Monthly Archives: December 2024

The Unsung Carol

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

First Sunday in Christmas • December 29, 2024

John 1:1-14

Christmas continues today. We left here Christmas Eve in darkness lit by candles that symbolized celebration of God’s embrace by coming to us in the person of an infant. It was Christmas Eve, though; Christmas came later. But where did it begin? When did you hear the first Christmas carol this year? When did you see the first decorations? We decorated here right after Thanksgiving and entered the season of Advent, anticipating Christmas coming. 

Christmas Begins

Where does Christmas begin in the Bible? I suppose some would say when Mary and Joseph begin the journey to Bethlehem. Luke suggests it begins with Gabriel telling Zechariah he would have a son, who would become John the Baptist. But hundreds of years before this, Isaiah had said, 

For a child has been born for us,
   a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
   and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
   Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace [Isaiah 9:6]

Mary connects the beginning to Abraham and Sarah: “[God] has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever” [Luke 1:54f] Matthew seems to agree; he begins the story of Jesus by showing how he is connected to Abraham in a long genealogy.

But it’s the Gospel of John that has the longest view. He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1] and goes on with some of the most abstract language in all the gospels. Many years ago when I was in seminary, when I was a lot smarter or thought I was, I could quote this part of John in Greek from memory. But just being able to quote something doesn’t mean we know it. We have a little dog named Ellie. When she was a puppy, we put a push button bell by the door to the backyard. The theory was that when Ellie needed to potty, she would go step on the button that rings the bell, and we’d let her out. And she learned to ring the bell. She didn’t do it the way we intended to, however; she just rings it whenever she wants to go chase squirrels. But what’s kind of funny to see is that Ellie thinks the bell operates the door. So if she rings it, and we don’t let her out, she just rings it again—and again and again and again. Bible memories can be like that: we recite them over and over but if we don’t know the meaning, nothing happens.

In the Beginning

So let’s break this down a and see if we can figure out what it means. Let’s start with “the beginning”. What is that? What is your beginning? Perhaps you have a “first memory”, usually from when you’re about three or four. But that’s not your beginning. We might say your beginning was when you were born, or when you were conceived. Sometimes there are stories about these. My family legend is that I was born while my dad took his final exams in college. Of course, the Bible begins with creation: in the beginning God created, Genesis 1:1 says.  “What happened before that?” I remember asking a Sunday School teacher once; she told me not to ask such questions, but the truth is she didn’t know and neither do I. There is no before when there is no time and in Genesis the first thing God does is to create day and night, that is to say, time itself. So John is saying, that in the beginning—when there was no before—the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The Word: what is that? We know something about words. If you’re a parent, maybe you remember the first word your child spoke. Is there anymore eagerly awaited sound than that first “Mama” or “Dada”? Just like Ellie learned to ring the bell to get us to open the back door, babies learn to make a sound we call a word to summon us. That word defines relationships: “Mom” also means “Feed me! Change me! Cuddle me!” It’s the first step to controlling the world. Now, I have to do something I hate doing; I have to teach you something about Greek, the language in which the whole New Testament is written and the language in which many early Christians read the Old Testament too. In Greek, what we translate, “Word” is ‘Logos’. Logos means more than just words, it stands for the whole business of putting things in order.

Putting Things In Order

We know something about putting things in order. Jacquelyn and I share a big walk in closet. I’m messy, and the closet has gotten chaotic over the last month or so. Shoes all over the floor, summer and fall and winter clothes mixed, luggage out of place. So this week when she had some time off, Jacquelyn took on the job of organizing the closet and she succeeded brilliantly. Now you walk in there, the shoes are on racks, matched, my shirts are grouped by color and they all face the same way. I have to say, until Jacquelyn brought her sense of closet order to my life, I’d never thought about whether the shirts were grouped or faced the same way but there they are. Genesis describes creation the same way: God puts things away, night gets separated from day, land from water, plants, animals, everything right down to you and I. And the term for this in Greek is Logos, and it’s translation for us is Word. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” means putting things in order.

