Two disciples walking together down a dusty road.
It’s not Peter. Not James this time or John. Not even Thadeus.
None of the familiar names of Jesus’ inner circle who we know so well.

Rather, it’s two others, from the outer ring.
Followers, friends, people we’ve never heard of.

The two are deep in conversation. Rehashing the events of the last week.
A lot of speculating. Arguing. Probably some cursing. Grieving.

Do you think Judas really…?
Ah, but where was Peter when…?
Ah we should have known…!
I always knew…

It’s seven miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus.
Plenty of time to take this conversation round and round in circles.
Because the truth is they’ll never get anywhere with it.
The truth is they don’t know.

A stranger increases his stride and catches up to them on the road. He matches their pace, listens in for a little bit, and then finally interrupts. “By the way, what are you two talking about?”

To my 21st century ears, maybe to yours, It's... it's kind of a jarring question.
Suburban privacy norms and my Bluetooth earbuds that are designed to tune the world out deter my natural curiosity about the conversations of strangers.

But I’m also taken aback because I know in my heart that this question isn’t just for Cleopas and his unnamed companion.
It’s a question for me. It’s for us.
What are we talking about?

I’m someone who does a lot of talking. As a priest you could say I get paid to talk..In fact, even as I’m recording this podcast, this is the week of Ash Wednesday, I’m realizing that this is the fifth sermon I’ve prepared in under a week. How often am I actually able to pause and ask myself, what am I talking about?

When I wake my kids up early on Sunday morning to drag them to church—what am I talking about?
When I make the occasional social media posts about welcoming immigrants, feeding children in Gaza, affordable healthcare, compassion for people with mental health struggles—what am I talking about?
When I sit with a hurting friend, assuring them of God’s love - do I know what I’m really talking about?

If someone came alongside you on the road and said, “what is that you’re talking about?”
How would we answer?
And what if that curious traveler actually was Jesus. Would it change the answer?

The disciples here see no harm in sharing their story with a stranger.
“There was a man”, they say, “in whom we had placed a lot of hope and things were really good for a while. But last Thursday he was arrested, put to death. Our disappointment was crushing. But then, then just this morning we heard something else might have happened”

They’re passionate in their remembering.
They’re fuzzy for sure on the second hand details.
And they don’t know what it all means.

I’d like to share a story with you. It’s one that I come back to pretty often when I’m asking myself how my own experience connects to the story of Jesus.
In other words, what is it I’m always talking about?

In 2015 I planted this new church in Birmingham, Alabama. We called it The Abbey.
We started as a coffee shop church - quite a business risk, and also in many ways a spiritual risk at the same time.
The Abbey was born because we wanted to try something different, a new way of reaching and engaging people with the gospel - especially younger people, younger adults - in a time when, even in the Bible Belt, Mainline churches are experiencing rapid decline.

Hopes were sky high for this new venture, and the pressure was on. I constantly felt the unrelenting weight of expectations - expectations from the outside and from within myself - to hit all the popular buzz words to be innovative, newsworthy and, most of all, successful in our mission.

And for four years, you could have said that it was all these things. In fact, it was beautiful.

We met people in that coffee shop who would never set foot in a sanctuary but who could somehow sit for three hours a day in a church cafe shooting the breeze about Jesus’ love, acceptance, and redemption.
We caught the Holy Spirit doing her reconciling work in hearts and lives, brought together over the communion of vanilla lattes and holy conversation.

Our young baristas started a hospitality ministry, offering a free coffee and welcome to our unhoused neighbors.
The diversity of the surrounding streets invited us to ask Jesus’ most profound question every day: “Who is my neighbor?”

Starting a new church from scratch, we found, is a lot like giving birth.
It’s messy, it’s slow, painful, and very expensive.
It’s full of anticipation, possibility, and hope.
The Abbey, our church was beautiful, and we were so proud of what we had built together.

And then, it all fell apart.

Our funding ran out. Unstated expectations and benchmarks weren’t met. The diocese didn’t renew their financial support. And without that support I lost my job as the priest.
Our coffee shop manager who had been clean and sober for over five years - relapsed.
As joyful and meaningful as our ministry at The Abbey was, the business couldn’t live any longer.
We laid off our amazing staff, packed it up, and taped laminated closed signs to all the doors.

It was a slow motion crash and burn I couldn’t prevent.

The first time I came back to the empty building it felt like a tomb. The milk steamers and coffee grinders once signs of hospitality and welcome had gone silent. The music and chatter of customers was gone. No smell of cookies baking in the oven. Just a heavy, echoing quiet.

I was angry.
Angry at the institution.
Angry at the ministry.
And angry at myself.

“What are you talking about?” Jesus might have asked me then.

Failure, shame, the death of something I had loved.

And yet, unbeknownst to me a new story was now brewing. Our church volunteers kept showing up.

“Why let a silly thing like a closed coffee shop stop us from loving our neighbors?” they said to me.

They came every morning. They cooked breakfast for our neighbors. They paid for the food themselves. They brewed the last of our fancy Costa Rican coffee beans and gave it away for free.

And then one morning, I met Joseph.

Joseph was living in a tent in a nearby park. He was a slight man with gentle eyes. Wearing a pair of women’s bell bottom jeans with sequins on the back pockets.

