Monthly Archives: October 2025

Turn

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Reformation Sunday • October 26, 2025

Luke 18:9-14

When I was little, maybe five or six, I hated making my bed. I didn’t care about my messy room with dirty clothes and toys scattered about. My mother did care and we fought about it endlessly. Finally, one day, she sat me down, and showed me a list. “This is your Do It list,” she said. There was a line for my making my bed, picking up clothes, and some other things. “If you can check off everything each week, you will get a prize. Well, I didn’t care about making the bed, but I did care about prizes. So I started doing the things on the list and I did get some prizes. This little interaction is exactly how religion worked for many centuries. There was a sense that God had a To-Do List and if you faithfully checked it all off, you’d get a prize. The prize might be a good crop, it might be a peaceful life, it might be a good life after death. Whatever the prize, you were buying it by doing your list.

That’s what’s going on at the beginning of the parable Jesus tells. It’s another “two guys” parable; we had one recently about Lazarus and a rich man, we’ve had others. In this one, we start out with a good guy. He tells us he’s a good guy right from the start. “The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” The tax collector is the other guy; we’ll come back to him in a bit. “I’m better than all these, God!”—that’s the beginning of his prayer. Then he goes on to tell God he’s done his To-Do list: “ fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” This is actually beyond what he’s required to do. He’s proud of his religious accomplishment. He’s completed the list, he’s ready for his prize. Let’s set him there on the shelf for a few minutes while we think about this system of relating to God by completing a to-do list.

It’s an ancient system. Hundreds of years before Jesus, we hear the prophets talking about how some people speculating on how much it will cost, what they will have to do, to get God’s favor. The first Christians were close to the message of Jesus but within a few hundred years, they were overtaken by Roman culture which included this idea of how you got to God. They also took over the Roman system of hierarchy: someone at the top, a few just below, more below that, and so on down to regular people. They called the ones at the top Archbishops, the ones lower bishops, and they had other titles down to priests. All these over time came to be more interested in power and wealth than the pure light of God’s love.

A thousand years later, this produced some beautiful cathedrals, an elaborate ritual for worship and a deep spiritual emptiness. Some people began to look for another way. They thought the Bible should be in a language everyone could understand. John Hus in Bohemia said this and inspired followers who fought for this new way. John Wycliffe in England translated the Bible into English. Both were killed as heretics but their ideas lived on. A hundred years later, Martin Luther criticized the system of To-Do lists and the corruption of the church around him. This time, some of the princes backed him. When Papal delegates came to Prague to negotiate, they were thrown out a window you can still visit.

But Luther wanted to keep the structure of the church with all its hierarchy. It took others to see that hierarchy is not God’s plan. John Calvin suggested a kind of church governed not by princely bishops but by the people themselves, electing a consistory of leaders who, along with the church’s pastors, would govern the church. His ideas spread through parts of Germany and especially Holland. They were added to by a man named Ulrich Zwingli so that a set of ideas about how to worship began to come together and catch on.

Those ideas generally included four things. First, that a church was not just everyone who lived in an area but a group of people who were covenanted, promised to each other as followers of Christ. Send that being part of a church meant understanding you were saved by faith in Christ, not by completing a To-Do list. Third, that the way to know Christ was through the scripture. Finally, they created churches that were governed by the people in the church, usually through something like our consistory. These ideas…covenant, consistory, conviction, conversation with the Word, became the foundation of what was called the Reformed churches, and they spread through parts of Germany and Holland. In England, the same groups were called Presbyterians—‘Presbyter’  is the Greek word for Elder, the title given to the clergy of these new churches. In England, another group took the idea even farther and said that each Congregation was complete under Christ. They were called Congregationalists.

By the 1700s in Germany, life was tough. Wars had devastated the economy and people were forced to worship however their ruler wanted. That drove many to immigrate to the new colonies in America. William Penn offered these Reformed people land and freedom of worship. So, many Germans came to Pennsylvania and in 1725, just 300 years ago, sponsored by the Dutch Reformed Church, they met and held their first service of communion. I imagine it was cold that day; this is Pennsylvania after all and they were in the wilderness near Lancaster. But their hearts were warm. Gradually, this way of worship, with its emphasis on covenants, and a direct peace with God spread. Eventually some of them got together with some Lutherans and founded this very church.

