In our third week of walking we’ve traveled 957.75 miles, almost exactly twice as many as our first week! Our swimmers are leading the way now, as we’ve dived off the coast of Nova Scotia and into the Atlantic.
Our rest break this week is just before the edge of the continental shelf. Here we find the Labrador Current, a cold water flow moving south along the coast of Canada. When it hits the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream moving north it creates an area of dense fog and good fishing. The cold water of the current can transport icebergs much further south than they would normally be seen, sometimes as far as Bermuda. If we stop to rest on an iceberg we’ll need to make sure we don’t get carried too far off course. This is also an amazing area for whale watching.
The scripture we will hear in church this week is Luke 24:13-35, which tells the story of two of Jesus disciples out for a walk on Easter Sunday. They’d seen Jesus arrested and watched him die, and then they’d heard crazy things from the women who went to his tomb on Sunday morning.
They were walking along talking about it all when a stranger appeared and asked what they were talking about. So they told him all about this guy, who they thought was a prophet, but now he’s been killed, but maybe not, because some women talked to angels who said he was alive. And the stranger called them fools and explained how all this fit in with what the scriptures said about the messiah. So they invited him to dinner, and when he blessed and broke the bread they realized it was Jesus.
We might meet fellow travelers on our walk (although maybe not in the middle of the ocean). They probably won’t turn out to be the risen Jesus, but you never know. In this we can take instruction from the sixth century rule of St. Benedict, who wrote “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me.'”
And so today we pray
God of the iceberg, God of the whale, God of the oceans and seas; help us to see Christ in every person we meet this day and to be Christ for every person we meet this day. Amen.