Now we all live with orders for things, places for them. Some of us do better than others but we do as well as we can. In our house, one cooks, another cleans up. The pots and pans go in one cabinet, the bowls go in another. There is a time for work, a time for sleep. There are other orders too. There is the way that atoms and molecules are bound and structured, the way that heavenly bodies and gravity keep the solar system spinning, the way that chemicals bond and become blood and move the oxygen and nutrients we all need around our bodies. I have no idea how this all works, honestly. I almost flunked chemistry. But I know there is an order to it all, and because of that order, we live and without that order our lives would be impossible. 

God is in the Order

So what John is saying is that right from the beginning, “in the beginning”, God was in the ordering of everything, that just like Jacquelyn matching up the shoes, God is in the order of the very tiniest and the greatest things. 

But what does this have to do with Christmas? Remember what he goes on to say: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.[John 1:14] Christmas is this order, this Word, becoming a child, a person, one of us, living among us. Think what Jesus does: he heals people, which is to say he sets them right, he casts our demons, he sets people back in order, he offers glimpses of how things should be in his teaching. How should we treat one another? “Love one another as I have loved you,” he says. He embodies the love of God which is the Word of God, the order of God and that is the glory John means when he says, “We have seen his glory.” Christmas is the Word becoming flesh.

The Real Christmas

This is the real Christmas carol and it’s often unsung. It’s easy to miss the real Christmas for the wrapping and bows. The real Christmas is God putting us right, ordering us, reminding us to live as children of God, seeing the image of God in others. It’s easy to go through life like Ellie, ringing a bell without knowing how the door really opens. Christmas means to teach us to open the door to love in our lives. It means living that love every day.

Christmas continues today—if that love lives in our hearts, if that light, shines in us. The most important question for our church isn’t “How can we keep going?”; it’s how can we shine the light of Christmas here? What do you think? What can we do together, to make sure it’s clear that Christmas continues with us? 

Amen.

Leaping Love

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of Locust Grove, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Fourth Sunday in Advent/C • December 22, 2024

Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-55

Ever since Thanksgiving, and even before in some cases, in stores, in media, in daily life, we’ve been bombarded with Christmas. Our culture encourages a season of frenzied spending and parties, of decorations we buy and hang to show the Christmas Spirit. But where is that Spirit? Our Lectionary, the guide to scriptures we hear each Sunday, has taken a different tack. This whole Advent season, we’ve been asked to look not to Bethlehem, not to the stable but to other events. We began with the end: Jesus coming in power, and the heartfelt command to be alert, to watch and listen for Jesus appearance. The last two Sundays we heard about John the Baptist whose testimony is that one more powerful is coming. Finally, today, the last Sunday in Advent, we hear this story on the eve of Jesus’ birth.

A Strange Story

It’s a strange story, isn’t it? Luke doesn’t begin his gospel with Jesus; he begins with the parents of John, his father, Zechariah. Zechariah is a priest and during a service in the temple, the angel Gabriel appears and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to have a son. Zechariah doesn’t believe him because Elizabeth is too old. So Gabriel tells him he will be mute until his son is born. Never mess with an angel! So today we don’t hear from Zechariah; we hear from Elizabeth. She is, indeed, pregnant; she’s had her own inspiration, and now she’s about to bear a child who will be known later as John the Baptist. There’s no statue for Elizabeth in nativity scenes but let’s pretend there is and set her aside for a moment while we talk about the other person in this story: Mary. 

Now if you were Roman Catholic, you’d have heard all about Mary. But what you would have heard is about Mary characterized as the mother of Jesus, not this Mary, not this young unmarried woman. There are endless theological debates about Mary in which the word ‘virgin’ figures prominently. Most of those debates are in Greek and none of them tell us about the reality of someone we would call a girl. Most Biblical scholars suggest Mary would have been about 14. That’s very young in our culture; it was common in hers. What is shocking is that she is pregnant without being married. Girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were often shamed, sometimes stoned.

