Monthly Archives: January 2021

Take Off the Devil Suit

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by Rev. James Eaton © 2021

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany/B • January 31, 2021

Mark 1:21-28

One day when I lived on 29th Street in Milwaukee, the Devil came to my house. He was a garish shade of red, had horns, a tail and carried a pitchfork and stood about four feet high.

I was sitting in the living room when the Devil came out of my son Jason’s room with a wild look and I knew we were in for trouble. A few minutes later, after some now forgotten bad behavior, a bit of parental yelling, and some tears I exorcised the devil, who returned to the bedroom. Minutes later Jason emerged and we were reconciled and agreed no more devil—at least for the moment.

It’s a true story: Jason had a devil costume for Halloween one year and for a while when he was going to be bad, he would put on the suit first. We learned to recognize the devil and the impending behavior and deal with it—partly by telling him to go back and take off the devil suit. Eventually, he outgrew the suit. I can only wish we all had outgrown bad behavior; obviously, we haven’t. The past few weeks have brought scenes of violence in our nation’s capital and a member of Congress threatening to kill other leaders. I’m sure you could add to this list. We cannot escape the men—and women—in the devil suit. How can we get them to take it off?

The story we read in Mark is amazingly appropriate. Last week we heard how Jesus created a community of disciples. His invitation to follow him is so authoritative that the text tells us they immediately left what they were doing and followed him. Now they have come to Capernaum, the home of those disciples. Jesus enters a synagogue on the sabbath, a sanctuary of worship but also a place of conversation where the whole community meets to gossip, greet, trade, and connect.

Jesus sits in the seat of the preacher; someone, perhaps he himself, reads a portion of Torah and Jesus begins to speak. The text says that he spoke as one with authority and not like the scribes, that is, the regular teachers. Now the usual method of preaching there was to discuss what Moses meant or what another prophet said. But the congregation recognizes something unique in Jesus: his words, his teaching, he himself, have an amazing authority. “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes,” the text says.

Just as a great guitar player, can make our hearts vibrate simply by running his fingers over a few strings, the words of Jesus move the hearts of the people there so that they are astounded, amazed. This sense of being astounded is not necessarily positive; it doesn’t mean they applauded. Preaching can make people angry. We all have a set of boundaries that make us feel safe. Like a fence at the edge of a precipice, like a barrier in front of a danger, boundaries keep us secure in a dangerous world. Anything that forces us beyond the boundaries destabilizes us, it threatens, and we react.

Years ago in Connecticut when the issue of full inclusion of gay folks was being fiercely debated in churches, I attended a clergy meeting where people on both sides spoke. Afterwards, we were feeling pretty good; the meeting had been mostly civil and no one had left in anger. There we were, a group of overweight middle-aged straight men sitting at a table in a church hall. One by one each was asked to say something about the meeting and when it was my time, I said that really, this topic had very little to do with our lives. Then I said, “But you know, here we are with pastries, and we’re all overweight. Maybe we should be discussing the sin of overeating.” That’s when the meeting got angry and a few moments later one of the guys said he wasn’t going to sit for this and left. “They were astounded.”

At least one person in Capernaum cries out and disrupts the moment. There is a man there with what the text calls “an unclean spirit”. Perhaps he stands up, there is a disruption. “Have you come to destroy us?” the demons in him ask. And then he says what some must have been thinking: “We know who you are, the Holy One of God.” What happens when the unworthy, the unclean, washes up like the ocean against the rock of God’s holiness? What happens when the demonic runs into the holy?

Notice how the text carefully distinguishes between the man himself and the unclean spirit: he is not a bad man, he is a man controlled by something unclean. “Unclean” means unfit for worship, unfit to come before God. Jewish religion carefully distinguished between the clean or pure and the unclean, between what was fit for God and what was not. The text tells us nothing about the man himself. Like Jason in the devil suit, he has been put into something other than himself. One writer likens this to addiction and points out that addiction is not the person: it is the cage with which the person lives. Like a devil suit, the cage of the unclean spirit is separate from the person, controlling but not the same as that person.

