speaker-1: Our first reading this morning comes from Acts chapter 2 verses 14 and then 36 through 41. But Peter, standing with the 11, raised his voice and addressed them. Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and listen to what I say. Let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified. Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, brothers, what should we do? Peter said to them, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, so that your sins may be forgiven and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone who the Lord our God calls to him. And he testified with many other arguments and extorted them saying, save yourself from this corrupt generation. So those who welcomed his message were baptized. And that day about 3,000 persons were added. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. This is our second week after Easter, wherein in worship we are sketching together what exactly the resurrection means to us. In Wednesday night Bible studies, we've been talking about sort of the mechanics. How exactly does Christ's resurrection save us? How does that work? It's something that we talk about all the time. It is so central to our faith, but yet the actual mechanics of it are slippery. But here in worship, we're talking about what the shape and the form of our experience of that resurrection is. Last week, Pastor Kim talked about how it is that Christ's resurrection heals relationships. And today, I'm going to suggest to us that we learn almost immediately that that healing happens together and that that healing is expansive. It's mending cracks and suturing what is splintered in ways that are unexpected and defy our hopes even. So let us listen for the word of the Lord from the Gospel of Luke, which picks up later Easter morning. Now on that same day, two of the disciples were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, talking with each other about all these things that had happened. And while they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Jesus said to them, what are you discussing with each other while you walk along? And they stood still, looking sad. And then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place in these days? And Jesus asked him, what things? And they replied, the things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it's now the third day since these things took place. Moreover, some of the women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb this morning, and when they didn't find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. And some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it, just as the women had said, but they didn't see him. Then Jesus said to them, ⁓ how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared. Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory? Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. As they came near the village to which they were going, Jesus walked ahead as if he were going on, but they urged him strongly, saying, stay with us, because it's almost evening and the day is now nearly over. So we went in to stay with them. And when he was at table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. And 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 and while he was opening the scripture to us? That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem and they found the 11 and their companions gathered together. They were saying, the Lord has risen indeed and he has appeared to Simon. And then they told what had happened on the road. and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Oh Lord, may our hearts burn within us as you speak into our hearts today, lengthening our tables and opening our minds and our souls to receive you and one another. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight. O Christ, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. My paternal grandmother was the matriarch of our family. Hers was the house that we gathered at for holidays along with all the members of the seven tribes she created. When she died a few years ago, It was a massive loss to us. We didn't know how we would survive really as a family without this glue holding us together. She was also an unrepentant racist. God bless her heart. She wouldn't have told you that she was racist, of course. It was just that white people should stick to their own and everybody else should stick to their own. She didn't have a racist bone in her body, but didn't a preacher once say that the black race was cursed? She was born in 1923 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. And she was living in the prime of her life during the Civil Rights Movement. And you would have hoped. that such an experience would have changed her heart. Alas, it did not. To give you a sense of the sort of world that Grandma Betty was born into, in August of her same birth year, 1923, there was a reported tussle with a black man that resulted in the death of a police officer in Rosedale, in the Rosedale neighborhood of Johnstown. Almost every fact ⁓ in this case that resulted in the death of a police officer would be challenged, but that one incident gave political cover to the mayor of Johnstown at the time, whose name was Joseph Caulfield, to demand that every black and Mexican resident of Johnstown who had lived there for less than seven years should leave essentially overnight under threat of unofficial death or official imprisonment. The mayor would use the exact same racist rhetoric that we hear today, claiming that Johnstown was being flooded and overrun by minorities who were being sprung from the south of prisons and sent to the north. Can you believe it? The subtext of which is that these folks are coming north to take what is ours, and we're going to use this opportunity to show everybody whose space this is. I don't know if you've heard the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, a story which is about inhospitality and violence against guests, but you will remember what happens to those towns, right? Can I tell you? It's not good. Can I also tell you that my hometown of Johnstown, Pennsylvania was completely flooded twice, once in 1889 and 1977? Do we think that that was a coincidence? Probably. Is divine judgment still on the table? I don't know. I'll let you make a decision. I'm just saying that Grandma Betty was swimming in some pretty nasty waters. But then one of my cousins married a black man. He's the nicest guy that anyone ever did meet. Still to this day goes by his childhood nickname, which is Huggy, because he loved to hug people so much. That is a true story. And Huggy muscled his way through my grandma's racism with nothing but strength of character. and the conviction in his right to belong in this family into which love had invited him. And there, at holiday dinners, in the breaking of bread and the playing of games, Christ's presence was made known to my grandma through the person of Huggy. So that at the end of her life, she would be able to say with all of her heart, that she had found the one good black person in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That's not how we hope this story would end, but it is indeed the case. And it has always been the same problem in our world. We read in the book of Acts one of the first sermons that comes from an inspired early church. And that message is that you should turn from evil, be baptized into the family of Jesus. Receive forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit so that you can live into a new way of being human in the world. And the kicker, the really important part, is that this new life and this new world isn't just for you. No. Peter says to the gathered Jews and people who had gathered for this holiday from all over the region, this salvation is