A sermon by the Reverend Kathleen S. Russell, Assistant Professor of Contextual Theology for Ministry, preached in Christ Chapel on April 19, 2006, of Easter Week

Today is the 19th day of the 4th month of the year -- April 19th. Thirteen years ago on this day, 85 people, 17 of them children, died in Waco, Texas, as a religious cult and government agents brought their conflict to a close. Two years later, on April 19, 1995, 168 people, 19 of them children, died when a home-grown terrorist blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City.

And 4 years after that in 1999, two disturbed teenage boys in Colorado spent April 19th putting the finishing touches on their plans for the next day. In their grandiosity they hoped to kill hundreds; in reality they killed 13 people directly, then killed themselves.

I remember that April 19th of 1999 very distinctly. I spent much of it at the Howard County, Maryland, police department looking at mug shots and working with a sketch artist. The day before on a bright Sunday morning, as I was leaving the parking lot of church, a young man rushed me. Yelling threats, and waving a gun, he robbed me of my purse, so I remember the next day very well, and indeed, the day after that.

Now on the Richter scale of trauma and suffering, my experience barely registers. But it was my experience; it was my gateway into a kind of knowing that no book or training could open. Here was the hospital chaplain who had heard so many stories; here was the person with the piece of paper in her hand -- "certified critical incident debriefer" -- yet here I was brought face to face with the effects of violence, no longer knowing from theory or even imaginative empathy, but from my own weak knees and trembling hand.

God, why am I going to this place?
Why just four days into this Easter season am I doubling back to Good Friday?
God, how about sending me some inspirational stories about empty eggs instead of these reminders that even on the other side of Easter we still walk in the shadow of the cross, like those disciples dragging themselves home or that fellow sitting at the gate waiting for someone, anyone, to throw him some change.

But I can't do that, and I can't because Easter, hope and grace won't let me.

We can't escape the cross and we ignore it at our peril, but -- the wonderful, wonderful but of Easter….allows us, calls us, moves us -- to look at the human condition with new eyes and in hope.

In his book, Resurrection, Rowan Williams keeps coming back to the theme of "diminution" -- the process or act of making something smaller, of diminishing and devaluing; that's how he describes what is at work in a fallen and unredeemed world.

Once the fellow who robbed me was gone from my sight I ran inside the parish hall where people were still working their way through cups of coffee and Danish, and as I ran through that room, I felt just like a little mouse, with a tiny squeek of a voice that no one seemed to hear and moving in such a hurry, yet still taking forever to make my across the room to a phone. I seemed to get smaller and smaller and those around me farther and farther away.

The world of these disciples on the road to Emmaus had indeed gotten smaller. I think the story of Cleopas and his companion has such power because like them we have all walked the path of loss, disappointment and grief; watching the past recede into memory and the future seeming so precarious. Here are two little people, trying to find words to make sense of what had happened, hurrying home but expecting little comfort upon their arrival as they will have to tell the disturbing story one more time, feeling smaller and smaller in their sadness and Jerusalem farther and farther away.

And yet Christ catches up with them. As those disciples were talking and discussing (processing: yes, a good thing but only a start) Jesus himself comes up along side them and goes with them. At first they meet him as a stranger. We don't expect much from strangers. We are either suspicious at worst or tentative at best. The disciples start their conversation expecting that they will be the ones doing the informing, filling him in. What could he possibly do for them?

And then they arrive at the place they were going to: It must have seemed like the least they could do, a mitzvah, a small good thing to offer hospitality. And so they extend the invitation: Stay, Eat.

And here, here is the center of this story, not on the road but at the table. Things get turned around. As they sit and eat, the guest becomes the host. The hosts become the recipients of the gift. The stranger is revealed as friend, someone who knows them better than they know themselves. And the messiah who had been diminished to the point of being just a piece of flesh on a cross is here with them.

Suddenly the world is filled with hope and expectancy. The world defined by its fragmentary and temporary nature is now defined by restoration, relationship and new life. The future is reclaimed as the past is redeemed. This small gesture of making space for the stranger becomes a moment of grace and forgiveness and revelation.