I’ve been going through our family album, I hope you’ve stayed with me. This is who we are: we believe everyone should be able to read the Bible for themselves, everyone should be able to come to their own way with Christ without a To-Do list or a bill from the church. We believe our church should be governed by us and it is. Someone asked me a while back, knowing I had retired four years ago, how it was to be back running a church. I said, “I’m not running it, I just preach there, the consistory runs it.”

So now I want to take that guy we started with off the shelf, remember him? He’s busy telling God his To-Do list is complete and how great he is, how righteous. But there’s another guy in the story. That guy isn’t righteous. He’s a collaborator with the Romans; he’s a tax collector. And it’s worth hearing his prayer too: “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ [Luke 18:13] This is his prayer; this is his faith, that God’s grace can rain on him even though he isn’t a righteous man. These two are standing far from each other. The Pharisee is alone; the tax collector stands far off. Jesus says this parable is meant for those of us who trust their own righteousness, that is the righteousness that comes from completing your To-Do list. But Jesus says it is the tax collector who goes home justified. 

One writer said about this,

At the end of this story, the Pharisee will leave the Temple and return to his home righteous. This hasn’t changed; he was righteous when he came up and righteous as he goes back down. The tax collector, however, will leave the Temple and go back down to his home justified, that is, accounted righteous by the Holy One of Israel. How has this happened? The tax collector makes neither sacrifice nor restitution. On what basis, then, is he named as righteous? On the basis of God’s divine fiat and ordinance!

God’s grace is experienced in our faith, not in a To-Do list. We can’t make God love us; we can only believe God already does. That’s the message of the whole Reformation; that’s the message of the scripture. Turning towards each other, turning towards God is the way. 

Amen.

Promises, Promises

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

19th Sunday After Pentecost/C • October 19, 2025

Jeremiah 31:27-34 • Psalm 119:97-104 * 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 * Luke 18:1-8

As many of you know, in December I’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of my ordination. I hope you’ll all celebrate with me on December 7th. It’s been a long run, God has been good, and perhaps because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of my experiences. One I miss is youth ministry. That’s a work for younger people but when I was younger, it’s one I loved. I particularly remember my first group as a youth minister. They were a great group of teens, and I remember them that way, although today they would probably be retired. One of the things I most loved was retreats. We were in Massachusetts, near Boston, and one of our members would lend us a ski chalet occasionally. 

The first couple of times we went off to Vermont, I planned the whole weekend, meals—it’s never good to let a youth group get hungry!—activities like sledding and some worship time, ending with a communion service around a fireplace. By the third time, I turned the planning over to the kids. They came up with a great schedule, but they left off the communion service. I didn’t want to take away their sense of authority, so I left the schedule as they planned it. 

The final night that year, we were all gathered in blankets, some of them quietly smooching in the back, and someone said, “Hey Rev, what about communion?” I pointed out that they hadn’t planned this. And then someone, who I am sure has since sat on a Consistory or a Church Board afterward said, “But Rev, we ALWAYS have communion!” Quickly they all agreed: I had failed to do what we always do!  We didn’t have any grape juice or bread, but we did have root beer and hot dog buns so we made do, and honestly, it was one of the most deeply moving services of communion I’ve ever shared. Maybe it was the root beer.

So much of church life is like that: we do what we’ve always done. We assume that’s the right way to do things. Jacquelyn and I spent last week in Prague in the Czech Republic, and we visited several cathedrals because they are so beautiful. Every one has the same form: there’s an altar at the front, a high pulpit on the side, pews,, side chapels with statues everywhere and they always have enormous amounts of gold and stained-glass windows. Honestly? I can’t imagine actually worshiping there; it’s not what we do, it’s not how we do things. Yet I know that people have worshiped there centuries longer than they have here. I know that they would find what we do strange and different. We do what we’ve always done but what about when things change? Can we change what we do and learn new ways?

Today we heard two oracles from the prophet Jeremiah. He lived in a very difficult time in what is now Israel and was then the kingdom of Judah. If you listen closely, you may have noticed that each of these pieces began the same way: “The days are surely coming…” Scholars call this eschatological, a big word that simply means look up from the present stuff and see the goal that’s always there. No matter where the Steelers are on football field, the goal is always there. No matter how the Phillies are doing in any baseball game, home base is always there. When someone begins to cook, they always have in mind the meal that will be shared. “Surely the days are coming!”—God has the goal in mind, Jeremiah wants us to see as God sees, toward that goal, toward the final feast.

