Monthly Archives: June 2026

Crying in the Wilderness

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2026

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost/A • June 21, 2026

Genesis 21:9-21

In 2009, the Bloomfield Hills Andover High School held our 40th Class Reunion. There were two remarkable things about this to me. One was that it started with a few of us from the old artsy, sarcastic, theatre group—notably both of us who were elected Class Cynic in 1969—reconnecting over Facebook. That spread until the former Cool Kids did what they always did and took it over, completely changing the event into an expensive dinner at a country club. We were 40 years, but the old dynamics still operated, and I ended up growling to Jacquelyn about it endlessly. The other thing that was remarkable was that we all had changed. My best friend came; he used to be a kind of round guy with his hair in a ponytail; I didn’t recognize the skinny, balding guy with the “Richard” name tag. I think that’s when it dawned on me that I had changed too; I wasn’t 140 lbs. anymore, and there wasn’t much left of my long hair either. Our lives unfold, we change, and yet some of the old stuff always remains. 

That’s one of the things I get out of the story we read this morning. This summer, I want to focus on the story of the patriarchs with you, but we have some catching up to do. Two weeks ago, we heard how God called Abram and Sarai out of their home and sent them on a journey to a promise. The promise was a place to live as God’s people and generations to come after them. Now we heard this story about Sarah and Hagar and their sons and Abraham. Just like with the class reunion, a lot has gone on. So first, let’s catch up. Today is like when you missed a few episodes of a series and you have to binge-watch to catch up. 

When we left Abram and Sarai, they were just packing up and moving. They ended up going all the way to Egypt, a long walk. They get into trouble there; that’s a juicy story I suggest you go read on your own. They get kicked out of Egypt, but perhaps while they are there, they acquire an Egyptian maid for Sarai. Along the way, God comes again and makes a covenant with them and changes their names: they become Abraham and Sarah. It’s like losing your hair: life changes you, and they are changed. Still no child, and honestly? Sarah’s really gotten too old for a child. She must have grieved for this, don’t you think? She must have wondered what happened to that part of God’s promise, and Abraham wondered too, I’m sure. How was the promise ever going to be fulfilled?

So she does what women still do. She decides to use the best technology of the time for a woman who can’t get pregnant. In this time, that means getting a surrogate mother. The custom is to officially send your maid to your husband, have her get pregnant with him; I’m not going into all the details. Because she’s your maid, it’s as if it’s your child; because it’s your husband, it’s his as well. So she sends her maid Hagar to Abraham. Hagar has a baby, and he’s named Ishmael, which means “God hears”. So all is well: Abraham has a son, they move to Canaan, and it looks like the promise is working out.

Except this isn’t God’s plan. They’ve missed an important step: waiting for God to fulfill the promise. Instead, Sarah has decided to hurry things along. Our patience and God’s timing don’t always align, and they didn’t here. That doesn’t mean God’s late; it means we’re early. One day, three mysterious visitors appear; Abraham has a big barbecue in their honor. Even today in the Middle East in traditional culture, women and men don’t eat together, and the host doesn’t eat with the guests; he serves them. So the visitors sit down to eat, Sarah is outside the tent listening in, Abraham is getting the food out, and wow! It turns out one of the visitors is God! This is a thing we miss about God: the way God shows up when least expected. And what God says is that in the spring, Sarah is going to have a baby. 

Now these people aren’t stupid. They certainly know there’s a point in a woman’s life where she’s no longer able to conceive. So when Sarah hears this, she thinks what women think when men say things that show they are totally ignorant about women. And she laughs, she laughs so hard they hear her in the tent. God asks about her laughing; Abraham tries to cover up as husbands sometimes do and says she didn’t laugh, but they all know the truth. God asks the fundamental question all people of faith have to answer: is anything too hard for God? It turns out that having an old woman get pregnant isn’t, and sure enough, in the spring Sarah has a baby, and he’s named ‘Isaac’, which means “one who laughs”. Babies are weaned after about three years back then, so that day comes, and Abraham holds another big feast to celebrate. Ishmael, —remember Ishmael?—is about 15. Now we’re all caught up to the story we read today. 

The story starts with a party; it’s important to remember that these people don’t live alone, they are part of a whole group, herding animals. The boys are playing; it may be that Ishmael is teasing Isaac, the Hebrew is obscure. Sarah doesn’t like it and she doesn’t like the idea that Ishmael might compete with her son. Sarah and Hagar have had a difficult relationship all along. So she goes to Abraham and says, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” Notice that she doesn’t even name Hagar and Ishmael; it’s “this slave woman” and “her son”. This is how we distance ourselves from people, isn’t it? We have an instinctive kindness that operates when we see someone as an individual, even more when we know their name; when we are going to be cruel, we prefer not to use names, we refer to them by some group. Sarah is proud of her son, she’s proud of her role in fulfilling God’s promise and she doesn’t want that muddied up with Ishmael.

