Emmaus Walk with Bishop Jos!

Be the Reminder!

My father suffered from dementia toward the end of his life. I watched it happen — slowly, tenderly, and painfully. He would forget what happened yesterday, but could tell you, in vivid detail, a story from forty years ago. Short-term memory goes first. The present slips away. And I remember sitting beside him, thinking: this is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever witnessed. I tell you that story today because I want to talk about forgetting. And not just the kind that comes with age or illness — but the kind that seems to be a fundamental condition of the human soul. When we hear the story of two disciples walking the road to Emmaus, I need you to notice something remarkable: these are not strangers to Jesus. These are followers. And yet they walk away from Jerusalem in grief and confusion, unable to recognize the Risen Lord walking right beside them. Why? Because they forgot. Earlier in Luke chapter 24, the women at the tomb — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James — had to be reminded by two blazing angels: “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” Remember. It keeps coming up. And Jesus, walking to Emmaus, says it with a kind of holy exasperation: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” He is not being cruel. He is being pastoral. He is doing what he always does: walking with the forgetful, the confused, the brokenhearted and helping them remember. But I want to suggest to you that we are not just dealing with two forgetful disciples in this story on a dusty road. We are dealing with a collective dementia, a cultural, civilizational forgetting of who we are and what we are called to become. Rumi, a great mystic poet, wrote of this ache with devastating beauty. He described the human soul as a reed cut from its reed bed, crying out for what it has lost, not because it is broken, but because it remembers, somewhere deep, where it came from. He wrote of love’s longing as a fire that burns away everything that is not essential, until what remains is the truth of who you are. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.” — Rumi That field Rumi speaks of — that is where we began. Children of one God, brothers and sisters under one sky. And we have forgotten it. We have forgotten the Holocaust. We have forgotten the millions who died because we forgot the commandment to love our neighbor. We have forgotten what is written on the very doorstep of this nation: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Emma Lazarus, a jewish woman, wrote those words as an echo of Matthew 25 — “when I was thirsty, when I was hungry, when I was a stranger.” If we claim to be a Christian nation and behave as we do now, we are not just forgetting a poem. We are forgetting the Lord himself. We are forgetting our identity. Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that every human being carries within them a natural orientation toward the good, toward truth, toward God — what he called the natural law written on the heart. Aquinas believed that we do not reason our way into knowing that we should love our neighbor. We remember it. Yes, We remember it! It is already there, inscribed in the very nature of what it means to be human. Sin, for Aquinas, is not so much rebellion as it is a kind of forgetting. Sin is a turning away from what we already, at the deepest level, know. Father Richard Rohr puts it this way: that the spiritual life is not about climbing to some new height, but about returning to the ground of who we already are: “We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.” That is what Jesus does on the road to Emmaus. He does not hand those two disciples a theological argument. He walks with them. He listens. He breaks bread. He lets the truth catch up with them from the inside, not the outside. And their hearts burn within them not because they learned something new, but because they finally remembered what they already knew. So what does this mean for us? It means we are called to two things simultaneously, and both matter. First, we are called to speak. When leaders or anyone deliberately deny the truth — when the poem on the Statue of Liberty is treated as an inconvenience rather than a calling — we must name it. We must call out the intentional forgetting with the same clarity that Jesus called his disciples foolish. Not from anger. From love. From the grief of someone who remembers what was forgotten. But second — and this is the harder thing — we are called to walk with. Because there are many people, like my father, who genuinely do not remember. Who have been so formed by fear, by noise, by the relentless pace of the world, that they have lost the thread back to their own humanity. These people do not need our condemnation. They need someone to walk beside them, to break bread with them, to stay patient and present until something in them begins to stir. That is ministry. That is what the angels did at the tomb. That is what Jesus did on the road. That is what the angels did again at the Ascension, when they looked at the disciples staring into the clouds and essentially said: “Stop gazing upward. Get on with your lives. Walk with each other.” Be the Reminder The world around us is suffering from a kind of spiritual amnesia. It has forgotten that we are all children of one God, made for love, made for each other. Our calling is not to have all the answers. Our calling is to be the reminder. When you sit with someone in grief, you are reminding them they are not alone. When you welcome the stranger, you are reminding the world of what it forgot. When you break bread with someone whose politics infuriate you and find the image of God still there — you are doing exactly what Jesus did on that dusty road to Emmaus. You are not just helping them remember. You are helping yourself remember too. “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road, while he opened the Scriptures to us?” Luke 24:32. May your heart burn again this week. Thanks for reading Emmaus Walk with Bishop Jos!! This post is public, so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. 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When Profit Wears a Crown of Thorns.