Mary’s Story

So we have this story that becomes stranger the more we listen to it. Mary has had her own angelic visitation; you’ll have to come back another time to hear that. Already engaged to Joseph, the angel tells her she will become pregnant with one who will become king, one who will reign in David’s line. She’s from Nazareth, up in the north; now she’s made the hundred-mile journey to Judah, to see someone who may be an aunt or a cousin, Elizabeth. These are two pregnant women who have no business being pregnant: one is too old, one is too young. There are no men in the conversation; this is women’s business. And at the moment they meet, something happens only a woman would understand: the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps.

This is the second time in the last few weeks when I feel totally unable to speak to a Biblical story. What does a man know about a baby in the womb moving? Nothing, not a thing. So I did what I did last time, I asked Jacquelyn about it. She said, “Well, May didn’t move around much; mostly she hiccuped.” I tried to imagine what that would be like, having someone hiccup inside you. It sounds awful. I mean, what do you do? You can’t feed them sugar, you can’t scare them, you can’t do anything but just wait, I guess. The one time she remembered May moving sharply was at a baseball game when some unthinking guy holding a beer, didn’t see her belly, tried to go past her and accidentally punched her belly. “May punched back,” she said. So, a word of caution; May isn’t here often, but if she is, don’t punch her, she punches back.

The reading goes on with two songs of praise, one from each woman. But I want to come back to this meeting. Luke—who, like me, is a guy, and therefore really doesn’t know anything about babies leaping in a womb—is the only place that tells this story. But we do have a story in Matthew about the same general time. Matthew tells us, 

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.
Matt. 1:18f

Joseph is usually described as a carpenter but the word translated ‘carpenter’ actually isn’t about someone who does what we think of as carpentry. It’s a person who makes tools out of wood: Joseph is a toolmaker.

Looking for Safety

So this is the story when we put it together. An angel visits a young girl, Mary, tells her she’s going to become pregnant. She’s already engaged; maybe she’s in love in that can’t stop thinking about him crushy way 14-year-old girls have. The Holy Spirit overwhelms her; she’s pregnant. Joseph knows the baby isn’t his. Honestly? Nazareth is a small place, if you know anything about small towns, you know they don’t keep secrets well. Joseph is planning to end the engagement; while he thinks about this, Mary leaves town, goes to visit her cousin or aunt Elizabeth. It’s a long way to go, a hundred miles, perhaps. Remember that the main way you get places in that time is you walk. What makes a young, pregnant girl walk a hundred miles? I can only think of one thing: she’s scared, and she’s looking for a safe place.

That’s what she finds with Elizabeth; that’s what that leaping baby in Elizabeth’s womb means. Maybe Mary still doesn’t quite believe the angel sent to her; maybe she’s already felt too many stares and heard too many questions. Maybe she’s figured out what’s going on with Joseph. But when she meets Elizabeth, when Elizabeth tells her own story, when Elizabeth’s baby leaps recognizing the special significance of Mary’s baby, she’s already safe. 

So we have these two stories of praise from two women who aren’t supposed to be having babies but are, who aren’t the sort of people we think of as especially blessed, but are. The rabbis who teach the history of God’s grace in Israel are all male but here it’s two women who say in the most profound way possible that God’s love is still active, still present, still making things happen in the world. 

Elizabeth speaks of the Mary’s baby as a fulfillment of the angelic message. Mary says, 

[God] has come to the aid his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever. [Luke 1:54f]

She also connects this aid to God’s special love for the poor, the weak, the powerless. Leaping love is for all, but it begins with loving those who need it most.

What about us?

What about us? What does this kind of love that leaps when Jesus is near mean in our lives? There is a big temptation here for me as a preacher. I want to suggest some specific thing to do.
I want to endorse some mission. I want to tell a story of some other church, some other time, some other people who leapt at a chance to express God’s love and helped someone or some people feel safer, fed them so they were less hungry, cared for them in a way that transformed their lives. 

