A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church on Sunday 19 April.  The service was simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.  For the next four weeks, you can catch up here.

The Bible passage was Luke 24:13-35 and Bob Stradling led and preached. (Bob took another look at the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus which we also explored with Duncan last Sunday.)  The sermon begins at 27 minutes in to the recording.

John writes:  Do listen to Bob’s sermon on the catch-up.   He began by likening the walk of the two disciples to Emmaus as a pilgrimage, one in which they were joined by the risen Jesus, whom they didn’t recognise.  Bob spoke about the slow pace of life in the 1^st century  Middle East. Jesus was, in the words of a book title he quoted ‘The 3mph God’ – it’s unlikely that Jesus ever travelled faster than walking speed.  He walked with the travellers heading for Emmaus – it may have taken between two and three hours, giving them time for deep thinking and discussion.

Jesus travels with us, and Jesus knows us by name. Bob described an experience in which God addressed him audibly by name, and shared how that experience both broke him and filled him with joy.  God knows our names!

In contrast, we travel so quickly, our lives are lived at such an accelerated pace, that we often don’t make time to truly connect with other people.  According to the experts Bob quoted, it takes 8 minutes talking to someone before they really feel noticed and affirmed. He urged us to make time for people, to interact with them, getting to know them better.  He reminded us that even a short journey can be a pilgrimage, if we regard each excursion, no matter how short, as an Emmaus Road, and to look out for Jesus walking with us, to learn to see Jesus in the women and men and the children we meet, each created in God’s image.

The second point Bob drew from the story was the curious matter of the two travellers not recognising, or being kept from recognising Jesus until he broke bread in their house.  That very morning, Mary in the garden of Jesus’ burial thought at first that the person to whom she was speaking was the gardener.  (I wonder if, just as we see what we are looking for, and filter out or misinterpret things we don’t expect to see, so Jesus is sometimes closer to us than we think, and our lack of expectation keeps us from realising this?)

Jesus, rising from the dead, was somehow different, and Bob reminded us of St Paul’s words ‘we shall all be changed, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye.’  (1 Corinthians 15:52 KJV) so that in the world to come, we will be free of all our imperfections, all the burdens we bear.  Whatever incapacities we live with, whatever sufferings we endure these will be removed. We will all be changed, and our true selves, the people we are ‘in Christ’ will at last be visible.

This then, was Bob’s challenge to us: to take time for deep encounters with others, to see the accompanying Jesus in those who surround us and also in more direct ways, to hold on to the hope that ‘we will all be changed’, to walk our lives, and each day of our lives, and each excursion of our days as roads to Emmaus.