Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning. Would you pray with me?
Lord, we pray this morning that you would open our hearts and our minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the Scriptures are read and your word is proclaimed, that we may hear with joy what you say to us today and let it inform the way we live our lives. Amen.
Our passage this Morning is Luke 24, verses 27 through 45, which can be found in your pew Bible on page 861.
It's a long passage, so you may want it now. This passage begins on what is known as the road or the walk to Emmaus, where two of Jesus's followers were walking and lamenting his death. This took place later in the day of the same Sunday that Jesus rose from the grave. We begin today with verse 27 as Jesus speaks with these men who were still filled with grief and doubt, even though they had already heard about Jesus resurrection.
Then, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in the Scriptures.
As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. But they urged him strongly, saying, stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.
So he went in to stay with them. When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the Scriptures to us?
That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem.
They found the 11 and their companions gathered together. They were saying, the Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon.
Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, peace be with you. They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He looked to them and said, why are you frightened? And why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands, at my feet. See that it is I myself.
Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.
And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.
Yet for all their joy, they were still disbelieving and wondering. And he said to them, have you anything here to eat?
They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it. In their presence, Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses, in the prophets and in the Psalms must be fulfilled.
Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Thank you for your word over us.
With Creator under us, in the earth behind us pushing and ahead of us with Jesus leading.
Amen.
Good morning, church.
My name is Chad.
I want to begin by introducing my partner, Elaine, who came down from Ventura county with me to stand up Elaine. He's my beloved and partner in all things.
I want to recognize a couple of very dear beloved elders. Sister sitting behind her, Darrell Myers, Presbyterian minister. And Marilee Robertson, Presbyterian missionary.
They've worked with us at Bartima's Cooperative Ministries for many years. I also want to recognize, in the spirit of the land, acknowledgement that Matt gave the Morelos Recalde family. Mona and Tony and Ella, you're sitting back there. If you all could stand. These are very, very prominent Tongva elders and leaders in this valley. Thank you for being with us. We've had the privilege of collaborating with them a couple of times, and it's really great that you're here. And Ellie. Yes, I think I said Ellie, but I think she's over having fun.
Pastor Matt and I, as he said, have known each other for 30 years now. And Elaine and I will have a little to say about that long, collegial friendship at the end of this sermon. Matt invited me to preach this morning on the Earth Day theme. It was last Tuesday, and I want to offer particularly thoughts to support the good work of the Knox sustainability team and the positioning of this congregation as an Earth care congregation in the denomination.
I met with them by Zoom 6 weeks ago on the night before Ash Wednesday, celebrated as Mardi Gras in some cultural spaces. I guess for Presbyterians, that means having a meeting. Anyway, we reflected on ashes as a painful experience for all of you living in the wake of the Eaton fire and yet nevertheless also the traditional symbol with which we Christians began the journey of Lent.
I can imagine it was a very long Lent for this congregation, especially for those of you who lost so much.
Here we are now in the second Sunday of Eastertide.
Given that many of you are still walking the demanding labyrinth of. Of material and emotional recovery from those fires, it seems important to avoid platitudes about resurrection.
Yet we are also desperately in need of its hope.
Matt suggested it might be good to draw from Luke's amazing Emmaus Rhodes story. So I'll endeavor to work from this beloved tale with all of this in mind, and if you can find back in your worship books to where that text is, or even if we could put that text that was read up, we're going to do a little bit of study of it, since the lectionary text in the Revised Common Lectionary is John's account of the risen Christ inviting his disciples to touch his wounds.
For this Sunday, we'll use Luke's version of that remarkable moment, which only appears in these two Gospels as it culminates the Emmaus narrative.
So if you're looking at the text, you can see that the excerpt I chose is bracketed verses 27 and 45 by two portraits of the risen stranger tutoring his beleaguered and traumatized disciples in Moses and the prophets, which is to say, their scriptures.
I included these two vignettes because they represent the heart of Luke's Emmaus road theology. Not once but twice on this journey, just before Christ's revelation, in the breaking of the bread that you heard, and again after his revelation as the still scarred Risen One, he seeks to school his followers in biblical literacy.
