Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 23, 2023
Delivered by the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas at Sts. James and Andrew, Greenfield
Luke 24:13-35
Walking our way to climate hope: Earth Sunday
May the grace of God enfold us, the love of Christ uphold us, and the Spirit of truth set us free. Amen.
Friends, what a blessing to be with you as we celebrate Earth Sunday. Thank you for inviting me to join you and thank you to everyone who contributed to creating this special service. As you know, I serve our diocese as your Missioner for Creation Care, and I travel around preaching, speaking, and leading retreats about our vocation as followers of Jesus to protect and heal God’s Creation. If you’d like to know more about what I’m up to, I hope you’ll visit my website, RevivingCreation.org.
I’m especially happy to be here because of your efforts to heal the living world entrusted to our care. Let’s give a shoutout to your Green Team for the monthly Environmental Sunday Series and to your Youth Group. I shouldn’t have been surprised a few days ago when I received a newsletter from the Anglican Communion Environmental Network – a newsletter, by the way, that goes out to Anglicans all around the world – and noticed that it included a story of this church hosting a panel of teenagers advocating for bold, collective action to address climate change. As your rector commented when I shared this news: Whoa! Thank you for the ways you bear witness to the Lord of life.
Altar, Sts. James & Andrew, Greenfield, MAWe have a wonderful Gospel text to consider this morning, the third Sunday of Easter. It’s a story that’s familiar to most of us: two confused and grief-stricken disciples walk the road to Emmaus and unexpectedly encounter the risen Christ. I can’t imagine a better story to work with on Earth Sunday, for it expresses in a nutshell how those of us engaged in the battle to save life as it has evolved on Earth can draw strength and sustenance from the wellsprings of our faith. That’s the gift that Christianity can bring to a frightened, troubled world: the gift of spiritual teachings and practices that empower us to move from passive despair to active hope, from confusion to clarity. So, let’s join the disciples on their walk and see if we can find our place in the story.
It’s late in the afternoon of the day of the resurrection. We don’t know exactly who the two disciples are, but since they share a home, it’s likely that they are husband and wife. One of them is named Cleopas, and if this is the Clopas referred to in John’s Gospel (John 19:25), then his wife, Mary, was among the group of women who stayed with Jesus at the cross. As the two of them head down the dusty road, late in the afternoon of the first Easter, they are struggling to speak about Jesus’ crucifixion. Surely, they are traumatized: they’ve just witnessed an act of unspeakable brutality and violence inflicted on someone they dearly loved. Not only that – the cruelty and suffering they’ve witnessed has triggered a crisis of meaning: what can they trust, what can they believe in, what kind of future is possible now that the one whom they hoped would save them has been killed? To make matters even more bewildering, they’ve heard a rumor of hope – reports that Jesus has risen from the dead. None of this makes sense. They’ve got things to talk about.
We’ve got things to talk about, too. What would you bring to a conversation about the crucifixion of Mother Earth? Maybe you’d confess your heartache about dying coral, melting glaciers, and thawing tundra, or your anxiety about sea-level rise, massive droughts, and severe weather. Maybe you’d speak about your grief for the species that are vanishing and for those that are struggling to hold on, as their habitat is swallowed up by palm oil plantations and cattle ranches, by freeways and malls. Maybe you’d express outrage that so many corporate and political powers are determined to perpetuate and even expand the extraction of coal, gas, and oil, despite the fact that burning fossil fuels is causing a dramatic rise in global temperatures, and every living system of the world is affected and in decline. We are living at a decisive moment in history, for climate science has made it clear that we won’t be able to leave our children and our children’s children a habitable world unless we change course fast.
We need to talk, just as Cleopas and his unnamed companion needed to talk. We may not think that other people are frightened or concerned, but in fact they are. A recent survey1 of 10,000 children and young people in ten countries around the world found that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change; more than half reported each of the following emotions – sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty; almost half of these young people said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning; and fully three-quarters said that they think the future is frightening.
