Easter 3A_2020

3rd Sunday of Easter Year A April 26, 2020 Last Sunday, I began my homily by sharing with you that I had been thinking about grief and hope the week before, and I had realized that grief doesn’t always look like grief, and hope doesn’t always look like hope. I then proceeded to talk about grief and how that connected to Thomas in last week’s gospel and how that may connect to our lives in our current situation. Spurred on by a small phrase in this week’s gospel, I’ve been thinking about hope, and how it doesn’t always look like what we expect hope to look like. Our gospel story for today is, perhaps, my favorite story in all of scripture. Definitely in my top 5. The story picks up immediately after Luke’s telling of the resurrection. Two of Jesus’s followers are on the way to Emmaus, and they are discussing the recent events of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Jesus, himself, joins them on the road, but they don’t recognize him. He asks what they are talking about, and they tell him; and buried in the heart of their telling is the little phrase that has so caught my attention: “but we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel”. “But we had hoped…” The story goes on to tell about how Jesus interprets the scriptures for them around himself, and when they get to where they are going, they invite him to stay and join them. Together they eat, and as Jesus blesses and breaks the bread for them, their eyes become opened, and they recognize him. They race back to Jerusalem (the 2nd 7 mile walk in that day) to tell the others the good news, saying to each other, “were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road…” It’s a beautiful story about how we encounter the Risen Christ in unexpected ways and places and how he often makes his presence known to us both in ordinary ways, such as meals together, as well as in one of our most sacred acts, the celebration of the Eucharist together. But this week, I am stuck by the poignancy of those four words those two men utter: “but we had hoped…” “It is said that Ernest Hemmingway was once challenged to write a short story in 6 words. He replied by taking out a pen and writing on a napkin: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” ‘It’s not just the tragedy of what happened that hurts, but the gaping hole of all that could have happened but won’t.’”i During this strange season, I’ve come to realize that much of what I often think of as hope is more about busy-ness or planning, or looking ahead to something fun. And I’ve been deprived of those endeavors of late. We can’t really plan our summer at this point, and we’d had some plans. But we had hoped… This type of hope is stymied or frustrated when our plans are disrupted or set awry, but there is a deeper type of hope that is available to us even now, in this strange liminal space. The scholar and theologian “Cynthia Bourgeault makes a powerful distinction between [these two different types of hope. There is] what she calls ordinary hope [this kind of hope that I’m talking about, the kind of hope we expect which is] “tied to outcome . . . . an optimistic feeling . . . because we sense that things will get better in the future” and [there is] mystical hope ‘that is a complete reversal of our usual way of looking at things. Beneath the ‘upbeat’ kind of hope that parts the seas and pulls rabbits out of hats, this other hope weaves its way as a quiet, even ironic counterpoint.’”ii She writes, “We might make the following observations about this other kind of hope, which we will call mystical hope. In contrast to our usual notions of hope: 1. Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions. 2. It has something to do with presence—not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by something intimately at hand. 3. It bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of strength, joy, and satisfaction: an “unbearable lightness of being.” But mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward expectations being met, it seems to produce them from within. . . [It] is all too easy to understate and miss that hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being…. We ourselves are not the source of that hope; we do not manufacture it. But the source dwells deeply within us and flows to us with an unstinting abundance, so much so that in fact it might be more accurate to say we dwell within it. . . . It is no accident or coincidence that the Risen Christ shows up to join his two disciples on the road to Emmaus just when their ordinary hope has failed them. Their plans for the future have been laid waste, and suddenly, he is with them, and he provides them with access to that mystical hope, that abiding state of being. By engaging the scriptures with them, he reconnects them to the wellspring of hope, the source of all hope that dwells deep within them, and after they recognize the Risen Christ, only then are they able to recognize the mystical hope which he has reconnected them with: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”iii How much of this mystical kind of hope might we also be experiencing these days but not recognizing because it does not look like ordinary hope to us? Each one of us, in our creation, has been connected to this deep wellspring of hope in our souls. God’s goodness which produces this hope flows in us and through us, and it is always available to us. We don’t have to produce our hope; we just have to tap into that which is already there. Your invitation this week is to look beyond the disappointments that this season offers to your plans and your expectations, and to pay attention to the times when you experience an unbearable lightness of being or your heart burning strangely within you; listen, this week, for where the hope that wells from God bubbles up in your life. i.This portion is cited from my own Easter 3A sermon from 2014 (preached at St. Peter’s by-the-Sea in Gulfport, MS. The portion quoted in this passage is written by David Lose on Workingpreacher.org, but I can’t find more details on the original citation such as the year. ii. This is Richard Rohr’s introduction (with my voice in parentheses) introducing Bourgeault’s work in his daily meditation titled The Universal Pattern : Mystical Hope Thursday,  April 16, 2020. The Full text can be found here: https://cac.org/mystical-hope-2020-04-16/ iii. As quoted in the meditation listed above. Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God (Cowley Publications: 2001), 3, 5, 9-10, 17, 20, 42.