The World Is on Fire. Make Dinner Anyway.

This week I picked up dog poop while simultaneously processing the news that our president had threatened to destroy a civilization. I wish I were being hyperbolic. I'm not.

This is the texture of our lives right now. And I don't think I'm alone in feeling the sheer absurdity of it — the way the catastrophic and the mundane keep colliding with each other without warning, without permission, without any apparent concern for our nervous systems.

I've been thinking about the 1994 NBA Finals. Game 5. Right in the middle of the game, the broadcast cuts to a split screen: on one side, professional athletes doing their jobs, playing basketball. On the other side, a white Ford Bronco fleeing police on a California freeway, O.J. Simpson reportedly holding a gun to his own head. Two completely different registers of human experience, crammed into the same frame, competing for attention. That image has stayed with me for thirty years because it so perfectly captures something true about what it is to be alive — everything happens at once, all the time, and we are expected to just... keep going.

So how do we keep going? How do we live with meaning and intention when the crises feel enormous and constant and there's still a bill to pay, a kid to pick up, a meal to figure out?

That's the question I brought to the text this week. And I think the road to Emmaus has something to say about it.

The Saddest Commute in Scripture

The story shows up in Luke 24, and it takes place on the same day as the resurrection — though the two disciples walking away from Jerusalem don't know that yet. Their names are Cleopas and an unnamed companion, and they are leaving. Done. Finished. Rome had won, their leader had been executed, and the whole movement they had staked their lives on had apparently come to nothing. "We had hoped," they tell the stranger who falls into step beside them, "that he was the one to redeem Israel." Past tense. We had hoped.

They are walking to a village called Emmaus — a place so unremarkable that we don't actually know where it was. Not Jerusalem, the center of religious and political life. Not some significant destination. Just... home. Or whatever passed for home when everything had fallen apart.

And here is what I find extraordinary: Jesus doesn't redirect them. He doesn't appear on the road and say, turn around, you're going the wrong way. He walks their direction. He joins them in their retreat. He asks, genuinely and without accusation, what are you talking about?

"The ordinary path that they were already on became the site of divine encounter."

Not the temple. Not the halls of power. A commute. A sad, directionless, seven-mile commute to a village nobody remembers. This is where the risen Christ shows up first. And I think that tells us something essential about where we should be looking.

Hospitality From the Bottom

They reach Emmaus and the stranger acts like he might keep going. I love this detail. Jesus — and the reader knows it's Jesus, which makes the dramatic irony almost unbearable — plays coy. He doesn't force his way in. He doesn't announce himself. He gives these two grieving, exhausted, confused disciples a genuine choice: invite me in, or don't.

They invite him in. But notice why they invite him in. It's not generosity. It's not because they're feeling particularly hospitable or spiritually mature or put-together. They invite him in because they're scared to be alone. Stay with us, they say. It's getting dark and we don't want to be by ourselves tonight.

This is hospitality as vulnerability. Not the curated dinner party kind. Not the impress-the-guests kind. The please don't leave us alone kind. And I think that distinction matters enormously — because so much of what we perform in our spiritual and communal lives is about demonstrating that we've arrived somewhere, that we've got it together enough to be generous. The disciples at Emmaus have nothing to offer except their need. And that turns out to be enough.

Jesus comes in. He sits at their table. He takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to them. If that language sounds familiar, it's because it's the same language used at the feeding of the five thousand, at the last supper, and at the communion table every single week in churches around the world. Took. Blessed. Broke. Gave. And in that moment — not during the scripture lesson, not during the theological exposition, but at the breaking of bread — their eyes are opened.

"It was not in the exposition of the scriptures from Moses to the prophets that got them to understand the divine in their midst. It was the breaking of bread."

The ordinary is the instrument of revelation. Grain and grapes. A table. A meal shared in need rather than abundance. This is where God shows up. Not as a replacement for the transcendent, but as the place where the transcendent breaks through.