His message is twofold: first, the immediate future is disaster; second, the ultimate goal is there and everything will be fine. He’s living like the people of Ukraine are now, under assault. The leaders of his day were so confident God would be on their side, they took on the greatest military power around. In that day, it was Babylonia, an empire based in what’s now Iraq. What’s happened here is that God’s people have lost the war. Jerusalem is destroyed; think of those old pictures of bombed out cities in Germany or France in World War Two or the recent pictures from Gaza with miles and miles of rubble. Jerusalem is rubble; the Temple, the focus of all their worship, is rubble. The leaders of the community are being led to exile; Jeremiah himself becomes an exile. Many are dead, all are suffering. 

Jeremiah’s message before this passage is that this is God’s doing. Because the people of God have not lived out God’s justice, have not followed God’s covenant, God has destroyed them. But that’s not the goal; that’s not God’s ultimate plan. Instead, Jeremiah brings this word.

And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. [Jeremiah 31:28]

The goal is out there: we just have to get there. The path may lead through defeat, but it shouldn’t include despair. The path may lead through foreboding and fear but it’s going to the  fulfillment of God’s plan. The path may lead through the valley of the shadows but it leads ultimately to the glory of the mountain top.

Now we live in a difficult time as well. Our city hasn’t been destroyed, but we are assaulted every day by news of gun violence. We hear about almost unthinkable things going on in other cities where the government is deploying our military to assault our own people. We are being asked to turn against people who aren’t citizens and the rules of our civic life, our constitution, are being changed in ways we never imagined possible. 

Last week, one of the most moving moments was walking through an ancient synagogue, now a museum, where the names of 80,000 Jews who were murdered by the Nazis are inscribed on wall after wall. What’s important to know is that Shoah, the holocaust, began with a long campaign of lies that Jews were somehow different, alien, and it’s humbling and scary that it took the cooperation of people just like us to accomplish.          

So we live in a difficult time as well. What does God’s Word say about living in such times?First, that this moment is not God’s ultimate goal; God’s goal is the joyful, abundant community of God’s people, living in justice, reflecting God’s love thankfully and endlessly. “The days are surely coming…”, Jeremiah says, when God will make a new covenant. The new covenant is that we will want to do God’s will. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”, God says. Now in ancient Jewish thought, the heart was not a romantic center; it was the center of a person’s will. This is a prophecy about a time when we all want to do what God intends.

How do we get there? That’s the question we ask every day. Everything is going to be fine eventually, “Surely the days are coming…”, but what about now? How do we live now? For that, we turn to the other readings. Paul wrote to Timothy in a difficult moment as well. The first thing he commends is simply to persist

…continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. [2 Timothy 3:14f]

The same thought comes through the parable we heard in Luke. Judges in Jesus’ time had enormous power; there was no system of appeals. Their word was final on all kinds of cases. But what about when they are wrong?

Jesus asks us to imagine a woman who just won’t give up. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? We can imagine this woman. Maybe it’s a small town, maybe she just keeps bugging the guy. “Give me justice!” Over and over again; he sees her in the market, she comes to his home, she’s there when he sits in judgment. The story tells us that he “neither feared God nor had respect for people”, a way of saying the guy just makes it up as he goes. You’d expect him to blow her off, wouldn’t you? But Jesus points out that actually what happens is she wears him down with her persistence. She never stops, she never goes away, and eventually she gets her way. The point isn’t that God is like the judge, it’s that persistence pays off.

We are all carrying around a bunch of ideas from our past about how things should be. But we live in a changing time, and it’s going to call for some new ideas, some new ways. It’s time for a new covenant. So God is asking: can we change? Can we let go of the old, persist in our faith in God and not in the forms of what we do?

Two years ago a horrific moment of violence occurred when gunmen took over 200 hostages, one of whom was an infant,  from a musical festival in Israel. An enormous amount of hate and division has come from that act powered in part by grief over those hostages. A synagogue in Detroit remembered the hostages by putting 240 chairs and a crib out on their lawn. This past week, the last living hostages were returned as the beginning of the promise of peace deal in Gaza. The synagogue marked the moment by removing most of the chairs; a few remembering hostages who have died but whose remains haven’t been returned were left. The ceremony also marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Jews of that synagogue and the large Islamic population in Detroit. They are trying to persist in their faith but also recognize this is a new time that calls for new efforts to embody God’s love. 

