Monthly Archives: November 2025

Climbing Up the Mountain

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

First Sunday in Advent/A • November 30, 2025

Isaiah 2:1-5 * Psalm 122 * Romans 13:11-14 * Matthew 24:36-44

“…they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore.” [Isaiah 2:5]

In 1939, the generation which had fought the “war to end all wars” 20 years earlier went back to war. In those 20 years, one of the most alarming changes had been the rise of air power. Fearful that London would be bombed, as in fact it was, British authorities organized the removal of 800,000 people to the countryside; about one and a half times as many as live in the Harrisburg-Carlisle area. Most were children. They gathered with a few clothes, a gas mask, and a name tag and were sent to rural villages where host families picked them out, sometimes separating siblings. This memorable event is the background to C. S. Lewis’ book, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. That story begins with four children sent out of London to stay at an old mansion with a sometimes distracted older professor and his housekeeper. As children do, they get bored and explore unused rooms, finding a wardrobe. Climbing into it, they find it is the gateway to a fantasy land called Narnia, where a great conflict between the Wicked White Witch and the great Lion Aslan is underway. Ultimately, Aslan sacrifices his life to save the children and is then resurrected, and the children lead the way to a great victory, saving Narnia. They become rulers and one day, on a hunt, they accidentally ride past the entrance to Narnia and find themselves climbing out of the wardrobe, back where they were, children again, but with this wonderful memory of victory. That memory sustains them; they know that whatever evil freezes the world, it will ultimately be made green again.

Today’s readings in Isaiah and Matthew are a special kind of literature called eschatology. Eschatology is a kind of literature that looks back to this time from the vantage point of God’s final victory. There are many kinds of language. That shouldn’t surprise us. Looking at a rose, for example, a botanist would say, “A rose is a woody perennial flowering plant in the genus Rosa, family Rosaceae. But the poet Shakespeare said,

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live;

Wow: totally different, both true. Same rose: different languages. The scientist wants to describe the rose. The poet wants to describe the experience of the rose.

Isaiah is a prophet of a time when God’s people are defeated by the terrible armies of Assyria and Babylon. The reason for the defeat, the prophets say, is the unfaithfulness of the people. So in the face of such sin, God refuses their offerings, refuses their worship, refuses them God’s help. That’s what comes before this Word from the Lord. That’s what God’s people are experiencing. Isaiah tells it in all its terribleness.

Your country is desolate,
    your cities burned with fire;
your fields are being stripped by foreigners
    right before you,
    laid waste as when overthrown by strangers. [Isaiah 1:7]

After speaking about the devastation of God’s people, the prophet then has another vision. It’s as if he turned a telescope around. Now he looks from the final victory of God, and we hear the vision that was read this morning.

In the midst of devastation, there will be new harvests. In the midst of conflict, there will be peace. What makes the difference? The advent of God as the great judge.

God shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war anymore. [Isaiah 2:4]

This is the language called eschatology; this is the prophet wanting us to experience the hope of God’s promise.

That’s what Jesus is doing in the portion of Matthew we read this morning. He lives in a place occupied by a foreign army, governed by rulers who are famously unjust and uncaring. He tells his followers that the time of God’s Kingdom has arrived; the very time when God is become the judge, just as Isaiah said. He tells them that people are missing it. Some get it; some don’t. 

For as in the days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so, too, will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken, and one will be left. [Matt. 24:38-40]

So Jesus is turning the telescope around, changing the view. “No one knows” when God will break in and the crisis will occur, he says. 

That alone should tell us to ignore all those people who think they know everything about God’s plan. For a long period, we had the “Left Behind” series, which was more about making money for a few people than the real word of God. The real word is: no one knows when the advent of peace, of justice, of God’s immediate presence will happen. Instead, Jesus simply says, “Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” [Matt. 24:44] Paul preaches the same message and simply says, “Walk decently”, in this time between.

The word of ultimate hope can be powerful. In the years before the Civil War brought the liberation of slaves throughout our nation, many had the courage to leave their bondage, and flee north to freedom. Part of what empowered them was the stories of the Bible of how God had led people from bondage to slavery. They made the story their own, they made all these stories their own. And they used songs to communicate. One of those songs was, “Climbing Up the Mountain, Children.” The song says,

Climbing up the mountain children, I didn’t come here to stay

And if I nevermore see you, gonna see you on the judgment day.

It reminds us all of where we are: climbing a mountain, moving upward toward God’s vision of us, toward a community of joy, a community of justice. It reminds us that we may get lost on the way but that ultimately in God’s final judgment, we are all brought together, we are all gathered as God’s children.