The Resistance That Looks Like Nothing

Here is where I want to push back against a reading of this story that flattens it into mere niceness. Into just be kind to your neighbors therapeutic deism with a casserole. Because that's not what Emmaus is. The person at that table had walked out of a tomb three days earlier. This is not a gentle metaphor about community. This is the risen Christ, the one who had conquered sin and death and the grave, and one of his first acts after the resurrection is to walk seven miles with sad people and eat dinner with them.

He could have gone to Rome. Think about that. If there was ever a moment for a dramatic confrontation with empire, for a I told you so delivered directly to Caesar, surely it was the morning after the resurrection. Instead, Jesus goes to an unremarkable road, to two people who had already given up, and he breaks bread.

I find that both humbling and clarifying. Because I spend a lot of time feeling like my ordinary life is too small to matter against the scale of everything that's happening. I have no access to launch codes. I am not in the room where decisions about civilization get made. And there is a temptation — I feel it constantly — to either spiral into helplessness or to perform some kind of frantic activism that's really just anxiety with better branding.

But the model I keep coming back to is this: the risen Christ puts the ordinary ahead of the spectacular.

A few weeks ago, one of our community members said that one of the best acts of resistance available to us right now is to host a barbecue and learn our neighbor's name. I know how that sounds. I know how embarrassingly small that sounds against a backdrop of genuine existential threat. But if we want to build a world worth living in, it helps to know who lives next door. It helps to have a neighbor who knows yours. You cannot sustain a movement — any movement — without the relational fabric underneath it.

Stay in the Game

There's a show called Shrinking — go watch it if you haven't — where Harrison Ford plays a cantankerous, wise old therapist. At one point he tells a younger colleague who is terrified of getting hurt again: what a shame to live 42 years and not have a body full of scars. Scars mean you stayed in the game.

I quoted that in a sermon and I'm not even sorry.

Because here is what I see in pastoral ministry, over and over: the temptation when you've been hurt, when the community disappointed you or the institution failed you or the God you believed in seemed to go quiet — the temptation is to leave. Or, almost worse, to stay but only on the surface. To perform your way back to worthiness. To over-function and accommodate so nobody has anything to criticize. Or to check out entirely, because if you don't engage, you can't get hurt again.

All three of those are a refusal to let the ordinary be enough. All three are ways of saying: my plain presence at this table isn't sufficient. I need to earn my place here. And Emmaus says otherwise.

"I cannot allow my joy to be hitched to an erratic bully. I cannot let the whims of politics dictate whether my ordinary life has meaning. That's a form of surrender."

The disciples at Emmaus didn't earn their revelation. They didn't arrive with impressive spiritual credentials or a coherent theological framework. They showed up sad, walking in the wrong direction, telling a stranger how badly everything had gone. And then they said: stay with us.

That was enough.

An Invitation

We are starting a new series called Everything We Carry — and that phrase is doing double work intentionally. We carry the weight of our grief, our anxiety, our histories, the world that feels like it's coming apart at the seams. And we carry our capacity for joy, for connection, for showing up even when we have nothing impressive to offer.

Stewardship — and yes, this is a stewardship series, we'll get to the money stuff, don't worry — stewardship isn't only about resources. It's about tending. Tending to your burdens and your gifts, because often they're mingled together in ways that are hard to separate. So here is my invitation, and it is almost embarrassingly simple: stay. Stay at the table. Text the friend you've been meaning to check in on. Learn your neighbor's name. Show up somewhere even when you don't feel like you have anything to offer. Allow yourself to be fed when you're the one who needs it.

It will feel too small. It will feel insufficient against the scale of what the world is asking of us. But I keep coming back to Emmaus. Two sad disciples, a stranger, a meal, and the risen Christ showing up in the breaking of bread.

That's where Jesus went after the resurrection. And if that's where Jesus went, maybe that's where we should be looking too.