Abraham doesn’t like it but he goes along with what she says. Helpfully, he comes up with these ideas of God’s plan: that both boys will become the patriarchs of clans somehow. So he takes a skin of water and some bread, does what Sarah demanded, casts them out into the wilderness. It reminds me of Adam and Eve: Eve takes the fruit from the forbidden tree and gives it to Adam, remember? He just eats what he’s given. Here, Abraham just does what Sarah says. 

It’s meant to lift up a mirror to our lives: how God’s promise weaves through them, how our pride and anger sometimes get in the way. Of course, the water runs out; of course, the bread runs out; anyone who’s ever fed a 15-year-old boy knows food doesn’t last long with them. So before long, Hagar and Ishmael are starving and dying of thirst. Hagar puts him under a tree, goes off a ways, because she can’t stand to see him suffer. She cries; he’s crying too. There, in the parched wilderness, where silence engulfs the world, perhaps the only sound is their cries. Until an angel, a messenger from God, speaks up and answers the cry. Suddenly, she sees an oasis with a well, and they are saved. I love a happy ending, don’t you?

There’s a lot to learn here about how God works in the world, how God works with us. The first thing is that God’s purpose is like the tide; it can’t be resisted, it can’t be hurried. Sarah and Abraham tried to use Hagar to hurry things along; now Hagar is crying in the wilderness because their plan led to anger and spite. 

The second thing is that God hears cries in the wilderness. Hagar is the first person in the whole Bible to weep; later, we’re going to see that God consistently hears cries. This past week included the celebration of Juneteenth, the day when slavery was finally ended in our country. We have all kinds of words to cover up the horror of that Holocaust. We talk about the “antebellum South”, forgetting that it was a place of oppression for most of its people. We call the places where slaves worked “plantations” when they were really slave labor camps. In those camps, people were treated as less than animals; they were whipped and tortured and literally worked to death until finally a great and awful war, one of its battles on our very doorstep, was fought to end that terrible curse. President Lincoln recognized in his Second Inaugural address the connection between the destruction of the Civil War and the sin of slavery.

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. [https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp]

God heard the cry of those slaves and freed them, and thank God for that.

Now we read this story, and it challenges us to ask: who are we sending into the wilderness? What cries are coming to God? Who have we refused to name? What cares is God hearing, and how does God intend to use us to answer those cries? If we are following Christ, surely he means to lead us to those who hurt in order to heal; if we are following Christ, surely he means to lead us to those who are crying to give hope. 

At the end of the story, Hagar and Ishmael find new life. Hagar gets Ishmael a wife in Egypt; their story will go on. It’s an article of faith in Islam that the Prophet Muhammad, the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is descended from Ishmael, just as it is an article of faith in Judaism that Jews are descended from Isaac. The Apostle Paul says we are adopted into this family as children of Abraham.

So this is our family story: not everyone acts well all the time. We stumble, but we walk forward. And if we walk forward in faith, following Christ, it can only be that we also learn to hear the cries in the wilderness. For as Paul said, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making an appeal through us. 

Amen

Hello?

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2026

Second Sunday After Pentecost • June 7, 2026

Genesis 12:1-9 * Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

I want to begin today with something that won’t make sense to some younger folks and I apologize for that. I want to take you back to a time when all phones were connected by wires to the wall. Do you remember that? Some were black things with a dial that had numbers and letters; in 1959 AT&T shocked us with the introduction of the Princess Phone, a curving bit of plastic that had a base but held the dialing wheel right on the phone. Back then, when the phone rang you generally picked it up and you had no idea who it was on the other end. It could be a friend, it could be a family member; it could be good news, it could be bad news, it could be someone who just wanted to chat. You let the call interrupt your day. There was no signal that said “likely spam” so you knew not to answer; there was no special ring tone for your best friend. Just the same ring for everyone, and you picked up the phone and said, “Hello?” All calls began the same way: picking up the phone, saying “Hello?” and then hearing the other voice telling you who it was and why they called.

Today, of course, calls are very different. Almost all of the calls I get are from people who want to make money off me; I get a lot of calls every single day from loan companies that want to give me money—so I will pay it back with interest. Some of the calls want me to give to good causes or campaigns for various candidates. All these have in common that they aren’t in my phone book so they first flash a message that says, “Likely spam” and generally I don’t answer, I hit a cancel button. I try not to cancel calls from any of you; those are what I call the “Hello?” calls, people I’m happy to hear from. Calls interrupt us; they ask for attention when we are paying attention to something else, they ask us to respond. That’s what’s happening in two of the stories we read today.

