There is a story in this Sunday’s Gospel that I keep coming back to, year after year, and it never gets smaller. Two people are walking away from Jerusalem. The city where everything fell apart. The city where the person they loved and followed was arrested, tried, and executed by the state. They are walking away because there is nothing left to stay for.
And a stranger falls into step beside them.
He asks what they are talking about. And Luke, who wrote this story, gives us a detail I find almost unbearably human: they stopped. And their faces were downcast. That is what grief looks like on the road. You stop moving. Your face falls. You tell the story again to the person who asked, because telling it is the only thing you know how to do with it.
The stranger listens. And then, over seven miles of road, he talks with them. He opens the scriptures. He helps them see their own story in a new way. And they do not recognize him. Not yet. They will not recognize him until that evening, at a table, in the breaking of bread.
“Were not our hearts burning while he talked with us on the road, while he opened the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32, CPDV)
That question is the center of everything for me this week.
Were not our hearts burning? They ask it after the fact, after he has vanished from their sight, after the moment has passed. But the burning was real the whole time. They just did not know what it was while it was happening. That is how the presence of the risen Christ so often works. You recognize it looking back. You understand in retrospect what you were in the middle of.
I think about that a lot when I look at this community.
I think about the people who have walked into Saint Francis Parish and Outreach carrying something heavy. Some of them have been told by other churches that they do not belong. Some of them are afraid right now in ways that are very concrete, because their names are on no list that protects them, because their families are split, because their country of birth is being used against them. Some of them are queer and exhausted from fighting for the right to simply exist in public life. Some of them are women who have been told the Church has no room for what they carry.
And they walk in. And they sit down. And something happens that is hard to name while it is happening.
That is the Emmaus road. That is what it looks like when the risen Christ walks beside people who are walking away from everything that fell apart.
What the Spirit Builds: WALK
This Sunday we are in the third week of our post-Easter series, What the Spirit Builds. Each week of this Easter season carries one word. The first week was TOGETHER. Last week was OPEN. This week the word is WALK.
The Spirit builds a community that goes out on the road to where people are. Not a community that sits inside its own walls waiting for people to find their way in. A community that moves. That accompanies. That listens before it speaks. That walks seven miles beside someone who is grieving before it says anything about resurrection.
That is the model in Luke 24. Jesus does not announce himself at the beginning of the road. He walks alongside. He asks questions. He hears the whole story before he opens his mouth to interpret it. And when he does open the scriptures, he does it walking, in motion, on the way.
The Church is a walking community, or it is not the Church. Our ministry at Saint Francis has always been street-level, people-centered, out on the road. This text is not asking us to do something new. It is asking us to understand what we have already been doing and why it matters.
There is one more thing I want to name about this story, because I think it is important and it does not always get said.
When the two disciples realize who they have been walking with, their first impulse is to run back to Jerusalem. Not to sit in the moment. Not to process it quietly. To run back to the city they just left, the city of danger and loss and broken hopes, and tell the people who are still there: the Lord is alive. We saw him. He was on the road with us and we did not know it.
The experience of the risen Christ is not meant to be kept private. It moves outward. It sends you back into the place you were walking away from. It makes you want to find the people who are still sitting in locked rooms, still afraid, still saying it is over, and tell them: I have been on the road. He was there. The story is not over.
I do not know what you are carrying into church this Sunday. But I know that some of you are on a road that has felt very long, and some of you are asking whether the burning you feel is real, and whether anything you are doing matters in a world that seems to get harder by the week.
I believe it is real.
I believe the risen Christ is already walking beside you. That the conversation has already started. That your heart has already been burning and you may not have had words for it yet.
Come and find out. The table will be set, the bread will be broken, and that is when we recognize him.
We will see you Sunday.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer
