Author Archives: James

Fear and Trembling

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Listen to the Sermon Preached Here

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

16th Sunday After Pentecost • September 8, 2024

Isaiah 35:4-7a, Mark 7:24-37

Jesus is on vacation. Mark says he went up to Tyre, a big coastal town north of Israel, outside its borders. He enters a house and wants some privacy: “…[he] didn’t want anyone to know he was there.” [Mark 7:24b] You know how this works. You go to the shore, maybe Ocean City or Wildwood, rent an Airbnb, just want to be anonymous, kick back, rest up. After all, just before this he’s had a tough time. He got rejected in his hometown and couldn’t do anything there. His mentor and friend, John the Baptist, has been executed. He keeps having arguments with better educated clergy. Maybe his disciples have gotten annoying, the way family sometimes can. So off he goes.

A Woman Comes to Jesus

But when he gets there, it turns out he’s too well known to hide out. Some Canaanite woman, a Gentile, throws herself at his feet when he’s out looking for breakfast. Honestly, I’ve never had a woman throw herself at my feet, so I’m not sure quite what that’s like, but I have certainly been accosted when I’m getting away. It’s a little professional secret that clergy mostly learn early on never, ever, to admit they are clergy when traveling. Years ago when I was young and on a long flight and a woman next to me asked what I did. I proudly said I’m a minister. She spent the rest of the flight telling me why she didn’t go to church and how she didn’t believe in God. I really just wanted to nap, not talk theology. So I’m guessing that’s how Jesus felt. He’s off duty; maybe healing people is exhausting. He’s on a mission, after all, to reclaim Israel for God, to bring all Jews back to a purer, more passionate faith but these people aren’t his problem, they’re Gentiles.

Still, there’s this woman at his feet; no way around her. She’s begging for his attention, his compassion. Her daughter is possessed; she’s desperate. All parents know this feeling, that special, relentless, desperation when your child is sick and no one seems able to help. Jesus might be on vacation, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter. She looks ridiculous, lying there in the street, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter. He’s a man; she’s a woman, he’s a Jew, she’s a Gentile, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter. She lives in a culture that tells women to be quiet in public, never to talk to a strange man, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter.

Dogs!

I think Jesus must have tried to get around her but couldn’t, so he says something conventional, tries to get out of the situation. “He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’” [Mark 7:27] Now we think of dogs as fun and cute, and we love them. But dogs in this time and place are dirty, mangy, they live outside in villages, they eat garbage and smell like it. ‘Dog’ is an insult; it’s like one of the many ethnic slurs we all know, no need for me to quote them.‘Dogs’ is what Jews call Gentiles and they typically ignore them. Jesus grew up as a Jew; Jesus is steeped in the culture, he’s human and like all humans, his culture has captured him. So he replies like a Jewish man to this Gentile woman. I’m sure he thought that would be the end of it. A little brusque language, a little insult, done, she’ll go away and leave him alone.

But she doesn’t; she only cares about her daughter, she doesn’t care about the insult. She turns it around: “Even the little dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” she says. There’s a little play on words there: she’s turned his insult from an image of the mangy alley dogs to a puppy playing in the home. It’s a good argument and it works. “For saying that, you may go,” he says, and assures her that her daughter is healed. She gets up , goes home and wow! Her daughter is fine, her daughter is back.

This isn’t a very nice picture of Jesus, is it? It isn’t gentle Jesus meek and mild; it isn’t the good shepherd, carrying the lost sheep home on his shoulder. It isn’t the love your neighbor guy we all expect. There are endless articles and commentary and sermons explains this away, trying to give us back the nice Jesus we think we know. Even the Gospel of Matthew, about 20 years after Mark, cleans the story up and makes it about her faith, not the argument. But I want the real Jesus, not the pretty picture someone else painted; I want to know the real Jesus, so I want to know what’s going on here. And what seems to be going on is that Jesus changed his mind. 

Is Jesus Changing?

“Wait, Jesus changed his mind? Isn’t he perfect?” I imagine someone wondering this. We believe Jesus is fully human and isn’t being fully human sometimes being wrong? Jesus thought of his mission as being for the Jews, for God’s people. I think Mark is giving us a peek into the moment when Jesus changes his mind and realizes God’s plan is bigger, more wonderful, than he had realized. We’re getting a look at a moment when Jesus realizes everyone is welcome at his table, everyone is included, everyone is a child of God. Everyone includes a Gentile woman with a sick daughter. She isn’t a dog, she isn’t just a woman, she isn’t just a Gentile, she’s a child of God, just like him, and God loves her, just like him. 

