Conversation and Conversion: An Emmaus Story

We’re going to begin this morning with a bit of self-examination.  Here’s the question: When was the last time you had a conversation with someone?  Your kneejerk reaction is likely, “In the narthex, just before church” or “At the breakfast table this morning” or “On the telephone last night.”  But is that true? 

When I reflect on my own interactions with other people, they often unfortunately take the form of (as my grandmother might have put it) “A talking at or a talking to.”  Either I’m attempting to give instruction, or I’m conveying information, or (if I’m brutally honest) I’m trying to impress.  Or, if I’m on the receiving end, I’m simply being pummeled by similar attempts from someone else.   Which begs the question, is “a talking at or a talking to” truly a conversation?

Former Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori once made the excellent point that the words conversation and conversion stem from the same root.[i]  That etymology matters.  It reminds us that an interaction with another person is never really a conversation unless each party is open to being converted to the other person’s point of view.  Toward the other, each person must be inquisitive, curious, seeking, honoring, as willing to hear as to speak…each person must be, at least a little bit, open to conversion by the other.  Otherwise, each person is merely using the other as a reflective surface off which better to hear his own voice.  Or, as author Kate Murphy puts it in her aptly titled book You’re Not Listening, people are usually just “waiting for an opening, for someone to take a breath, so they [can] lob their [own] verbal firecrackers.”[ii]  There is no real conversation happening.  So, I’ll ask you to consider again: When was the last time you had a conversation?  When was the last time you engaged someone with an openness to having your mind, your heart, your soul converted?

It’s rarer even than we may think.  In his book Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell chronicles multiple instances in which even the most apparently careful and intuitive listeners fail accurately to receive the information being conveyed to them.  Gladwell reveals, for instance, that the best FBI interrogators are correct in their assessment of verbal and physical cues exactly 50% of the time.[iii]  Did you catch that?  The FBI’s most adept listeners hear wrongly just as often as they hear correctly.  Like the rest of us, they approach interactions with presumptions, biases, mental and emotional roadblocks that prevent them from entering into a true conversation.  And if those trained cannot do so, what hope have we?

Today’s Gospel passage in Luke takes place on Easter day.  Read in a vacuum, it seems as if these two disciples of Jesus are on a leisurely walk.  In context, however, it’s clear that they are actually fleeing Jerusalem.  They have been associated with a man—Jesus—who has just been horrifically executed for sedition by the Romans.  The only prudent course of action is to gain some geographic distance from the events—and thus disassociate from Jesus—as soon as the Sabbath has ended and they can scoot out of town.  As the two disciples make their escape, they hear whispers that Jesus’ tomb was found empty, that maybe Jesus isn’t dead after all.  It’s a weird and confusing story, but these former followers put no real stock in it.  As Luke tells us just before today’s reading, to these two (as with the other disciples), “it seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe [it].”[iv]

And so, they get the heck out of Dodge.  The two head to Emmaus, a village about seven miles away from Jerusalem.  While they are walking and talking—no doubt both about their fear of getting caught in a Roman dragnet and about the incredulous story that Jesus might have survived the crucifixion—someone they do not recognize approaches them on the road and engages them.  And we find ourselves at an important moment, both in the narrative of these two disciples and in our own lives.  What will happen next?  Will this be a talking at and a talking to, or will it be a conversation?

Maybe the disciples are too exhausted by fear and apprehension to be guarded.  Maybe they’ve walked just far enough that they believe they are out of reach of Roman agents.  Maybe there is something about this stranger that gains their trust.  Whatever it is, the two disciples share like open books.  They chronicle events as they understand them, but they also convey their hopes and dashed dreams.  Finally, they admit of their confusion.  They are vulnerable. 

The stranger responds in kind.  Though the NRSV has him begin by calling the two disciples “foolish,” other translations are gentler, saying, “It is unwise to be so slow of heart,”[v] as if the stranger is saying, “You are talking yourselves in circles, but you aren’t opening yourselves to understanding.” 

The stranger then begins to converse with them about Jesus and redemption, and the two disciples are so enthralled that Luke says their “hearts burn within them while he is talking [to them] on the road.”  When they finally arrive in Emmaus, they don’t want to leave the stranger’s company, so they invite him to stay and break bread with them.  The stranger does so.  He takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them—a physical sacrament of the spiritual food he has given them on the road—and when he does so the disciples’ eyes are opened, and they recognize that the stranger has been the risen Jesus all along.