Is this a good time to talk, to name our fears and share our concerns? You bet it is. Talking about climate change with friends, family, and co-workers – and with our elected leaders – is an essential step to building momentum for change. When we end what’s been called “climate silence” and start talking with each other, start walking the road of life together and speaking about our deepest fears and naming our possibly very faint traces of hope, today’s Gospel story assures us that even though we may know nothing about it, Jesus is walking beside us.
That’s what the two sad disciples discovered, to their great surprise. It seems they traveled miles with an apparent stranger and talked with him at length without recognizing that the one they longed for was walking right beside them. It’s a poignant scene, for how often we, too, get lost in our sorrows and fears and have no idea that the risen Christ is walking with us. Maybe it’s a frustrating scene, too, for Jesus sounds impatient when he bursts out, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe!” I think it’s a funny scene, too, for the person whom the disciples are lecturing about recent events in Jerusalem is the very person who knows more about those events and their meaning than anyone else on Earth. As Frederick Buechner once put it, “Blessed are they who get the joke.”
Our Gospel story invites us to acknowledge and name our climate grief and anxiety and to give thanks for the assurance that God’s love is walking with us, sustaining us, and mysteriously present with us, even though, like the two disciples, for a while we may know nothing about it. That’s the deep truth of Christian faith, a truth that I pray the whole world will come to see and know in this perilous time, for God’s abiding love alone can guide us forward and help us forge a new path, a new, more excellent way of walking on the Earth.
What happens next in today’s story? When the disciples fail to recognize Jesus, he patiently interprets all of Scripture to them until they begin to perceive and understand. Jesus is gentle and deeply respectful: he doesn’t force himself upon the two disciples as they approach the village, but instead he walks ahead, as if he were going on. He waits for the two disciples to invite him to stay with them, and only then does he enter their home. And it’s there, around the table, when he takes bread, blesses, and breaks it, that their eyes are opened, and they recognize who he is.
Our story not only conveys the deep truth of Christ’s abiding presence with us – it also provides two practices for experiencing the risen Christ: reading and reflecting on Scripture, and the blessing and breaking of bread.
When it comes to Scripture, the eyes of our faith are being opened to perceive the deep ecological wisdom in the Bible. Like many of us, I grew up believing that the Bible cared only about human beings and God, as if for some reason only one species, Homo sapiens, was worthy of God’s attention. It turns out that this interpretation of the Bible is far too small, for in fact, from the first words of Genesis, when God created all that is and pronounced it “very good” (Gen. 1:30) to the last pages of the Book of Revelation, which speak of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev. 21:1), the sweep of our salvation history embraces the whole creation. The New Testament tells us that Christ lived, died, and rose not only to heal the human soul and the human community, but also to heal the Earth community, to reconcile all things on earth and in heaven, “making peace through the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). As Archbishop Desmond Tutu once put it, the “supreme work”2 of Jesus Christ is to reconcile us to God, to one another, and to God’s whole creation.
This means that caring about the health of the Earth, and the fate of the Earth, isn’t some extra, new-fangled add-on to Christian faith, one more “issue” to add to our many other concerns. No, protecting, healing, and loving the Earth is core to Christian faith, and once our eyes are opened to it, we find this message running throughout the Bible.
Ferns, AshfieldWe meet the living Christ in the pages of Scripture, and we also meet the living Christ in the natural world. You know what that’s like – the joy and wonder that may come upon us when we lift our eyes to gaze at the Holyoke Range, when we look down and see the fern unfolding its tiny green fist, when we listen to the call of cardinals, and when we feel the wind or the rain on our face. The crucified and risen Christ is giving himself to us in and as the living world around us. As Martin Luther once said, “God writes the Gospel, not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and the flowers and the clouds and stars.” The living Christ meets us again and again in the book of the Bible and, also, in the book of Nature.