“The days are surely coming…”, God says. In the meantime, it’s up to us to listen to God’s Word, persist in faith that God’s ultimate goal will be accomplished and embody not what we’ve always done but what God is doing. What God is doing is always the same: a justice that sees all people as God’s children and a love that embraces every single one. This is God’s promise; these promises are the foundation, the only foundation, for building our lives together.

Amen.

All Together Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

World Communion Sunday • October 5, 2025

Luke 17:5-10

One of my favorite musicals is The Music Man. Do you know this show? It concerns a con man in early 20th century Iowa named Harold Hill. His swindle is that he gets people to believe there is trouble in their town only he can solve and only by creating a boys’ band. He sells them instruments, he sells them uniforms, he sells them on the idea that he can teach them to play the instruments and march in the uniforms through what he calls “The Think Method”. This simply consists of thinking you can play. Now, I was a trumpet player when I was a boy and part of a band. I can tell you that thinking won’t make your trumpet sound sweet, that takes practice. I was part of a marching band for a while and it’s less about thinking than drilling on making each step exactly the same as the last so that you stay in line. So none of what he says is going to work. There is a wonderful moment in The Music Man when Professor Harold Hill is found out, arrested, brought in handcuffs to the school where the boys are assembled along with the town and told to prove the band can play. He takes up his baton, and with the most unbelieving expression possible, says, “Think, boys, think”. 

I wonder if that’s the same expression Jesus had when he said the things we read today. Jesus was no con man, but he’s been teaching and preaching for a while now. The part we read pictures him alone with his disciples. They’re on the way to Jerusalem, and he’s told them already that there he’s going to be crucified and said discipleship with him means a cross. Yet they just don’t seem to get it. Do we? Just before this section, he talks about forgiveness.

So watch yourselves. “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them.

Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.” [Luke 17:3f]

Just after this section, Luke tells us that they are traveling along the border between Samaria and Galilee, on the way to Jerusalem. 

These two snippets tell us where Jesus is: he’s crossing borders. He’s calling his disciples to cross them with him. Cross the border from guilt to forgiveness; cross the border from one place to another. In those moments of crossing, the disciples ask, “Increase our faith.” It’s funny, but I’m not sure if we get the joke. These are disciples, followers, but here they are, ordering their Master like he’s a servant. So Jesus gently reminds them of their relationship to him—and ours. They all understand the relationship of servants and master, and he invokes it here: Will a servant be thanked for doing what he was done? Everyone knows the answer. Servants—and disciples—are meant to follow the Master, not have the Master wait on them.

Today, there are many voices wearing Christ’s cross but demanding that he follow them into division. So perhaps World Communion Sunday, this Sunday, is especially important. It began not far from here, in Pittsburgh, in 1933. That was a time when denominations were fiercely competitive, anti-Semitism was officially promoted and racism was rampant. The Shadyside Presbyterian Church began the service as a way of reaching across boundaries of faith. It was promoted by the National Council of Churches beginning in 1940, as the whole world sunk into the violence of a second World War. Today, it stands a reminder that Christ does not belong to us; we belong to Christ. Anyone who tells us that Christ is on one side or the other of political or ethnic conflicts is lying. The call of Christ is beyond the sides, bigger than any of them, a call from the God who loves all. 

Today, all over the world, Christians of every theology, every tradition, every background, every nation, unite to share communion. So we need to see at this table not just those of us here, but people of other colors, other traditions, other customs. It’s a reminder that we all follow Christ. And in that reminder is a miracle waiting to burst forth. 

When Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, begins to conduct the boys’ band, something magical happens. The boys, it turns out, have actually practiced and can get some noise out of the instruments. But it’s not noise the parents hear: the parents hear the sweet melody of their children making music. The camera lets us see what they see. One man cries out, “That’s my Davey!” And somehow, the boys are transformed; they become the band they had imagined.

Christ’s call is for us to become the disciples he imagined: faithful, loving, forgiving. Like Prof. Hill, he raises his baton. Like Prof. Hill, he calls out, “All Together Now”. And waits to hear us.

Amen.