April 14, 2024 “Resurrection begins with the Heart”

Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

Homily for St. John’s Episcopal Church by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn given April 14, 2024

The Third Sunday of Easter: Luke 24:13-49

On Easter Sunday I preached about the great resurrection of the Way of Love that Jesus embodied and taught, that I am seeing coming up like a great wave, unstoppably, in so many different forms. I spoke about some of the themes I am seeing in this resurrecting Way of Love. That it honors the earth and lifts up the divine feminine. That it honors the fulness of human experience, body, mind and spirit. That it is kin-centric and non-violent. That it is not exclusive, does not insist that its way is the only or best way. It tells the truth and makes amends for past harms. It recognizes the Holy Spirit which has been poured out on all flesh, and knows that each one of us has a unique genius, a unique part to play in the great drama of healing our planet so desperately needs, a unique gift granted by the Holy Spirit that is needed by the world and by our own souls. All of these were answering the question, what does the resurrecting Way of Love look like?

Today I want to talk about how we recognize this resurrected Christ. The reading from Luke’s gospel for today is part of a bigger story, the story of Jesus meeting the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and in that story, I notice something that shows up three times that can help answer the question “how” we recognize the risen Christ. In this story, on the very day of the resurrection, two disciples are walking from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. As they are walking Jesus joins them, but they don’t recognize him. They talk for a long time and finally stop to have a meal. And it’s when Jesus finally breaks the bread for them that they recognize him, but then he vanishes from their sight. When they go back to Jerusalem the same night to tell the other disciples what they had experienced, Jesus appears right in the middle of their conversation, which is where the reading from today picks up. Incidentally, this story is just a different version of the story from John’s gospel we heard last week that centered on Thomas. The gospel writers had their own unique genius and perspectives they wanted to share, just like all of us.

And here’s what happens three times in Luke’s version of the story: the heart is portrayed as the center of the need for change. In today’s reading when Jesus appears to the disciples, he asks them why doubts are arising in their hearts—not in their minds, but in their hearts. Earlier on the road to Emmaus he says they are foolish for being too slow of heart to believe the prophets—not too slow to mentally believe in the prophets. The disciples talk about their hearts burning within them, their hearts recognizing Jesus before their minds and eyes did.

And this is the point. How do we recognize the risen Christ? With the heart. It is our hearts that are the first to get it, the first to open and warm to this resurrecting Way of Love that is sending up countless shoots of new life all over the globe.  It’s also the heart that can be slow to respond, slow to trust. So I think it’s important to say what we mean by the heart.

We don’t mean the seat of our emotions, though emotions are an important source of information for us about all kinds of things. The heart is a vast field and is itself an organ of spiritual perception. It is subtle and able to sense spiritual reality in a way that our mental software just isn’t built for. The heart is the place where we experience union with God, and kinship with all other things.

I have told you this story before, but it bears repeating. Twenty years ago, I had the incredible privilege to support a Lakota Sundancer who was a good friend of mine. The Sundance is a sacred, eight-day ceremony in which Sundancers dance around a tree in a sacred circle from sunup to sundown for four days, without water or food, offering their prayers for the people and the earth. They follow the beat of the great drum that sounds hour after hour, echoing in the silence of the plains. Supporters feed them after the sun has gone down each night. During the day the supporters stand in the shaded arbor that surrounds the sacred circle, dancing in place as a witness and joining their prayers with the Sundancers. Sundancers are not to be touched as they are set apart, understood to be walking in this world and in spirit world throughout the ceremony. They are called wakan, the Lakota word for holy.

When I first arrived at the Sundance, I began making camp, pitching my tent. Everyone was just beginning to arrive. And a Lakota elder came to my camp to welcome me. He said something I’ve never forgotten. He said, “see with the eyes of your heart.” He pointed to his physical eyes and said, “these eyes will deceive you.” Over the course of the eight days, I tried to follow his guidance. I tried to allow my endlessly chatty mind to be quiet, to jump in the river of this experience and swim.

The heart is a portal to every realm of existence, to the world of spirit and the infinite space where there is only God, only love. In a way, the heart is the spiritual mind. It is a source of wisdom. It is a deeper authority than the part of us that evaluates, judges, differentiates. It is the place where we recognize the divinity in all things. The mind, with its software for evaluating and judging, is also important. But the mind is made to serve the heart, and not the other way around.  In all the great spiritual traditions of the world, we are asked to spend regular time seeing with the eye of the heart—to meditate, to contemplate and engage in imaginative prayer, to sing and dance and enter the great flow of sacred connection with all that exists. In our culture this part of us is greatly underdeveloped, even stunted. But it is still there and we can claim it as a source of great spiritual energy and love, connection and guidance.

The heart is mentioned three times in this story of Jesus appearing to the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and I believe tuning in to the heart is  the way we follow Jesus’ Way of Love in the 21^st century. It is the link between their time and ours. There are vast stretches of time and space, and so much history of both great good and great evil, that have separated our version of Christianity from these disciples on that first day. In a way it’s a chasm that can seem impassable, like a dark void opening between them and us. But Jesus himself made the trip to the void, into death and beyond, and even if we can’t see our way forward with these eyes, our hearts recognize his presence and the energy of his footprints.

It is my heart that recognizes the signs of Jesus’ Way of Love that I mentioned to you on Easter Sunday and at the beginning of today’s homily. You may at times have experienced church or tradition or religion as too small. But the resurrected Christ, and the realm of the love of God, is vast and big enough for us and the complexities of modern life. Together, we can learn to tune into our hearts, and follow what we sense and see from there. It is by tuning into our hearts that we learn to embody love, to bring into physical reality what we know and experience at our center.

What is it that you know in your heart, that you have been slow to believe or to trust? What if you could allow your mind to be still, to stand in a respectful silence, allowing the great wisdom and love of your heart to surface? What would it show you?

Through the rest of the service, we have many opportunities to enter the heart. We do not have to be Lakota Sundancers to experience the heart; our own tradition offers us ceremony and liturgy for the same purpose, if this is our intention. Singing and listening to music provide a way to enter the heart. Offering the peace to one another can be much more than a polite greeting—it can be a profound offering of reconciliation and reverence from each of us to the other. In Holy Communion, the presence of the risen Christ is with us in a real way that is greater than the sum of the parts of the liturgy.  Perhaps God has brought every person here, so that we can open our hearts together, collectively stepping through the gateway into the vast field of the love of God. From the heart, we may see things that had been hidden to us.

Like the writers of the gospels who told the story of the same event from different angles, each of us too has a unique perspective in what we perceive from the heart, that needs to be shared with the community. From the heart, we may become conduits for the love and healing of God, for ourselves and others. May it be so. Amen.

10am Service