Matthew invites us to imagine Jesus walking along. Where is he going? We aren’t told. He’s not alone; he has some disciples with him, perhaps others, maybe some of the Pharisees who show up later. He sees a tax collector booth, the way we see toll booths on the highway. No one likes paying taxes and in this time, tax payers were especially hated because they were a symbol of Roman oppression. Everything had a tax on it, what you did, what you earned, and every time you crossed a bridge. Tax collectors paid a fee upfront for the right to collect the tax on something so there was a built in incentive to get as much as possible. They were people shunned in their community. Yet here is Jesus, walking by, and simply saying, apparently out of the blue, “Follow me.” 

It’s an interruption, a phone call out of the blue. We aren’t told what happens next but it must have been positive because in the next sentence, Jesus is at Matthew’s house, having dinner with him and other tax collectors and people who are described with the catchall term, “sinners”. Sinners means people who for whatever reason are thought of as not worthy to come before God. It’s shocking and some good church folk ask his disciples about it: Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” [Matt 9:12] Eating tougher is surrounded by customs in this time; no one just sits down with strangers. Yet here Jesus is, with a bunch of the unworthy, sinners, tax collectors, people no one wants. This is his answer: “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’  For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.” [Matt 9:13] It’s a 700 year old quote from the prophet Hosea. Jesus is looking back into the Biblical tradition to remind these Bible teachers of what the tradition truly teaches: God’s mercy for all, no distinction, no one left out, no one left behind.

Before they can say anything, there’s another interruption, another “Hello?” moment. A local leader—Mark calls him a leader of the synagogue—begs Jesus to come resurrect his daughter who has died. So they all leave the dinner and go off to deal with this crisis and on the way yet a third “Hello?” moment occurs. A woman with a woman who has been bleeding for years touches Jesus; in another version of the story, she grabs the fringe of his cloak. Women who are bleeding are definitely among those who are seen as unworthy, in Biblical terms ‘unclean’. No good and righteous man has contact with them but Jesus stops stock still and turns and says, “Take heart daughter, your faith has made you well”. He takes the time to heal her even though he’s apparently in a hurry.

Notice that he doesn’t examine Matthew’s fitness before he calls him; he doesn’t ask that the dinner guests be vetted before he eats with them, he doesn’t tell the woman to prove her goodness, he just heals her. These are all stories of interruption; these are all “Hello?” moments that show Jesus flinging God’s grace into the world as casually as a homeowner watering the lawn. No one waters just one section, or one bit of grass; you water the whole lawn. Jesus comes to save the whole world. He does it one table, one dinner at a time, because eating together is a way we have of connecting to each other. One writer said, 

I have many food-related memories from childhood. Food bank lines stacked with government-issued blocks of processed cheese my scrawny arms could barely carry. Mean lunch ladies who told me that free lunch kids like me could only have the white milk, not the chocolate milk. I learned early that food could divide people or make someone feel excluded. I learned the economic difference between white milk and chocolate.

I have other memories of food, such as my mother’s fried chicken. I remember those rare Sundays when she wasn’t working as a nurse’s aide, when she would invite folks from her church to Sunday dinner. It didn’t really matter who you were—you would lose your sense of etiquette trying to negotiate your favorite piece of that golden brown bird. I learned that food could make one feel welcome. I learned that hospitality—and, symbolically, food—could not only mediate social relationships but even break boundaries. Whom we ate with could be inclusive and recalibrate relationships. It was always powerful to see my mother as host and pastors and parishioners as grateful guests. God’s hello’s interrupt but they also break boundaries; God’s hello’s come out of the blue but lead us to God’s path.

We see the same patten in Genesis. The very word means beginnings and from Chapter 1, which we read last Sunday, until just before today’s reading, we have a series of stories that move from creation through humanity’s fall from grace to Noah and the flood and the rainbow covenant, God’s promise to never again wipe out all life. Then we’re given an explanation in the Tower of Babel of how languages are invented because of human pride followed by a long genealogy that takes us from Noah’s sons to Terah, the father of Abram. Suddenly the progression of legends and myths is interrupted. God speaks to Abram, a man just like any other man, and says, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land I will show you.” [Gen 12:1] Wow—in a time when your clan was all, when most people lived and died in the same area, this is a tremendous “Hello!”, an interruption of all life.

