A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Ninth Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 10, 2025

Luke 12:32-40  

Years ago, I was a high school track parent. My older daughter Amy was a lithe, fast girl. She ran sprints and she ran relay races. Now the thing about being a track parent is that the meets take hours and your kid, the one you want to see, be seen cheering, runs for maybe five or ten minutes. We lived in a small town, so I knew lots of people, many in my congregation, so a track meet was a chance to mingle, check-in with people, maybe talk to one of the Trustees. The problem was that it was so easy to get involved in doing the business of being a pastor that it was easy to miss Amy’s races. 100 yard dashes take place fast. They line up, bend over in the runner crouch, someone calls ready, set go, shoots of a phony gun and BAM! Ten or 15 seconds later the whole thing is over. It’s easy to miss; it’s easy to let every day things distract you. 

This is just what Jesus is talking about in the section we read today. Honestly?—I’m not sure why this set of verses was put together for reading; they don’t go together. So let’s take them apart and see how they can each feed us. The section begins with the startling statement, “”Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This verse really goes with what we read last week. Remember the parable of the rich fool who thought he could store up enough stuff to maintain his life? Instead of storing stuff, Jesus says God is giving us the whole kingdom. No bill: no payment, free gift, free grace. This verse and others like it led theologians like John Calvin, the originator of Reformed Churches, to talk about ‘violent grace’, by which they meant that God gives the grace of including us in the kingdom without our doing anything to earn it, whether we want it or not. This is freedom: freedom now, freedom to live in God’s kingdom.

If the kingdom is given as grace, what do we do then? We don’t have to work at earning it; we don’t need barns to store up grace. So Jesus tells this parable. Palestinian houses weren’t like ours, they were little fortresses. Frequently several families lived in one house. Think of those old U shaped motels our parents took us to when we were kids: a bunch of rooms, surrounding a central courtyard. The houses were walled because robbers were a constant threat. So at night, the main gate into the courtyard was shut up.

Now imagine the head of the house coming home late at night; Jesus says, coming from a wedding banquet. Wedding banquets could and did run for days at a time, so there’s no way of knowing when the head of the house will return. What’s the job of the servants? Their whole job is to be ready, whenever that return happens. “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit”, the parable says. Don’t be asleep, don’t be busy with something else, or you’ll miss it. 

What happens when you are ready and open the door to the Lord? “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” Wow! It’s a total reversal of things. Masters never serve slaves; what Jesus pictures is a total reversal of what we would expect that comes from being ready to serve. From the prophets to Jesus, the image of a banquet at which all are welcome is a fundamental picture of God’s kingdom. Here, the kingdom is recognized by being ready to serve, so the moment isn’t missed. 

What does this look like in practice? It might mean something small, like passing by the school supplies aisle and remembering we’re collecting such things this month. It might be saving someone’s life. The village of La Chambon in southeastern France is just a small place. Most of the people worship in the same Reformed tradition we do here. Instead of German Reformed, they are French Reformed, called Huguenots. Hundreds of years ago, they were persecuted by Roman Catholics and the Kings of France, and they haven’t forgotten. In 1940, when the Nazis defeated France, La Chambon was left in the unoccupied zone. But even there Jews were persecuted. Pastor André Trocmé and his congregation offered shelter to these refugees. Many were not French; no one cared. They put them up in private homes, in schools, in their church. They forged identity cards and ration cards for them; some of them were guided across the Swiss border to safety. From 1940 to 1944, they sheltered 5,000 people; 3,500 of them were Jews. A majority of them were children.

There was a cost. On February 13, 1943, Pastor Trocmé and his assistant were arrested and interned. They were eventually released but had to go into hiding. His cousin, Daniel Trocmé was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, whether he was murdered. Others who helped were shot by the Gestapo. In recent years, they have been recognized by France and by Israel, where they were honored by being included in a list of rescuers called the “Righteous of the Nations.” After talking with many residents, a filmmaker was so impressed with how they saw what they did as ordinary, that he said, 

“These days we seem to think that good people are those who agonize. They ” sleep on it” and maybe in the morning their conscience gets them to do the right thing. No- this idea is wrong. People who agonize don’t act. And people who act don’t agonize.” [LeChambon]

What’s needed is simply a moral readiness that doesn’t count political party or our own opinions, that only counts what is right, what path Jesus points out. 

Last Tuesday, I was in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel in heavy traffic. There are two lanes into the city and both were jammed; we were creeping along at 15 miles an hour, frequently stopping. Suddenly, far behind me, I saw flashing red lights, and then I heard a siren. An ambulance was trying to get through, and my first thought was, “No way it’s getting through.” Then I noticed something strange for city traffic: people were stopping, letting the left-hand lane drivers in ahead of them, clearing the lane. It all happened fast and suddenly the ambulance, with all its signs of emergency, was flashing past me. The kingdom comes like that. This is what Jesus is teaching, that the kingdom comes as a sudden, urgent, immediate moment and our job is to cooperate with it, move with it, help it to come. Like the servants in the parable, we are told: be ready, live ready, because kingdom moments come when we least expect them. 

In a few moments, we’ll release a group of butterflies, signs of hope, signs of fluttering beauty. But before they were butterflies, they were in a chrysalis, an enclosure. Then at some moment, each one pressed against the chrysalis, bursting it, freeing its wings, expanding them, ready to fly. That’s God’s invitation to us: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” The kingdom is coming; you don’t know when. Get ready; live ready, every day.  Amen.