I imagine every one here is climbing some mountain. For some, it’s physical illness and pain, for some it’s a nagging gray hopelessness, for some it’s worrying about the circumstances of life, how to stretch a budget to fit needs. In the 1850s, many enslaved people were escaping. William Still was an African-American abolitionist who frequently risked his life to help freedom-seekers escape slavery. In excerpts from letters, Still left a record of some of the letters sent to him from abolitionists and formerly enslaved persons. The passages shed light on family separation, the financial costs of the journey to freedom, and the logistics of the Underground Railroad. In those letters, they often refer to escaping people as “goods” or “boxes”. One I want to lift up says simply,

We knew not that these goods were to come, consequently we were all taken by surprise. When you answer, use the word, goods. The reason of the excitement, is: some three weeks ago a big box was consigned to us by J. Bustill, of Harrisburg. We received it, and forwarded it on to J. Jones, Elmira, and the next day they were on the fresh hunt of said box; it got safe to Elmira, as I have had a letter from Jones, and all is safe. [https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/the-sectional-crisis/stories-from-the-underground-railroad-1855-56/]

These people, including people from this very church, were all in danger. But these people believed in the promise of freedom and a new life. So they climbed that mountain in that hope.

The hope of advent isn’t simply that Christmas will come; it is what Jesus says, what Isaiah says, that in the love of God, we have a place, we are embraced as children of God. In that hope, in that peace, we come to Advent not as people marking off the days until Christmas, but knowing that God comes into our world, into our lives,
even when we least expect it.

Amen.

Thanksgiving Vision

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Thanksgiving/Reign of Christ Sunday • November 23, 2025

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 • Psalm 100 * Philippians 4:4-9 * John 6:25-35

I once lived in a 120 year old house and the floors in that house had a paint build-up a quarter of an inch thick: gray paint, and three or four layers down white paint and way underneath, if you dug in, there was red too, but when someone finally came in and sanded those floors all the way down to the wood, it turned out they were even better with no paint at all. Thanksgiving is like that. It’s overlaid with so many customs and traditions that it’s hard to see the original event for what it was.  

Yet in that original event there is a peculiar beauty and inspiration. The people we call ‘the Pilgrims’ began as a little group of radical non-conformists who refused to be satisfied by the standard worship of their time. Their lives were formed by Elizabethan England: the England of the Spanish Armada, of Shakespeare, of great advances in arts and letters. It was a time of soaring hopes. Whole new worlds were just being explored, physical worlds across the sea in the Americas, spiritual worlds as the Reformation took hold, intellectual worlds as the beginnings of modern science emerged. It `was a time of extremes: great theatre and bear baiting; impassioned theological debate and men appointed to be pastors who never saw the inside of their church and simply collected the salary. 

They were called Separatists, because wished to separate from the Church of England. They began with a simple idea: to worship within the circle of a small, committed group of men and women, not in the state churches. They wanted to hear the Bible and understand it; they wanted to pray from their hearts, not from a book. Many, many early separatists were imprisoned and died for this faith. Finally, one group left England for Holland where there was more tolerance. But problems there and a foreign culture led them to decide to try another solution. That solution was found in planting a new colony in America. So, after considerable negotiation, planing, and overcoming obstacles, a company of 102 people set out for Virginia on the Mayflower and the Speedwell.

Only a little less than half were committed Separatists, or Saints as they called themselves. The rest were called Strangers (they were mostly called this by the Saints!). After turning back twice and leaving behind the leaky Speedwell, they finally arrived on Cape Code in the fall of 1620, settling at the area they named Plymouth in November, 1620. They missed Virginia by hundreds of miles. For a long time they remained aboard ship, sending out exploratory parties. November in New England is a cold, harsh month, with more cold to follow. They had a poor diet, cramped quarters and little in the way of cleanliness. Many sickened and died, so many that they took to burying their dead in unmarked  graves for fear the Indians would realize how small their band was. In April, the Mayflower left for England and the band was on their own. Despite their best efforts which included pilfering Indian corn storage, they almost starved that first year. They were mostly tradespeople and trades people. They knew little about farming and their crops did poorly. They had not brought the right equipment for fishing, so the great bounty that gave Cape Cod its name went unused. At the end of their first year they held an eight hour prayer meeting, a time they described as of solemn humiliation. Their ration consisted of about 14 pounds of corn a week per person and occasional game. 

Gradually they adapted; they learned. They found fast friends in two Indians who had learned English from contacts with fishermen. These taught them how to plant and fertilize corn. They learned to find the oysters and clams in which the coast abounds. They learned to set snares for game. They made friends with local Indian leaders and they generally treated them well; sometimes those leaders took pity on them and helped feed them. They built lean-to’s and shelters and a meeting house where they could worship Still, their little community was always on the edge of starvation, always just a hairsbreadth from being  wiped out.