And Christ meets us here as we share the bread and wine of Holy Communion. When the celebrant at the altar lifts up the bread and wine, all of Creation is lifted up. When the celebrant blesses the bread and wine, all of Creation is blessed. The bread that is placed in our hands is made of wheat, earth, and sun, of rainwater and clouds, of farmers’ hands and human labor. Christ dwells in the bread and wine, and God gives God’s self to us, once again, through the natural world. When we stretch out our hands to receive the bread, we take in what is natural and we take in Christ.3
You and I have practices to sustain us in the days ahead, practices that strengthen our resilience and resolve to take bold climate action and to join in healing God’s Creation. As with the two disciples, the risen Christ will meet us in our honest conversation and lament, in our reflection on Scripture, and in our breaking of the bread. When our eyes are opened, we, too, will understand that the risen Christ was with us all along. And then, as in today’s story, he will likely vanish from our sight. Why? Maybe because he has other places to go, other people to strengthen and inspire. Or maybe because his living presence is now fully within us, so that we can embody his love in fresh and creative ways.
The two disciples of our story have had a long, traumatic day and have walked many a mile, but now, with their hearts burning within them, they find the energy to leap up and travel the seven miles back to Jerusalem to bring their joyful news to their community. At the beginning of today’s story, hope is only a rumor. By the end, the disciples themselves embody hope: they will give their lives to the possibility that God’s love will be fully expressed in the world. Rather than quietly accepting a killing status quo, they will join God’s mission to reconcile and heal, and they will bear witness to a love that nothing can destroy.
On this Earth Sunday, we celebrate the risen Christ who is in our midst, calling us to be healers and justice-seekers. How is God calling you to step forward?
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1. Caroline Hickman et al, “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey,” The Lancet, December 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00278-3/fulltext#
2. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “Foreword,” The Green Bible (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers (HarperOne), 2008, I-14.
3. This paragraph is adapted from Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, Joy of Heaven, to Earth Come Down (Forward Movement, 2012,2013), 35.
March for jobs, justice, and climate: Were not our hearts burning within us?
They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32)Crowds march down Pennsylvania Avenue, carrying placards and chanting
I bring you greetings from Massachusetts, where I serve as Missioner for Creation Care in the Episcopal Diocese of Western Massachusetts and in the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ. I took a train to get to Washington, D.C., this weekend, but I feel as if I sailed here on the living waters of the Holy Spirit. I was carried here, called here, moved to come here by a power greater than myself. Like John Wesley, my heart felt “strangely warmed” and called by the Spirit to be here at this critical time in world history.
Yesterday’s historic “March for Jobs, Justice and Climate” drew me, and many of you, and something like 200,000 other people to converge on our nation’s capital to express our shared love of life and our fierce intention to fight for a habitable planet, a just society, and a healthy future for our kids. We were like a mighty river, pouring through the streets in all our variety and diversity, a wave of people standing up for life, including people who had never done anything like this before, people who had never protested in the streets, had never taken part in public witness, yet who now felt moved to connect with others and to say that now is the time for our country to change course. Now is the time for fossil fuels to stay in the ground.
Where does such a beautiful wave of faith, hope, and love come from? Where does it begin? A mighty river has to begin somewhere, and if we hike upstream and follow a river back to its headwaters, we probably discover that even a great river starts as something very small – maybe nothing more than a trickle, a bit of moisture on the ground, a trace of dampness in the soil. Yet eventually that rivulet of water becomes a power to be reckoned with.
A great wave of Easter hope poured like a river through the first followers of Jesus – a mighty surge of confidence that the crucified Jesus had risen from the dead, that he was alive through the power of the Spirit, and that life, and not death, would have the last word. But that great wave of hope likewise began in a very small and humble way. We learn this, for instance, in today’s Gospel story. Two dejected followers of Jesus are walking to Emmaus. This is not a big march, but a mournful amble by two people who feel lost. Cleopas and his unnamed companion – who might be his wife, but who might also represent you or me – the two of them are walking together, talking about their confusion and sorrow. The person they had loved and followed, and who had ignited their hopes, has been executed. Jesus has been handed over, condemned to death, and crucified. The powers that be have triumphed. Injustice has won the day.