But those are other people, other times, other places. So I’m going to simply leave the story here with you. Mary went to Elizabeth, seeking safety, and found it. When did you feel safe? How did that feel? When have you helped someone feel safe? When can you do it again? How can we do it together as a church? We have this sign: “A small church with a big message”. Isn’t that the message?—that here, you are safe in the arms of love, God’s love. In Reformed Churches, we don’t use the word ‘sanctuary’ much. But perhaps we should. Because that’s what this place is meant to be: a sanctuary of safety, where all are reminded we are children of God together. If you want to feel that leaping love, you don’t have to be pregnant with a child: we are all pregnant with possibility. May we turn that possibility into the reality of helping people find safety here.

Amen.

A Particular Joy

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Third Sunday in Advent • December 15, 2024

Luke 3:7-18 

This week winter came roaring into our area and whatever fantastic, private hopes we had that the weather would stay mild vanished with a blast of arctic wind. Isn’t it often the same in life? We roll along through the pleasant seasons until we are surprised by the onset of a winter of bleakness. The world goes cold; everything is difficult. When the cold is a matter of weather, we get out hats and gloves and heavy coat; when the cold is inside, when souls turn gray, we look for something to light the fire again. Last week we heard the story of John the Baptist’s message of repentance. Today we hear the specifics and this strange final note: “…he proclaimed the good news to the people.” [Luke 3:18]. Is John’s message good news? Is it joyful news? 

Luke is writing about people 80 years before, when Jesus was born, but he is writing for people near the end of the first century, people shivering in a spiritual winter, wondering how to find the way forward, perplexed about their purpose. The great shining promise that animated the very first Christians, that Jesus would return before they died, any day, any hour, had worn off in time passed and in the passing of the first generation. How to live in the meantime?—that is the great question they face. How to live in the meantime?—how to put into practice every day the teachings of Jesus? They live in a time of change, a time when many are being persecuted for their faith, many are in conflict with family members. Old institutions are collapsing; new ones are strange. In that sense, it is not so different from now.

John the Baptist: See Him

So Luke has reached into the great tradition of stories in the church and lifted up this story about John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus ministry. There is John, Luke tells us: see him?–a wild, strange figure on the banks of the Jordan, the river Israel had to cross to come into the promised land. He looks and smells like the desert: camel hair garments, wild honey and roast locusts for food. He preaches repentance as the right response to the time: spiritual change that leads to behavioral change, doing new things as a way to experience a new spirit. 

It’s not a general message. He gets specific in a way preachers are always reluctant to do. Details always get you in trouble. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none.” Wow. Ouch. The thing is, I have more than two coats, I have coats for different purposes. I have blue blazers, the uniform of small town business and professional guys; I have a black leather jacket that lets me look cool and stay warm in the spring and fall. I have a blue down winter coat and a heavier beige one. Three suit coats, a couple of jackets. It’s no wonder a lot of preachers stick to pointing their fingers at people who do things they don’t; here I am having to deal not with your sins but with me. Ouch. “Whoever has food must do likewise.” Well, there, that’s a little easier, we give to food pantries. I can manage that one, I think. Could we just slide by the coats? Tax collectors in the period were famous for extracting outrageous interest; soldiers often demanded protection money. “What should we do?”, they ask. John tells them not to collect exorbitant fees and tells the soldiers not to demand protection money. That must have hurt, they depend on that money. I’d much rather talk about how they should behave better than about the coats. I don’t take bribes like the tax collectors; I certainly don’t get protection money. Thank God he didn’t mention wedding fees. What John seems to have in mind is devoting the details of life to God, letting God use the details to change us.