By 1622 they had a better harvest, though they were still eating some of the grain brought on the Mayflower. They decided to throw a party. Think of their situation: more than half of the original group dead and buried, a ration of moldy grains and a little corn, hard, unremitting work every day just to stay alive. Would you have felt thankful? These people did. They felt they had reason to rejoice together. The woods were safe because of their wise policy of making peace with the native people. The sickness of the first months had abated and the company was free of dissension and quarreling. So, they gave a party and they gave thanks. 

The first Thanksgiving was not what we imagine. First of all, it was not an afternoon dinner, it was a three day feast. There is no record that turkeys were served at all, although they may have been. Cranberries were probably not used yet, although they were present in droves in the bogs of Cape Cod. And the first mention of pumpkin in English only goes back as far as 1647, so no pumpkin pie. There weren’t any cows in the community so there wouldn’t have been any whipped cream for it anyway. They did have ducks and geese, clams, oysters, succulent eels, white bread, corn bread, leeks and watercress and something called salente herbs. They invited a local sachem, or chief, of the native people named Massasoit, who brought 90 braves with him. Seeing how this would stretch the food, the braves went out and got several deer, so there was venison. They had games, a military review, and lots of wine, both red and white. There was also  considerable beer. Wild plums and berries formed the dessert. 

The celebration was a great success and the Pilgrims held another the next year, and gradually it became customary to hold an annual celebration. The custom spread through New England and entered other states as well. Different areas celebrated on different days, however, until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln set the fourth Thursday in November as a national day of thanksgiving. That’s the way it’s been ever since, except for 1939, 1940 and 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt changed the date to the third Thursday in November to make more shopping days before Christmas. It wasn’t one of the successful New Deal experiments and so the date was changed back.  

So much for the story of the holiday; it really isn’t much like our celebration at all, is it? No advertisements, no going to the store, no Turkey, no cranberry sauce, no stuffing, no pumpkin pie, no football game, no traveling hundreds of miles to be with friends. Then what connects us to this Pilgrim celebration? I think it is just this: that for a day out of the year we, like the Pilgrims, see, really see, our blessings. And anyone who really takes a look at his blessings is most likely going to feel like doing just what William Bradford said the Pilgrims decided to do: after a “more special manner,” to rejoice together.

Of course, seeing your blessings is not automatic; it begins with the sort of person you are and choose to be. There is a story of a psychologist who wanted to study attitudes and behavior. He took put two boys in special rooms to compare their reactions. One was a very dour, pessimistic guy and the other was a very optimistic, hopeful, bubbly guy. He put the pessimistic boy in a room filled with wonderful toys: remote controlled cars and Lego blocks and every single Nintendo game ever made. He hoped to cheer the boy up. He put the optimistic boy in a room filled with piles of horse manure, hoping to teach him a lesson about how rotten the world can be. 

But when the psychologist came back, he discovered something strange. The pessimistic boy was sobbing, really crying his heart out. And when the psychologist went in and asked him what was  wrong, the boy said, “All these wonderful things, I’m so afraid I’ll break something.
The psychologist, feeling a little remorse about his experiment now, hurried to the room with the horse dung. He expected to find the optimistic boy in tears as well, but instead he discovered him laughing and shoveling the manure energetically. When the psychologist asked what he was doing  the boy replied, with all this manure, there’s got to be a pony here somewhere!

Seeing is not automatic. The Pilgrims were not uniquely religious or hardy or suited to be colonists. They simply had this one strength: an unbending determination to see what they believed were God’s blessings. They came to a hostile, unknown place and died of strange sicknesses. Some simply starved. Yet, gradually they opened their eyes, and discovered there were fish and shellfish and deer and corn and berries and everything needed right around them. These things didn’t suddenly appear; they had been there all along. It just took the seeing, the determination to keep looking out for them, to make them out. And they did and they gave thanks and the thanksgiving sustained them, because it reminded them that these were blessings.

So what have you seen? Deuteronomy has rules for a thanksgiving offering; we read them earlier. Their offerings were grains and fruits and it wasn’t enough to give them; you had to look in a mirror and remember where you came from. 

‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. [Deut 26:5-9]

It’s easy to live where you have what you need and assume you have a right to it. This is a reminder that our lives and all the things that sustain them are a gift and that’s a reason to be thankful.

Today is Thanksgiving Sunday but it’s also Reign of Christ Sunday. We read the lessons for Thanksgiving Sunday but there are also lessons for Reign of Christ. In those lessons, the gospel is Luke’s description of Jesus on the cross. There he is, whipped, tortured, dying. What does he see? He sees two others also crucified; two men who are children of God. This is the greatness of Jesus Christ: that he saw every one of us as children of God. Even on the cross, he’s gathering them in; he tells them that they will be with him in paradise. 