Shirley Chisholm’s observation cuts with surgical precision across decades: “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.” She said this in the 1970s, but it reads like a dispatch from this morning’s news cycle. Some truths are stubborn that way. There is a useful distinction worth making at the outset. Animals operate by instinct — they react, they survive, they pursue. No one blames a wolf for what it does. But human beings are different. We possess rationality, and from that rationality flows something instinct can never produce: character. Character is not what we feel. It is what we choose — especially under pressure, especially when no one is watching, especially when we have every reason to do otherwise. The oldest literature in the world understood this. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, falsely accused, imprisoned and forgotten, eventually rose to power in Egypt. When famine brought those same brothers to his feet — desperate, unrecognizing, utterly vulnerable — he had every reason to be vindictive. The instinct would have been revenge. Instead, he wept. He fed them. He said, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” That is not instinct. That is character — rationality shaped by something larger than the self, expressed through conduct when conduct was costly. This is precisely why the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s warning carries such weight today. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she observed that the most dangerous leaders are not openly monstrous, but those who have convinced themselves — and their followers — of their own righteousness. Let us take a pause to see if we know someone like that today. When a leader borrows the imagery of Christ’s self-sacrifice to decorate a project built on self-interest, we are not witnessing faith. We are witnessing the absence of character — instinct dressed in borrowed robes. Pure absense of Character! Cornel West puts it plainly: “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people.” Love, in any serious moral tradition, reveals itself in conduct. It shows up in policy, in sacrifice, in the willingness to bear cost for others. It does not announce itself with a golden Bible or a messianic pose. When actions consistently contradict the image being projected, we are not dealing with a failure of messaging. We are dealing with a failure of character — which is simply to say, a failure of the rational, moral self to govern. James Baldwin saw this self-deception with devastating clarity when he says, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” A nation that cannot name what it is witnessing — the weaponization of the sacred, by those who govern against the poor, the immigrant, the vulnerable — cannot begin to correct it. Let us not condone the failure of nerve among the leaders and pastors, rather let us remember this as character shown plainly and openly for us to be the judges of it. I will put it in the words of philosopher Simone that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Pay attention now, because there will be a day when this attention we pay, will pay off the attention we give to it now. Truly seeing another person — their dignity, their suffering, their humanity — is itself a moral act. I want to say that again. Seeing another person — their dignity, their suffering, their humanity — is itself a moral act. Its opposite, the studied indifference of the powerful, is a form of violence dressed in fine clothing. Joseph paid attention to his brothers’ hunger even when their cruelty was fresh. That attention was the proof of his character, not his words about himself. What does it mean when the symbols of self-giving love are borrowed to dress up self-interest? It means we have arrived at a moment that demands not outrage alone, but clarity. Chisholm was right about profit. Baldwin was right about facing things. And Joseph — three thousand years removed — remains an example precisely because character, unlike instinct, does not expire. Character does not expire! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com [https://bishopjos.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

The Wrong People Saw It First!

