Fairhaven Sermon 4-19-2026

Summary

In this week’s service, Rev. Dylan Parson uses a personal anecdote about a beloved childhood restaurant in Slippery Rock to explore the profound theme of recognition and context. Reflecting on a time when he failed to recognize a familiar waitress in a grocery store because she was "out of context," Parson transitions into the biblical narrative of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. He describes how Cleopas and his companion, blinded by the weight of grief and the unexpected nature of the resurrection, initially failed to recognize the risen Christ even as He walked alongside them and explained the Scriptures. The sermon highlights the pivotal moment when the disciples' eyes are finally opened through the simple, sacred act of Jesus breaking bread.

Moving from the biblical text to contemporary life, Rev. Parson encourages the congregation to remain vigilant to Christ's presence in the unexpected moments of everyday existence. He notes that while we may struggle with spiritual blindness caused by despair or the chaos of life, Jesus often reveals Himself in the faces of the marginalized and the "least of these," as described in the parable of the sheep and the goats. Ultimately, the message serves as a call to keep our hearts soft and open, resisting the temptation to let familiarity or hopelessness prevent us from seeing how Jesus is actively working both within the church and throughout the wider world.

Transcript

There's a little restaurant in Slippery Rock, which is where I'm from originally, that's been there for pretty much ever. I think it was there whenever my mom was growing up, whenever my grandmother first moved there in the '60s. Camelot is the place. And it is a restaurant, little diner kind of thing that is loved by just about everybody around. Everybody goes there. It used to be one of the only places you could go. That's expanded a little bit since. Let's consider it something like the Frank and Shirley's of Slippery Rock, if you will.

You got college students there. You got the old farmers who get there before sunrise every weekday. And it's right on the corner of Main Street. So it's this little stone building, a landmark wedged between Quick Fill and the bank. And the place is styled like kind of a raggedy old English pub in the countryside. It's got some dark floral wallpaper all through the place. It's got this miniature suit of armor beside the cash register. And they were long known for their 99-cent breakfast. Yeah. As of about 10 years ago, that's now the $1.99 breakfast, which is still nothing to complain about, but doubling. And now you've got to get a cup of coffee with it. But they remain famous for their cinnamon rolls, homemade every morning, about this big, the size of your head.

And last time I went, about a year ago, my cousin was in town. I went up to meet her. These cinnamon rolls were still, I want to say, 240, an economic miracle. But through high school, I'd go to this place to Camelot with my youth group friends every Sunday after church. It's the only place in my life where I'm going to go. I'm getting close at Breakfast at Shelley's, but the only place in my and my life where I've ever had a waitress come over to me every Sunday and remember my usual, which was a breakfast A with the eggs scrambled and a cinnamon roll and a coffee. And so you can say I knew the place quite well. It knew me very well. And the faces that I'd see there every week were deeply familiar to me. And lots of them, staff included, are still there every Sunday.

But one day in those years, I remember being in Giant Eagle in the bakery section, saying hello and having this brief kind of casual conversation with a late middle-aged woman that I recognized. I knew I'd met her before lots of times, but I had no idea who she was. And it drove me crazy for days. I could not think of the woman's name. I could not think of where I knew her from, just that I knew her. And so I racked my brain for the week trying to remember until Sunday came again and I went to breakfast and I saw her face before me and she was one of the three waitresses at Camelot, a person that I'd spoken to and seen dozens and dozens of times. Out of context, half a mile away, my brain had just been completely unable to identify her. I had no idea who she was. But standing there with a pencil and the pad in her hand and an enough apron and that little knight's suit of armor behind her, the pieces snapped together. I knew who she was. And I was wondering how I possibly could have forgotten that. I was confused and completely moved to recognition.

And it's amazing how circumstances and location can change our experience of other people. I mean, I find this happens sometimes whenever I'm in the grocery store or something in shorts and a t-shirt, and I think people take a minute to recognize because they see me like this or in a robe all the time. And there's that classic example of a kid seeing their teacher outside school during summer vacation. It feels almost scandalous. Like, you're not supposed to be here. You're supposed to be in school. In August and June, teachers are supposed to go into hibernation or just disappear for a little while. And encountering one is just like Twilight Zone kind of stuff.