So what have you seen? Thanksgiving is really about vision. It is being able to see what is a gift, what is a blessing, that connects us to the authentic spirit of Thanksgiving, not what we eat or how we celebrate. It is our ability to have Thanksgiving Vision. What have you seen? The opportunity of Thanksgiving is to open your eyes. It is to see the possibilities in your situation. It is to see the blessings that sustain you and know they are God’s gifts. And then finally, when you are done with the special rejoicing, when the wishbone is dry and the pumpkin pie is gone, to decide: what are you going to do about it?

Amen

Do Over, Do Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

23rd Sunday After Pentecost • November 16, 2025

Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 21:5-19

“I want a do-over.” I was standing in the cockpit of my boat, trying to back out of the slip. There were two things different about this time. First, we had an audience; some friends had come over to say goodbye. Second, it had gone totally wrong. Jacquelyn cast off the lines at the front perfectly. I put the boat in reverse, all 17,000 pounds started to move backward, and then it stuck and swung the wrong way. Everyone hurried to help, but the boat didn’t respond. Finally, I figured out that I had left one of the lines on the stern tying us to the dock connected; as soon as I untied it, we were fine. But I looked ridiculous and created a dangerous situation and all in front of our friends. I wanted a do-over.

“I want a do-over.” The first time I remember hearing the phrase was from my son. We were playing with a basketball; some game where we took turns throwing it at a basket, trying to get to a score. He would miss and say, “I want a do-over” and come up with some excuse, some reason: he was off balance, the ball had slipped: something. Later on, I came to the same feeling on my own, mostly as a parent. No one prepared me for the fact that parenting was so arbitrary, s make-it-up-as-you-go. There were so many times I wanted a do-over. Have you ever felt that way?

I wonder if that is how God feels about the world: “I want a do-over”. In English, we have “Behold I make a new creation” but the Hebrew really says, “Look at me, I’m making a new heaven and earth.” The truth is, we don’t want a new creation and a new earth; we don’t want things to change. We want everything the way it is and has been but better, cheaper, more. I’ve spent most of my life working with churches that said they wanted to grow and what I’ve learned is that we don’t want to grow; we don’t want to change. We don’t want a new heaven and a new earth and a new church; we want what we remember because it’s comforting. What if we did get a new heaven and a new earth? What if we got a new church? What if we became a new church?

We have to understand the setting to which Isaiah brought the word we heard this morning. God’s people had been disastrously defeated 80 years or so before, a defeat that shook their souls as well as destroying their nation. Thousands became refugees and many were taken into captivity in the foreign city of Babylon. Ever since, God’s people have listened to their grandparents tell them, “In Jerusalem, the gardens were better…in Jerusalem, the weather was better…in Jerusalem, the temple was better”. Now the Persian king has released the Jews and some have returned to Jerusalem. But they’ve gone home to something like Berlin in 1945 or Gaza today: a wiped out city with ruined buildings. That’s the present; what is the future?

God is offering a vision here of where we are going. I’m making new heavens and earth and this is what it’s like: you’re going to enjoy it, you’re going to build houses and live in them, have a vineyard and enjoy its wine. It takes a long time for vineyards to bear fruit, but you’ll still be there. I’m going to be there, and I’m going to anticipate your every want. The wolf and the lamb are going to lie down, there is going to be peace, even the natural world is going to be at peace. That’s where we’re going; that’s what the do-over is for: that’s our destination. Don’t worry about the trip: God knows where we are going.

 What is our ultimate destination? We have this Word from the Lord, and it’s about where we’re going. I’ve lived most of my life along the great parallel defined by I-90, a road that begins in Boston, runs through New York, loops south to take account of the Great Lakes, runs through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Indiana, Chicago, up through Wisconsin and Minnesota, then across South Dakota and Montana, where it rises into the mountains and snakes through the passes of Idaho before it flows out into the desert of Eastern Washington, jumps the Columbia River and ends in Seattle. I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve lived in Boston, and no matter which I was in, I never forgot the one at the other end. I knew the road had a destination; I knew where it was going. 

The same faith flows through what Jesus says in the reading from Luke. Jesus is a rural person and so are most of his followers. Think how they must have been dazzled by Jerusalem; think how the big buildings, the sights, the sounds, the smells must have impressed them. They must have felt this was a permanent place. Yet now Jesus tells them it’s all going to be destroyed, desolated: “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” 

Just 35 years or so after Jesus said this, it came true. Luke was written about 20 years after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Like the shock of Pearl Harbor or the towers falling on September 11, they are living in a moment of shocked grief when it must have seemed, as the poet Yeats said,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

He goes on to warn them about the immediate aftermath: violent times, demagogues, false

preachers, persecution. All these things have happened in the life and experience of the Luke’s

audience. Yet at the end Jesus invites them to this one faith: that in the love of God, there is permanent place: “…not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.” 