One of the most remarkable testimonies of our time is the witness of Mother Teresa of Calcutta — a woman who spent her life finding the face of Jesus not in cathedrals, not in the comfortable pews of the powerful, but in the gutters of Kolkata, in the hollow eyes of the abandoned, and in the trembling hands of the forgotten. She knelt beside Hindu men ravaged by leprosy and saw the crucified Christ. She cradled children discarded by the side of the road and held the very body of God. She looked upon women cast away by their families and recognized, somehow, the divine image they still carried. What was she doing, really? She was restoring the love of God to those from whom it had been stolen — stripped away by poverty, by caste, by cruelty, by neglect. She was not simply performing charity. She was performing resurrection. The True Meaning of Resurrection This Easter, I want us to wrestle with what resurrection actually means . Because if we reduce it only to the miraculous resuscitation of a single body — Jesus walking out of a tomb two thousand years ago — we may be missing the far greater and more urgent miracle it announces to us today. The resurrection is not merely about restoring life to one dead man. It is about restoring life — hope, dignity, belonging — to every human being who has been made to feel that their life does not matter. It is God’s declaration that hope cannot be buried. That love cannot be entombed. That no human being, however abandoned or despised, is beyond the reach of the divine. The recipients of resurrection hope are not the triumphant. They are the ones who have run out of hope entirely. The feast of Easter is the feast of those who had nothing left to believe — and then found that God had not finished with them yet. God Shows No Partiality In our reading from Acts, the early church was forced to confront one of its deepest assumptions. Peter — a devout Jew, a follower of Jesus — stood in the home of Cornelius, a Roman Gentile, and announced words that must have startled even him: “God shows no partiality.” Not to the Jew over the Gentile. Not to the Roman over the Samaritan. Not to the powerful over the poor. Not to the citizen over the stranger. The reason God shows no partiality is not a matter of policy — it is a matter of identity. We are all children of God. Every last one of us. The architecture of divine love has no walls, no gates, no checkpoints. There was not a person on earth who did not have room to dine with Jesus — not even Judas, who still found his place at the table on the night of the Last Supper. Resurrection Is Universalism, Not Exclusivity The resurrection proclaims a radically inclusive God. And this brings us to a profound irony at the heart of our national conversation. There are those who insist this is a Christian nation — and in one sense, they are more right than they know. Because the founding vision of this nation, whatever its many failures in practice, was stamped with the very logic of resurrection. Emma Lazarus gave it voice in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” This is resurrection language. The tired. The poor. The wretched. The homeless. These are precisely the people Easter is for. Emma Lazarus, herself Jewish, envisioned America as a place of refuge for all people, regardless of origin, religion, or status — a nation built not on dominance but on the dignity of the displaced. The Dangerous Heresy of Christian Nationalism Here is where we must speak plainly. Christian nationalism — the ideology that fuses the Christian faith with ethnic, cultural, or political dominance — does not merely misunderstand American history. It misunderstands the very Christ it claims to follow. “Christian nationalism confuses the flag with the cross, the nation with the Kingdom of God, and the powerful with the blessed. But Jesus did not rise from the dead to crown an empire. He rose to call a marginalized woman by name and send her — above all the men — to announce the news of new life to the world.” Consider who witnessed the resurrection first. Not the high priest. Not the Roman governor. Not the powerful disciples who had access and influence. The first witness to the resurrection was a woman — Mary Magdalene — someone the world had cast aside. Jesus called her by name. He did not call Peter first. He did not appear first to those in power. He appeared to the marginalized, and he commissioned her as the first evangelist in history. The poor, the fisherman, the tax collector, the farmer, the prostitute — those who knew they needed God — were the ones who could see the risen Christ. Those who clung to power and status fell over at the sight of truth, dignity, and divinity. Our Easter Calling So this Easter, let us be clear about what we celebrate. We celebrate a God who shows no partiality. A love that cannot be entombed. A hope that belongs to those who have none. A resurrection that is not the property of any nation, race, or political movement — but belongs to the whole of humanity. Like Mother Teresa, may we find the crucified Christ in the faces of those the world has thrown away. And like Mary Magdalene, may we be the first to run and announce: Hope is not dead. It never was. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com [https://bishopjos.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

It began in a garden. Not a Temple!

