I wonder if you’ve ever had the experience of returning to
your childhood home. Or a place
you loved in a different time in your life. Everything looks just the same. But somehow, everything looks completely different.
With time, we can see the movement in what seemed to be
standing still.
We can see the trees have been growing. We can see that the porch has been
sagging, the paint fading.
This weekend, some of the congregants from St. Lydia’ s went
on retreat. And we spent a lot of
time with the text we just read: the story of two men on the road from
Jerusalem who meet Jesus, and don’t see that it’s him.
Every time we read the story, it got deeper. It opened wider. We read it through different
lenses. We saw how it resonated
with our community, with the experience of walking a labyrinth, with our own
experience. And the text just kept
on giving.
I could talk a lot about what we discovered n this story:
the rich images and symbols we find in it. But tonight, I’m drawn to the end.
The moment where,
after meeting Jesus on the road,
after he opens the scriptures to them,
after their hearts burn with longing,
after they sit down at the table and break bread,
and after that startling moment of recognition,
of seeing him,
after he vanishes,
they go home.
They go home,
and everything is different,
but everything’s just the same.
I’ve spoken before of the time I spend living in the
Netherlands. After about three
years after leaving the country and moving home, I went back for a visit.
And I landed at the airport I remembered so well, and got of at the
train station where I used to get off, and biked through the streets, and it was
almost as if I was riding next to this girl who existed three years ago. A version of myself who was entirely
familiar, but also entirely changed.
I had grown deeper, opened wider.
I could see the movement in what seemed to be standing
still.
For our retreat this weekend, we met at the clock at Grand
Central. After we got off the
train at the end of the weekend, that’s where we said goodbye. We were the same people with the same
luggage, maybe a little more rumpled and a little more sleep deprived, but
something else was different too.
We had grown deeper.
Our hearts had expanded wider.
The two disciples in our story do what all of us do when we
go home. They tell stories of what
happened on their journey.
They tell stories of how, as they walked and talked, God
came and walked with them.
And how, as they read scripture, God opened their eyes,
opened their hearts.
And of how, as they broke bread together, God was revealed,
unveiled, and then gone,
as quickly as she had come.
These are the stories we tell every week at St. Lydia’s.
Sometimes it takes wandering away and coming back to the same place to
know we’ve been transformed.
The word conversion means “to turn.”
Stand in the center of Grand Central Station as the rush of
humanity speeds recklessly toward whatever destination they’ve laid out for
themselves.
Stand in the center and watch the hands of the clock turn, slowly
and steadily.
Just as slowly and steadily, God is converting you.
Turning you.
Moving you,
drawing you deeper,
pulling you wider.
We share the sermons at St. Lydia’s, and so I ask you to
share a story from your experience that’s been brought up by the text or my
words.
good sermon em. how i appreciate that conversion=to turn. metanoia. such a good old greek word. sometimes it is to stay simple, like this one.
Posted by: Mieke Vandersall | 08/05/2010 at 08:40 PM