The section before this contains a long genealogy in which Abram’s wife, Sarai, is noted and we’re given this note: Sarai was unable to have children. Certainly this is significant in the culture where the primary job of a woman was to have children. What makes it even more stunning is that when God promises blessing, part of the blessing is, “I will make you a great nation.” How will this promise be realized with a woman who is barren? What did Sarai think about this call; what does she think about leaving everything? Surely she’s leaving her family and home too. No more visits to see them; no more going home for holidays, just a husband and his calling and his journey. Her life is being interrupted also: she doesn’t object, but it’s not clear she agrees.

Still, they go forward. God’s promises this: 

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” [Genesis 12:2-3]

Go forth: become a blessing to everyone who will ever be. 

So they go, first to Canaan, which is now Israel, through Shechem. Now the interesting thing about Shechem is that it’s up in the hill country of what will later be Northern Israel and still later Samaria, a part of Israel conquered by the Assyrians and in Jesus’ time, a land of people who are rejected by the Jews themselves. That’s where Abraham builds the first altar to our God. There is where Abraham responds to God with his own hello. 

This is the beginning of our whole faith story. This is how God comes, interrupting lives, sending people to new places and new directions. What happens to Matthew when he follows Jesus? He stays with the disciples after Jesus’ crucifixion; he’s there after the resurrection, he becomes an evangelist. Early church leaders believed he wrote down stories of Jesus that became the Gospel of Matthew. Some legends say he was an preacher in what’s present day Iran where he angered a local king and was killed for his faith, becoming a martyr. The interruption became his life.

What happens to Abram and Sarai is that they continue to journey beyond Canaan. We’re going to hear more of their story this summer. The interruption becomes the foundation of their lives and the fountain that produces three great religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All revere Abram and claim this story of the great interruption of his life as the beginning of their history with God.

These stories invite us to ask where God intends to interrupt our lives. Where is God saying hello to you today? Our church life is like our personal lives: it tends to float along day to day without much change. Where is God trying to interrupt our church? How would accepting that Hello change us?

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Trinity Sunday/A • Mary 31, 2026

Genesis 1:1-2:4a • Matthew 28:16-20

Climbing up the mountain children
I didn’t come here for to stay
If I never more see you again,
Gonna see you on the Judgement Day

You can listen to the song here

Do you know this song? It’s in the style of a spiritual. Spirituals used religious metaphors to signal slaves and call them to take the risks of seeking freedom. It’s striking how often mountains figure in our faith tradition. Ancient people looked up and believed they were looking toward God. So to get higher was to get closer to God, draw nearer divinity. Isn’t that our hope? Isn’t that why we come to worship?—to feel closer to God. Today, let’s listen to these two stories from scripture and let them help us climb the mountain toward God.

Take that long, long story that open Genesis, the book of beginnings. Did you follow it as we read it this morning? When you listen to a song, there are two parts: you listen to the lyrics and you also listen to the music. It’s the same way with this story. The words are the lyrics; the rhythm and balance is the music. It starts out with what our translation calls “the formless void”; in Hebrew, the “Tohu Bohu”, absence of anything and then—light. The light is divided—night and day. There’s a place: now it’s divided, above, below—sky and world. It’s divided: Earth and seas. On the earth, plants, in the sky lights—time and fruitfulness. In the sea, creatures of every kind, in the air, birds of every kind. On the land, animals and cattle, which is to say animals that live mutually with humanity. Finally: us—humankind, gendered and made in the image of God. What we hear if we listen more to the music than the lyrics is an amazing, ultimate ordering, a place for everything, everything in its place. 

Clean Up!

It reminds me of being a boy in the room I shared with my brother. We had closets, desks, and some storage areas. And we had an amazing mess of toys, dirty clothes, books, magazines, half-built plastic models and what I can only describe as “Interesting Stuff”—a special rock, some shell brought back from a beach. My mom would tell us to clean up and we would, in the way boys clean up, which is to say we’d dump stuff into the closets and push it under the bed. But every once in a while, often on a summer day, my mother, in the way of mothers who are never fooled and knew exactly what we’d done, would appear in our room and tell us that today we were going to really clean. We knew what really clean meant: everything came out from under the beds, everything came out from the closet and then, bit by bit, my mother would help us put it all away, dirty clothes to the laundry, beds made without lumps, toys and models on shelves, trash thrown out and Interesting Things examined and put into a box. She brought order and even though we whined about the process, at the end we loved it. She’d stand in the doorway, arms crossed and say, “Now that’s the way this room should be. Try to keep it this way, at least for a little while.”