Now there are all kinds of cages. I confess that in the past, I often compared this cage, this unclean spirit, to mental illness with its hallucinations and altered sense of reality. I realize now I wanted to keep my own boundaries intact. I wasn’t mentally ill so thinking about it that way meant it wasn’t me. But what I see now is that there are all kinds of cages, big and small, and some of them enclose me as well. And when the cage is threatened, we all ask the question the unclean spirit asks: “Have you come to destroy us?”

This fear is, I believe, behind the anger that fuels so much of our national life. Cages are being broken. We are living through an enormous cultural transformation.What happens when the cage is broken and the person is released? We know that when Jesus walks in, demons walk out. The solution to our cages lies in the connection Jesus calls love: a compassion that refuses to let boundaries stand between us and invites us to see each other as equal children of God.

I mentioned addiction earlier as an example of a cage that controls a person. Today we are facing a terrible epidemic of addiction-fueled not only by drugs but by our misconception about the nature of addiction. So often we have forgotten Jesus’ distinction between the cage and the person so we see addicts as bad people who should simply start acting better. The truth is that addiction is only partly about chemical dependence. Those who are finding the most success at treating addiction have learned to treat it as a disease, not a moral failure, and to make human connection part of the solution. The problem isn’t the person; the problem is the cage.

In the same way, there are larger cultural cages. One of them is the fear of people who come from other places. Almost all of us have immigrants in our background. But we’ve forgotten that and today’s immigrants often have different colored skin. How do we solve the anger that comes from breaking this cage? Perhaps we do it by simple connection.

Umstead Park United Church of Christ in Raleigh, North Carolina, is a 300 member congregation that is one of 32 congregations housing people who are at risk of deportation. After studying and meeting about the issue last July, the church voted in September, 89-5, to invite an undocumented person to their meeting house. Eliseo Jimenez and his family came to stay in the church’s youth activity room. The church organized volunteers and worked with five other congregations, including a synagogue. Now we might think this would be a terrible burden and a drain on the church. In fact, one of the volunteer hosts says, the church has found renewed energy. “I’m really proud we’re doing this,” one of the members said.

At the center of this story in Mark today is this: “What have you to do with us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” It’s a question for all of us who say we are the body of Christ.

In a culture of cages, what has Jesus to do with all those caged? Isn’t it to invite them out of the cage; isn’t it to say, “Take off the devil suit” and come out? Isn’t it to see the child of God in each person and invite that child out? That’s what Jesus does: “Be silent and come out of him,” Jesus says. At the end of the story, the crowd is amazed. And indeed, whenever, wherever, we as the Jesus people, invite the child of God caged up, imprisoned, out to play—it’s still amazing. This is our calling in Christ: to invite the caged out, to invite everyone in, into the community of Christ, into the circle of those who recognize each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, children of God. For when we recognize others in this way, we find we ourselves are also recognized in that circle.

Amen.

The Urgency of Now

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A Sermon by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor © 2021 Al Rights Reserved

Third Sunday After Epiphany/Year B • January 24, 2021

Mark 1:14-20 

It was a cold day in December; I imagine someone had to get there early to get the heat going. The church was probably decorated for Christmas and I imagine led songs of Advent and Christmas. At 2:30 PM the radio announced that the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had been bombed; the nation had been attacked and was at war. Everyone’s life changed in a moment.

It was a rainy Friday in November. Everyone was waiting for the weekend, some preparing, some watching the clock. Suddenly, like that moment when a wind sweeps ahead of a storm, teachers were rushing about, some of them crying, some of the male teachers crying—unthinkable! President John F. Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas, Texas. Everyone’s life changed in a moment.

It was a sunny Tuesday morning in September, a busy time for ministers. I was in an office with no media, trying to put together worship and a sermon for the coming Sunday. I was newly married and unlike my new wife had a habit of calling me mid-morning, interrupting whatever I was doing. Later, much later, we’d deal with that but on this day when she called I was irritable and put it off and then she told me: an airplane had flown into a tower in New York City and it was on fire. Moments later we heard about the second crash. Everyone’s life changed in a moment.

Like an old man telling the story of how his life was suddenly changed, we’re hearing someone’s memory, Peter’s perhaps, of how things suddenly changed. What stuns me today about the story we read in Mark, what has always stunned me, is its rush. “…immediately they left their nets and followed him,” the text says. Immediately: now, right now, they drop everything and go with Jesus. Much of the whole gospel of Mark is written in the present, in a slangy language our translation fails to convey. From start to end, it’s as if the whole text is saying, “Right now, right here, immediately.” 

