What do You Want?

What do you want? And when do you want it?  We want a win, and we want it now.  We want quick fixes and easy solutions.  We want the shiny new gadget that will take us to the moon and back in the blink of an eye.  We want the big red easy button that we can push whenever we want.  And most of life is like the poster on the wall at a photocopy store.  “If you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good.  If you want it good and cheap it won’t be fast.  If you want it good and fast, it won’t be cheap.”  You choose!

Job and Bartimaeus knew that life wasn’t easy.  They knew what it meant to feel like they were blamed for the situations they found themselves in.  They knew that people disrespected them for the problems that they had, and they knew that there were no easy answers to the challenges that they faced.

Bartimaeus had people tell him to be quiet, to shut up, to stop bothering them.  They didn’t believe he had the right to bother other people, and certainly had no right to pester someone as important as Jesus.

Job had people tell him he deserved the tragedies and illnesses he experienced, he had earned all his troubles and trials.  He should just be quiet and accept his fate quietly, confess to God what he had done wrong, or even curse God so God would put him out of his misery.

Both these men were targeted with bad, arrogant theology that assumed that other people knew what was best for them more than they did themselves.  Other people knew what they should or should not be allowed to do.  Other people put controls on what they should think and how they should act.

Except those other people were wrong!  And not just a little bit wrong either, but spectacularly, arrogantly wrong.  So wrong that Job and Bart ended up with personal encounters with the holy that would forever change their lives.  Wow.

Too often we are the crowd who are focused on what we can get for ourselves, and we ignore the outsiders who also need to hear good news, or see signs of hope for their lives.  Too often we are like Job’s comforters, telling people how to think, what to think and what to do.  We assume we know the answers that will solve everyone else’s lives.  We get focussed on fixing, saving, advising and correcting other people.  We act like we know what they need to make their lives perfect, and we are blind to what they might really want and need.

And sometimes we are Job and Bartimaeus, wrestling with life experiences that hurt, that challenge, that feel like they will never end.  We face tragedy after tragedy and when we turn to the people we think will help, we are left high and dry.  We find ourselves wrestling with depression and mental illness and assume that there is nothing we can do to change it.  We struggle with the temptation to make life into a giant pity party, and to sit in our woes inviting sympathy.  We assume that somehow life is terrible and things never change.  If we are not careful, we can become a permanent victim, cynically seeing the world through pessimistic eyes that allow us to stay stuck in our apathy.  When we are caught in that broken record of negative thinking, it is hard to imagine a different future that might be better than the present.

The holy shows up and disrupts things.  The sacred experiences happen to Bartimaeus and Job despite the bad behavior of their friends and community.  Bartimaeus and Job are the ones who experience first-hand the healing that they so desperately wanted.  Job, after 42 chapters of complaining about how unfair life is and how mean God has been, changes his tune and says to everyone who will listen, “I have had a personal experience with the Holy that is so profound, so amazing and so immense that I am in wonder, and I am humbled.”  He’s like this one you tube video that tried to describe the number of galaxies in the universe. It used the metaphor of filling a swimming pool with cheerios to show how many galaxies there are - you’d need over 300 swimming pools and that’s just for the ones that the Hubble Telescope can see.  There’s even more that we can’t see.  That’s the kind of God experience Job had and of course it was humbling.

Experiences of the holy, whether it is Jesus helping us see the world in new ways, or Job discovering joy after tragedy, are rare and special.  Not everyone experiences them, but when they happen they have a way of showing up unexpectedly, even when we’ve given up hope.  One thing that helps us have that kind of experience is thinking of ourselves as disciples and learners, being humble and asking for God to be in our lives.  Job was a faithful man who regularly studied scripture, listened to the priests, went to temple and prayed to God unceasingly.  Bartimaeus was a Hebrew.  He knew scripture, and he called Jesus the Son of David, recognizing Jesus as a royal person, full of authority and power, with a unique connection of God.  His faith was deep.

Faith is more than a logical experience of the divine, or an easy answer button. We need both a logical and an emotional connection to the holy. On this Reformation Sunday, we remember Martin Luther’s inspired list of problems nailed to the church doors, John Knox’s reforming of the Scottish church, John Wesley’s logical Anglican faith turned upside down by the experience of his “strangely warmed heart”.  We remember liberation theologians challenging power systems, feminist theologians and queer theologians pushing our understanding of God.  And we pray to see our world with fresh new eyes as disciples of Christ.

How about them apples?