The Story of a Coat

So let me tell you the story of one of my coats. Jacquelyn and I were pretty newly married, and she was starting the long, long process of making me more presentable. I had a faded red jacket I loved; it had an under coat that made it warm, and it had endless pockets. I don’t know how women live without pockets; I can’t get enough of them. So Jacquelyn got me a new coat. It was blue and gold, had a down lining, came down to mid-thigh, and it had some pockets though not as many as the red coat. Plus, there was a problem. You see, where I come from in Michigan, there are two tribes: the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. MSU is where I went to college and our colors are green and white. No one from MSU would ever wear blue and gold because those are the University of Michigan colors. But here was this new wife and this new coat, and even if it was blue and gold, what could I do? I wore it. 

I never quite got over the embarrassment of the colors, but I liked being warm. And that coat just lasted and lasted. Eventually the zipper pull broke off and I had to use a paper clip. Every spring it would go away; every winter it would come out. One day, a slim woman showed up at our church with nothing but a suitcase. It was snowing outside and freezing, and she had no coat. We ended up taking her home; turned out she was a refugee from Eritrea who had been bought as a wife and escaped her husband. Jacquelyn gave her a coat and some other things, and it dawned on her that there were others who were shivering. So she put a basket in the church basement and asked people to give coats for those who didn’t have any. By then the blue and gold coat had been around long enough to be a candidate for this, but I really didn’t want to give it up. This new mission hadn’t gone through the Deacons, so there was some grumbling about it; I felt like I should set an example. So one day I made a more permanent fix to the zipper and put it in the basket. Others added their coats; we took them to a place that helped refugees. There weren’t many the first year, but the next year there were more. The year we left that church, the coats had become a tradition; over a hundred were donated that year. I’ve been gone from there four years and they’re still collecting coats. People are still getting warm because of what those people do. Sometimes I smile and think somewhere, someone is still keeping warm in that blue and gold coat. I’ve had lots of coats; that’s the only one we ever talk about. That one turned out to be a real joy.

Will giving a coat away or passing out food save the world? Of course not. But then, John says, we’re not expected to save the world. The people who heard him wondered about world saving too: “…all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah…” That’s not my job, John replies; God is sending someone much more powerful to do that, and so he did, and so he does, and so he will. What’s the point of all this food and coat distribution then? It is to give us a path, a way to change ourselves so that we look more like Christ. 

The True Appearance of Christ

For the true appearance of Christ isn’t that long haired, blue-eyed picture hung on the walls of so many Sunday Schools; the true appearance of Christ is the joyful gift giver, hope giver, peace bringer who will shortly appear right there at the Jordan among these people who are busy changing their direction. Just as we reshape our bodies by going to the gym, we reshape our spirits when we change our lives this way. And when we do, we discover the fierce joy of walking God’s path.

Walking God’s path isn’t abiding by some general rules, really. It’s always particular. It’s always some act in some moment. The Roman Catholic Church has a saint who was a Mohawk Native American and converted to Christianity. Her name was Kateri. She had smallpox as a child and it left her blind so she got renamed Takewitha: person who bumps into things. So she called Saint Kateri Takewitha. I love that image because it’s just how we run into God: we bump into God without intending to. John said, “Repent”, but the repentance was particular, individual. This week, sometime, somewhere, you’re going to bump into something where you can choose to act out your part as the body of Christ. It may to be comfortable, it may not be what you normally do, but there it will be: you’re chance in some particular moment, to be kinder, to give more, to live out your faith. When you do, if you do, there will be a little more light in the world, a Christmas light, a joyful light.

Christmas Joy

There is joy waiting for Christmas; there is joy shining in the Christmas lights. It is the joy of making God’s purpose our own; of living from God’s giving nature, on the way with Jesus. When we make our direction God’s way, when we determine to turn our eyes from the advertising to the star, we will see for ourselves God’s joy. When we follow that star, we’ll feel that joy.

Amen.

The music on the audio track is “Christmas Is Coming”, Licensed as CC BY 4.0 Deed Attribution 4.0 International


Get Ready!