But I don’t live immediately; I live routinely—what about you? What I mean is that I have a regular set of things I do. I get up, get dressed, l make the bed, let the dog out, feed her, turn on CNN, let the dog out, go to the café, get coffee, read the New York Times and some other news. I drink my coffee, eat something. Tuesday I study the scripture text, write the liturgy: call to worship, prayer, pick the hymns. Wednesday I try to draft the sermon. Thursdays Jacquelyn often goes to work, so after I drop her off, I go to the bookstore and read. I finish the sermon. I practice. Fridays are off; Saturday mornings May and I go out for breakfast. Of course, not every week is the same but you see what I mean? There is a routine to it all. 

We do the same thing in most churches. When we consider a problem, when we think of a program, when we look at the next month, one question always pops up, one question must always be answered: “What did we do last year?” We look for what is routine; we say, “we always…” and fill in the blank with what we did last time and the time before. I don’t think we are much different in this way then others. I’m sure the Baptists plan pretty much the same way, they just do it with longer prayers. Catholics don’t make a move without consulting church tradition and Lutherans feel better if they can pin a Luther quote to whatever they are doing and the Methodists—well the very word “Methodist” comes from being methodical, from observing routines. 

Contrast that with this scene in Mark. John the Baptist is arrested; there is a crisis. We have no notes about Jesus meeting with top advisors; no campaign plan is written. He simply says, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Now repent means: change direction. To Jesus, the arrest of John means the same thing those events I mentioned at the beginning meant: everyone’s life needs to change and the time for change is now.

 Next thing you know, he’s passing by some guys working, fishing. I’m pretty sure they’re just following their routine; I’m certain they got up that morning, put on their fishing clothes, got some coffee and pushed off into the cold morning without a thought about Jesus. They are doing what is routine and suddenly, with no explanation, no preface, no plan, Jesus appears, tells them to follow him, “And immediately they left their nets and followed him.” A little farther on he sees James and John working on nets and it says, “Immediately he called them”; they follow him too. The urgency of the call grasps them;  the urgency of now overrides everything and they become disciples of Jesus.

What are we to make of these calls? They look nothing like the calm, ordered church life we practice. I hear This story and I think, ok: a mission. But where’s the follow up plan? What’s the budget? What are the demographics? I see Jesus coming to the disciples and I wonder if he wouldn’t be better of as part of a team ministry with a music person and someone to handle administrative stuff. Is there a graphic designer? Where are the cards with colorful pictures and the website prominently displayed? What’s the budget for this project? Are there reserves in case he runs a deficit? Would it be better, perhaps, to set out some interim goals? Suppose, instead of saving the world, we just save Galilee this year and work on Judah next year. Wouldn’t that let us focus our energies more effectively? 

I know these stories are the poetry of God’s Spirit and we live in the prose of the world but I see here also something deep and profound. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said in the midst of a time of crisis and war, “we are confronted by the fierce urgency of now.” God’s call does not come as one of many possibilities; God’s call is immediate, urgent and absolute. “Immediately they followed him”: the words are stark and precise and challenge us today. 

We meet together in the shadows of a transitional time. Churches are struggling through the high waves and winds of economic adversity as so many of us are struggling. We are all living with the lurking threat of a virus that uses our very routines to defeat us. We are used to getting together; many did at the holidays and the result was a spike in sickness. We are used to a medical establishment that overcomes illness; so we can’t understand why this goes on because we’re tired of it. 

 Like a boat thrusting forward with its passengers splashed by spray, we have had moments when we wondered if we would be overwhelmed. Yet we are here today, and the question we must address is how we can go forward together in the cause of Christ. Deep in our fears is the lurking dread that our beloved church could die, that we could die. To those who fear this, I say: don’t worry—don’t worry because we are already dead. Paul himself, writing to  the Corinthian church, said as much: “The present form of this world is passing away.” The urgency Jesus meets head on is precisely this: that we are dead in our sins and that death is urgent. So I am not fearing the death of the church, I am not fearing the end of things, even my own end today. The only question is: will we hear Christ calling us to resurrection? We are already in the grave: the only question is, are we ready to walk out like Lazarus, are we ready to live now in the living Lord?

