All Saints’, Dorval
April 23, 2023
Léon Augustin Lhermitte, “Friend of the humble (Supper at Emmaus)”, 1892. From Art in the Christian Tradition.
Three years ago, preaching on Zoom during the first COVID lockdown, I said this:
“Cleophas and his companion, after all, did not invite Jesus to a solemn High Mass, or even a dinner party with the special tablecloths and the good china; they invited him to whatever they could scrounge after a two-and-a-half hour walk home to an empty house.”
The painting by Léon Augustin Lhermitte, displayed on the slide you can see on your screens, depicts Cleophas and the other disciple as two men, being waited on by a woman and a child. The Scripture, though, says nothing about servants, and I’m inclined to believe that the second disciple was Cleophas’ wife, Mary, whom we know existed because the gospels mention her elsewhere. I wonder whether the house was a mess when they got there; whether they had anything to offer Jesus other than the bread; whether either of them had any misgivings about inviting Jesus into their home without any chance to prepare.
On Thursday morning, some of the members of the Ginger Group sat in a circle in the children’s area at the rear of the church, bouncing around ideas from the results of the Natural Church Development survey. The survey results indicate that the two areas of our parish life that we need to work on are “Needs-Based Evangelism” and “Passionate Spirituality” – in other words, if we want our church to grow and flourish, we need to get more comfortable with noticing where God is acting in our lives, and with talking to people we know about it (in a non-browbeating way). Dave was also tossing around the idea of taking this Sunday’s Gospel reading, about the road to Emmaus, as our “trademark” scripture for this NCD cycle.
As we discussed the idea of inviting people into our lives and the lives of this congregation by talking to them about our experiences of God and asking them to come to worship with us, someone – I think it was Mark Weatherley – said, half-jokingly, “Well, you wouldn’t ask someone over for dinner without cleaning up first!” And the rest of us laughed, and I pointed out that that’s exactly what Cleophas and his companion did – at the end of a long, weary road, after an exhausting and traumatic weekend, with no chance to stop by the dépanneur or run the vacuum cleaner, they nevertheless invited a stranger into their home.
But Mark had a valid point. We’re not always comfortable with sharing the less presentable parts of ourselves – with each other, with our friends who don’t go to church, and sometimes even with God. We want to make sure our messes are cleaned up and all our trash is, if not thrown away, at least stuffed in a closet where our guests can’t see it.
We’ve been trying for a long time to clean things up around here. We want to get past the raw feelings and persistent hurts of the merger. We want to renovate our kitchen and repave the parking lot and finally get around to hanging those stained glass windows that have been sitting in a wooden box for four years. We want to have a thriving children’s program, and binders full of well-thought-out and realistic policies and procedures, and a clear sense of what our unique ministry calling is (and what it isn’t).
And, on some of these fronts, we’ve made a lot of progress and continue to make more. And on some, we feel stuck, in that liminal space I kept talking about during Lent. But we keep trying.
And none of this should keep us from having guests over.
In the midst of the mess, we still need to invite people. No, we’re not perfect. (Who is?) Yes, we have a lot of work to do. But think of the reasons this congregation is important to you. Those things don’t change just because we don’t have all our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed.
If you have found meaning, and life, and joy, in this community of faith, why would you hesitate to share that gift with others who are also searching for meaning, and life, and joy?
Because God is working, all around us. A surprising number of people have in fact walked in our doors over the last few years, and found something here that enticed them to stay.
If we have experienced the love of God here, even amid the mess, then we can trust God that others will experience it too.
We shouldn’t feel bad, though, about sometimes having a hard time recognizing Jesus even when he’s right in front of our faces. After all, Cleophas and his companion, who had known Jesus for months or years, who had made the life-changing decision to become his disciples, talked to him on this occasion for at least an hour before they finally recognized him in the breaking of the bread.
They were not afraid to invite a stranger – to invite God in the person of a stranger – into the middle of their mess.
When I preached on this text three years ago, the mess we were in the middle of was pandemic lockdown. We had just about hit the six-week mark, the point at which many studies have shown that human beings reach a breaking point with the kind of ongoing crisis that COVID represented. We were losing our patience with staying home, with being on top of our family members and stuck in the middle of our messes – or with not having seen or spoken to another human being in person in a month and a half.
Three years ago, this text was painful and poignant because we were not finding Jesus in the breaking of the bread. It was the third Sunday of Easter, and the last time we had celebrated Communion was the third Sunday in Lent. We would not do so again for another eleven months.
This morning, we gather once more around the table, as we do, week in, week out. We meet God in the place God has promised to show up: in broken bread and in wine outpoured, God’s body and blood offered for us. In all our humanity and messiness, God meets us, feeds us, and loves us.
There are a lot of things we want to do. A lot of ways we want to grow. A lot of plans we have for being a better, stronger, more focused congregation. We pray that many of those hopes will come to pass.
But whether they do or not, God is here. Whether we recognize him or not, God is here. God is among us, regardless of the mess. And we don’t need to wait until we’ve cleaned up, to gather our guests around the table and let God be known to us in the breaking of the bread.
Amen.
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