 I’ll never forget the day that someone told me about the secret star inside every apple.  No way, I thought.  We had always cut our apples from stem to blossom end, and it never occurred to me to try any other way.  What a revelation to see that pretty, 5-pointed star smack dab in the middle of my fruit.  Like a little miracle of love, unseen under the delicious flesh, ignored by many, but there none-the-less.

Rather like the first time I realized my parents loved me.  Not something we ever said in my family, and whenever I got into trouble for doing something mischievous, I was sure my parents hated me.  There were times when I did wonder if they could love me when I dropped plates, spilled milk, made a mess in my bedroom and other such monstrous misdemeanors. My parents did love me in their quiet and undemonstrative way, and showed it when I least expected it.  Flying to Halifax to see me convocated or tying up my shoes for me when I was eight months pregnant or quilting a beautiful runner for my coffee table.  Signs of love hidden like the apple’s star, unseen until I looked at their actions in a different way. Many people are not so lucky – the Blanket Exercise reminded me of the disruption of love caused by residential schools and generational trauma.  Parental love is missing from many people’s lives.  God’s love is not, even when it’s hard to see.

Jeremiah knew that it was hard to see God’s love in the midst of tragedy.  He had been preaching bad news for so long, it was unexpected to preach something different to the people.  And preach the idea of God loving us not because we follow a rule book that God gave us.  No, because God was reminding Jeremiah of covenant, like a loving spouse married to a troublesome partner, but not holding it against them when the partner breaks promises and gets things mixed up.  A partnership that God would not end or abandon, and thriving would happen once more. 

Jesus was preaching on a similar vein.  God more loving than a nagged judge, more patient than a wronged widow, in it for the long haul, in it because that’s what the character of God is.  Hard to see that when we are in difficult times, when the world around us seems empty of any sign of God.  How do we keep going with the news from Ukraine, or a premier who insults people facing real discrimination for their race or gender identity or their physical or mental abilities by comparing them to folks who knowingly chose to ignore science and medical best advice?  How do we keep going when the price of an apple at the grocery store is now 1.50/lb or more?

Jesus was also preaching about prayer.  And how important it is.  How we need to persist like a nagging street person at the gates of MaraLago demanding justice from a billionaire who wants anything but justice.

How often do we pray for justice?  How often do we nag God for fair play?  It’s an interesting question.  And how often does it feel like our prayers are falling on a God who can’t hear us?  Probably more often than we think or like to admit to ourselves.  It would be so easy to give up, to assume that there is no one listening, that God doesn’t care, God judges harshly without any love whatsoever.  And yet, and yet.

This week I came across a story about Frederick Douglass.  He was born in 1818 and looked as dignified as Morgan Freeman.  He was brought up on a slave plantation by his grandmother as his mother was not allowed to stay with him, most mothers were taken away from their children when they were very young.  He had four or five masters before he was even 16, and managed to learn his alphabet and to read, mostly without any help from a teacher.  One woman taught him a little before her husband convinced her it was evil to teach a slave to read.  But Douglass persisted and eventually took the Underground Railway to freedom where he changed his name and married.  He became a Methodist preacher and travelled to England and Ireland where he preached against slavery.  He wrote impassioned essays on abolition. He convinced Abraham Lincoln to let blacks enlist in the Union Army to fight against the Confederates.  But just prior to the Civil War, he was feeling frustrated and discouraged.  All his attempts to end slavery had bogged down.  He was feeling depressed and his speech at one conference lacked fire and compassion.  He was tired of praying for freedom, for justice, for equality, for everyone’s the right to vote, including women.  At that moment, in that hall of crowded people hoping to be inspired, another famous lady, Sojourner Truth, also a powerful speaker for abolition, was in the audience.

She heard his lackluster speech and stood up in the middle of it.  She hollered a question so loudly everyone in the room heard her.  She said it over and over until Douglass answered her.  That question changed everything.  Douglass remembered his passion, his love for justice.  He became reenergized and his speech energized everyone who heard him.  And it got him back into remembering why he was there.  The question she yelled at him with so much passion?

“Is God Dead?  Is God Dead? Frederick Douglass, Is God Dead?” “No,” Douglas replied, and that was the answer they all needed to hear.

We need to hear it too.  God is not dead!  God loves us and will hear our prayers for justice.  It’s not easy, it’s not fast, but God will answer.  The world does change.  Slavery does end.  Women do vote.  Love does change everything, maybe especially when it is as tiny as a star hidden in an apple!  

Whose Fault is it Anyway?

 

1 Corinthians 10:1–14 Flee from idols

Luke 13:1–9 The parable of the barren fig tree.