I wonder how deep their despair went. Along with the grief that someone they loved had been tortured and murdered, did they also wonder if they had been fools to follow him in the first place? Did his message of God’s mercy, justice, and love now seem absurd? The movement that had formed around the power of Jesus’ love, teachings, and presence seemed to have been defeated forever. The government, like unjust governments everywhere, had tried to destroy the Jesus movement by arresting and killing its leader, figuring that without its leader, the movement would lose heart and dissipate like water into sand.
‘Emmaus’ door, by Janet Brooks-Gerloff
So here they were, on the road to Emmaus, two followers of Jesus feeling shocked, helpless, stuck, and sad. Sure, some women of their group had told them an astounding tale that Jesus’ tomb was empty and that they “had… seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive” (Luke 24:23) – but what did that mean, and how was that possible?
I want to pause here, because it’s important that we find ourselves right here in this story, without jumping ahead. I don’t know about you, but for me, the climate crisis can evoke similar feelings of grief, helplessness and fear, for we are witnessing (and complicit in) a crucifixion of another kind, the crucifixion of Earth. 97% of climate scientists worldwide are reporting with increasing alarm that climate change is upon us. Unless we take action fast, we will leave our children a world that none of us would recognize, a world very difficult to inhabit. In a mere 200 years – just a blink in geologic time – human beings have burned so much coal, gas, and oil and released so much heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that levels of CO2 are higher than our species has ever experienced before. Last year was the hottest year on record, crushing the record set the year before, which in turn crushed the record set the year before that. As global temperatures rise, every living system of the world is affected and in decline. Sea ice is melting rapidly at both poles. Land ice is melting and sliding into the sea. Tundra is thawing and releasing methane – a dangerous greenhouse gas. Storms are becoming more intense. Droughts are spreading in some areas, extensive floods in others. The ocean is absorbing heat and excess carbon dioxide, and in just decades has become 30% more acidic. Scientists recently reported that large sections of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have died.
The climate emergency is not just a quote-unquote “environmental” problem. It’s not just about polar bears and coral. It’s about people in Southern Africa, where rains have failed, crops are withering, and starving families are “reduced to eating cactus and even rocks or ashes.” It’s about Pacific islanders whose homelands are already flooding from rising seas. It’s about impoverished people here and abroad who are hit first and hardest by a changing climate, who have the fewest resources to adapt to it, and who are the least responsible for causing it.
To make matters worse, fossil fuel groups are working very hard and spending millions of dollars to keep the American public confused. The same folks who once spread doubt about the risk of smoking tobacco are now throwing their weight behind efforts to mislead the public about the reality of climate change.[1] We learned this week that a think tank known for attacking climate science is mailing out books to public school teachers across the United States, books which contend that climate scientists have not reached a consensus on the causes and the urgency of global warming – when of course they have.
Given the climate emergency in which we find ourselves, and the political and corporate powers lined up to deny there’s a problem and eager to maintain business as usual, do I ever find myself walking beside Cleopas on that sorrowful road to Emmaus? You bet I do. It is easy to feel overwhelmed and to get stuck in fear or inertia, uncertain about what to do and doubtful that it’s worth doing anything, anyway, since, after all, maybe it’s too late, maybe we’re too far gone, and what difference can one person make? Paralyzed by fear, we can get caught in something like a death spiral, in what U.N. Secretary General Ban-ki Moon has denounced as a “global suicide pact.”