Lest we fail to recognize the depth of their conversion—the way that Jesus’ conversation with them has utterly changed their hearts and minds—these two disciples, who that morning had fled Jerusalem in fear, get up from the table and with courage immediately begin walking back to Jerusalem.  Panicked confusion is replaced by ardent faith, and they cannot wait to get back to share what they now know to be true, no matter what the danger.

There is a provocative scene in the movie Waking the Dead in which Fielding is searching for Sarah, who may be alive or dead.  Fielding walks through an airport terminal, and each person he passes is Sarah.  He walks past her a dozen times but never pauses, never notices, never engages.  I wonder how many times the two disciples passed Jesus on the road before finally conversing with him, finally opening their hearts and minds to conversion.

I’ll return to our opening self-examination, but this time allow me to pose the question slightly differently: When was the last time you had a conversation with God?  Not the last time you talked at God, or asked God for something, but rather the last time you engaged with your Creator and Redeemer with an open heart and open mind?  When was the last time you set aside your anxiety, your fear, your confusion, your dogged desire not to change and listened to what God might have to say?  That voice might come from the ether, but today’s Gospel also reminds us that sometimes the strangers we meet in this world turn out to be Jesus.  Indeed, we may walk past Jesus each and every day.  That is to say, it may be that engaging God in conversation requires that we first learn or re-learn how to engage one another in conversation.  We need sometimes to tune out all the voices with which we already agree and instead seek out those who may have something to teach us about God, about grace, about goodness and joy, about this world’s deep yearning for redemption. In conversation we may find conversion.  Our hearts may burn brightly on the road.  We may meet Jesus, and when we do, we will find the courage to face anything. 

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[i] I don’t recall the exact reference.  I believe I heard her preach this in a sermon.

[ii] Murphy, Kate.  You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters, pg. 14.

[iii] Gladwell, Malcolm.  Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know, pg. 73.

[iv] Luke 24:11.  Luke makes clear that the two disciples on the road to Emmaus are among those who didn’t believe the women’s account of the empty tomb.  Luke says in verse 24, “Now on the same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus.”  The “of them” clearly refers back to the “them” who disbelieved in verse 11.

[v] See, for instance, the Holman Standard Christian Bible.

A Reflection on Priesthood

The following homily was delivered on April 18, 2023 at an annual gathering of clergy friends and colleagues in Memphis, TN.

I’m going to break every homiletic rule this morning and acknowledge that this reflection is, in many ways, all about me.  That said, I hope it’s all about you, too.  In two months, I will have been ordained twenty years.  The last two of those twenty have presented me with greater physical challenge and more angst than this already-angsty priest would have thought possible.  Things are much better now, as you’ll hear when we check-in with one another, but my recent experience, most especially weeks upon weeks during which I was mostly lying flat on my back, gave me protracted pause for reflection on what was, and what is.

In the 2017 indie film First Reformed, Ethan Hawke plays the Reverend Ernst Toller, a clericals-wearing minister who serves the two hundred-fifty-year-old colonial First Reformed Church.  Ernst is a damaged and conflicted soul who determines to keep a prayer journal for one year as an attempt to tease sense from his torment.  Much of the film consists of Ernst moving through the motions of his days, with the internal monologue of the journal playing on screen.  That monologue is mostly a consideration of calling to the ordained life.  In one among many memorable scenes, Ernst writes, “Discernment intersects with Christian life at every moment.  Discernment. Listening and waiting for God’s wish what action must be taken.”  Immediately after these lofty, highbrow, and true words, the camera shows Ernst pouring Drano into the church toilet and going to work furiously with a plunger to unstop a clog.  It’s a great juxtaposition. 

I still remember the first time I put on clericals.  Just before seminary graduation, I had ordered a black, long-sleeved clergy shirt and collar from Almy.  I put them on, sat at the edge of the bed in our little Austin rental house on Harris Park Blvd., and stared at myself in the bedroom mirror.  Though I was still a few weeks away from my diaconal ordination, I thought I sensed, for the first time, what Professor Bill Adams meant when he spoke of the ontological change that comes with ordination.  Like Peter Parker bitten by that radioactive spider or Clark Kent bathed for the first time in the light of our yellow sun, I felt as if something in me was—or was about to be—different.  (I should also acknowledge that as a teenager I was a prolific reader of comic books, and a therapist would no doubt have a field day analyzing my lifelong desire to wear costumes and play superhero.)