So: we know where we are going—what about now? What do we do now? Because we know it’s not like that now. The wolves and lambs are not lying down together now. What we are doing is living between the past and that vision. These readings have two ideas about what to do now. The first is to work here and now toward that vision. Someone said the Puritans were so effective because they believed everything depended on God but they acted like everything depended on them. They believed God’s faithfulness; they lived faithfully to God. 

Our future is in God’s hands. Our mission remains the same: to sustain here a community of care, where God’s love is evident in the embrace of people who have been embraced by Christ. The Rabbis say: if the Messiah comes, still finish your Torah study for the day. Work is the creative activity by which we are carrying out God’s will in the world. So we are called to work now, we are called to work here, for justice, for the embodiment of peace. We have been hearing this fall about the world changing effect of forgiveness. We have been hearing this fall about the world changing effect of finding the lost. We change the world when we do this now.

The second thing to do is witness. Luke is writing about 15 years after everything he says in this section has already happened. The temple is already destroyed; people are already being arrested for being Christian. What Luke understands to be our job in the present is to witness. Don’t worry about how you do it either, Luke says. This part always makes me smile at books on how to witness. How do you witness? Live your life: that’s your witness. Live your life in a way that allows Christ to make a difference. A number of social researchers have looked at Christians and others in terms of their behavior; what they find is being Christian often makes little  difference. Your witness is to let Christ make a difference in your life now.

Because Christ can make a difference, in good times, in bad times. In 1945, just before his execution by the Nazis for resistance, a German soldier wrote these words to his mother.

Dear Mother: Today, together with Jorgen, Nils and Ludwig, I was arraigned before a Military tribunal. We were condemned to death. I know that you are a courageous woman, and that you will bear this, but, hear me, it is not enough to bear it, you must also understand it. I am an insignificant thing, and my person will soon be forgotten, but the thought, the life, the inspiration that filled me will live on. You will meet them everywhere— in the trees at springtime, in people who cross your path, in a loving little smile. You will encounter that something which perhaps had value in me, you will cherish it and you will not forget me. And so I shall have a chance to grow, to become large and mature.

God’s work in the world through people who endure in faith is amazing.

The people that went into exile in Babylon did return and rebuild Jerusalem but they did something far more significant. While they were in exile, the stories, the teachings, the books we know as the Hebrew Scriptures were brought together and given their final form. The kings and armies and politics of that time are just obscure footnotes read by historians today. The scriptures they brought together have inspired three great faiths and people ever since. 

The little group, not as many as are here today, who heard Jesus and endured in their faith in him and his teaching and his vision of God’s reign saw the temple fall, experienced persecution, but they endured. They kept his memory; they became his body. Through all our stumbling history, that faith continues today and we are their inheritors. In our lives, in our witness, it has, as the resistance leader said, “…a chance to grow, to become large and mature.”

Where we are is not where we are going. Where we are going is in the hands of a God, beyond our vision of greatness or defeat. When we grieve, we should not do it as people without hope, as Paul says, but as people who have put their hope in the God who doesn’t fail. The creative God who when all seems dark still can say: “I’ll have a do-over: behold, a new creation.” Let us give thanks to God as we work, as we witness, as we wait for God to make the new creation.

Amen

Something God Alone Can See

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

22nd Sunday After Pentecost/C • November 9, 2025

Luke 20:27-38

Isn’t it good for us to gather here this morning? The Book of Job imagines all the angels of the Lord gathering one morning; I think it was just like this.

One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them.The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.” [Job 1:6f]

Well, none of you are Satanic but you’ve been out in the world. How was your week? What did you see that made you angry? What did you see that uplifted you? What was troubling? What made you smile? You’ve had to answer some questions: what’s for breakfast? What are we doing today? Why is that guy standing in the middle of North Third?

Here’s one you probably didn’t spend any time on this week: “How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?” What do you think? Supposedly, this was a big theological question in the Middle Ages. Actually, historians now find almost no evidence anyone worried about this until after the Reformation when people began to make fun of it. The answer depends on whether you think angels have substance. If they don’t, then an infinite number can stand on the pin; if they do, then just one. There: out of all the questions you’ll have to answer this week, that one is settled. You can go onto more interesting questions like what are we doing for dinner.

I bring all this up because today’s reading from Luke is about a question no one is really asking, just like the angels on the pin. Last week we left Jesus going to dinner at Zaccheus’ house; we’ve jumped ahead of the whole Palm Sunday story and Jesus is in Jerusalem where he encounters a group of Sadducees. It’s the first and only time we hear about the Sadducees in the Gospel of Luke. They’re a group centered at the temple who were generally more well to do than the Pharisees we’re used to hearing about. They’re actually  opponents of the Pharisees. You see, the Pharisees have accepted the prophets and some books lie Job called ‘the writings’ as God’s Word—holy scripture. The Sadducees, on the other hand, are purists; they only accept the first five books of our Bible, the Torah. 

