had only been obscured. In the risen Jesus, we don’t encounter some fantastical marvel: what we do encounter (perhaps for the first time) is life as it really is, as it was created in the beginning. Resurrection, in other words, is what is in fact ordinary and commonplace—the darkness of evil may obscure it, but it is the darkness itself that is peculiar.
 
            Traditionally, the homily that is delivered at the Great Vigil of Easter is one that was first given by St. John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, around the year 400. His Easter homily bubbles over with joy and enthusiasm, as if he just can’t control his eagerness to have everyone included in the Paschal feast: Have you been fasting these 40 days of Lent, he asks? Well then, come, join the celebration! Or have you perhaps been … neglectful? Well no matter, you come in too, for the feast of life is prepared for all!
            Alluding to Jesus’ parable of the laborers in the field (who were all paid the same, whether the worked a whole day or only the last hour), Chrysostom exclaims, “Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord! First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!” And how is such an unqualified welcome possible, you may ask? Because above all things, “the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.” That includes you, just as you are.
            And it is this level of unqualified acceptance that is, for us, the sign that the old ways of being human have simply collapsed under the weight of their encounter with Jesus. The stress of encountering pure love and compassion, has broken apart the hold that selfishness and deceit have held on humankind.
 
            And so, says Chrysostom, “Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of God’s goodness!
Let no one grieve at her poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.”
            Surely, these unabashed words of reassurance are a message we long to hear just now: affirmation that out of the rubble of our broken society, a new justice and integrity will arise. Encouragement that out of our dreams that have been eclipsed by economic hardship or physical loss, new opportunities will emerge. Confidence that out of the illness and death that surround us so pervasively on all sides, life will prevail.
            Chrysostom imagined the source of such encouragement this way: in his physical death, Jesus descended to the place of the dead itself, and brought with him into those shadowy regions the inexhaustible life through which all things were created. In the person of Jesus, life invaded death. Love squared off with hate. Mercy faced down violence. And the result? Life, love and mercy emerged triumphant, and the powers of darkness crumpled under the shear stress of the encounter.         
            And so, as that 4th century preacher said in his Easter homily, “Let no one fear death [any longer], for the Death of our Savior has set us free. He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.
He put it into chaos even as it tasted of His flesh.

… Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it was mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it was destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven. …
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?
Christ is Risen, and you, O death, are destroyed!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever!”




           No wonder, then, that when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to the tomb on Easter morning to mourn Jesus, and instead encountered an angel who told them, “He is not here, for he has been raised,” they went away with both great fear … and great joy. May that peace and joy also be with you this day. Amen.