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Second Sunday in Advent/C • December 8, 2024

Luke 3:1-6

Mise en place. Unless like me, you’re fascinated by French cooking videos on YouTube, Mise en place may not be a familiar phrase. It’s a French that translates roughly, ‘Preparation’. It means before you set out to make something, getting all the ingredients ready and at hand. For example, I make Hollandaise sauce at home. It’s a fussy sauce, prone to falling apart if you don’t attend to it. So before I start, I separate two eggs and put them in a little bowl. I slice a butter quarter into bits and put the bits on two separate little plates. I zest two lemons and then squeeze the juice into a cup. Only when all the preparation is complete do I start actually cooking. It makes a lot of dishes—but when the ingredients are combined and heated and the critical moment occurs and the sauce thickens, I’m not looking for something I forgot. Mise en place: preparation. Today’s reading calls us to a spiritual mise en place, spiritual preparation, and advent is the time to get ready.

One of the most important steps in preparation is clearing the space. This past week at our house, before the Christmas decorations were brought up, before Jacquelyn did the amazing transformation she oversees each year, we had to put things away. The light on the table behind the sofa by the window: gone! The lamps that sit against the wall: moved. The sofa had to be moved to make space for the Christmas tree. We don’t have a lot of electrical plugs, so things had to be unplugged to make space. All this is mise en place, all this is preparation. All this is before the decorations appear. And there is a moment, just a moment, when the space is bare, almost back to the emptiness of when we first arrived.

Luke wants to summon us to just such a moment with Jesus. Mark starts with John the Baptist and Matthew hurries past a genealogy and the story about the wise ones. But Luke has already told us about the special birth of John. The long call to worship we read this morning is John’s father’s song about his son coming into the world; we’ve already heard this when we get to hearing about his ministry. Luke is preparing us; Luke is getting ready, getting there slowly but surely, and we’re invited along.

Luke starts with the particulars. Folk tales start, “Once upon a time…”. Luke is using the dating conventions of his time. We talk about, “AD, BC”; scholars now use “CE” for Common Era to mark the same thing. People in Luke’s time used the reign of rulers to set dates. We do the same, don’t we? In our house, we have “before we were married,” “When we lived in Norwich”, “the year we got that huge snow storm in Owosso”. Luke is using events but honestly, Luke’s dates don’t quite match up. They roughly put us in what we would call about 27 AD. Tiberius is emperor; Herod Antipas is governing Judah. Pontius Pilate is the Roman procurator, something like governor, of Palestine. 

There is a lesson behind Luke’s careful dating. He wants us to see the particularity of God. God always acts in a particular place, a particular time, a particular person or people. “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?,” the Psalmist asks, and the answer is always someone’s name, some particular person who lives in a time, who lives in a place. Luke asks us to see John as a real person, as real as any of us. He’s inviting us to see that God is acting in all of history though this particular man in this particular time. What God does is to call him to preach a message of repentance. Next week we’ll hear more of what he preaches but for now, we’re offered two parts. One is that he’s calling people, including us, to prepare for God’s coming. The second is that he’s offering a baptism of repentance.

This is the portion from Isaiah.

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight”.

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” [Luke 3:4b-6]

Straight paths, valleys and mountains made level—this is the language of road building. Have you seen this? In 1971, I drove across the country to my first church, the Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church in Idaho. Interstate 90 wasn’t complete yet. Every so often, I’d have to detour off the highway, drive past the bulldozers and work crews building the next section. The most spectacular part was in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. There, they were taking the zigzagging rising road and straightening it, filling valleys, literally making crooked places straight.

Isaiah may not know about Interstate 90, but he does know about road building. He lived in the time of Babylon and every year Babylon had a big New Years festival. The climax of the festival was the king dressed up like the god Marduk being pulled on a huge parade float into the city. But before that could be done, thousands of slaves would be sent out beyond the city gates to make the road smooth, fill in low places that had washed out, cut down hills. Curves would have to be changed into straight sections. This is what Isaiah is imagining: making a way for God to come to us. 