“Why are we talking about obscure first century Jewish theology?”, I hear you wondering. Hang in there with me; we need to understand this question Jesus is being asked. Now, The prophets speak of God resurrecting the people of God. Ezekiel, for example, says

[God] asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!

This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. [Ezekiel 37:3-5] 

This ability of God to resurrect and make new is central in the prophets. So the Pharisees are preaching this. But as I said, the Sadducees don’t accept the prophets, so they don’t accept resurrection.

Jesus is preaching resurrection. He tells his friends that he is going to be killed in Jerusalem but God is going to raise him up again after three days. So, the Sadducees have come to confront him about this and that’s where we pick up the story in Luke. Do you ever ask a question without really caring about the answer? My dad did this: “What do you think you’re doing?” I’ve done it. “What’s all this mess?” That’s what the Sadducees are doing: they’re asking a question without really wanting an answer; the answer they want is Jesus saying, “Wow, I don’t know.”

So they’ve come up with a rule from Deuteronomy. This is the rule.

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her.

The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.

However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.”

Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not want to marry her,” his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, “This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.”

That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled. [Deuteronomy 25:5-10]

Now, there are some things where our common sense can lead us astray when we put them back in the Bible. One of them is the whole concept of a widow. Throughout the Torah and the Prophets, God shows a particular care for widows. But who are these women? 

They are women in a patriarchal society. They couldn’t own property; they couldn’t function in regular economics But if they can’t own property and can’t earn money, how will they survive? Add to that is the fact that many women were widowed when young. When we say ‘widow’ we often think of an older woman who has lost her husband late in life. But Israel had to consider how to care for young women. So they did what many societies have done; they provided a way to marry them off. 

Israel also had a particular concern about biological descent. God’s blessing was understood to be carried on this way. So it’s important that each family be continued. This rule takes care of both problems. Who’s going to marry a widow? I’s not a matter of romantic attraction; there’s a rule. The rule is, your brother marries her, has children with her, and those are considered your children. Problem solved, right?

Except for all the problems this raises. What if these two don’t like each other? When Jacquelyn and I were married, I had two brothers. My brother Allan was tall and handsome, much more handsome than me. My brother David is more charming than anyone I’ve ever known and he’s a rich lawyer. But you know, love isn’t always reasonable. This text comes up every three years and it came up about a year after we were married. After the service, Jacquelyn quietly said, “No matter what happens to you, I’m not marring either of your brothers.” The Sadducees think they’ve found another problem: “If, as you say, Jesus, there is resurrection, whose wife will she be after marrying seven brothers?” It’s a gotcha question!

I think of them gathered around, someone proposes the question, just as we heard: “Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless;..” And so on. I think of them smiling in their arrogance, knowing they’ve got him. The crowd is quiet, listening, Jesus looks back at them for a moment, perhaps sad at their lack of imagination, their lack of faith in God creative power, and simply says, 

“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. [Luke 20:34f]

Wow. That’s it: God’s able to create and recreated and resurrect is so far beyond our present experience, our present lives, that we can’t carry all the things we know into it. So there’s no problem; God’s love is so great, it’s beyond what we can imagine.

Jesus isn’t content to brush aside their gotcha question, though. He goes on to point something out from Exodus, from the very scripture the Sadducees claim to represent. 

the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.

This is what we should take away from this section: God is God of the living and all of us are all the time alive to God.

The closest we can come to this is the way parents are with children. Every parent, I think, has this experience: they are alive to us in their whole history, in all their ages. May is 35 but in my head, she’s also the little girl who was fabulous at her sister’s wedding when she was 10, she’s also the 15 year old who taught me to enjoy alternative music and rap, she’s the 20 year old college girl and so on. The same is true of my other kids. My daughter iAmy has grown kids now but to me she’s still the high school girl who outsmarted me. She used to go out on Saturday nights; she had a midnight curfew. I’d do that dad thing starting about 11:30; I’d start thinking she was going to be late and get mad. By 11:45 I’d be all worked up. By 11:55 I’d be ready to deliver a real dressing down to the late Amy. But Amy would sit outside in the car with her date until 11:58, then waft in just as the clock struck 12. I’d be obviously mad, ready to yell, but with no reason; she was on time. She’d look at me and say, “What?” And I’d have to stifle it. Maybe you know how awful it is to go to God full of unexpressed righteous anger. I could go on about Jason as well. What’s true is that all these are alive to me in all their ages, not just their present. 

That’s what Jesus is saying about how God is with us: we are all present to God  in all our ages, in all our lives. Our past is present to God. Our present is present to God. And our future is present too, beyond death. Death is one of the structures of this world, not God’s love. We don’t know how this works; we don’t know what this is like. So we imagine all kinds of things, most of them based on what happens here. That’s fine, as long as we realize that’s us. God’s love is beyond ours, beyond our imagination.