That’s what this story in Genesis is about. People who want to argue about it as a scientific description of how things came to be are missing the song it means to sing. This isn’t about how things came to be, it’s about how things are meant to be, all in order: night, day, animals, cattle, human beings, ordered by a loving God, everything in its place, everything dancing together to the music of God’s order, just as a choir sings together to the music of the organ. Now there are various names for this order. When it comes to everything, we call it creation; when it comes to human beings, we call it justice. It’s where God is always trying to move us, and the pathway there is the mountain we are meant to climb.

We have to climb it because, just like my brother and I, on the whole we are messy children. We are meant to be caretakers of creation; we wander off and become consumers instead. We are meant to live in the equality of mutually, equally being made in the image of God, recognizing that image in each other. Instead, we create hierarchies, we compete to be better than others and, in our pride, we use our strength to create systems that oppress some and benefit others. Hierarchy always involves coercion and coercion is violence. Violence disorders the balance, the order, God created and like the pressure under a volcano, it gets stored up until finally the coerced erupt against it.

A long time ago, when May was small, she had a problem and needed help. She seriously and carefully explained the problem and then came to what she wanted and said, “That’s where you come in.” Clearly, today we need someone to stand, like a mother at the doorway of a messy room, to clean things up. And that’s where you come in. Yes: we are meant to be part of the solution to putting things back in order. Just like my mother, God has a plan and the plan is in the other story we read this morning. It begins with God seeing the disorder of the world and coming to us, like my mother coming into the room. The signature act of God in Jesus is resurrection. Resurrection is God transcending violence. The cross is all the world’s violence, all the police on someone’s neck, all the politicians refusing to help the needy and helping friends get the benefits of God’s creation. The cross is domination; resurrection is the solution.

Trinity Sunday

The other story we read today pictures Jesus with his disciples on a mountain. “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.” [Matthew 28:16]. Jesus tells them to do three things: make disciples, baptize, teach his commandments. Today is Trinity Sunday and this is the one place in the Bible where the Trinity is explicitly mentioned. I have a history with the Trinity; the history is that when I was 12, I was in Confirmation Class, the old minister, probably not as old as I am now, tried to tell us about the Trinity and I said, “That doesn’t make sense!” Later he called my mother and asked her not to bring me back. Honestly? The Trinity is a way of trying to encapsulate that God comes to us in many ways. Jesus isn’t preaching theology here; he’s giving commands. Matthew says this interesting thing about the audience: “When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.” [Matt. 28:17] Believing all the theology doesn’t really matter, apparently; even the doubters are included. So if that’s you, welcome! 

What Jesus is teaching isn’t theology, it’s this: go make disciples. Sometimes we’ve misinterpreted this to mean “force people” but Jesus never forced anyone; he only invites. And what he invites them, what he invites us to do, is to obey what he commanded. It starts with the  power of forgiveness and what is forgiveness? It’s the intentional act of saying, “Let’s start new.” It’s the do-over after a missed opportunity, it’s the refusal to store up grievance and let it become resentment. Baptism is the symbol of this, the symbolic washing that gets rid of the dirt of the past. His ultimate command is love, loving the image of God where ever it’s found, whether in God or in God’s image, the person you meet, the person you haven’t met. To make disciples simply means to help someone else start to live this way, usually because they’ve been inspired by the example you set.

Living Now

This is a disordered moment. The regular rhythms of life are off. We are at war in a distant way that seems to cost mostly other people’s lives and our money. Our politics sounds more like a call to holy war than an invitation to solve problems. We can’t choose whether to live in this time; we can choose how we live. We can’t choose whether we live in a racist culture but we can choose how we live in it. We can use our politics, our money, our social media, our lives to say, to others, “I care about you—you’re a child of God, I’m going to treat you like one.” That’s being a disciple; that’s teaching Jesus way of love by example.

Somewhere, someone is rolling their eyes at this, I’m sure. Somewhere, someone is thinking it will never work. I imagine some days my mother stood in the doorway and thought, “How will they ever clean this up?” Jesus started with 12 disciples; here he is, just a short time later, and already he’s lost one—there are only 11 left to gather in Galilee. But it doesn’t stop him. He knows the truth that our politics always forgets, the one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently voiced when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” 

In all the time since that moment in Galilee, there have been plenty of failures. Christians have busily built their own systems of domination and others have had to fight to restore justice. But God never stops trying, never stops coming to clean up. There’s another mountain song that reminds me of this. It’s meant to be a love song but I think of it as God’s love song for us and it begins, “A’int no mountain high enough, a’int no river wide enough, to keep me from you.” That’s the message of the resurrection: there is no power, no principality, nothing that can ultimately overcome God’s hope. When we live in justice, care for creation and each other, appreciate the image of God in creation and and all people, follow Jesus’ commands, then we are part of God’s plan. Isn’t it time to clean up today?

Amen.