It isn’t easy to admit you’re wrong and change. May and I like to argue, Jacquelyn likes everything peaceful. So when we became a family, Jacquelyn introduced a rule that we call the dance. It works like this: if you argue a point, and you are proven wrong, you have to turn around to the left three times and say, “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong”, and then to the right three times and say, “You were right, you were right, you were right.” By the end everyone is laughing; peace is restored. We remember that how much we love each other is more important than being right. 

What I love about Jesus in this passage is that he was wrong and could change. Mark makes it clear; it’s what the woman says that changes his mind. The passage asks us too: can we change? Can we listen to our history and our values and change our minds, change our hearts? I think this is something all too rare today. We all moan about the dark divisiveness of our politics, but isn’t it precisely because we don’t listen that we are divided? I wish we could make our politicians abide by the dance rule. I’d love to see some of those guys, instead of defending the indefensible, simply turn and turn and turn and say I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong. 

Acting on the New Reality

The rest of this passage makes it clear Jesus is acting on this new understanding. It says he goes by way of Sidon to the Deacpolis. This makes no sense; it’s like saying I went from Harrisburg to York by way of Philadelphia. But geography is theology in the Bible. What Mark seems to want us to know is that Jesus works among Gentiles as well as Jews. The Decapolis is a largely Jewish area. When Jesus arrives, we’re told that some friends brought a man who was deaf and stammered for healing. He takes the man aside and heals him in an astonishingly intimate way, touching his ears, telling them to be opened, wetting his finger on his own tongue, touching the man’s tongue. “Be opened!”, is the command: Ephphatha!

We’re starting a new year of programs and worship here, in a new time. Don’t we need to hear Jesus saying Ephphatha to us? There are some great things here that come from our values. One thing I’ve learned in the last few months is that this church is really great at appreciating. I love that we applaud the music; I love the positive energy of how people seem to appreciate each other here. How can we carry that forward? And what do we need to leave behind? 

Fear and Trembling to Joy

When Paul writes to a new Christian church in northern Greece, in the letter to the Philippians, he tells them to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. I think what he means is for them to discover that everything they think needs to be tested, evaluated, considered. I think he means they need to listen to Jesus, not just their own common sense. I think he knows that isn’t easy because it’s scary to change. I think he means to assure them that God is with them in the process. 

The same is true here. At the end of this story, Jesus is on his way home. Along the way, he heals a man who is deaf. Isn’t this all of us? Aren’t we sometimes deaf when God is practically shouting at us? It’s a fulfillment of what Isaiah said: 

Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. …then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.[ Isaiah 35:4-7a]

Jesus goes on from here with a new understanding. He knows change is difficult; he knows we we have fearful hearts. Yet he says, over and over, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear.” May we hear him; may we follow him, no matter how it changes us. May we learn the love of God so that our fear and trembling turns into songs of joy.

Amen

Leaping Love

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

15th Sunday After Pentecost/B • September 1, 2024 (Labor Day)

Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Listen to the sermon here

Happy Labor Day! You probably already have ways to celebrate this holiday but do you know its history? At the end of the 1800s, American labor conditions were grim and there was a rising tide of anger at the injustice. In 1894, that anger found expression in a march on September 5, 1882, by 10,000 workers through New York City who took the day off and marched to show their strength. Soon the custom spread and by 1894, Labor Day became a federal holiday. But that only affected federal workers; it took decades for the unions to win the right to the holiday in other industries. So today, along with barbecues and family gatherings, we ought also to remember that this holiday has its roots in the longing for justice of all people.

God Loves Holidays

Holidays have a special place in God’s plan. Literally in the beginning, at creation, God rests and that creates the sabbath, in Hebrew, Shabbat. In Exodus 23:9-12, God commands rest on the seventh day, not only for God’s people but also for undocumented people living among them, for slaves, even for animals. That theme of seven is extended in what is called the “Jubilee Year”, God’s command that debts be canceled every seven years. Also, it’s extended in the seven great festivals of God’s people: Passover, First Fruits, Pentecost, Day of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah, Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur and Tabernacles. Every one of these festivals has a set of customs that make it special. At Passover, we are encouraged to remember God saving God’s people out of slavery in Egypt; at Tabernacles, God’s people are told to build a booth with a roof open to the sky and to spend time there, remembering the greatness of God in creation. Every one of these festivals is meant to bring us to a passionate appreciation of the presence of God.

We see that passion in the reading today from the Song of Solomon. The song is a love story and a lot of preachers over the years make it into an allegory of Israel and God. But I think it’s more of a metaphor, a way of saying “Look, this is what being with God is like: it’s like being in love.” The section we read today imagines a girl watching her boyfriend approach. He’s leaping over things to get to her; nothing is going to stand in his way. And when he gets there, he begs her to come away, because, he says, “…the time of singing has come…” The whole Song of Solomon is a duet, and in other parts we hear of his passionate love for her. Why is it like to love God? The Song tells us: “It’s like the first time you were in love.”

