Easter 3A 2026

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ The story of the disciples’ trip home to Emmaus after their terrible weekend in Jerusalem is one of the most beloved stories in Luke’s gospel. They've witnessed their leader being tortured, crucified, and buried. Yet their journey home was long enough that they had to wait until after the Sabbath and the Passover in order to make what was a forbidden journey on those days. 

They’re walking along, possibly in despair, wondering what hope there may be for them, when suddenly they’re joined by a stranger. The stranger begins asking what’s happened. They're incredulous! How can this man, this stranger not know what has happened? How can he be so completely clueless as to what they have witnessed? Has he just been hiding under a rock? 

But it’s late; they’re near home and their own sense of who they are in their faith means asking a stranger to share in their hospitality, to join them in their home, to have a safe place to be overnight. They sit down to supper and continued conversation. Then, the guest becomes the host. He takes bread. He blesses it. He breaks it as is their custom for supper. At the beginning of the meal the host breaks the bread and then offers it to those sitting around the table. 

Suddenly everything changes. It’s not just hospitality norms that get rewritten. Life itself has suddenly transformed, is changed forever. The guest disappears, and the disciples leap up, run back to Jerusalem and tell the other disciples what they have just seen, how the risen Christ appeared to them and was made known to them by breaking bread with them. 

At some point during the Easter season I ask a question. Have you seen the risen Christ lately? 

There are a lot of ways that we expect to see Christ. There are a lot of places where we expect to encounter the risen Christ. Most of those we’ve been taught occur in church, in the liturgy. Perhaps it’s during a reading when we hear something we haven’t heard before. In liturgical churches like our own, we’re taught to look for Christ in the Eucharist. 

I wonder if it’s time to reconsider all those things we’ve been taught. I wonder if we’re looking for Christ in all the wrong places, or only in certain places so that we miss the presence of the risen Christ where Christ most often can be made known. 

Look again at today’s gospel. The disciples on their way to Emmaus are about as low as they have ever been. The sun is setting; the world is literally becoming darker all around them. All they know now is how to make their way home, and for now, that’s enough. They don’t have to do anything miraculous. They don’t have to have a life plan, a life coach or any other accepted method available to them. All they have to do is find their way home. 

I can imagine that with each step the disciples feel their sandals growing heavier. It must feel like the weight of the world, like gravity itself is increasing as their heavy steps move in a familiar direction. Yet even that seems uncertain even after all the trips they must have made before this day. 

Yet, as they look back they sensed things were changing. This sad, familiar journey was somehow becoming different. Looking back, they asked themselves, “were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the road?” 

For about 2 1/2 years now I’ve been asking questions about ministry. With all the numbered reports, the budgets, the attendance, all of those things that give data to those who live on data, I’ve been asking questions about ministry. Ministry is defined as that action undertaken to help others, not to enrich ourselves, even though that happens in the activity of ministry. 

I ask about ministry because it is in ministry, in the doing of ministry, that we find ourselves sitting at familiar tables, and suddenly joined in the presence of the risen Christ. It is in the activity of ministry that we discover the risen Christ has been with us all along, especially in those dark times where it seemed that we could not go one step further. 

It is in ministry where the light of the world, the light of Christ we proclaim at the beginning of the Easter vigil, shines most brightly. The places, the budgets, the how-to manuals, the coaches, those are all secondary to the activity of ministry. They are a means, not an end. 
Yet, for far too long we’ve gotten that backwards. We have, as they say, put the cart before the horse. We stress over numbers. We look at empty pews and see only the emptiness and not the fullness of those who are actually here. We make a big deal about the high holy days and the greater numbers, then sit in despair until the next one while doing very little in between to help folks know that this is a way of life and not just a dress-up party a couple of times during the year. 

So maybe all these years I've been asking the wrong question. To ask, “Have you seen the risen Christ lately?” is the wrong way of looking at things. I say that because we only look for what is outside ourselves. We are always looking for help, for safety, for hope, in the other. And so let me change my question. Have you been the risen Christ lately? Have you been the evidence of resurrection to those wandering in the valley of so many shadows? Have you carried the light of Christ into our increasingly darkened world so that others might rediscover the hope that's been with us all along? 
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Maybe, when we begin to answer those questions we'll find our own hearts burning within us as we walk this road before us. Because just like it was that day in Emmaus, it is the road home.