Apr 5th: EASTER SUNDAY: The Practice of Coming Home, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.
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Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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EASTER SUNDAY: The Practice of Coming Home with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: Life as Pilgrimage, Lent 2026 A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Luke 24:31-35.
Wondering if love really is stronger than despair? Join us this Sunday (online or in person) as we explore a hopeful, honest Easter story where hearts burn, grief is named, and love refuses to give up. Come curious; you don’t have to have it all figured out.
Transcript:
Steven: I want to come clean about something. Sometimes hope annoys me. Now, I believe in hope. I need hope. I build my life and ministry around hope, but hope is risky. I mean, hope asks us to open our hands again, after disappointment has taught us to clench them shut, to love again after loss, to trust. The road continues, even though all the signs say dead end. You know, given everything that’s happening in the world right now, the violence, the fear, the fracturing of things that we thought were solid, maybe something you’re carrying right now, you might find it genuinely hard to risk hope. It’s easier. Sometimes it feels wiser to just close our hearts off. I understand that impulse. I mean, I feel it myself, but I don’t think we can afford despair, as the story we heard earlier said, after the crucifixion, two of the followers of Jesus are not at the tomb, singing Hallelujah. They’re walking away from Jerusalem, away from the place where their hopes were buried, trying to make sense of what could not be made sense of I’ve always loved the honesty of that, because that’s precisely where many of us live much of the time, not standing triumphantly at the empty tomb, but on some long road with more questions than answers. A woman once sat across from me her husband of 50 Years beside her, or rather, his body was Alzheimer’s had taken so much already, and she looked at me and asked, Why? Why? You know, I’ve heard that question, why? In more rooms than I can count, where are you asking? Why this morning? You know? Why? Is rarely a request for information. It’s a protest, a wound looking for air, a love with nowhere left to go. I didn’t have an answer for that woman. I’m not sure I ever do. The road to Emmaus is the road of why Luke tells tells us that the disciples were talking about everything that had happened. You know, that’s what grief does. Grief circles, repeats, rehearses, hoping maybe this time the answer will hurt less, and then come the three saddest words in scripture we had hoped. We had hoped the marriage would last, the treatment would work. The addiction would loosen its grip. The child would come home. The peace talks would work. The worst thing would not happen. It matters that Easter begins right there, not not at the at the empty tomb, not in triumph, but on a dusty road between two heartbroken people who don’t know yet that the story isn’t over, because Easter is not denial. Easter is not pretending that Good Friday didn’t happen. It’s not optimism with better music. Easter is what happens when God speaks one more word into a world that thought the story was over. The worst thing will never be the last thing, if it looks like love isn’t winning, it just means the story isn’t over yet. So back to the story. A stranger falls into step alongside the disciples. No announcement, no glory. He just walks beside. Besides them and asks what they’re talking about. Cleopas says, with the disbelief of someone whose world has collapsed. Are you the only one who doesn’t know what’s happened? And the stranger says, gently, what he asked them to tell the story, not because he doesn’t know, but because they need to say it, because grief that has no language stays trapped, because sometimes the first grace is simply someone willing to walk beside you. Well you tell the truth about what you’re carrying. Jesus doesn’t shame them. He doesn’t rush them. He stays the first gift of resurrection is not explanation. It’s companionship. I mean, not answers. Presence. The risen Christ doesn’t doesn’t begin by solving their questions. He begins by joining them right there in the midst of their questions, friends, some things cannot be fixed, only carried. And the question is not whether we will have to carry them. The question is whether we carry them alone and somewhere on the road, something starts to happen, not certainty, just a stirring, a warmth they can’t quite name later, they will say, Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road? Not did we finally understand everything? No, their hearts burned. Their hearts burned before their minds could even make sense of it, something in them recognized life, hope, a possibility that the story was not as finished as they thought. And that’s how resurrection often begins, not as an argument one, but as a quiet burning in the heart that refuses to go out and they recognize it, not in a theological explanation, but in the breaking of bread at the table, in the ordinary gesture of bread Blessed broken and given resurrection doesn’t only happen in sanctuaries. It happens on roads, at tables, in kitchens and hospital rooms. Resurrection happens in all of the ordinary places where love refuses to die. Easter. Easter isn’t about proving anything you can’t possibly explain the unexplainable. Easter is about choosing to believe, choosing to believe and to bet your life on one thing, that love is stronger than the absolute worst life can throw at us. I need to believe that now more than ever. I suspect you do too. You know, as I sit tempted by despair over all that’s happening in the world, I want to tell you about people whose hearts, whose hearts are burning. There’s an organization called Parent circle families forum made up of over 700 Palestinian and Israeli families, every one of them having lost a close family member to the conflict, to the violence, to the war. These are people who have every every reason to harden, every reason to hate, people who’ve earned the right, if anyone has, the right, to despair.
And yet they sit, they sit down together palace. Palestinian mothers and Israeli mothers, Palestinian fathers and Israeli fathers, and they sit across from each other and they tell each other the stories of the children they have lost. They look into the faces of people the world calls their enemies, and they choose, at enormous cost, to see their shared humanity instead to see their shared grief. One Israel Israeli father whose daughter was killed, said, I could have chosen hatred. It would have been so much easier, but hatred would have meant she died for nothing. Love is how I keep her alive. Friends, I don’t know what to call that, except resurrection, not the end of grief, not a not a tidy answer to the why, but something burning in the heart that refuses to go out. People choosing to bring life where there is death, people choosing to love still to love more, because they know what it costs when love fails, their hearts are burning and they turned around. The remedy for grief is not to feel less. The remedy for despair is not to care less. It is to love still to love more. Closing off our hearts might feel like protection, but it’s its own kind of death and friends we were not made for that you know, in the story, once their hearts had burned, the disciples turned around back to Jerusalem, back to the place of heartbreak, back to the frightened community that they had left. Resurrection doesn’t remove us from the world’s pain. It sends us back into it. So here is the Easter invitation. Go back. Go back to that hard conversation. Go back to the person that that you’ve been too frightened or too proud to reach toward, feed someone, sit with someone, love someone in the specific, inconvenient way that only you can. You don’t have to end a war. You just have to bring your love to the particular patch of ground where you stand and trust that love offered faithfully. That is how the story turns those Palestinian Israeli parents already know something most of us are still learning, not certainty, not proof, just this, Christ is risen, which means love wins. And you, each of you, you are love storytellers. So go, go and love as if you dare to believe That is true. Amen.
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