Third Sunday of Easter

More than three years ago now, I walked into this church for the first time. I was invited by my friend Fr. Mike Bayard, who served this community with lots of love and devotion before he was transferred to other work for the Jesuits in Portland. I had recently arrived here in Seattle, I knew next to no one, and was looking for a place to land pastorally in addition to my work at Seattle U. I had met Paul Magnano once or twice, and knew his sister Mary from San Francisco. It seemed worth the trek from First Hill to the corner of 2^nd and Stewart.

I remember going home after that Sunday. I was intrigued by the concept of this emphatically urban parish, of its location here within the Josephinum, its avowed mission of service. I confess, though, that I was as much intrigued by the name of this parish as by its ministries: “Christ our Hope.” Christ our hope.

I remember that when I went home that day, I looked up a poem that had been drummed into my head in high school a century ago:  Emily Dickenson wrote:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land, 

And on the strangest sea;        

Yet, never, in extremity, 

It asked a crumb of me.

Being in a new place, in a new circumstance, I was comforted by the promise of hope in Christ our hope, by the assurance of the poet’s promise, of hope that perches in the soul singing her wordless song that never ceases, keeping us warm even amid the gales—and Seattle storms––of life. So I started coming here.

Today’s gospel, perhaps the most beautiful story in all of scripture, speaks to us of despair and hope, and we’re lucky enough to have it illustrated in Dora Bittau’s icons on our East wall.  Cleopas and his companion, maybe she was Mrs. Cleopas as depicted on our icons here, had run out of hope. The faith they had in Jesus, the hope they had in his message, had been washed away by his brutal death. What remained was sadness, disappointment, emptiness. “We were hoping,” they said, “we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” They had heard strange stories of an empty grave, a grave as empty as their hearts were empty. Their hearts were empty because there was no hope to fill them.

A stranger meets them as they walk along the road together, speaks works of powerful explanation, unfolds the scriptures like a tapestry for them. Their hearts, they tell us later, began to burn again with an ember of hope, yet it was all too much to believe. To use St. Paul’s words, the tragic experience of the death of Jesus had deprived them of faith, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

In the middle panel, they stop, the stranger makes as if to go on, and they invite him to stay with them, and they sit down at table. They recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread, and he vanishes from their sight. Hearts on fire, they see, they understand, they believe; they hurry back to Jerusalem, where they hear the testimony of others, and tell them how the disciples how they had recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

And so do we.

That’s why we come here to this table again and again. We gather sing our feathered Spirit’s song of hope, and to recognize Jesus present and alive in the broken bread of our lives as much as in the breaking of the bread on this table. We hold him to his promise to be with us ever and always, especially when we break bread together at this table. We recognize him as that promise, the guarantee, the assurance of all we hope for, the conviction of what remains unseen.

Yet look at the third panel. The Cleopas clan doesn’t sit and wonder, not for long.  They hasten back to Jerusalem, to give witness their lips and with their lives. And so are we called to do, every day. The testimony of our lives is, finally, testimony to hope, the hope we have in Jesus crucified and risen, testimony to Christ our hope.

So in this Easter season, let us listen ever more carefully to hear the wordless, eternal song of hope.

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

Nor should we stop. Never stop hoping.

Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J.