Their Eyes Were Opened

May My Heart Always Be Open by E.E. Cummings and Luke 24:13-35

April 19, 2026

Good morning again, thank you for being here and thank you for the privilege of your time. I have always felt the important of a weekly gathering centered around love. Thank you for being a part of it. I invite you now to take some deeper breathes, breathing in peace, breathing out worry and pray you hear whatever you need to. Hear this prayer from Psalm 19. God of many names and expressions, help us to take in whatever we need to, may the words my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Can you remember that moment? Was it sudden, or had it been building to that for a while? The moment when you changed- changed your way of looking at it or thinking about it, changed your sense of what could be or what should be? What does it take for us humans to see things differently?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, with the sight of so many people given their blind devotion in exchange for feeling protected, for feeling like winners, for feeling in charge. As we watch so many who claim to be in support of life, give their support to death and the war machine, I have been pondering how it comes to be that so many don’t see it, what it’s right in front of us.

When I reflect on my own journey, it seems that more often than not, while a moment might have created an opening for a shift to be visible, it is rare that one moment changes us. Usually it is awareness of it, followed by modification, followed by repetition and spaces to reinforce the values underneath the shift. And sometimes it is one moment, but it takes us living with the moment for a while to actually be changed by it though, like a guest that arrives and never stops whispering, or shaping, it’s something we live with for a while, walk with, wake with, a moment we can’t shake, that even beyond the experience in real time, the moment accompanies us and somehow changes us.

Early in college, still operating in the paradigm handed to me, but albeit with new questions, I decided to volunteer to get engaged in politics. As a passionate 19-year-old infused with new ideas from reading I was soaking up like a sponge, I found the College Republicans and a man named James Kolbe. He was born in the Midwest and moved to Arizona when he was 5.

He served in the Navy, including a year in Vietnam. He went to Northwestern and then went onto Stanford for graduate school. When we met, he was running again for Arizona’s 5th congressional district, a lifelong Republican. But he didn’t check their boxes perfectly. He was mixed. He supported women’s reproductive healthcare but just the year before I showed up in Tucson, he had voted in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which was a law passed in 1996 arguing that marriage should be only between a man and a woman. The problem was that this Navy Veteran, who was a businessman, and a staunch Republican, it turns out Jim Kolbe was gay. When he voted the way he did, he was outed by the news magazine The Advocate, who was furious at him for not advocating for LGBTQ rights. When asked how in the world a gay man could vote the way he did, his argument was that states should decide. But what in the world was the Arizona Republican Party going to do with this guy who didn’t fit their ideas of a conservative man?

Mr. Kolbe was the embodiment of a tension. Not this or that. Not here or there. Not just what they were used to seeing. His thinking on its own presented questions to the answers that had been established. His living outside for their view offered them an encounter that confronted their comfort. And as he was challenging a status quo, do you know like 6 years later in 2013, he shared openly that he had changed his mind, and even saying in 2017 that he was wrong. Maybe it was seeing and knowing a more expansive kind of love? Because I learned that he ended up marrying an immigrant man named Hector Alfonso. Hector is a Panamanian native and special education teacher. Mr. Kolbe even went on to speak before Congress advocating for the inclusion of particular provisions allowing a path to citizenship for same-sex bi-national couples. His existence invited them to understand things in a new way, those who wanted to at least, and sharing his own experience invited him to evolve his way of thinking, to open his eyes to a different perspective.

And I think that is one way to understand this post-Easter story. We only get this story fleshed out here in this Gospel and it’s rich with symbology and meaning- 7 miles, the journey ends in Jerusalem, women are making statements that not everyone is sure of… and the group walking doesn’t recognize what is really going on. Isn’t that an agent problem? Women not being believed…. They are grieving. They can’t see what is happening.

They are living in a certain paradigm of what is possible and then… When Jesus does what he always did, so it’s not until their encounter with him, doing these ordinary things, it’s not until they are right close, doing life together that they get it, that they see it, that their eyes were opened.

“When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him…”

His existence among them invited them to understand things in a new way.

How is this happening? But then they see it. Somehow it’s as if their eyes were opened to a whole new way of looking at it all.

And I think of how true this is, in life, in many situations, how often it is only when we are face to face with something, when we doing something so intimate as sharing life and hearing a story or having an encounter, that totally challenges how we were thinking about something.

It’s often only then that we can see things differently. As I said sometimes it takes a while to integrate or to know what to do when these experiences that cause tension or create cracks in our paradigm- when something or someone no longer fits. Not this or that. Not here or there. Not just what we are used to seeing.

In a commentary on this passage, Molly Marshall says that “we need others to change our narrowness.” And that has been my experience. It’s easy to claim to be someone with an open mind, if we are never in places where we hear our perspective probed or our way of thinking challenged. In my opinion, one of the most important things we do as a church, investing in being together in our weekly gatherings is the spiritual growth that emerges in sharing life with people who have different perspectives than us. In the United Church of Christ, we value theological freedom and prize unity not conformity, we see the variety as a gift. We do need each other to change, to have our eyes opened and we need that out in the world too.

I look back on that time in the late 1990’s, standing on a median in a monsoon, holding a sign for that gay Republican and, I wonder if his refusal to accept the established thinking of that time, also helped hold space for my own evolutions? Because my paradigm was cracking… My eyes were starting to open, to the limitations of my own thinking… Maybe it was because of a more expansive kind of love?

I believe it is part of our commitment as people of faith and conscience to always remain open. May we be open to hearing from and being changed by even the non-human creatures that speak beyond words. As we heard from e.e. cummings, may our hearts always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living… may our minds stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple.

I believe we must be willing to open our eyes to things we thought we understood, or to have things we thought we knew challenged, to open our hearts to people, to ideas, to all that we thought was settled, to new ways of thinking, new answers, new questions. Beloved of God may our eyes keep being opened!

Communal Reflection Question: What encounters have you had that opened your eyes and changed your perspective?

May our eyes keep being opened. May we see our need for one another in challenging our narrowness. May we accompany one another in finding that some of the strangers we encounters will lead us straight to something Holy.

May it be so. Amen.