Our culture emphasizes what we do, and we’ve let that leak over into our spiritual lives. So we hear a lot about “coming to Jesus”. But the testimony of scripture over and over again is that it is not we who come to God; it is God who comes to us. What we can do is to prepare the way for God to come, make the path straight and easy. 

We do that the way we prepare for anything. Mise en place: get things ready. Every Sunday, we all receive a bulletin here that Linda carefully, thoughtfully prepares. Take it home. You heard the scripture in a few minutes, but a great discipline is to take that bulletin, make it a devotional guide for the week. Read the scripture readings again, you will have my thoughts; consider your own. How does it make you feel? What questions does it ask? What does it ask you to do? Read a little before, a little after the reading. Scripture is particular: every reading is new. I’ve been a lectionary preacher over 40 years. The lectionary is a three-year cycle of readings, so I’ve been through the whole cycle more than a dozen times. Yet every week when I start to prepare to talk with you, I read the scripture for that week fresh, I find fresh things in it. Because the reading is not just words, it is the mix of the words with this particular moment.

Preparing takes some space. Perhaps the hardest spiritual discipline of all for me is just that, making space, doing nothing. I don’t know about you, but if I sit down for am minute with nothing going on my mind starts to fill up with all the things I should be up doing. I have to consciously push them aside for prayer time. Yet isn’t that precisely what John is asking? “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Make a moment; listen. Once again, our culture misleads us. We think of prayer as something we say. And God surely wants to hear what we want to say, God surely wants to hear our particular fears, our particular hopes, our concern for others. But real conversations aren’t just what we say, they are what we hear as well. What if we just listened?

The second thing we learn about John in this reading is that he’s preaching a baptism of repentance. Now repentance means changing your direction. When you’re lost, it’s easy to keep getting even more lost; it’s hard to stop and ask for help. But that’s what John is preaching. 

Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. Eighty-three years ago, people just like us sat here. I’m sure some worried about the war in Europe, some were anxious to get on to Christmas, they had all the daily hopes and fears we all have. I imagine the pastor preached a good sermon that day, they sang some great hymns, perhaps hymns we still sing. They left church, went home, and heard on the radio the terrible news of Pearl Harbor. Nothing had prepared them for that. In that moment, everyone’s life changed.

Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. We can, however, prepare for God to come to us and when God is with us, those events will not crush us or overwhelm us. “Mise en place”: prepare the way of the Lord, as carefully as we would prepare to make something wonderful on the stove. The gift of advent is time to get ready. The gift of advent is time to prepare. The gift of advent is to make straight God’s path to your heart.

Amen.

The Forest of Advent

by

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

First Sunday in Advent/C • December 1, 2024

Jeremiah 33:14-16, Luke 21:25-36

Take a moment: look around. Look at how this room has been transformed. European cathedrals use stained-glass to tell stories from the gospels; we use fabrics. Each banner has a story, each banner tells a story. Some I’m sure are old, and we greet them like old friends, not seen for a year, welcome back in this new time. Some are mysterious; we’ve forgotten what they meant to say so we’re left with what they show. Look up here: really see Advent candle lit, and the promise of more light from others. There is the Christmas tree, a reminder of evergreen life. Advent is about waking up, really looking around, seeing what God is doing. 

Imagine for a moment what it would be like to see through these walls, past the building. I love how our meeting house is embraced by the forest. I confess I’m not a good enough botanist to know what sort of trees surround us; I assume from the name that at least at one time they were mostly locusts, but now others have moved in as well. If we looked even farther, if we pulled back like one of those overhead movie shots, we’d see a larger forest, we’d see Kreutz Creek winding through it all, trying to find the Susquehanna. Advent is about waking up, looking around, seeing not just with eyes but with the heart and soul.