Luke thus portrays the first the Church's first catechism. This is the Church's first catechism.
In these verses, Luke uses three poignant verbs.
In Greek, deir mernuin means not just interpreting but actually translating the sacred text into language his friends could understand.
The verb dia noigo means opening eyes and minds and hearts that have been shut down by empire.
And the verb suniami refers to the practice of connecting the dots to truly understand the personal and political meaning of the moment.
Jesus is modeling for us the discipline of interpreting one's historical crisis, no matter how traumatic or overwhelming, through the lens of our sacred story.
And for Luke, this practice lies at the core of resurrection faith.
To paraphrase the famous metaphor of Ezekiel 37, when the Old bones of scripture dance again, they have the power to animate a church mired in the valley of death, to imagine how to renew forgotten ways of healing what is wounded, of resisting what is toxic, and of embodying God's jubilee justice.
Throughout Luke's story, Jesus doesn't just tell good news, he also shows it. And he does that here twice, as happens so often in the third Gospel. This takes place over meals, kind of like the pizza party you're going to have after church.
In verses 28 and 29, the two disciples who we can reasonably assume were on the lam after the public execution of their leader a few days before, they urged this stranger they'd met on Emmaus road to take shelter with them in a safe house before the Roman curfew fell.
During supper, Christ is then famously revealed in a eucharistic ritual. He takes, he blesses, he breaks, and he gives them bread.
But take note that Cleopas and his anonymous buddy, a cipher perhaps for thee and me.
They respond to the shock of that revelation in verse 32 by reminding themselves, did not our hearts burn within us while he talks to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?
Sacrament does not replace word.
There is something about rediscovering the ancient sacred story that just opens us up.
These refugees, fleeing from a shattered, criminalized movement, now do something deeply counterintuitive. In verse 33, they reverse course and head back to Jerusalem, where their lives are, frankly, still in danger.
There, in the attic of another safe house, the scattered and dazed followers begin to gather to reckon not only with the murder of their rabbi, but now also to compare notes on something even more disturbing, the joyful but also unbelievable experiences of encountering Jesus 2.0.
Into this frenetic, confused and frightened space steps the risen one.
But not to offer them a Hollywood happy ending or a ticket out of this excruciating world.
Rather, he invites them to reconnect with him by touching his mutilated body.
This is perhaps the most extraordinary, if uncomfortable moment in the whole of our scriptures. And it takes us to the heart of incarnational faith, what we could call somatic theology.
As the struggling bros try to sort out their confusion, an exhausted Jesus, who, after all, had literally been to hell and back, asks almost whimsically, dudes, it's been a long couple of days that I've been through, you know, and I've been through a lot. Anybody got a sandwich?
Luke, here again radically centers the somatic.
Just as Jesus still bears the scars of his showdown with empire, and frankly, 1500 years of Christian art have gotten portraits of the risen Jesus exactly wrong. His wounds were not antiseptic little slits, as if he just had arthroscopic surgery.
This was one beat up body of flesh risen.
So just as we are to touch those that violated flesh, we are also to attend to its needs, to feed him. And that, friends, is a clarion call to the gospel work of restorative justice. Because bodies matter, which also means that earth matters.
After finishing a meal of fish, the reason, one then resumes the Bible study that he started on the road. The first Bible study in the Life of the Church breaking bread at the Emmaus Airbnb reminds us that the famous earlier demonstration project during Jesus ministry in galilee in Luke 9.
In that story, he organized poor folk in the wilderness to share loaves and fishes so that everyone has enough.
That tale in turn alludes to the primal bread in the wilderness story of the manna in Exodus 16.
That's a tale that revolves around three instructions on how to remain free of empire, the community art of constraining both affluenza and poverty, making sure creation's resources circulate rather than concentrating among a small class of plutocrats and third, observing Sabbath's constraints on both production and consumption stopping, turning the phones off once a week.
For the past 25 years, we at Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries have been working to rehabilitate what we call this as Israel's first catechism of Sabbath economics because it's almost completely disappeared in our capitalist culture. You may recall that your pastor authored one of our resources entitled Sabbath Economics Household Practices.