Did you know that God Has Always Met Us in Gardens? God did not place humanity in a temple. He placed us in a garden. From the very beginning, the sacred has been woven into the sensory — into soil and seed, into morning light through leaves, into what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” The divine has always smelled like earth after rain. And here is what I want you to hold today: the first time God called someone by name — the very first time — was in a garden. Not from a throne. Not through a prophet at a distance. God walked in the cool of the evening and called: “Where are you?” That question was not about geography. God knew exactly where Adam was. It was an invitation. A reaching out. The theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that this God is not “a static, settled deity,” but one who moves toward us, who enters our hiding places and calls us out of them. The Bible opens in a garden and the resurrection happens in one. That is not coincidence. That is architecture. In the first garden, God found a person in hiding — ashamed, afraid, covered in fig leaves and excuses. Adam had broken trust. He flinched at the sight of the One who loved him most. And yet — God came looking. God always comes looking. In the Easter garden, Mary Magdalene stood weeping among the flowers, so consumed by grief she could not recognize the Lord standing before her. She took him for the gardener. Maybe, she was not entirely wrong. He is, after all, the one who tends us. Who kneels in the soil of our grief. Who coaxes life from what we were certain was dead. And then, as the novelist Marilynne Robinson writes of grace, it simply “arrives.” Not announced. Not argued. He speaks her name: “Mary.” That is the whole of Easter, isn’t it? One word. One name. Everything changes. Notice what both gardens offer us: a choice. In Eden, Adam heard God coming and hid. Fear was his first response to Love. In the Easter garden, Mary heard her name and turned. She ran — not away, but toward. The poet Wendell Berry says: “It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” Both Adam and Mary had reached the end of what they knew. One flinched. One turned. The difference was not their worthiness. The difference was the name they heard. No matter which garden we find ourselves in today — the garden of our hiding, or the garden of our grief — God meets us there. In our vulnerability, not our performance. In our natural environment, not a cleaned-up version of it. Easter is not merely a date on the calendar. It is an invitation. Like Lazarus stumbling from the tomb, still wrapped in grave clothes, we are called to let ourselves be unbound. The fears, the old stories, the shame we have carried so long we have forgotten it is not our skin — these are linen wrappings. The Risen Christ does not ask us to have shed them already. He asks us to come out while still wearing them, and he will take it from there. Frederick Buechner wrote: “The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.” You were called by name this morning. That call will tremble outward. It always does. The stone is already rolled away. The gardener is standing in the morning light, saying your name. The only question left is the one that matters most: Will you come out? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com [https://bishopjos.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Letting Jesus Turn One Table Today!

On Holy Monday, I sit with one of the most jarring scenes in the Gospels. Jesus enters the Temple — the holiest place in Jerusalem — and what he finds there is not worship. It is a marketplace. Merchants hawking animals. Money changers turning profit from pilgrims. The sacred has been colonized by the transactional, and I am struck by how deeply I recognize this — not only in history, but in the institutions of my own time, and if I am honest, in myself. Jesus overturns the tables. Not calmly. Not apologetically. He acts from righteous anger — the anger of love confronting betrayal. And I hear his words as if they are spoken directly into the noise of my own life: “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers.” I believe this is what the Lord is asking me to see today. The exploitation of the sacred is not only a first-century problem. When the Church — when I — allow what is holy to be crowded out by power, performance, or self-protection, the tables need overturning still. So many people are disoriented because the places meant to offer refuge became places of transaction. I feel that disorientation too. And I believe the Lord is inviting me, on this Holy Monday, to let him in to do the same work in me. “The soul is the temple of God. If you defile that temple, God will destroy you — not out of vengeance, but because what is corrupted cannot house what is holy.” — St. John Chrysostom This lands heavily with me. Because I, too, am a temple. St. Paul writes that my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within me. And if that is true, then the question the Lord presses upon me today is one I cannot avoid: what has crept into the temple of my heart that does not belong there? When I look honestly within, I find my own money changers. Resentments I have nursed for years. Anxieties I have mistaken for wisdom. Distractions I invited in and never asked to leave. The low hum of bitterness, the clutter of false identities, the noise of a life that has slowly, without my fully noticing, become very crowded. These are loud. They take up space. And I know they make it harder for me to hear the still, small voice of God. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you.” — St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions Augustine names what I feel. When my interior life feels like a crowded market — noisy, exhausting, never quite at peace — I am beginning to understand that this restlessness is a signal. Something has taken up space that belongs to God alone. Holy Monday does not ask me to be perfect. It asks me to be honest. And I believe the Lord is asking me today to name what tables need overturning in me. Jesus did not destroy the Temple. He restored it to its purpose. That is what I believe he wants to do in me. Not to condemn me, but to clear me. Not to shame me, but to sanctify me. A house of prayer is not an empty house — it is a house filled with the right Presence. And I want that. I want to be that. A Question for Holy Monday Sit in stillness for a moment. Ask yourself: What in my life has turned the temple of my heart into a marketplace? What is taking up sacred space that belongs to God alone? What one thing, if cleared away, would make more room for prayer, for rest, for love? I do not have to clear everything at once. I only need to begin. Let Jesus turn one table today. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bishopjos.substack.com [https://bishopjos.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]