We’re going to sing a song in a few minutes that’s one of my favorites: “In the Bulb There Is a Flower”. Most of you know this song: in the bulb, there is a flower, in the seed, an apple tree. There’s nothing about a bulb that suggests a flower. There’s nothing about a seed that suggests an apple tree. Yet that’s their future. In the same way, Jesus is telling us, nothing about what we are now is big enough, full enough, to show God’s love for us. He invites us simply to believe in the love of God, beyond our imagination, beyond our experience. In that love, we are, we were, we always will be, embraced in the love of God. Who you truly are, who you truly will become, is indeed, as the song says, “Something God alone can see.”

Amen.

Finders Keepers

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

All Saints Sunday • November 2, 2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 • 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 * Luke 19:1-10

This is how God starts: everything in order, light and darkness separated, land and sea, a fruitful creation, two people set in a garden. Then the people decide they want to be like God and it all falls apart. There’s violence and shame and sin and it’s a mess. It’s like when you go through one of those periods where you don’t clean, the dishes pile up, the bed’s a lump of twisted covers and sheets and you can’t face it all. 

So God starts over; washes it all away in the Flood, teaches boat building to Noah and Noah goes on a cruise, God promises not to do this again, the waters recede and everything is in order. Then people spread out, they decide to be god like, build a tower and God has to scatter them and invent languages, and it all falls apart.

So God starts over: whispers to Abram and Sarai a promise about a land where they will be God’s people and that they will have children and become the beginning of a blessing to the whole world. God makes a covenant with them, sends them on a long journey, gives them a child, and it all looks good. Then it falls apart. There’s violence, there’s division. The people of God go off to Egypt and become slaves.

So God starts over: gets Moses to go to Pharaoh to say, “Let my people go”, because on the whole, God hates slavery. It takes some doing to convince the Egyptians but eventually God’s people leave slavery, wander around, doubting God some, complaining some, but God gives them a set of rules, Ten Commandments, makes another covenant with them, promises the promised land. They get there and then it all falls apart. They don’t live by the covenant, they think other Gods look like more fun, and they think they can be Godlike themselves.

So God starts over: sends prophets, gives them a Word. One of them is Habakkuk. He lives in a time of deep division. The Chaldeans, a people from present day Iraq, have defeated God’s people but it’s before the final devastation of Jerusalem. He sets out the problem.

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?

1:3 Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.

1:4 So the law becomes slack, and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous; therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

But what’s the solution? Habakkuk says, “the righteous live by their faithfulness”.  But what about the rest? 

I’ve summarized the whole Hebrew Scriptures and perhaps you noticed the repeated, “So God starts over.” This is God: ever faithful, always trying to get back to that garden moment, like someone cleaning a house, making the bed, doing the dishes, putting things away. That’s what Jesus is doing: Jesus is God’s cleaner. And today we heard how he does it. Did you get it? Did you understand it?

It’s a simple story. Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem. Just a little before this, he’s told his friends for the third time that he’s going to go there and be crucified. No one wants to hear that but he keeps telling them anyway. Now, Jerusalem is up on a mountain. To the east is the Dead Sea and above that is the Jordan River. There’s a deep, deep valley, it’s actually so deep it’s below sea level. There’s a place at the river where you can ford and there’s been some kind of village there since about 9,000 BCE. There are fresh water springs and palm trees. Out to the east is the wilderness; off to the west is the winding road up the mountains. The city that’s grown up there is named Jericho and it’s one of the oldest cities in the whole world. To get to Jerusalem, you first have to go through Jericho.

That’s what Jesus is doing: he’s in the last stage of going to Jerusalem. It’s like taking the train here from Philadelphia; when you get to Elizabethtown, you know it’s time to get ready to arrive. When you drive up from Baltimore and hit the turnpike, you know it’s time to get over for the Harrisburg exit. He gets to the edge of Jericho and meets a blind man; Luke doesn’t name him, Mark says his name is Bar Timmaeus, which means more or less “Timothy’s son”. He cries out to Jesus; the crowd tells him to shut up but Jesus stops, has Tim brought to him, heals him because of his faith. 

It’s a sign: Jesus has been dealing with so many people whose eyes work just fine but who are blind to the way God’s love just falls on the world like rain. Jesus has been dealing with so many people who are blind to God’s hope for all of us to treat each other with that same love. Timothy’s eyes are now open and he can see fully what he had glimpsed in faith, that Jesus is the Son of God, come to show that love.

They move on into Jericho itself. I’m sure there’s a crowd, after all Luke says that at one point Jesus had sent out 70 people to share the good news about him with others. There are a group of women who have supported him all along. There are the 12 disciples. Just try to walk down Green St. with 12 guys following; you’ll end up stopping traffic. It’s the same thing here. 