Can you imagine hearing these scriptures from the pulpit in a  church in L'viv or Mariupol?  I don’t know if these readings are in the Eastern Orthodox Church’s list of what to read in Lent, but it would be heard very differently again in Moscow.  Two different ways of hearing the scripture, when there’s a war going on.  And how might Syrian Christians hear this passage?  Or the tiny group of Afghanistan Christians whose very existence is illegal in that country?

It is easy to look for a simple interpretation of these passages, like Robbie our river dragon did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pn7aA0y_GM, but easy is not best.  Both passages struggle with one of the most difficult questions Humanity asks.  If God is so all powerful and good, why do bad things happen to good people?  There’s no easy answer to that question.  It assumes a duality of human nature, either a positive or a negative.  And while that might work with motivating soldiers and civilians, it does not work in the long run for the benefit of Humanity. 

Paul says in this scripture that worshiping false priorities brings disaster.  And I totally agree with him on that.  When we put our faith and trust in something other than God, whether it’s stocks or a union or big business or the shopping channel, our lives can get messy and our priorities mixed up.  We can lose the drive to care for each other, lose our ability to see another’s viewpoint, lose our courage, lose our commitment to building a better world, and be only focused on surviving as best as we can in the day-to-day struggle to pay our bills and have a little fun now and then.  We forget about old-fashioned values like kindness, respect, empathy, hope and so on.  But Paul goes on to say that God never gives us more than we can handle.  Tell that to the Ukrainians, the people in war-torn countries like Nigeria or Yemen who aren’t getting the media that Zelensky does.  Tell that to the Russians who woke up to find large ‘z’s painted on their doors to intimidate them into compliance.  Tell that to folks here who have lost a loved one.  This is not helpful, Paul, and despite it generating a lot of t-shirts and coffee mugs, when life gets messy, this scripture does not comfort and inspire those who are hurting and desperate.  They feel blamed and overwhelmed.

An easy interpretation that God hurts only the unfaithful causes more harm than good.  And it ignores something that we Canadian Christians have tended to ignore, even though it is also embedded in our scripture.  That is the fact that evil exists.  I’m not talking about a laughable cartoon character in red tights with horns, tail and pitchfork, or even a handsome bar owner who works with a detective when he’s not playing the piano and forcing confessions out of people.  Evil exists.  Putin’s hunger for power is evil.  Trump ‘s arrogant superiority complex is evil.  Black marketeers concocting chemicals that eat away people’s brains and leave them dying on Edmonton streets from overdoses is evil.  Angry djs’ plans to infect their community with outrage and devotion is evil.  Cyberhackers and scammers disruption of society, steal money from seniors and destroy banks and hospitals alike for their own gain is evil.  The actions of ultra right-wing conservatives challenging common sense protocols to protect people’s health, and people more interested in profit than caring for their neighbor, try to undermine our health and education.  Actions and attitudes like this are evil.

God may never give us more than we can handle, but evil can give us so much that we need to reach out to others for help.  And if we think that coming to church will spare us from the messiness of life and death, we are wrong.  I think Jesus was clever in his response.  He confronted that kind of easy thinking – ‘they died because they were bad’ or ‘they died because they weren’t religious enough’, by challenging the Galileans around him to mind their own spiritual business!  Rather than pointing fingers or claiming the lives lost were because of weak faith, he said, fertilize your own soul before you start judging the worth of other people’s devotion to God.

That is a helpful word in Lent.  We are called to fertilize our own souls, to add manure to our own faith journey, and let God sort out the rest.  Not as an insurance policy to protect us from messy deaths.  Jesus and Paul both, even Peter for that matter, had messy deaths, despite their devotion to God.  But as a motivation to build honorable, inspiring and trustworthy lives that can be a beacon for all to see.

An analogy can be seen in a simple electric plug.  It has two prongs, hot and neutral, and both must be used to turn on a light.  We need both the current and a place for the excess current to go, both positive and negative flowing through the two prongs to have light.  But when we add a grounding prong, we can handle a lot more.  We can be a bigger light, we can shine farther and stronger when that ground is plugged into the outlet.  It doesn’t mean we are protected from a lightening strike that hits the circuit, but it does mean that we will handle the normal fluctuations and challenges to come our way.  When  we are grounded in God’s love, we will light the world with hope.  Hope is not a simple solution or an easy fix, or an insurance policy.  Hope is doing the possible, leaving the impossible to God.  Hope is when we honestly see the world in its complexity, and trust that in the messiness, in the complexities and simplicities, in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are not alone.  Thanks be to God!

