Easter 3A (Luke 24:13-35)

Have you seen Jesus?

If he were standing right here, right now — could you recognize him?

The answer to both questions is no.

We don't know his face. We've seen countless interpretations — artists across centuries, across cultures, each painting their own Jesus. None of them are him.

And even those who walked with him didn't recognize him. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus knew Jesus. They followed him. And they walked right beside the risen Christ without a clue. Only afterward — only looking back — did they understand who they had met.

Two things broke it open for them. Their hearts burning while he opened the Scriptures. And their eyes opening when he broke the bread.

You know what those two things are. They're the bones of every Christian liturgy. The Word and the Table. The sermon and the Eucharist. What we're doing right now, and what we're about to do.
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Right now we're in the middle of the Word. And honestly — are your hearts burning? Probably not yet. That's fine. I'm working on it.

But here's the thing. The Word and the Table exist because of a third thing — the thing we can't manufacture. The thing that makes the other two necessary in the first place.
Seeing the risen Christ.

We can't see him. We couldn't pick him out of a crowd. And because we can't — because the resurrection keeps slipping past our eyes — we need our hearts cracked open first. Not by argument. Not by explanation. By grace. By love. By compassion. By laughter and sorrow and vulnerability. That's what moves the heart. That's what opens the eye inside the chest.

Because resurrection isn't an idea. It's mending what's broken. Feeding what's empty. Healing what's sick. Holding what's been hurt.

And today, we are hurting.

This is the last service of St. Agnes'. One hundred and thirty years of this community — the living and the dead — and it ends here, today. That is a real loss. The pain is real.

So I'll ask again: have you seen Jesus?

Say yes. Because yes — we have.

Look around you. Look at who is gathered in this room. Did you forget? We are the Body of Christ. We are the risen Christ. Every time we gathered here and broke bread together, something happened to us. We stopped being just ourselves. We became something we could never be alone.

That's why we couldn't recognize him at first. We forgot who we become when we gather. We forgot what happens at that table.

For 130 years, this community burned off its individual agendas and private desires and became — by the fire of the Spirit and the breaking of that bread — the Body and Blood of Christ. That is not nothing. That is everything.

And that body doesn't die when this building closes.

It scatters. It looks different. It might be harder to see for a while. But it continues. Because you continue. Because we are imperishable seed, as Peter says — not perishable.

His words are the right ones to end with:

"Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart. You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God." (1 Peter 1:22-23)

Let your hearts keep burning. Not once, but steadily.

St. Agnes' is not ending. It is being scattered — like seed.