If you’ve ever been to old cities, you know that the streets are narrow for the most part with the occasional open plaza area. That’s how I imagine this. There’s a small crowd, some running ahead, some behind Jesus, some trying to stay next to him. Surely news about him has gone ahead and there are people who stop what they’re doing to see. 

Now, I know you’ve all been to a parade and you know how it goes: there are always people in front of you. You always have to decide how hard you want to push and if you’re like me, it’s not that hard. That means going to a parade tends to be looking over people’s heads; not that fun. There’s a guy there in Jericho who has an additional problem: he’s short. He’s not going to look over anyone. This isn’t the first time he’s had this problem, so he does what I suspect he’s done since he was a kid, he climbs up in a tree. His name is Zaccheus, which means ‘Innocent’. But people there don’t see him as innocent;  they see him as a very bad man. He’s the chief tax collector there in Jericho which to most people means the chief cheat. He’s rich, and perhaps he’s not shy about showing it; drives a fancy chariot, has more than three sets of clothes, has enough food every single day. Being a tax collector means he’s ritually unclean; he’s not welcome at worship. 

But there he is, up in the tree, can you imagine him? He wants to see Jesus. Isn’t that like you? Isn’t that like me? I used to preach from a pulpit that had a little brass quotation on it I saw every time I was there, it said “Sir, we would see Jesus”. So, Jesus is coming down the street, with this whole crowd, some just want to be around him, some want him to solve all their problems, some want to touch him. Maybe the tree is in a little square, and the crowd flows in. There are sycamore trees, a kind of fig tree, and there are palm trees, maybe there’s a pool of water, and there’s Zaccheus up in a tree and this is just the reverse of what Zaccheus had in mind. It isn’t a story about Zaccheus seeing Jesus: it’s about Jesus seeing Zaccheus.

Zaccheus is rich but he isn’t popular. He’s rich but he isn’t liked; no one invites him to coffee, no one comes by his office just to hang out. People avoid him. But Jesus sees him and calls out to him, “Come down, I’m going to your house for dinner.” Wow! Imagine Jesus inviting himself to your home. Imagine Jesus seeing you and calling you out by name. “Salvation has come to your house,” Jesus says. But it’s not a popular saying; Luke says that everyone grumbled. Everyone in that crowd feels they are better than Zaccheus; he’s an unclean, unpopular, unrighteous guy. Why is Jesus making a big deal over him? Why is Jesus actually going to his house, planning to eat with him?

It isn’t some great act of repentance by Zacccheus; he isn’t going to change his life on the spot. He’s already pretty much doing good, he says he gives half his income to the poor, he goes beyond what’s required when he wrongs someone. But that all comes after Jesus has announced he’s coming to Zaccheus’ house. It’s not the reason for it, it’s Zaccheus reacting to the grumbling. No, there’s something else at work here and it’s this line near the end: “he, too, is a son of Abraham.” He’s part of the promise, he’s a child of God. It doesn’t matter that he’s rich; it doesn’t matter what he does for a living. He’s a child of God. A lot of those children have gotten lost and Jesus is all about finding them, guiding them back to the family, reminding them of who they are. He wants to remind us as well.

Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “I’m nobody; who are you? Are you nobody too?” So many live as nobody. Jesus comes to remind us of who we are. He sees Zaccheus and he sees what the grumblers have missed: that whatever else he is, whatever he has done, he is a child of Abraham, he is God’s child, a child of blessing and promise. Now today is ‘All Saints Day’ The word ‘saint’ has come to mean someone recognized as extraordinarily good but originally and always in the New Testamet, it means any follower of Christ. Paul says in Christ we have been adopted into Abraham’s family. So what Jesus says about Zaccheus he could say about you or me: this person is a child of Abraham. This person is a child or promise. This person is a saint. This person is a child of God.

Jesus mission is to find the children of God and keep them home with God. Surely that is the real meaning of All Saints. We look back to friends and family we have known and loved; we remember them. Behind them is an even longer line of those who came before. All these are God’s children. All these Jesus came because he finds God’s children and just as the prophets said, intends to restore them to God. 

But All Saints is not just the past; it is the present as well and the future. This is a wonderful congregation. What is said in Second Thessalonians about those Christians so many years before us could certainly be said here.

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. [2 Thessalonians 1:3]

That same spirit of the saints is here. It’s here and Jesus is looking at us, as he looked at Zaccheus, saying the same thing about us, that we are children of God, hoping we will recognize each other in that way, act in that way.

So when we hear him talking to Zaccheus, we should hear him talking to us as well, saying the same thing. “This too is a child of God…and today salvation has come to your house.” May that blessing live in your hearts this week and always. 

Amen.