Pointing to Love

 My in-laws have a sturdy little sundial on the deck made out of black wrought iron.  It’s supposed to tell the time by the way the shadow falls. But it doesn’t work unless it is pointing North.  Last summer when I was staying there, I decided to rearrange the deck chairs and the sundial got shifted around.  Since it no longer pointed north, it no longer told the time.

Some days I feel like a sundial that is not pointed in the right direction.  Maybe something unexpected happens, I sprain my ankle, there’s bad news on the radio, a friend’s house burns down, or a photo of a flag with a swastika is spotted in Boyle.  Instead of feeling like a calm grown-up Christian, I feel like a grumpy grouch that doesn’t know how to love her neighbor, especially one with a penchant for flags that are so horrific.

Enter the scriptures.  Jesus has a penchant for fixating not on the north pole, like a sun dial, but on Love.  Love is the true north that Jesus constantly points to.  Jesus is no sundial, but more like a compass that swings to point to the right direction.  Unlike humans and sundials, Jesus is unwavering in his commitment to be loving.  And not just any kind of loving, but one that is willing to take risks that seem irrational and dangerous.

This is no cheap or over-sentimentalized card or poem, this is a robust, muscular love.  In our society, we use love to describe anything from our enjoyment of flowers and chocolate to our sense of profound deep astonishment when we look into the eyes of a newborn baby.  Talk about sentimentalization!

Sentimentalization is not love.  We think that love is just sweet emotions or gentleness.  But real love leads to action and change.  I heard the story recently of a church who had a new person join it for worship.  One Sunday morning the newcomer had a panic attack because someone wore a red shirt.  It triggered memories of a trauma experience she had at the hands of a bully.  The congregation was concerned.  Should they ban red shirts?  Should they say to the newcomer, “I’m sorry but you don’t belong here if you can’t handle a red shirt or two from time to time”?  How would that help her in her day to day life ?

We have had a similar debate for years that flared up online this week with United Church ministers.  Do we call this service “Mother’s Day Service”, “Christian Family Day Service” or just “Sunday Service”?  For some folks the word ‘Mother’ triggers memories worse than any seen in movies like “Mommy Dearest”.  Others struggle because of fertility issues or because of life circumstances.  Or tragedy strikes when they least expect it, and motherhood becomes a memory rather than a lived reality.

When I was growing up as a child, we didn’t know much about grief.  We didn’t have funeral resources for stillborns, miscarriages and infants.  And we thought that the most loving thing we could do for a person in grief was not to talk about it for fear of upsetting someone.  We pretended the tragedy didn’t happen, or that a pregnancy that didn’t end happily was no big deal as one could always try again.  We didn’t treat single women or couples who didn’t procreate with a lot of respect.  We didn’t make space for the many tiny moments of grief that came into everyone’s life. And we didn’t talk about the ways in which people coped with those stresses, the addictions to cocktails, the risky behaviors, the mental illness, the depression, the abuse or family violence and the anxiety attacks that resulted from trying to live as if pain and grief did not exist.

That was not love.  That was supposed to be love, protecting each other from pain and hurt, but it was not love.  It enabled people to keep stuck, keep the grief suppressed, keep the emotions bottled up, keep the pain at home where it belonged, in private.  It kept people feeling isolated and alone.

Real love says, “I am here with you.  I hear you.  You are not alone.  Your pain may be unique, but others have gotten through what you are going through.”  Real love says, “this is going to hurt but I will hold your hand”.  Real love says, “these are birth pangs and I can’t take them away from you, but I can breathe with you”.  Real love says, “let us weep together a while.  We will one day rejoice together too.”  Real love says, “let us have a memorial service for that stillborn” even if it happened 40 years ago.

Dr. Katharina Manassis, a member of St. Mark’s United Church in Scarborough and both a Child Psychiatrist and University of Toronto Professor Emerita said this about such real love by her congregation:

My introduction to a community of faith didn’t come until middle age, after a traumatic bereavement. The minister on call to the local funeral home listened intently to my distraught, guilt-ridden tale of loss and validated my experience. I was reassured that… my emotional response was not unique… I … became a member of his church. I came to understand that in some circumstances compassionate pastoral care is even more helpful than counseling by a mental health professional, because rather than singling out the person as having a psychological problem, it recognizes suffering as part of the human experience.  Within my faith community, I found supportive friends, inspiring role models, and people who were just good fun. Coffee time, whether in person or over Zoom, is a valuable mental wellness activity for many of us. Knowing there are like-minded people struggling with similar challenges can make a huge difference in well-being, especially when we are feeling alone. 

