May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

This past week Meg shared a story with me about a special pair of glasses that can help some colorblind people see the colors they’ve been missing. Those colors are usually red and green, which wind up being brownish and grayish. The glasses eliminate some portions of the light spectrum that muddy the red and the green. They get clarified and much more visible. There are various causes of colorblindness, this works for some but not all of them.

Imagine a fire truck looking brown to you. You can’t see what you can’t see. Then with the glasses you see it in fire engine red. Suddenly those words take on new meaning. Once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it. And even if those glasses are taken away from you, the memory of that sight remains recorded in your memory.

We tend to refer to this passage from Luke’s Gospel as “the walk to Emmaus,” which makes sense because they are, in fact, walking to Emmaus. But Emmaus isn’t the point. No one goes to Emmaus, no one makes pilgrimages to Emmaus. We don’t even know exactly where it was, although a best guess is about 7-7½ northwest of Jerusalem, on the road to Joppa, or modern Tel Aviv.

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Years ago I came across a program that was supposed to highlight the 100 scariest moments in film history.  I already knew which movie was and is the scariest of all time. It was so scary that at one point the guy sitting behind me gently grabbed my shoulder and said, “It’s only a movie, son.  Sit down,” because I was literally standing there screaming. (I was 13.)

I just had to see where my number one scariest movie was on the list.  They agreed with me that the #1 scariest movie of all time was Jaws.  And boy was it scary. After that movie I didn’t feel safe at the beach.  I’d be walking around in the surf, looking.  I didn’t even feel safe in a swimming pool.  It’s probably when I started taking showers instead of baths.

What was so scary about that movie? 

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Some years ago, our son Sam and his wife Abby adopted a cute little Chihuahua-Pekinese-mini poodle mix named Sage. Sage is cute as she can be, all 4 pounds of her. But she had a problem when they first got her. She was covered with fleas. The poor dog was absolutely miserable. She looked frightened, cowering, and much smaller than her 4 pounds would indicate.

I suggested Sam should go get a flea and tic shampoo so we could kill the fleas and wash them away. Sam got a flea shampoo. It smelled really nice, but it claimed to be a repellant, not a killer. And it didn’t seem to bother the fleas at all. So, I ran to the store and grabbed the right product, came back and we washed her. The second bath killed all the fleas.

The change in Sage was abrupt and complete. She immediately became joyful. She couldn’t stop smiling and as soon as we got her mostly dry, she started bounding all around greeting everyone. It was quite a transformation. Sudden. Complete.

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