And the disciples on the road to Emmaus existed in a kind of similar situation, much darker. They had just undergone an experience that marked a very significant threshold. Their Lord is dead. Everyone saw it happen, which was the whole point, and an era has ended. This brief electric moment of hope, you know, it peaked on Palm Sunday. It looked like the king was going to be restored in the lineage of David. The Messiah was here. He was about to make all things right. Gone, extinguished as Jesus is crucified over Jerusalem. And this man had risen and fallen like a shooting star. He was this hillbilly from out in Galilee who, over the course of three years, rose to become one of the most well-known preachers in the area and eventually to be seen as the Messiah before finding himself executed as a celebrity, a heretic, and a rebel. Jerusalem and now he's gone.

And the situation is strange because somehow his tomb has come up empty. Cleopas and the other disciple, perhaps Cleopas and his wife in this story, talk about the women of this group who claim they've seen Jesus alive, but they are widely understood, as Luke puts it in the beginning of chapter 24, as telling idle tales. They're these women who mean well, but they're really just chatterers or wishful thinkers. They write them off. And so all of this to say, Cleopas and his friend or his wife, we don't know who that is, when they're on the road, they don't expect Jesus to be there. Why would they? And so it's no wonder that they don't recognize him when he's speaking. He's not only out of place, he's showing up on a plane of existence he's supposed to have left. It's not that he's half a mile from where he's supposed to be. He's not supposed to be on this earth right now. If your deceased grandmother were to show up next to you on the sidewalk, you might not register it for a little bit either.

Their eyes here are clouded by death, by despair. Right? Their minds have firmly categorized Jesus as gone, and so he is. But Jesus joins them on the road. We know that, not them. And amusingly, again to us but not to them, he begins to．interact in this mischievous kind of way. He pokes and he prods at them on this long walk, this journey. He opens, "So what are you guys talking about?" And they explain to this clueless stranger all that has happened in the last week around Jesus' great following, his persecution, his crucifixion, and now this new mystery that's emerged around the empty grave. They don't necessarily believe the woman that he's alive, but they do know that the grave is empty. And Jesus now, in a move that would be really rude if he wasn't who he was, calls them foolish and dull. They finish talking about this deep trauma they've had over this past week. Their lives are pretty much ruined. Their hopes are shot. And Jesus says, "You fools, your dull minds can't understand what it says in Scripture." And then he explains the Old Testament, talking about all these places from Moses through the prophets, through the Psalms, where they point to the Messiah having to undergo all of this suffering, this death, before rising again in glory. Right? So he comes and explains it all.

And after he has kind of patronizingly explained scripture to these grieving friends, he pretends to go leave. He's going to keep going on his own. But amazingly, they ask this rude stranger to stay with them for dinner. And dinner is served. And Jesus offers the blessing, an honor that was given to him as a guest. He offers the blessing. He prays over the meal and he breaks the bread and hands it to them. And suddenly, these clouds of confusion burn away. They finally get recognition. In the midst of complete disappointment and grief and hopelessness, this small act of friendliness and love opens their eyes. And as he hands them the bread, they know exactly who he is now. And this is not just because he's reenacting what happened to the Last Supper. These people weren't there, mind you. This is just something that spoke to Jesus' character. And the darkness is driven away, his face appears, their hearts are warmed, and then, of course, Jesus just vanishes. Mission accomplished, apparently. Cleopas and the other disciple realize they should have known all along. They remember as they were walking with him on the road the way their hearts burned as he spoke.

It's very, very, very easy to go through our lives without any sense whatsoever that Jesus is alive. Luckier than Cleopas and the others here on the other side of the ascension, we do at least affirm and know that Jesus has risen from the dead, but do we? Do we believe that, really? The disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus and not recognizing him points us to the truth, the reality, that sometimes God has to break through the darkness, the hopelessness, the stagnation that we allow to build up around us in order to meet us face to face. Sometimes we're just not paying attention. Sometimes we're not open to Jesus being here, and he has to make himself known. And like he did for these disciples, he can surprise us by showing up crystal clear in the everyday moments of our lives. These small instances we see where people offer love for each other. In moments of tenderness, of hope, that defy despair and meanness and death, you just see something good that shines out into the world. And of course, we do meet Jesus in the breaking of the bread, the sharing of the wine, where we taste and see the Lord is good.