To live this way, means to live as part of the community of Christ. We’ve now read twice, once last week, once today, how he worked: not alone, not by himself, not on his own, but by connecting a community together, calling together others. We have already accepted the challenge of welcoming; now we must move further and at his command take up the mission of inviting. The purpose of this invitation is simple: people need purpose. So now is the time for us to invite others to find their purpose by following Christ with us. 

We have this moment. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote from the jail in Birmingham to white ministers who urged him to go slower,

We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Now is the time for us, to listen to the call of Christ, to hear his call to proclaim good news, to learn to make the gospel, the good news of God’s forgiveness and welcome the very fiber of our daily life. 

Now is the time for us to understand we are not here for ourselves or because of ourselves; we have been bought with a price and we are not our own, we are the body of Christ. 

Now is the time for us to stop asking what did we do last year and start wondering what is God doing this year, for us to live in the urgency of now, peering by the light of God’s love into the darkness of this world.

Now: now, now. There is indeed, a fierce urgency to now. Now is the  time for us to embrace the call of Christ and keep our eyes on the prize of his upward call. Now is the time to let go of the dead past and embrace the living Christ and life he offers. Now is the time to begin our new life. 

Amen.

Are Your Ears Tingling?

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A Sermon by Rev. James Eaton • © 2021

January 27, 2021 • Second Sunday After Epiphany    

1 Samuel 3:1-10 (11-20) • 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 • John 1:43-51

We have a small, blond dog we call Lucy; opinions differ on whether that’s short for Lucille or Lucifer. She’s a mix of terrier and small poodle. The idea was that she would be perky like a terrier and smart like a poodle and not shed. She’s not that smart, she sheds most of the time and she barks at everyone and everything. This wasn’t so much an issue when we lived on a big lot. It became an issue in Albany the first morning the garbage guys arrived at 5:30 AM and Lucy decided to warn us by barking loudly and endlessly. Lucy doesn’t do any tricks, she doesn’t come on command. She has one talent but she has it in abundance. Lucy has big pointy ears and she can hear things no one else can. 

What do you hear? Today we read the story of Samuel’s call. It’s a lesson in hearing your own call. It’s a slack time in Israel’s history. The great days of Moses and Joshua are over; King David isn’t on the radar screen yet. The text says, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Samuel is a kid, the son of Hannah, who conceived him after praying desperately and has, the Bible says, “lent him” to the Lord. So he’s helping out at the sanctuary, assisting Eli. Think of him as an intern. 

He’s sleeping when he hears this: “Samuel! and he goes running off to Eli, assuming the boss was calling. Eli tells him to go lie down. Again: “Samuel!” It happens again. I’m guessing by now Eli was getting tired of this game; he tells Samuel, “Well, if it happens again, pretend it’s God and tell God you’re listening.” Amazingly enough, it is God indeed calling and God says, “I’m going to do something that will make everyone’s ears tingle.” Just to start, he certainly makes Samuel’s tingle; he tells him he’s going to throw Eli and his son’s down because of all the bad things they’ve done. This isn’t a great message to take to your boss; at first, Samuel says nothing but of course God’s Word always gets out and it does and Eli is overthrown, Samuel becomes renowned as a prophet. Later on, he’s going to be the one who has the courage to do God’s bidding and anoint David as God’s chosen to rule God’s people.

Are your ears tingling? Have you heard God calling your name? Is there a moral purpose at the center of your life based on a call from God? Today I want to offer a way to seek God’s call in this time, in every time. 

That process begins with the same advice parents gave us about crossing the street: “Stop, look, listen”. Perhaps you remember the story of Moses’ call. He had been an exalted leader in Egypt who had to run for his life when he murdered someone in a fight over mistreatment of Hebrew slaves. He hides out in the wilderness of Sinai; he makes a new life there. One day, off in the distance, he sees a bush burning without being consumed. “I will turn aside to see this sight”, he says and does. There, turned aside, after he has stopped, when he looks, as he listens, he hears God calls his voice. There is an ancient Rabbinic tradition in fact that there had been many burning bushes before but no one bothered to stop and look at them. 

