emmaus

Our Weird Faith: Sermon Preached on 19th April 2026 (Third Sunday of Easter)

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Preached at Christ Church, Bulkington and Holy Cross, Seend

Acts 2.14a, 36–41; Luke 24.13–35

“Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared!” 

A young kitchen maid, of Moorish complexion, in a white headcloth and dark olive-green smock stands behind a wooden table, her head bowed and her hands resting on a cloth on the tabletop. On the table in front of her are two large earthenware jugs, a shallow metal basin, a small dark pot, a white jug with blue decoration, a stack of plates, a mortar and pestle, and a bulb of garlic. A small white cloth lies folded on the table. Behind her on the right hangs a cloth-wrapped bundle. In the upper left corner, visible through an opening or hatch in the wall, a smaller scene shows three figures seated at a table covered with a white cloth, with one figure gesturing towards another who sits opposite. The painting is lit from the left, with warm brown and ochre tones throughout.
Diego Velázquez, Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1620–2). Hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

How weird! God revealed Himself to us by becoming a human being and still makes Himself known in a ritualised meal. Christianity is a very strange religion.

Most of my atheist or agnostic friends think Christianity is a religion of rules and regulations invented by Bronze Age primitives and perfected by Victorian prudes – basically some mix of not having sex outside marriage, not swearing, and not drinking.

But Christianity is much stranger, and we shouldn’t shy away from that. A generation is coming of age in this country who can’t win if they do the conventional, sensible, responsible things. If they work hard at school and go to university, they’ll incur debts they’ll never be able to pay off, to earn not much more than they would otherwise, and might never be able to afford a family home unless their parents are well off. If you’re thirty years old today, you were twelve when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit – since which wages in this country have stagnated – and your adult life has been the era of Brexit and Covid, of wars and energy shocks.

This is a generation which has seen the conventional, sensible leaders do badly – and the edgy radicals who promise to stand up for the people against the system perform even more poorly. I don’t usually say things that are too directly political from the pulpit, but this morning let me say that our Prime Minister is currently exemplifying everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be sensible – their strange mix of presumption to moral superiority and visionless incompetence – while the President of the United States, and the unwinnable war and uncalculated risks he has backed himself into, demonstrates everything that is wrong with the people who claim to be tribunes of the people.

“Save yourselves from this corrupt generation”, Peter warns the pilgrims in Jerusalem – in some ways, little has changed.

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Eleven Kilometres from Jerusalem: Sermon Preached on 23rd April 2023 (Third Sunday of Easter)

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A painting by James Tissot from 1900. Three men in long flowing robes, two in white and one in red, are waling as the walk along a rough path under some trees. This purports to be the scene from Luke Chapter 24, where a mysterious man talked to two of Jesus' disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the mysterious man turned out to be Jesus.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes and Christ Church, Bulkington

Readings – Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Luke 24.13-35

“…he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.’”

You may or may not know that our Bible readings for any given Sunday repeat on a three year cycle, and I very distinctly remember today’s Gospel reading, about the travellers on the road to Emmaus, at this point four cycles ago: on the Sunday that fell a fortnight after Easter in 2011.

A painting by James Tissot from 1900. Three men in long flowing robes, two in white and one in red, are waling as the walk along a rough path under some trees. This purports to be the scene from Luke Chapter 24, where a mysterious man talked to two of Jesus' disciples on the road to Emmaus, and the mysterious man turned out to be Jesus.
The Road to Emmaus, James Tissot (1900). Hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I remember it so vividly, because I was in Cape Town, and one unfamiliar detail in this otherwise very familiar passage of Scripture left me feeling disorientated and far from home. Instead of Emmaus being about seven miles from Jerusalem, it was instead about eleven kilometres from Jerusalem. As their country converted entirely to metric two generations ago, miles are an unfamiliar measurement to most South Africans today. Of course, neither miles nor kilometres were used two-thousand years ago in the Roman Empire – both are translations for the convenience for us modern hearers, and Luke originally reported that Emmaus was located sixty stadia from Jerusalem.

I have driven across the Irish border often enough that a switch from miles to kilometres is a familiar experience, and this was a minor quirk of translation – but worship is such an intense and meaningful thing for most of us, including those of us who don’t go in for emotionally expressive worship, that even very minor changes in ritual, translation, or music can leave us feeling disorientated and bewildered.

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