Yes, forgiveness. As Williams says, there were no innocent bystanders at the crucifixion. Nobody, not even the Marys, offered to take Jesus' place. Nobody organized a blockade of that procession to Golgotha. All are diminished. Yet, here, these disciples are raised up; they come to know God and themselves in a new way. They are received by Christ; they are forgiven.

It is my deep belief that our own suffering either opens us up or closes us down. We either become absorbed in our own pain, staying trapped in ever smaller circles of cynicism, fatalism, or stoicism or we fall prey to illusions of grandeur, whether that of the gun or religious triumphalism. Perhaps what we need to do is embrace our smallness -- not the imposed diminishment of others, but our own inadequacy and vulnerability and need for forgiveness -- and embrace these as the very things that open the doors of our hearts to the suffering of others and the world's need for reconciliation and transformation.

This is our call, our vocation -- to be a living commentary on Scripture. To respond in faith and thanksgiving to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ in the stories we tell and the stories we live, stories of grace, hope, forgiveness and communion.

Jewish tradition has a name for this: it's called midrash. A story about stories in Scripture, and so let me end with my favorite midrash on this story of the supper at Emmaus. It's embedded in a short story by Raymond Carver.

"A small good thing" is a story about a young couple whose 8-year-old son Scotty is hit by a car on his birthday. His mother had ordered him a cake for the special day, and all is ready for celebration, but he goes into a mysterious coma and Ann and Howard, his parents, are bewildered and fearful and in shock. They take up a vigil at his hospital bedside, going home only when they have to.

But their attempts at respite at home are disturbed by phone calls; phone calls in which no one speaks, then hangs up. Rude, accusing phone calls, late at night, early in the morning. But Ann and Howard are absorbed with their child and so at first the calls exist as annoying background noise to their crisis. Then three days into his coma, Scotty dies.
His parents return home from the hospital, deep in their grief.

Once again the telephone rings.
A voice says: "Your Scotty, I got him ready for you. Did you forget him?"
Have you forgotten about Scotty?" Then the caller hangs up. Ann is distraught. At first she thinks it's the hospital calling, but no, it's not that. "The bastard," she thinks, "Who would do such a thing?" Then she realizes it's the baker, calling to harass them about the cake that had been left forgotten. She had had him write the child's name Scotty on the cake. All of her grief and the pieces of her broken heart get poured into her anger at the baker. Furious she and her husband storm down to the bakery to confront this cruel man mocking their grief. And so they come face to face with the baker, in the night, in the back room of an old building.

Carver writes that Ann…"clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep burning inside her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself, larger than either of these men." The baker, not knowing the story that has unfolded as he has gone about his business, offers the cake at half-price…It's no good to me now…" he says.

Ann's anger goes deeper, and the tension rises. More words are spoken; the baker picks up a rolling pin and taps it in the palm of his hand. Violence seems so close. Finally Ann says with a "cold even finality" "my son's dead." Deflated, all her grief spills out.

Surprisingly, the gruff baker's heart is touched. He rushes to get Ann and Howard chairs to sit on; he makes a place for them at the table. He tells them how sorry he is for having caused them pain, for the part he has played in their story.

"Let me say how sorry I am, God alone knows how sorry. Listen to me. I'm just a baker. I don't claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being. I've forgotten,…but I'm not any longer, if I ever was. Now I'm just a baker…." He shares his regrets, his losses, his loneliness -- the diminishment that has come over time. "Forgive me, if you can. Can you find it in your hearts to forgive me?"

Carver leaves the moment of forgiveness undescribed, unspoken.

Ann and Howard and the baker simply sit together at the table. Without a word, Howard takes off his topcoat and helps Ann with hers. The baker gets them coffee and cream.
"You probably need to eat something. You have to eat and keep going," he tells them.
"Eating is a small good thing in a time like this."
He takes warm rolls from the oven, the icing still runny.
He feeds them bread, sweet and heavy with molasses and coarse grains. And so they sat together through until dawn, eating warm bread and rolls, talking, listening,

The story ends with this: "They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale, cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving."

Risen Christ, our host and our guest, gather us, feed us, love us, forgive us.
Be known to us in the Breaking of the Bread.