You can review this perspective in this new book on Luke which which we have out on the table, where I show how every single one of Luke's meal stories, including those that look like communion, are grounded in this Sabbath economics cosmology.
And what about that second meal, the Risen One's fish dinner?
Well, it harkens back to the earliest fish tale in the third Gospel, the story of the great catch in the Sea of galilee in Luke 5.
Stay with me now we're doing Bible study on Emmaus Road and it can give us heartburn.
The real world context of that story was Roman and Herodian trade wars. There must be an echo in here which had targeted the fishing industry in the sea on the sea to extract this key local resource for export. In the process, native fishing communities were being impoverished, going hungry. This marginalized, struggling group is where Jesus begins to build his movement. And he begins with a teach in that's where he gets a boat, pushes out onto the shore, and he's talking to them from the boat in order to show what he has just been telling. For example, in the Nazareth, his inaugural Nazareth sermon, Jesus exhorts a certain Simon to keep on fishing.
In response, the peasant fisherman poignantly laments that everything is fished out.
What follows is an explosion of natural abundance, which may strain their nets, but promises also to smash their cycle of poverty.
This sustenance story is another Lucan recontextualization of Exodus 16, and I like to call it Mana del Mar.
It envisions creations restored, a glimpse of how those waters used to be.
In back to back moments, Luke has shown us the grief in front of the artificial scarcity wrought by Empire's greed.
And then celebrating creation restored, which, rightly shared, can sustain everyone's need, starting with the most marginalized.
Like sharing bread and fish in the wilderness, this great catch is a prophetic sign of resistance to plutocratic disparity. By affirming God's common wealth on the heels of this object lesson, Jesus issues his call to discipleship, which he metaphorizes as fishers of people, an allusion not to modern evangelistic techniques, but to no less than four different prophetic oracles, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel and Habakkuk about ecological and social justice.
Okay, that was a bit of a fire hose of scriptural intertextuality. That's a fancy word scholars use for how different stories relate, but that actually was the language of traditional storytelling.
But hey, you think that that Emmaus catechism that Jesus offered on the road was some kind of dumbed down and domesticated fast food Bible study? I don't think so.
If you're interested in exploring these bread and fish threads, you'll find lots of elaboration in this new book on Luke's Jesus and Sabbath economics. So let me conclude by venturing a couple of thoughts on what these Gospel visions might mean for us today, especially in the light of Earth Day.
So Luke's narrative goes to great lengths to insist that Jesus rose from the dead as a body, not as a ghost.
Somatic faith calls us to feed hungry bodies, to heal wounded or violated bodies, and to affirm and stand with disenfranchised bodies.
That is a discipleship of Sabbath economics.
It also calls us to creation, defense, repair and care.
Our bodies insist the original Genesis story at the beginning of our canon are earthen and creation will be fully restored, promises John the Revelator. At the close of our canon.
That is what in our work we refer to as watershed discipleship.
So we return back to Earth Day.
Like some of you, I'm old enough to remember the first one in 1970, 55 years ago, a ruptured oil rig off the Santa Barbara coast spewed 3 million gallons of oil into the Pacific and animated one of the largest popular demonstrations in the history of our country.
This in turn, kick started a grassroots environmental movement whose advocacy secured some of our strongest protections, like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water act, both of which the current administration wants to dismantle.
In middle school, I experienced that first Earth Day as a commissioning.
A few years later as someone not raised in church, I experienced my first Bible study, a second commissioning the text.
It was the Loaves and Fishes story.
I remember being so thrilled to learn that Jesus was into reusing, recycling and repurposing those leftovers. I connected with it until the group leader decided that I was missing the spiritual point.
50 years of scripture study and organizing later, I don't think I was.
Climate crisis has many manifestations which we are slow to heed because we are a people used to living in denial about our past and thus also about our future.
Obviously, the most revelatory moment for your community began almost four months ago when those apocalyptic fires raged through your community and your lives.
I feel your pain keenly, especially for those of you who have become climate refugees for two reasons. For one, I grew up in South Pasadena.
