Sermon on Luke 24:13-35

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

The words in our Gospel reading that always break my heart are: “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

These two disciples tell the stranger on the road that they “had hoped.” They had lived in a state of hope until that stopped. They don’t have that hope anymore.

They had followed the rabbi they had hoped was the Messiah, “the one to redeem Israel,” but he had been executed by the Roman Empire. Most of his disciples fled the scene, trying to escape a similar fate. We read last week about most of them hiding in a locked room, fearful of the authorities.

These two disciples seem to have decided to skip town altogether.Once they were out of immediate danger and telling their story to a stranger on the road, I wonder if their shock wore off and their grief hit them full force.I wonder if they fought back tears as they spoke. I wonder if the words “we had hoped” caught in their throats. I wonder if their grief felt like the hope in their hearts was extinguished.

Even as we celebrate the Easter season and rejoice in the hope of the resurrection, I can imagine people a few decades from now saying, “we had hoped.”

“We had hoped the sea levels wouldn’t rise this much.”

“We had hoped we would find a solution for climate change.”

“We had hoped we would do enough to keep our kids, grandkids, or great-grandkids from suffering.” Or “we had hoped our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents would do enough to keep things from getting this bad.”

Hope isn’t always an easy thing to find or keep.

It can be hard to feel God’s presence in the midst of pollution, war, discrimination, everything that’s wrong with the world.

It’s possible to bury our heads in the sand as a coping mechanism. If we stay away from the news, if we keep from finding out what scientists are predicting, if we don’t learn the extent of the damage, maybe we can hope that things aren’t as bad as they seem, that they can be fixed if we just try harder.

But as we learn more, we can find ourselves saying, “we had hoped…”

And it can feel like God is nowhere to be found.

But Jesus’ two disciples, who had given up hope, discovered that Jesus had been with them all along.

It’s a strange story: the disciples not recognizing their beloved rabbi, him keeping up the ruse for hours, the sudden recognition, the even more sudden disappearance.

But despite this story’s surprising and supernatural elements, it’s grounded in the physical.

The disciples recognized Jesus in the breaking of bread—physical food they had similarly shared with him only a few days before.

They marveled that they hadn’t recognized him, but realized their bodies knew all along: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

It took something physical to help them understand what God was up to, just like there’s a physical element in our sacraments, because God knows we understand better when there’s something of this world we can connect to.

We can recognize God in the breaking of bread, the pouring of wine, the splash of water.

We recognize God in the physical, because God made us physical beings. God formed our bodies out of the dust of the earth God created. God shows Godself to us through what is earthly and earthy.

We’re not just souls inhabiting inconvenient and messy bodies. We’re both physical and spiritual creatures. Our bodies can help us recognize God, because God shows Godself to us through what is earthly and earthy, like our bodies.

And that’s why this world we live in matters. We’re not just souls inhabiting a strange planet for a few decades before floating off into the clouds. The book of Revelation talks about a new heaven and a new earth. God loves this world and won’t abandon it. God loves you—all of you—the embodied and spiritual and everything about you.

Every time we touch water—sink, shower, garden hose, ocean—we can remember that God affirms our belonging to God’s family in baptism.

Every time we eat together—bread, wine, sushi, salads, or tortilla chips, dinner party or quick snack—we’re proclaiming our Savior’s death until he comes again. We’re recognizing God’s presence in and around us always—our communion with each other and all that lives.

We can recognize God in all that’s created.

A bright point in the news cycle lately has been the Artemis II mission, and I was moved by the impromptu response of the pilot, Victor Glover, to a request for an Easter message.

He said, “As we areso far from earth and looking back at, you know, the beauty of creation, I think that for me one of the really important personal perspectives that Ihave up here is I can really see earth as one thing.

And, you know, when I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us whowere created, you have this amazing place, this spaceship.You guys are talking to us because we're in a spaceship really far from Earth, butyou're on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos.

Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you, and I'm trying to tell you—just trust me—youare special.In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we getto exist together.

I think as we go into Easter Sunday thinking about, you know, all the cultures all around the world,whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are thesame thing and that we got to get through this together.”

What a great reminder that God created this beautiful planet and created us as part of it. What a privilege it is to live on this planet. Such a powerful message of unity and cooperation. After all, as Pastor Jaz reminded us last week: “Hope is a group project.” Say it with me: “Hope is a group project.”

This Easter season, let’s renew our hope in our risen Savior. Let’s do our best to recognize God in the world around us, in what is physical—bread, wine, water, the face of a stranger.

God is with us. Jesus is risen. The Holy Spirit breathes new life into our home in the cosmos.

Let your heart burn within you and hope again.