The Third Sunday of Easter - Sermon Excerpt
Excerpt from the sermon
preached by Father John Brndjar
at the 10 A.M. celebration of the Holy Eucharist
on April 6, 2008: The Third Sunday of Easter
. . . . . . .
As I, so you may have seen a television commercial touting Travelocity, a company which … offers significant discounts to persons ordering travel packages online. One of the enduring features of Travelocity ads has been a bearded, rotund figure wearing a tall pointed hat and having a suitcase strapped to his body. In one such ad, apparently he has fallen off a high mountain, and is heading, head first - hat still firmly in place on his head — for a very, very hard landing.
“Am I going to die?” he asks in a reedy and bewildered voice as his plummet continues. The obvious, though unspoken, answer is: “Yes, you are gong to die.”
As, indeed, are we. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, within us which will save us from death. But there is a promise … God’s promise of resurrection and life given Jesus and given us. Whenever bread is blessed and broken here today, and every Sunday as we celebrate the Eucharist, our ‘Aha!’ moment [of recognizing the Risen Christ] is offered once again … ours to receive, ours to accept.
Cleopas was the name of one of Jesus’ followers who were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus late in the afternoon of that first Easter Day. We don’t even know the name of the other. But this we do know: we are more like these two men who lived some 2,000 years ago, than not. Over bread blessed and broken, they were offered resurrection and life. Over bread blessed and broken, we too are offered resurrection and life.
And neither for them, nor for us, shall death have the last word!