When we love deeply, compassionately and bravely like this, we transform our world.  Whether it’s getting an ugly flag pulled down in our county, letters written to MLAs about racism in the proposed curriculum, or donating to the Mother’s Day Mission and Service appeal this year, together, when we remember that like sundials we must orient ourselves by the true north of love that Jesus taught, we make a real difference in the world.  May it be so for us all.

Who Ya Gonna Call? Lock Busters!

 

People say that it takes a lot of repetition before we remember something.  Well, it took more than a few years of repetition before I realized that we always hear the story of Thomas the first Sunday after Easter.  The early church thought it was so important, that it is right up there with the Luke passage on Christmas Eve.  Even the Road to Emmaus is only once in three years.  It’s a pretty special story, and one that is trying to get the critics and cynics to hear a message they don’t want to hear.

There’s a lot of that around these days.  Locked doors, locked minds, locked up emotions, locked up because we’ve been living with Covid and we humans are not very good with dealing with curtailments of our freedoms and our lives.  We have a difficult time with thinking about short term sacrifices for long term gains.

There’s an old experiment where children were told that they could chose to eat a marshmallow right away or they could wait and eat two marshmallows when the tester came back.  They were left in an empty room. A third of the kids ate the marshmallow as soon as the tester left.  The rest were able to wait, some as long as 15 minutes.  Interestingly, the kids who waited were more successful in school, in work and in their personal lives.  Waiting for the future, giving up things for a benefit down the road, these were all predicted by their ability to hold off eating the marshmallow. 

We want what we want when we want it and some folks want it now.  Some of us can wait, some of us choose not to wait.  When tragedy hits, we don’t know what to do with our wants.  We don’t know how to deal with the loss of our dreams and expectations.  We go into trauma mode.

That’s where the disciples were.  The anguish of losing their leader to state-sanctioned torture and brutal execution, the fear that they would be the next victims of that violence, the grief of having their dreams and hopes brutally stopped unexpectedly had put them into full-blown trauma reactions.

When we are faced with a stressful situation, we will instinctively respond in one of three ways, fight, flight or freeze.  We see that most clearly in war zones.  Some choose to become refugees and take flight, some pick up weapons to join a side and some hunker down waiting for the war to pass.  All are normal responses to conflict.  We too are likely to respond in one of those three ways.

Given the circumstances that the disciples were living in, an occupied country with extreme poverty amongst the Jewish people and extreme wealth for the upper-class elite especially the Romans and the collaborators, there was already a sense of Fight and Freeze.  The disciples thought they were going to serve Jesus as the king’s advisors and the Zebedee brothers were squabbling over who would get the best seating near Jesus’ throne.  Insurrectionists were a source of constant trouble for the Romans, and the temple authorities didn’t want Jesus to continue to stir the pot.  So, there was already trauma and conflict brewing.

No wonder the disciples, after facing the arrest of Jesus, scattered and ran and denied they knew Jesus.  No wonder after the execution, they gathered in fear and trembling behind locked doors.  They were living with trauma!

So what takes people who are locked down, scared for their lives, denying their faith and afraid to take a stand and transforms them into powerful public preachers?  How do we reconcile the fearful disciples with the man who wrote boldly, “We declare to you what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands…”  That is a strong and passionate statement to start a letter with, don’t you think?  How do we connect the dots between the locked doors and the courageous writer?

It keeps coming back to Jesus.  Not once but twice does he do his magic Houdini act, appearing behind locked doors.  He keeps showing up!  Again and again.  He’s willing to have Thomas touch him in his wounds, a most intimate act.  “See my suffering!  Hear my comforting words! Touch my trauma!  And please, let’s not wag fingers at poor Thomas.  After all, the rest of the disciples saw Jesus first and they still met behind locked doors.  What is striking about Thomas is that one appearance was all it took.  The others needed more, and could not convince Thomas that what they were saying was true.  Not because he was at fault but maybe because they still were not completely sure themselves.  They were teetering on the edge of transformation, from disciples to apostles, from students to teachers, and they were not quite ready.

What pushed them from trauma to new life, new hope, new vision and goals and expectations?  Jesus.  He pushed past the locks they had put in place to keep themselves safe.  He encouraged them to ask questions, comforting them with new challenges and thoughts.  He kept showing up in their lives and they grew to trust him.  He gave them choices and opportunities to touch him.  Thomas didn’t take Jesus up on the offer to touch the bloody cuts, but he appreciated the invitation.