One of the most important prayers of my life was, “I give up, Lord.” As a pastor of a growing church in Suttons Bay, Michigan, I had been going to meetings, talking to church leaders and trying to get a building project going. The congregation needed space but was divided on what to do, whether to build new or try to expand our existing building. Finally, we held a Congregational Meeting to make a decision. But the meeting fall into an inconclusive process and nothing was done. All that work went down the drain. Discouraged and depressed, I sat in the little sanctuary a day or so later and told God I was giving up. And I did. One day a few months later, a young woman who was new to the congregation came up with a solution that had never occurred to any of us. I believe now, as I have believed for years, that God was just waiting for me, and our church leaders, to stop trying to do it on our own and listen for God’s call.

The first step toward hearing your call is to stop living from your to do list and listen for God’s call. Look around: see to what God puts in front of you. God often uses what is simple, what is there, to teach. When Jesus taught, he didn’t construct long logical paragraphs, he told stories about the simple realities everyone hearing already knew. Sowing seeds; keeping watch, everyone knew about those things. He taught them to see these things with great seriousness. 

Part of this looking and listening is paying attention to others. Assume everyone you meet might be a text from God. In the story we read from the Gospel of John, Jesus doesn’t call Nathaniel. Jesus asks Philip to go with him; it’s Philip who goes to Nathaniel and invites him to come along as well. Every Christian leader I know has a story, often many stories, of a person or people who were the means of God’s calling to them

Listening means learning to pray slowly. I find this is a great challenge. When I sit down to pray, I want to get to it. I want to start right up but is that how we talk to good friends? “Hey, yeah, hi listen here’s what I want you to do, Lord.” When I was being taught to do counseling, I was nervous about how I would start a conversation. The professor listened to me and said, “Why don’t you just say, ‘How are things?” and then shut up?” Perhaps the best prayer is one that simply begins, “Hello God” and  then… shuts up, listens.  You can see this process in the final part of the story of Samuel. What does Samuel say to God? “Speak, Lord, your servant listens.” Notice there are no petitions here, no requests, no list of things for God to do. Just a slow prayer: your servant listens. 

Stop look and listen, pray slowly, assuming others might be a text from God are three steps toward hearing God’s call. We can’t all hear as well as Lucy our dog does. That’s ok; over and over we find that in the stories of God calling, God is persistent. God calls Samuel three times before Samuel understands it’s God calling. God calls Moses and confirms that call several times. 

Paul said in First Corinthians, “…you were bought with a price.” Now even we have a purpose when we buy things. I don’t randomly buy spinach; I buy it because Jacquelyn is coming home and she eats it for breakfast. I don’t randomly buy dog food; I buy the cans of chicken for small seven year old dogs because that’s what Lucy likes. If we act with such purpose, isn’t it certain God does? So if we have been bought with a price, it must mean God has a purpose for your life, a call to which you’re invited to respond. Are your ears tingling? If they aren’t, maybe the answer is to take Lucy as an example and stop, look and listen. 

Amen.

Mission Accomplished?

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor • © 2021 All Rights Reserved

Epiphany Sunday • January 3, 2021

Matthew 2:1-12

Today is a unique and special day. It is for me the conclusion of a long career as a pastor and minister of churches from Boston to Seattle, in six different states, sometimes in cities, sometimes in small towns. It is as well my last day here with you as a pastor. For though it may be that I will come back some time, see you some time, it will not be the same, it will not be as your pastor or the minister of this church. Something is being put away, something I have savored and enjoyed and for which I have knelt here in this same room so many times and thanked God. So there is a temptation to simply bathe in the warm waters of memories, share them, shape them into a message. But it is also the day we celebrate the final story of Christmas, the visit of the Magi to the stable, and join together in communion. For over 45 years, I have focused my life, my mind, my talents on connecting the scripture to the life of a church, the life of people with whom I shared a church, as I do with you. So let me today, one last time, set aside the backward pull of memories and look with you once again at the strange and wonderful story of the Wise Ones who came so far and see how it calls us forward to follow the star ourselves.