Advent is a kind of forest and forests are never really still, though we see them that way. The truth is that forests are always full of movement. Jeremiah lived in a time of great conflict. The King of Israel went to war with Babylon, present day Iraq, and Jeremiah was arrested for saying they would be defeated. When they were, the destruction was absolute. Like a forest fire burning everything, Jerusalem’s walls and temples were torn down, it’s people made refugees, many deported to Babylon itself. Yet here is Jeremiah looking at this destruction and what does he say? 

In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”
[Jeremiah 33:15f]

Look at the ashes of a burned over forest and indeed, just that way, there are new sprigs. There are seeds which have a waxy outer coating that melts in a fire; they only grow afterward. There are small creatures who scuttle safe now from the larger ones no longer able to live there. There is life reclaiming desolation. There is hope in action. 

Hope is behind the awful vision in Luke’s gospel. He wrote it in a terrible time. Perhaps 20 years or so before he wrote, Jerusalem was engulfed in a war that again led to its destruction. Many historians believe that sometime in that violence, the members of the first Christian church, including James, the brother of Jesus, died. Surely friends of Luke perished. Jerusalem was left a ruin, and Luke must have heard about it, perhaps seen it. Some people like to take this section of the gospel and others like it and make up stories about the end of the world. But if we listen closely, we find that it isn’t about some future disaster, it’s about the present. 

For we live also in a time with threatening clouds. I could name various things, I could describe the darkness I see, but I don’t think it’s necessary to recite headlines from the news; we see it, we hear it. The question isn’t whether to be more afraid of one or the other threat, the question is, how can we find hope amidst all the threats? And Jesus’s answer is simple: the fig tree.

Figs weave throughout the Bible. We don’t think anything about sweetness; it comes in little packets for coffee, in bowls, in white sugar and brown, in cakes and all kinds of things. But the ancient Mediterranean world didn’t have sugar as we know it. They only had two sources of sweetness: honey and figs. So throughout the Bible, figs are a symbol of God giving a sweetness to life. Fig trees are mentioned many times along with vines, that is, with wine. The figs the tree gives are a sign of God’s blessing.

In the midst of threats, in the midst of fear, Jesus says, “Pay attention to the fig tree.” I used to live in Northern Michigan where about 80% of or cherries are grown. I had a church with lots of cherry growers, and we all watched the progress of the trees. We had a blessing service for their blossoms in May; we had a festival that shut down everything in July when the harvest began. We all reveled in the cherries when they were ready. I imagine people with fig trees are the same. Jesus says, “Pay attention!” He points out what everyone knows: that when you see the blossoming fig tree, you know the sweetness is coming. When you see the blossoms, you know the blessing is coming. 

Later on in this season, there will be angels to talk about, but that is not this day. Later on, there will be gifts to wrap and unwrap, emblems of the gifts of God, but that is not this day. This day is a day to spend in the forest of Advent, looking around. This day is a day to look for the tree old and dead, and discover how it’s sending out a new sprout, a sign of hope. This day is to wake up, look around, and gratefully remember that in this forest, in this day, there are indeed figs, gifts of God, emblems of God’s love, getting ready to blossom and grow.

There is a story about a psychologist who put two boys in stalls full of horse manure and told them to shovel it out. Left alone for a while, when the psychologist came back, one boy was sitting in the corner, shovel leaned next to him, and when he saw the psychologist, he said, “Get me out of here! It stinks and this is hard work!” The other boy was shoveling furiously, intent, busy, and when asked why he was working so hard, he said, “With all this manure, there has to be a pony here somewhere!” 

Advent is a time to look around, see the signs of hope, give thanks for them, share them. I used to add: it’s a great time to invite a friend to church. I still think that but today what’s more important is that we invite people we see into seeing the signs of hope. There are indeed dark clouds; there are storms breaking. No one should deny that. But there are also signs of grace; there are blessings waiting to burst forth. Our task, following Jesus, is to share those. Advent is a forest; look for the shoots coming up, signs of God’s loving creation. Look for the figs, the sweet signs of God’s blessing.

Amen.