For another, we in Ventura county experienced a very similar trauma through the Thomas fire in 2017, which at that time was the largest in California history, long since dwarfed by annual disasters culminating in the LA fires. In the early 1870s, my maternal ancestor, Julius Jacobs, a Jewish merchant from Prussia, came to the United states via Shreveport, Louisiana and then resettled here in Pasadena. In the 1870s, he opened Jacobs Hardware. Members of that side of my mom's family have been here ever since.
I've been reflecting on the fact that Julius Jacobs came here just as human caused carbon emissions from the Industrial Revolution were starting to significantly impact the environment and climate. As increased fossil fuel burning leads inexorably to substantial greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Climate change.
So here we are in 2025. As of March, the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration stands at 420 parts per million. That's way beyond the 365 that Bill McKibben built a movement around as the limit for our civilizational survival.
Eco philosopher and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka summed up our dilemma best.
If we throw Mother Nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.
Like Jesus disciples under the shadow of a different empire, we are caught in an extractive economy and culture that is punishing the poor and ruining the earth. In this dark time, the risen Jesus calls us anew to share bread, to touch wounds, and to join him in going after some big fish.
So I urge all of you here at Knox to strongly support the work of your sustainability team as you as church live deeper into the vocation of somatic faith to help liberate bodies and creation.
So thanks for this opportunity to be with you. It's my first time in your pulpit and I ask for just another minute so Elaine and I can offer a public but personal word to the sustainability team and to Matt and his family.
Sustainability team.
Elaine, Wendy. I think she wants to offer this to you. Wendy's going to give you a beautiful artistic rendering of our Ventura river watershed in which we live and work on Chumash territory and to which we have apprenticed. Perhaps this little poster can hang somewhere in the Knox office to remind you of your responsibilities to serve and preserve, to use the old language of Genesis, your partner of the LA river watershed, including Haha Manga.
As Matt mentioned, he was a student of mine at Fuller in 1995. I think he was the only one who really resonated with my efforts to articulate the vision and practices of radical discipleship in our overdeveloped country.
He was also the only divinity student who ever took my advice to apprentice to a trade as a Plan B so he would always be free as a minister to speak truth in church.
He did it. He's an auto mechanic.
Between church assignments, Matt worked with our cooperative, as you mentioned, both as intern and staff, co published with me, and has remained a faithful friend and supporter.
And earlier this month, he helped us memorialize important Presbyterian mentors, Gloria and Ross Kintzler. Thank you, brother.
And now, Elaine, I want to invite you up because we just have a little gift.
[00:27:44] Speaker C: Good morning, church.
We know that you all agree that Matt has become a really good leader and pastor here and in partnership with Jill. Is Jill here this morning? There's Jill. Hi, Jill.
So, yes. Give them a hand. All have come.
The fact that they are now climate refugees as other families in this congregation gives your parish a unique positioning to address climate crisis.
Jill and Matt, there are no words adequate for the ache and anxiety of losing your home.
But maybe there is music, especially music that you two, we know, make so beautifully together.
We noticed that you mentioned among your losses were musical instruments. So as a token of our solidarity and friendship, we want to pass this guitar given to us by world class Nashville musician and Episcopal priest Scott Claussen. It's a beautiful guitar. May it help you sing a new song.
And may your mutual love of music bear you up.
There is a song and it's inside you and we hear it when you're near that song is yours alone and every note is lovely and it's clear oh, they say a friend is someone who can sing your song it's true when you're lonely or you're weary we will sing your song to you.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: After.
[00:30:01] Speaker C: All those wonderful musicians. Thank you. And there may be some words, especially if they are from the great poet and priest Daniel Berrigan, who was Chad's mentor.
So, when you do finally have a place and some walls to hang important art on again, perhaps you will consider this piece.
It has one of our favorite poems on it, a summons to show as well as tell the gospel in the spirit of Luke and the genealogy of faith on whose shoulders we stand. And so let me read it as a benediction to close this homily. These are the words of Daniel berrigan.
For every 10,000 words, there is a deed floating somewhere. Head down. Unborn words cannot make it happen.
They only wave it away. Unwanted, yet child necessary one. Unless you come home to my hands. Why hands at all your season? Your cries are their skill, their reason. Amen.