The first problem with the gospel story is that we’ve already heard it. We have little statues of the Wise ones, we have a song, We Three Kings, there is a kings cake,  and a whole festival day dedicated to  them, Epiphany, January 6. In many countries, that’s the day you give and receive presents and eat special foods—did I mention the cake? With a new story, we pay attention to the details, we figure out the plot, learn the characters. With an old story, we tune out. It’s like listening to your dad telling you how many miles he had to walk to school. So our problem is how to pay attention. We can do that by treating the story like a white board, erasing it, and starting with the same questions we’d have about any story. Who’s involved? What’s their mission? Are they successful? Why is this story here?

Let’s start with the characters in the story. Who do we meet? First of all: Herod, the Roman appointed king of the Jews, a man almost universally despised by contemporaries and historians. Behind him stands the emperor and the might of Rome. The second character we meet is the people of Jerusalem; they’re a walk on part, we’re just told they are sort of a chorus for King Herod, frightened as he is. I’m going to skip the wise ones for the moment and go to the end. There, we meet Mary and, “the child”—isn’t it interesting that the story doesn’t call Jesus by name?

In between are the wise ones, called “magioi” in the original text. That’s a Greek word, a plural, that usually refers to intellectual religious authorities from Persia. They might be priests, they are certainly astrologers. They are Gentiles. The text in our translation reads “Wise Men” but the actual text doesn’t call them wise men, it says nothing about gender, it says nothing about wisdom. It also doesn’t say there are three. That tradition probably came about because of the three gifts.

Now that we’ve met everyone, consider what happens. The wise ones come to Jerusalem, to King Herod, tell him they’ve seen a predicted star—which simply means a particular bright light in the sky—and that there is a prophecy that a new king of the Jews has been born. 

It’s interesting to contrast the missions of Herod and the Magi. Herod is all about power. He’s scared; all kings get scared when their successor is talked about. He helps the Magi by getting his experts to send them to Bethlehem but later we learn it’s so he can accomplish his own mission, getting rid of the new king. In the next story, in fact, he is so afraid of this new king that he orders all boys born during the period killed; Mary and Joseph have to take the baby and flee to Egypt for a time to avoid this murderous mission of power.

The Magi, on the other hand, are on a mission to pay homage to the new king. They also give three gifts, often thought to have symbolic significance. Gold, the traditional tribute for kings, myrrh, a very costly ointment used for embalming and frankincense, used as a symbolic upwelling of something good to God, a tangible symbol of prayer. Notice they didn’t give Herod gifts; they didn’t give Herod anything. After they give the gifts, they depart by another way. 

Why does Matthew want us to know this story? He’s the only one who tells it. The context  can help us understand. Matthew starts out with a long genealogy almost never read in churches that connects Joseph to Abraham and King David. Matthew wants us to know Jesus is part of the continuing story of God’s promise of presence to Abraham. Matthew wants us to know Jesus is born of a royal line, a king in waiting. But the only ones who are going to know this are Jews; no Gentile is going to see Jesus as royal because of David. The implication that the baby will be royal is made specific by the second story. There, an angel connects Joseph to Marry and goes on to say that Jesus is going to fulfill a scripture promise of God’s presence so that he will be called Emmanuel, meaning Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God with us.”

So before the story of the wise ones, Jews have been given a reason to believe Jesus is the Lord. But Matthew is seeing a larger vision. By his time, Christians had stopped being a Jewish sect and included Gentiles. Now he tells this story of the wise ones and the message seems to be that even the Gentiles recognize Jesus as king, and they do it even if the Jewish authorities like Herod don’t. Matthew wants us to know what Herod couldn’t understand: Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is king: Jesus is Lord, Jesus is God with us. That’s the message of this story and we have to ask: so what? What will we do about it? Matthew is telling us about the past: what difference does it make that Jesus is Lord to our future? The first time I preached here, I said that the problem of faith was whether you believed Jesus was here to stay. It’s still the greatest question. Because if he’s here, if he’s staying, if he’s Lord, shouldn’t we do what he says? And what he says is, “Go make disciples.”

