One day, a long, long time ago, more than fifty years ago, in fact, a little boy – not much more than a toddler, really –  went shopping with his mother, his grandmother, and his baby brother.  The boys and their mother lived in a small town, where everyone knew them.  But they were visiting the biggest city in the state, where the boys’ grandmother lived.

It was a time before seatbelts, or any other safety consciousness, for that matter.   On the way to town that day, the boy had stood – not sat, stood –on the front seat of his grandmother’s big Oldsmobile.  As they drove downtown, the boy’s grandmother pointed out a city bus in the traffic.  “Look, a city bus,” she said.  The boy had never seen a bus before.  Already both a perfectionist and an authority in his own mind, the boy argued:  “No, Ga-ma, city truck!”  Trucks, not buses, filled his world at home.

Finally arriving downtown, the little group looked in the plate-glass windows of the big stores of all kinds.  But it was a good day, because they were headed to Woolworth’s, the biggest “dime store” they had ever seen.  Large display tables defined the interior, not the wide aisles we know today.  The tables were piled high with things that attracted the attention of both little boys and their mothers and grandmothers.

Sure enough, as they each marveled, attention and imagination fully focused selfishly, the little boy and his family became separated.  Being small, he couldn’t see up over the tables. And because he was small, his family couldn’t see him behind the tables.  All by himself in a very big and unfamiliar city, the boy became scared.  Then panic set in, and he started to cry.  In a few moments that felt like forever, a friendly store clerk helped him find his family, who had never been that far away.  But in those brief moments, he couldn’t see them, and he couldn’t find them.  He thought, in those moments, that he was alone.  He felt abandoned, and very alone.

Though that happened to me more than fifty or fifty-five years ago, it left an impression on my soul.  And there have been other times, of course, when the panic has arisen as I have felt lost or abandoned.

I tell you about my own experience as a frightened little boy because there are times when the feelings of abandonment hit us all.  When a parent gets sick, there is something of the child that is scared.  When the door closes behind you going into first grade, or when your parents drive away on the day they take you to college, when you walk into your first job, when you walk away from your first job loss – all those times, and thousands of times like them, it’s easy to feel very, very alone.  And, especially when someone dies, we feel like we’ve been left behind.

The separations I’ve mentioned are, though painful, a part of life’s normal course.  We deal with them in various ways, often with the support of friends and family.  But there are other, more unnatural separations, too. There’s the distancing of a parent because of mental illness or alcoholism.  There are the painful partings that occur between marriage partners – when someone you thought you knew and trusted becomes a stranger again, and you go your way to another part of the country or just to another part of the house.

My point, I suppose, is that we are all touched by the pain of loss in our lives, and that part of that pain is the sense of abandonment.  In those times great loss, it’s both easy and normal to think that God has left as well.  Years ago Martin Marty, a faithful Lutheran scholar at the University of Chicago, wrote a book in response to the protracted illness and death of his wife.  He titled the book, “A Cry of Absence,” not just because of his loneliness at losing his wife, but because of his experience of feeling that God, too, was gone.  Just when he needed God the most, this man of deep faith felt God’s absence.  Notice that even the very best believers, the deepest thinkers, and the most diligent prayer warriors can hit a wall.  If it has happened to you, you are not alone.

Of course, even if you’ve never felt quite this way, when it comes to sensing God’s presence, most of us would be grateful for a more definite, more measurable, more palpable presence than we feel most of the time.  I think that we’re each a bit like the child who, being told to wash her hands, asked, as children always do, “Why?  They don’t look dirty.”  She didn’t want an answer, really, but her parents gave the standard response about the germs and their presence in spite of our not seeing them.  As the child stormed off she mumbled to herself:  “Germs and Jesus!  Germs and Jesus!  That’s all I ever hear around here, and I’ve never seen either one!”

That first Easter day, the gospel of Luke tells us today, two disciples are on the road, headed away from Jerusalem to the little town of Emmaus, twelve miles away.  Later in the story it seems that one of them lives there. 

We wonder why they are leaving, and then we remember all the pain that Jerusalem had held in those short days just over.  They may have headed home just to find a place that felt like normal, and maybe that’s just what they wanted:  for things to get back to normal as quickly as possible.  Of all the things they might be feeling along that walk, I think that abandonment – the loss of someone they loved – was high on the list.  So they walk in their grief, caught up in themselves, in their own inner world, now quite broken.  They hardly notice the stranger with them, but then they talk with him.  Later, they will realize that it was he – the risen Jesus – who was with them all the time.  They were not alone at all.  He was there.

There is so much in the story, but notice that it is very much OUR story.  For not only am I the child once lost at Woolworth’s, alone and afraid:  I am also the child rescued by a stranger, reunited with family, fully restored to life with family.  Though in that moment I felt alone, I later realized I never was alone, not really.

The Emmaus story is our story, friends, even as we walk along, numbed by fear, doubt, grief, loneliness, anger – though we think we are alone, we are not.  Though we at times feel abandoned by God, we are not.  Though we assume that no on understands, the assumption is not true.

John Wesley the founder of the Methodist Church, spent long hours on horseback, riding around to the little towns of England.  He trusted his horse so much that he read along the way, and he even devised a way to write sermons and letters on horseback.  He was out in all kinds of weather, at all times of the day and night.  But, looking back on his life from his deathbed, he knew that he was never alone.  His last words were an affirmation:  “Best of all,” he said, “God is with us.”

Friends, in that spirit we gather at the table of Christ.  And here, with each other, like those disciples in Emmaus, we often meet Christ in the breaking of the bread.  When we share the loaf we remember:  ours is an Easter faith, a faith of community in communion. God is with us.  We are not alone.  Thanks be to God.

Please stand, as we affirm that faith together.

Amen.