And, but God shakes his head at us, I'm sure, that we all get so caught up in our lives and chaos that we'll argue to God's face that he's nowhere to be found, even as he meets us anyway in what we need. And all of this is just grace. We don't have to be looking for him. We don't have to be taking out a telescope or looking closely at everything we go through in our lives to find him. Because remember that the disciples on the road here, they're not looking for Jesus at all. And in fact, if we're not looking for him, which isn't to say we shouldn't, he's likely to barge in when we least expect it. Maybe an unfamiliar or very familiar face is transformed into the loving face of Jesus. They're not looking for Jesus at all. And that can go in a number of ways, as we see in Scripture. In this story, we see this surprise encounter with Christ where he appears as he's serving his disciples. But it can also happen in the other direction, I think. Just as that waitress for me was out of context in the grocery store, we can find Jesus out of context in faces that we are ready to overlook. You know, maybe the neighbor you've walked past for years. Maybe even a person we've never really gotten to know or talk to here.

And then we see in Matthew 25... no, that's not the next chapter, but in Matthew 25... we hear that famous parable of the sheep and the goats. When Jesus tells us that we literally, somehow literally, serve Jesus when we care for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the hungry, the thirsty. I wonder if you can think of times where that's happened for you. Where you thought you were serving somebody or helping somebody or talking to somebody and then you realize Jesus is here. I've had this experience, right? Right? In hospital rooms, at dinner tables, sharing lunch with people at Prevention Point, walking with the kids we pick at the Good Friday crosswalk through Allentown. That's always a miracle. We get these kids tacking on with us to hear the Bible story as we carry the cross on Good Friday.

Unfortunately, Jesus often appears and then vanishes the moment that we realize he's there. It's just a split-second thing. That's what he did for the disciples. But rather than dwelling on that loss, he intends that we're supposed to be invigorated by that, renewed. We're supposed to keep looking, keep seeking, keep hoping to find him in our lives. He's out in the world. He's ready to be found in service, in love, in conversation, in friendship.

I have such incredibly strong memories of spending Sunday mornings in those little corner booths at Camelot. My sister and my friends and I would all share breakfast after worship there. It was a good crowd, right? And most of us were baptized together. One Christmas Eve at the Slippery Rock University Rec Center Pool, I think there were like eight of us that were baptized that day. And together we went through like four youth leaders over the course of six years, which probably says something about our group. Yeah. And we participated in the Bible lesson to varying degrees, but we always tried hard and captured the flag on Wednesday night. Just such good memories here. On Sunday mornings, we all sat in one pew almost every Sunday, the second one back on the right, and most of us had no family with us. We were just kids by ourselves. And a number of us who would probably have had next to zero social interaction, our paths never would have really crossed without the love of that church, we became good friends.

And this sounds dramatic here, I know, but it hurts to remember this because I miss it and so much of it is gone. Most of these people, these friends of mine, as far as I know, have drifted away from the faith that we shared in high school. We were baptized together and I think they're far away from that now. But, Jesus was there in all the moments that we had together, from sharing the bread of communion to sharing a cinnamon roll an hour later. And Jesus' face was present in all of those faces and is present now in the memory there. I knew him in the breaking of bread and the making of friends. And he was working in and among us, and I can know that he's still on the road with them, regardless of whether they recognize him right now.

And I've been thinking about that great Easter hymn, the one we sang last week. "You asked me how I know he lives. He lives within my heart." And that's true. But that's only part of it. Because as we hear our gospel story today about the road to Emmaus, we see also that we can know that Jesus lives whenever we see him in the world. Jesus isn't just in here. Jesus is out there in other people, in the world. He's not just a faded memory. He's not just an affirmation that we say he's alive, but really, really alive, right?

And I think a big part of why I am in ministry today is the persistent hope that I will encounter Jesus and the people around me in the church the same way I did in the church in my teenage years with those friends. And when we do get that miraculous gift of seeing him, you know, rather than lamenting how brief those encounters are, because they are brief, right? Hopefully we can hold on to it. We can seek more of him, find him more. Maybe Cleopas and the other disciple would not have seen him at all if their hearts had refused. And perhaps we can refuse to see him too when he's looking us in the eye. But our challenge from Emmaus is to do our best to keep our hearts soft and open to meeting him out there on the road, in the world, both among those who need his love from us and those who share his love with us. And of course, if we can't do that, he just might surprise us and show up anyway. He seems to enjoy that. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.