for you, it is for your children, it is for all who are far off, indeed it is for every person whom God calls to God's self. which immediately complicates everything about how things move forward because people have always wanted to keep their worlds small and be in control. If this gift of salvation had been a special gift to one people, one nationality, one country, one ethnic identity, it wouldn't have been difficult to understand. Grandma Claussen could have wrapped her mind around that. How does the saying go? Good fences. Make good neighbors? Did you know, by the way, that that phrase was popularized by Robert Frost, who penned it in order to skewer its very sentiment? But we've taken it to be folksy knowledge. Indeed, his poem, Mending Wall, begins with these stanzas. Something there is that doesn't love a wall. that sends the frozen ground swell under it and spills the upper boulders in the sun and makes gaps even two can pass abreast. Something there is that doesn't love a wall indeed. Frost in winter, obviously. The poet, Frost, very likely. And the love of God, certainly. When we have very clear delineations between us, the people with the good stuff. and them, the people who obviously do not have what we have and therefore are bad. Life is simple. Anyone who has ever had children chaff and cry about the injustices of what someone else has that they do not or croon and condescend about what they have that another does not will understand this sentiment seems baked into the dust of what makes up humanity. But there goes Jesus. screwing things up for us and expanding our tables when we didn't ask for more seats and pushing us to open our arms to more than just kiss or kin and urging us to imagine that the world that came bursting out of the tomb with him on Easter morning is indeed a defeat of everything that would ever separate us. And yet I do not have to make the argument to you that even 2,000 years later there are forces at work in the world that would keep us from one another. They might be all the various isms of our day, racism, classism, militarism, or it could be the phobias, homophobia, Islamophobia, whatever they are, they are animated not by Christ. but by some fear that Christ has left dead in a tomb all those years ago. Maybe a lack of security is our fear, but it seems to me that if Easter teaches us anything, it is that nothing, not even death, can keep us from the love of God in Christ. Maybe it is a fear of losing our privilege or our comfort that animates our fears. But might we consider together that Christ calls us to imitate him in service and in humility and in love? I can tell you that whatever it is that causes us to be afraid, it's often weaponized against us. When's the last time you watched a cable news show? I hope. It's been a long time. But if it hasn't, I wonder if you've noticed that even if folks are in the same room during these shows... And quite often they are not. How they appear on screen will show them in their own separate boxes, separated from one another, two ideas floating in space, unconnected by anything other than their argumentation. And all the while, while that's happening, underneath there is a scroll of ramped up headlines that can hardly be considered reporting. And if we didn't have already a hard enough time opening our hearts one another, it does not help that there is a larger apparatus of people trying to make you afraid of your neighbors and keep you from one another for their own clickbait and profiteering. But here we are. I've got to imagine. that no one, after watching top news or indulging in their favorite, most divisive Facebook groups, feels like they've had an experience of resurrection, all teeming with joy and hope and goodness for the future. But that is not our best hope. These things that make us afraid are not the best of us, nor the best of what God has to offer us. The resurrection of Jesus is the death of everything that would keep us from one another. It's the invitation into a family, a way of being, a salvation named as belonging to God that is for you and for me. for our children and for everyone who is far off. But if we keep setting up the terms of that inclusion around who is the most right or who is the most like us, then we are positioning ourselves with the expectation of conflict. It becomes a battle of culture or ideas, all about boundary issues. But we aren't being called into battle as Christian people. We're being called to the dinner table. This problem and solution are on display throughout the rest of the New Testament. For the rest of the New Testament, the authors will struggle with, what does Jesus mean for who belongs here now? And every time the question comes up, does this person belong? The answer is always yes. And every time they come to blows about it, it's always, where can we meet people at the table? And so we find this problem and this solution here on the road to Emmaus the very day that Jesus rises from the dead. I point out to you that the disciples meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus dejected and alone. Not knowing that it is him and he's explaining to them from the scriptures all about his perspective and when they've traveled long enough and when it gets dusk and when they're tired from traveling and the roads get dangerous at night He goes on ahead, but they beg him to stay And it's there at that meal when jesus takes bread and breaks it and shares it with them It's then when they're close enough to him to rub shoulders and rip off from the same loaf. That's when their eyes are open. I believe that God is calling us into the world not because we need to do intellectual battle there. But because it's out there putting our actual bodies next to people who are different than us, that we realize that someone else's difference isn't a place of conflict, but an invitation to know something of God that I wouldn't have been able to know otherwise. When we share more than just our ideas with one another. But when we make space for one another, when we make space for one another's difference and stuff, when we commit to the message of a kingdom of God that is for everyone, then we will begin to experience the very power of the resurrection of Jesus. Because at the end of the day, one of the greatest gifts of this shared faith of ours is our common adoption into it. so many of our fears simply the outgrowth of the worry that we won't belong or that we don't belong or that we're not good enough or haven't done enough or that we don't have enough. We've tried to secure ourselves by exclusivity and it has not saved us. We've tried a violent defense of what is ours and it has not saved us. We've tried to have the argument instead of sharing the meal and putting our bodies close to people who are different from us. And that too has not saved us. Every alternative to the table of Jesus and the presence of Jesus through the presence of the stranger has left us smaller and more afraid than when we started. So come to the table. If I've ever screwed up not having communion, it is today. Come to the table. Invite others to the table in your home that looks something like this. And find there the gift of the resurrection of Jesus that is making all things new and all people one. Let your eyes be opened to what God has been trying to show you all along. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn what Grandma Claussen had to learn from Jesus face to face, but what the Lord was trying to teach her through the presence of Huggy Purdy. The of a family at peace, the promise of a family that is one is for you and it is for your children and it is for all who are far off and it is for everyone whom God is calling and I bet that none of us can imagine just how far that invitation goes. Thanks be to God. on that.