What is a disciple? Is it someone who gives to the church, serves on a committee or Board, comes regularly?Look at the disciples in the gospels. There’s James and John, who snap and snark about who’s number one, Judas who betrays Jesus, Thomas who doesn’t believe in the resurrection and Peter who seems to get everything wrong all along but is the first disciples to understand the message of the Magi and call Jesus the Christ. So in a way, the bar is pretty low. But in another way, it’s very high. Because discipleship is giving your whole self, sharing your whole self, in the service and following Jesus Christ. To be a disciple is to know Jesus is Lord and act on it, live from it.

Long ago, the prophet Isaiah said, 

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…

Isaiah 61:1-2

When Jesus first began his mission in Galilee, he began with this same text: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.. [Luke 4:18f] Anointing is what you do with kings: it signals someone who leads. Matthew’s message is the same: here is the king, here is the Lord. 

Now when I was ordained to the ministry at the Seattle Congregational church, when a group of Deacons of that church and clergy laid hands on me, this same text was read. It’ a mission statement and the mission is to show God’s presence in the world by bringing God’s light to darkness, to show God’s presence in the world by bringing God’s love to the unloved, to follow where Jesus leads as his disciple and invite others to come along. 

Today is my last Sunday as a pastor, though not the end of my ordination. It’s fair to ask: did you accomplish the mission? I’ve started two preschools, nurtured another, helped four churches grow their membership, baptized a lot of people, including Jacquelyn and all five of my grandchildren. I helped start a food pantry in one place, a coat ministry here. But the mission isn’t a list of what you’ve done: it’s a challenge about whether you’ve made disciples and that’s harder to know.

When I came here, it was clear this would be a different kind of ministry, one exclusively about preaching and praying. At times it’s been hard for me to give up trying to program things; I think I wanted to build things here. But like Peter stumbling along, you have wonderfully let me learn. Sometimes we’ve prayed in hospital rooms, sometimes here. I learned the answer to conflict wasn’t to win but to go pray for those who disagreed. I learned to do something ancient: to walk humbly with God, inviting others along. Has that made disciples? 

The first time I preached here, almost seven years ago, I said the church was intended to be a school for discipleship. So the same question applies to all of us: have we accomplished the mission? We’ve done some amazing things in the last few years. We helped a young woman get free of bondage, we have brightened Christmas for many, many children through the mitten tree, we’ve gladdened the heart of homeless folks through the Capital Latinos, we’ve praised God, worshipped God, listened to God’s word together for six and a half years. But have we made disciples?

It’s a hard question. So much of what we do in churches is just like home: maintenance. There we is always a tendency to polish old furniture rather than finding new missions. There is always a pull to measure attendance instead of discipleship. But people who come here, visit here, are looking for a new vision, not a photograph of the past.

I’m about to do something rare in my life: find a new church where I’ll worship in the pews. And my hope is that I can find a church making disciples. This is what I look at when I visit a church: how many pictures on the wall are people praising the Lord recently, how many announcements in the bulletin are about helping others rather than committee meetings, how many voices are heard in worship. So it ’s not a question just for me, it’s a question for all of us in churches: are we accomplishing our mission, making disciples by sharing the light of God’s love?

The Magi came to signal that the new King of the Jews, the Lord, was also here for the whole world. Great churches are built by being a community open to all, where all take responsibility for the worship and mission of the church. We must constantly fight the tendency to let a church be run by one person or family or an inner circle. We must constantly fight our human tendency to listen to our own wisdom instead of the wisdom of God, which is the Cross of Christ. We must constantly ask: mission accomplished?

So I leave you with that question. I ask it of myself. When two boats meet on a voyage, perhaps both in a strange harbor, the crews will talk, share stories, give advice about the next harbor or a hazard or opportunity ahead. But then there’s a moment when they both untie the lines, leave the dock, depart and watch each other as their courses diverge, finally out of sight. This is the day we untie the lines. But even out of sight, we will remember, we will share a hope and a mutual concern.

I remember laying on a dock in northern Michigan when I first felt the stirring of the Spirit, when I learned to listen to the gospel. I remember all the ways, all the years, I’ve tried to tell what I heard there. I remember the first time I stood in this pulpit, called here by God, chosen by you, to share the call of Christ to discipleship, to ask again and again, “Are we accomplishing our mission?” It’s still my question, it’s answer is still the star that can guide us on our separate ways. May your journey lead you to the Lord;.

Amen