But then something happens: “Jesus himself came near and went with them” (Luke 24:15). The Lord of life is walking beside his grieving, frightened friends. What’s so poignant and even funny about this part of the story is that the sorrowing disciples don’t recognize the stranger beside them. They even rebuke him for apparently not knowing that Jesus has just been crucified and that strange reports are circulating that he has risen from the dead. But though they are not yet aware of it, the risen Christ is with them, walking beside them, patiently listening to their sorrows.
Maybe that is how our own awareness of Christ’s resurrection begins. As we pour out our grief about the climate crisis, as we pour out our protest that the web of life is unraveling, we sense that a sacred Someone is listening to us. That is how the risen Christ often comes: he draws near, he walks beside us, he listens to us – and we begin to realize that we are not alone. A divine presence and power is with us.
Or maybe, like Cleopas and his companion, we begin to sense the risen Christ as we study Scripture and come to understand, as the first disciples did, that these sacred texts speak of a suffering love that the powers of this world can never destroy.
But in order to come fully into our lives, it seems that the risen Christ needs to know that we actively want his presence – that we are willing to reach out and ask him to stay. That’s what happens in our Gospel story. Christ starts walking ahead of Cleopas and his companion, and going on, as if leaving them behind. They call out to him strongly, “Stay with us” (Luke 24:28-29). And this is just what he does: “He went in to stay with them” (Luke 24:29).
Maybe we sense the risen Christ most vividly right here at this table, when we share in the sacrament of Communion, when we take, bless, break, and share the bread. That is when the eyes of Cleopas and his companion are opened: they recognize the risen Christ, and in that moment of recognition, he vanishes. Why does he vanish? Because the disciples have been transformed. Because they have fully taken in his presence. Because their own Christ selves have been awakened, and they are now seeing with the eyes of Christ, feeling with the heart of Christ, serving with the hands of Christ.
“Were not our hearts burning within us?” (Luke 24:32), they say to each other, as they reflect on what just happened. They have received what we might call a unitive vision, an experience of union with God. They see now that their lives are filled with meaning and purpose. They know now that they belong to a sacred mystery that is larger than themselves: to a love that will never let them go. Although they are still mortal and frail, just two small people in a big, chaotic world, they understand now that they are part of a long story of salvation to which they can contribute, every moment of their lives, by choosing compassion over hate, kindness over cruelty, love over fear. This insight is a great gift. And it is also a choice and a discipline that we try to renew every day and in every aspect of our lives
Tired as they are that night, the two disciples get up and head straight back to Jerusalem to share this astonishing news with their friends – only to discover, to their further amazement, that their companions have independently had the same experience: a divine love has been set loose in the world, a love that nothing, not even death, can destroy.
That is the wave of Easter hope that filled the early disciples and that set them on fire to bear witness to the risen Christ and to resist the forces of death in the world around them. That wave of Easter hope fills us and carries us now – every one of us who feels impelled to join our Creator in re-weaving the web of life and in building a gentler and more just society.
After the march, many people paused at the EPA office to leave messages of rebuke (“Pruitt is getting spit roasted by oil and gas”; “Climate justice: Don’t frack with democracy”) and support (“Save the EPA”)
And so we marched yesterday, and we will keep on marching. We will lobby, we will advocate, and we will press our politicians to keep fossil fuels in the ground, where they belong. We will block the path of new fracked gas pipelines, we will push for a fair price on carbon, and we will work to build a clean green economy that provides decent jobs and improves public health.
The Church was made for a time like this – a time when God is calling us to become an Easter people, to step out of despair and inertia and to join – maybe even to lead – the joyful, justice-seeking, Spirit-led, unstoppable movement to protect the world that God entrusted to our care.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
1.Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming; see also Ross Gelbspan, The Heat is On; and Union of Concerned Scientists’ 2007 report on ExxonMobil.
To make matters worse, fossil fuel groups are working very hard and spending millions of dollars to keep the American public confused. The same folks who once spread doubt about the risk of smoking tobacco are now throwing their weight behind efforts to mislead the public about the reality of climate change.