“Yeah it’s kind of embarrassing,” he said. “But they fit. So why not?”

Even sleeping on the street, Joseph insisted on dignity. He washed dishes for us. Cleaned the restrooms. Brewed endless pots of coffee.

He believed in God, he told me, but he wasn’t much into church anymore. Not since his stepdaughter had died. He didn’t say much more about this, and I decided not to ask.

But one morning, after breakfast, as I was trying desperately to get some emails answered on my laptop. Joseph sat down from me across the room and started talking.

“She was nine,” he said. “It was cystic fibrosis. The doctors at the hospital said she had about a week more to live.”

They asked if she wanted to stay at the hospital or go home.

And she chose to come home.

Joseph, whose love language, apparently, is coffee and food, asked her what she wanted to eat in these last few days. Was there anything in the world she wanted to try? Filet mignon? Sushi? A milkshake?

“Do you know what she said?” he asked me.

At this I finally closed my laptop.

“No. What did she say?”

“She said, well I’ve always wanted to try marijuana.’”

My eyebrows must have shot up at this, as well as the corners of my mouth.

Because Joseph smiled. “It’s okay. You can laugh. It’s funny.”

So he said, “I baked weed into brownies and zucchini bread and pasta carbonara. And she ate more that week than she had in the last five months,” he said. “And on the ninth day, she passed. It was peaceful.”

I, upon having received this story, just sat there for a moment.

I had been wallowing in the tomb of a closed coffee shop.

And here was a man who had buried a child—and still carried with him gentleness. Still carried hope. Still carried humor.

The story felt awfully like a pearl of great price. The one that Jesus is always talking about.

And if I had kept my head buried in my laptop, I might have missed it.

A few months later, COVID hit.

I had been dreading the day our community at The Abbey would have to leave our coffee shop storefront building. The rent was just too much for us to manage without money coming in from the coffee sales. And yet I knew that the process of moving was going to feel like a second failure. A second death.

But with Covid - suddenly no church had a building.

There was no long goodbye. No dramatic closing. A few days before the lease ended that summer, our church community gathered to clean the space up together. And we wrote the names of everyone who had passed through those walls in bright sidewalk chalk—employees, neighbors, skeptics, saints.

Names written low and high, on the outside cement block walls.

Names, we trusted, were also written in the heart of God. Names who would forever be part of our story with God.

On Holy Saturday 2020, I went back to the storefront alone, wearing a full set of liturgical vestments. I built a tiny Easter fire in the back parking lot. And like so many pastors were doing that day, I chanted the Exultet into my phone on a tripod:

“Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels…And let you trumpets shout salvation”

Just as I was finishing up, someone jumped out at me from behind the building. It was someone wearing a full face Día de los Muertos mask and holding a hedge trimmer in one hand.

My first thought was: Well, what a fitting end. I’m about to be martyred by a clown. With a hedge trimmer. In all my priestly vestments. On Holy Saturday.

And then they took off their mask.

It was my friend Joseph.

He had gotten an apartment, he said.

“You guys helped me. I just wanted to do something nice for you.” he explained. “You know, trim the weeds. They’ve gotten awfully high lately.”

“But Joseph…” I asked, “What is with that mask, buddy?”
He gave me a little shrug. “It’s COVID.”
Right.

What are you talking about? Jesus asks.

What are you talking about?

I’m talking about the story of a man with a hedge trimmer who showed up for me -
In one of my most confounded moments.
In pain, in gratitude, in love and hope.
Helping me understand that human failure is not God’s failure.
Showing me the place that I thought was a tomb was actually full of a great cloud of witnesses.
Someone who interpreted for me what it means to respond with certainty, “The Lord is risen indeed!”

The last time I saw Joseph, which has now been many years ago, I asked him if it was okay for me to share his story with others, with you. “Of course!” he replied, “If you think it will give them some hope and comfort, share it all you want.”

Back on the road to Emmaus, our two disciples finally recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

It had been Jesus all along who had helped them interpret the story that they were part of.

The story showing how God ultimately uses human brokenness, persecution, sorrow, disappointment and grief for good.

Explaining how Resurrection was always the only possible outcome.
That it was never about institutional success. Never about triumphant vindication.
But about the fulfillment of everything the prophets had ever said about love and creation, brokenness and justice, redemption and life.
That what seemed to be the failure and the end of their Movement was only the beginning.
That they need not be afraid anymore, or ever again.

Whatever business the two disciples were on in Emmaus, it’s completely trivialized by this revelation.

They race the seven miles back to Jerusalem, in the dark, knocking on doors until they find the famous eleven apostles. And there, they tell the rest of their story.

Which is what Jesus asks you and me to do. Tell a story. Share a story.
“Bear witness to the hope that is within you,” as it says in 1 Peter.

We live in a world that needs some hope. A world that trades in isolation, and rumors, and fear.

And so when Jesus sidles up to you on whatever road it is you are walking—and believe me he will at some point—and asks,

“What are you talking about?”

Be ready.

Be ready to tell him about the things that broke your heart.
About the pearl of great price you almost missed.
Tell him about the moment hope came back from the dead.

And then listen.