We all are invited to a new holy and loving life.  We are invited to care about ourselves, our neighbors and our God.  We make mistakes and fall short, struggling to be honest even to ourselves about our flaws.  To hear John write that we all make mistakes is to hear that he too struggled with his own mistakes, his own fears and failings.  He too hid in a locked room, afraid to come out and share his truth.  But he testified that Jesus keeps breaking the locks to our own rooms and keeps coming into our own lives with the glorious Easter news that we are not alone, that God loves us with a passion beyond human experience and guides and supports us all in our times of trial.  Truly, blessed are those who have not seen Jesus and yet believe even in their fears and traumas.  Easter comes to us all, Halleluiah!

April 26 2020 Pilgrimage Journeys

Putting one foot in front of another can be the hardest thing we can do in times following tragedy.  And yet, often it is the simplest thing or the smallest thing we can do that carries us forward into a new understanding of the world.

I was in a workshop on Thursday for clergy learning to do pastoral care during a tragedy.  Not too many of us studied responses to pandemics in our classes, and the ones who did focused on 9/11 and the 1998 airplane crash just outside Halifax and Peggy’s Cove.  We didn’t have any training in mass social isolation or church lockdowns or internet zoom technology, it didn’t even exist back in 2014.  But one thing I was struck by is that the simple things in life can help us to keep going.  One person who was struggling with depression found that they couldn’t come up with anything they felt they could do until her counsellor asked her if she could brush her teeth.  That was something she could do and would do, and did do, and that became the start of her recovery.

One tiny little thing we can do when we feel numb with fear, paralyzed with grief, shaking with anger, or frozen in depression.  Our words of assurance from the 1 Peter reading today talked about living in reverent fear while we are in exile, and I suspect many of us are living in fear but now is the time to add some reverence.  Some folks have been getting print copies of our worship as they don’t have internet, and I hope they have found some reverence with the little things we tuck in, a rock, a shell, a candle, a doily for them to decorate a space with, a little booklet of prayers to read.  I have an angel and a silver communion chalice and a prayer card on my dresser table that I look at every morning and night before I go to bed.  One little thing we can do might be just lighting the candle we have and praying the Serenity Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, or just saying, “God I’m scared” or even having a cry.  Sometimes there are no words.  Sometimes there is silence.

N. T. Wright in a Time Magazine on March 30 wrote “In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead. As the Spirit laments within us, so we become, even in our self-isolation, small shrines where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific understanding, new hope.”

The disciples walking back home from Jerusalem knew what it was like to have all their hopes dashed.  They could only take one step at a time back to a place where they knew they would be safe.  They plodded, remembering their glorious hopes and dreams, their glimpse of great new possibilities that had all been ended, dashed to smithereens when Jesus had been crucified.  They couldn’t stop rehashing their experience, and when Jesus asked them what they were talking about, I can imagine that their response, “"Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?"  was tinged with a little anger, a little disbelief and even a touch of sarcasm. They didn’t know what to think at the story of the empty tomb even though they too saw it. 

When we face the unimaginable, it’s easy for us to get caught up in what Jungian psychologists call the shadow side of our personalities.  We might be more irritable, more weepy, more apathetic.  We may try to control more in response to being in a situation where we have no control.  We may find our minds full of many words and thoughts that whirl around in our heads especially late at night when we are trying to sleep.  We may say things or do things that we regret, or forget to be kind and gentle.  The hardest person we struggle to be gentle with is ourselves.  But in the first sermon Peter ever preached, he called to the people to repent of those shadow sides.  To turn away from the self-destructive habits and mindsets, to save ourselves from a corrupt generation that thinks only of individual desires.  That is not easy, and not something we can do on our own.  It’s not something the walkers could do on their own either.  They needed Jesus to hear their complaints, their fears, their angers, and then they were able to offer the hospitality that was such a hallmark of what he had taught them.  And it was because of that hospitality that he was able to break bread and feed their souls.  Such a little thing, offering what they had to a stranger, and yet it opened their eyes and their hearts.

So keep on doing the little things, the grace-filled things, the knitting and crocheting, the sewing of masks, and the phone calls.  The delivering of worship services or sharing books, or shopping for a neighbor when you are doing your own errands.  Be as kind to yourself as you know you should be to your neighbor. And don’t be afraid to lament, to cry, to complain to God, because that might just be what God is waiting to hear.  Courage dear ones, and remember, in life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us, we are never alone, thanks be to God!