"We Walk the Emmaus Road to Conversion" - Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter 4-19-26

Lord Jesus, stay with us […] be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread (BCP 124). †

I am reading a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian. He was an opponent of the Third Reich and took part in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler. Dietrich was imprisoned in a concentration camp and executed by hanging on April 9, 1945.

   Dietrich, like many Germans, was a life-long Lutheran, but he and others believed that when the German Lutheran Church became, in effect, the Reich’s Church (1), it was no longer faithful as a true church. They formed the Confessing Church – Germans faithful to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and not acquiesce to the sinister and anti-Semitic ravings – soon to be realities – of Hitler and his henchmen.

   Dietrich began as an academic, but was drawn – converted – to the pastorate through a brief series of events which included time in New York City and regular worship with Black Church congregations, worship that expressed the lived reality of centuries of oppression, and the hope of liberation in Jesus.

   The Nazis used our Jim Crow laws and traditions as a foundation for their final-solution anti-Semitism (2). Dietrich, post-conversion, became a pastor-among-the-people, well-placed to draw the necessary comparisons and conclusions of what was soon to come in Germany (3).

   Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Oscar Romero after him, were products of conversion of life. All three were life-long Christians, but they found themselves in situations where their ministries changed because of their openness to the Holy Spirit’s leading.

   Martin’s epiphany was at his kitchen table in what would be the early days of the modern Civil Rights Movement, when he asked God for the courage, clarity, and grace to take on this heavy and dangerous ministry of liberation.

   Oscar’s was when he, newly-appointed as El Salvador’s Archbishop, and expected to be a place-holder of the status quo, walked among the poor who were oppressed by their United States-backed government, military, and oligarchs.

   All three paid with their lives. Martin and Oscar walked the path of non-violent resistance; Dietrich went, reluctantly, the way of violence for the greater good. These martyrs reside on the Calendar of Saints of the Episcopal Church.

   Jesus’s downcast disciples, walking the seven-mile road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, became products of conversion of life. They didn’t become Jesus’s disciples that day – unlike, say, the three thousand who joined the movement after Peter’s Pentecost Day speech. These two – like Dietrich and Martin and Oscar long after them – these two had already signed up, as had Mary Magdalene, who failed, initially, to recognize the risen Lord.

   Mary’s conversion of life came when Jesus called her by name in the Garden of Easter.

   Cleopas and his spouse’s (4) conversion of life came at that first-ever post-resurrection celebration of Mass, when their hearts burned within them during the Liturgy of the Word, and their eyes were opened at the Liturgy of the Table. That same hour, after consuming the Body of Christ – the bread taken, blessed, broken, and shared – they raced back to Jerusalem to tell the others. A journey, by the way, equivalent to walking from Ocean Beach (Jerusalem) to the Ferry Building (Emmaus) and back again (to Jerusalem).

   You and I are already disciples. Some of us brand new, others for years. Trust that God will put you in a situation leading to conversion of life. Maybe it won’t be as dangerous as Dietrich’s or Martin’s or Oscar’s – but conversion will change you, and that is danger enough.

   Like Cleopas and his spouse, we are in a good place for conversion of life right here, listening to the scriptures being opened, and Holy Communion being shared. Like Dietrich, and Martin, and Oscar, we are in good places for conversion of life in our communities when we pay attention to people who are lonely, or hungry, or afraid.

   Let your heart be kindled, your life converted. For the first time, or yet again. †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Third after Easter A – April 19, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“We Walk the Emmaus Road to Conversion”

(1)     An expression of Christian Nationalism, which some hope for in the U.S. today.

(2)     Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” tells this tragic story of the Nazi’s study and application of our laws to separate and oppress the Jews and other “undesirables” well.

(3)     Textual comparisons of some words and phrases in some speeches of the current U.S. president and members of his administration have been remarkably like those of the leaders of the Third Reich. They learned from us; we learned from them.

(4)     Spouse is one tradition. Being unnamed suggests the other was a woman. Walking together to their home suggests that they were married (or otherwise related). We do not know for sure, of course.