I was ordained in Memphis at age thirty, and I immediately fell in with a small cadre of other youngish, new priests who sat in the back at clericus, rolled our eyes at our older colleagues at clergy conference, and generally believed that the ails of the church were due to the laziness and ineptitude of its priests.  We called our group Goya, which we told others derived from the Hebrew Goyim—the people—but which was really an acronym, G.O.Y.A., standing for Get Off Your Ass, our indictment of our fellow clergy.  I’m pretty sure we were insufferable.

Despite our attitudinal deficits, our intention was true.  We—I—believed that the grace and power of God would redeem this good earth, and I believed with only slightly less fervor that through my own relentless hard work and dogged will, I could bend the world in God’s direction.  Sort of like a superhero.

A few years ago in Santa Fe, Kayleen Asbo taught our Urban-Suburban group Dante’s Divine Comedy, leading us through hell to heaven, and the following summer I took it upon myself to study Dante in greater depth.  That resulted in a Dean’s Hour series I taught entitled, “The Way Down is The Way Up,” and both the study and the course title proved prescient for my own life.  As you know, in February of 2021, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, a rare thing for a forty-eight-year-old man, and as proved to be true in my case, a more aggressive cancer when manifest in the forties.  No sooner had I recovered from cancer surgery than a lumbar spine that had been deteriorating for more than a decade finally gave out, and three back surgeries later I ended up with a tear in the lining of my spinal cord and a spinal fluid leak.  That leak caused brain sag, which resulted in persistent headaches more intense than I knew possible.  The only relief came from equalizing the pressure in my head and spine, and the only way to do that was to lie flat.  Which I did for five months, including one week in neurological ICU and twenty-three full days on my back. 

During the past two years, I first shed my pretense of invincibility, then my pretense to be able to bend the world to my will, then the pretense of just being o.k.  I experienced guilt, fear, depression, and finally despair.  I was on the way down, but I did not see how that trajectory could ever be the way up. 

The way down began to be the way up in late October last year, when I was able to visit the Mayo Clinic.  Good counsel, good medicine, and time have allowed me to adjust to a life that is different, a life with some chronic pain and some limitations, but that is now, strangely, fuller and richer than it’s ever been before.  It’s a life in which I now think back on that scene in First Reformed, and I am taken less by Ernt’s lofty words about discernment and more by the plunger in the toilet.  Or, better said, the plunger in the toilet gives new meaning to Ernt’s words: “Discernment intersects with Christian life at every moment.  Discernment. Listening and waiting for God’s wish what action must be taken.”

At some point in each of our lives, we discerned that God and the church were calling us to the priesthood.  And, as I’ve gleaned from our annual conversations, we continue to discern all the time whether or not God still calls us to the priesthood.  As for me, I don’t really like to wear clericals anymore.  I wear a collar as seldom as possible.  Not because I reject my ordination—God’s calling is more palpable to me than ever—but because the notion that priesthood is somehow like the bite of a radioactive spider is now so completely foreign to me.  Priesthood, for me, is now about plunging clogged toilets, and in the best way.

In First Reformed, Ernt’s journal, reflecting further on calling, reads, “Some are called for their gregariousness.  Some are called for their suffering.  Others are called for their loneliness.  They are called by God because, through the vessel of communication, they can reach out and hold beating hearts in their hands.  They are called because of their all-consuming knowledge of the emptiness of all things that can only be filled by the presence of our savior.”

I believe that today as profoundly as I believe anything.  As I skirted despair the last couple of years, there was nothing left but Jesus.  As my physical being betrayed me, the only way to arrest the spiritual downward spiral was to look to Jesus and hope Jesus would pull me up.  Lest I preach an entire homily without a nod to the Gospel text, this is my story of Nicodemus approaching Jesus under cover of night and slowly coming to grips that the emptiness of things can only be filled by the presence of the savior.  In First Reformed, Ernst Toller says, “Reason provides no answers…Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our minds simultaneously.  Hope and despair.  A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our heads is life itself.”

That is priesthood, I now believe: Holding up the hope of the savior in the face of despair.  If we think we are about anything other than that, then we are merely putting on costumes, at worst playing superhero and at best playing parts that are for others to play. We plunge toilets.  We unclog spirits.  We hold up hope.  We speak of the savior.  We hold beating hearts in our hands. 

What a privilege.  What a gift.  Amen.