Turning Passion Into Routine

The trouble is we have an immense ability to turn this feeling into something routine and boring. In 1904, Virginia Cary Hudson wrote was 10 and wrote this view of church. 

Before I go into the house of the Lord with praise and thanksgiving, I lift up mine eyes unto the town clock…to see if I am late. It is not etiquette to be late.

Do not hop, skip, jump or slide in the church vestibule. Tip. Tip all the way to your seat. Be sure and do not sit in other people’s pews Jesus wouldn’t care but other people would. Paying money makes it yours to sit in…. Never punch people in church, or giggle or cross your legs. Crossing your legs is as bad as scratching or walking pin front of people or chewing gum…

[Hudson, O Ye Jigs and Tulips, p. 6f]

We have made worship something that proceeds in an orderly, careful manner and rarely offends people.

This is at the heart of what we read this morning from the Gospel of Mark. Jewish religion revolved at Jesus’ time revolved around a set of practices that governed the most basic bits of life like eating and drinking. The rules were meant to remind you that God was involved in every moment, the rules were meant to keep you looking up to God every day. There were rules for Shabbat, there were rules for food, there were rules for everything. The rules began as practices that helped people keep God’s covenant but over time, they became a burden for many.

In this chapter of Mark, the issue is handwashing. Now, we’ve all come through the pandemic, we all had those lessons, those endless lessons, on how important washing your hands is, how to do it, how long to do it. But this washing isn’t so much about germs and cleanliness as about being pure before God. Many Jewish rituals involved symbolic washing with water. We’ve taken one over, and we call it baptism. This handwashing is a kind of every day, every time you eat, baptism. It’s not even actually washing your hands; it’s enough to pour a little water over your fist.

A group of Pharisees have come to see Jesus. This isn’t the first time; you might remember earlier this summer a group of Pharisees argued with him because his disciples were eating on the sabbath. The Pharisees are often looked down on by Christians, but the truth is, they were trying to bring people back to a daily faithful observance of God’s covenant. But here are these followers of Jesus, eating without doing the ritual handwashing. They should be setting a good example, right? So Jesus: what about this? What about the “tradition of the elders” which is to say the customs of how God is worshiped.

Jesus’ response is pointed. He says they’re just paying lip service to God. They quote the tradition of the elders; he says that they are “…teaching human precepts as doctrines.” And then he goes on to list all kinds of bad things summed up by the phrase “evil intentions”. What he seems to be talking about is what Buddhists call desire. In our culture, we almost equate sin with sexual immorality so it’s interesting that in Jesus’ list of theft, murder, avarice, envy, slander and pride all occupy equal places. What keeps us from God isn’t whether we perform some ritual or another, it’s that we do it for ourselves rather than as a way to watch for God.

The Meaning of Worship

For that’s what worship is really meant to be: watching for God, hoping God will appear, hoping we will feel God’s presence. It’s not guaranteed, and it doesn’t always happen. We’ve all sat through boring church services; I know I’ve conducted my share. Part of the problem is that we want to be comfortable. And we’re most comfortable when we know what’s going on, when we know what to do. Like Virginia said, there is etiquette and every church has its set of customs. 

We’re in transition here. We know where we’ve been. I love the story of the day people of this congregation left the little wood church just a few yards from here, carrying books, and I’m sure other things, marching into this building, ready to carry on. They were making a transition and have been hard for some. The pews were different, the walls were different, the place was different. What if they had said, “No, we’re not going.”? We have a great history as a church and that march symbolizes it all, that carrying things forward to a new place and a new time. Hebrews calls those in our past, “the cloud of witnesses” and we should honor those witnesses. Our congregation is not just those here today, it’s that cloud of witnesses whose gift to us is this church. 

But there’s another crowd we should honor and remember too and that’s all those who aren’t here yet: the future congregation of this church. What will they look like? Who will they be? What will they need? We are a church in transition but in reality, all churches are in transition and always have been. Forty years or so after the days Mark is writing about, the church faced its first great conflict precisely over rituals that had to do with eating and whether all Christians would keep kosher. Surely this story is here in Mark because it helped them see how to go forward. 

I started with Labor Day for a reason. Labor Day honors workers: all those who produce everything we need, everything we use. What is our work as followers of Jesus? What is our work as God’s people? What is our work as members of this church? Surely it is to share the love of God; surely it is to refuse to let our desire for comfort get in the way of sharing the joy of God’s presence. So today, close with a quote from Anne Sexton’s poem, “Welcome, Morning”.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.” ― Anne Sexton

Amen

And Also Many Cattle

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

14th Sunday After Pentecost/Year B • August 25, 2024

Jonah 4

Imagine something with me. It’s morning, a still, cool day like today, on the edge of fall. It’s quiet, no breeze, no sound. The sun is shining and you’re out for a walk through a little woods. You come to a pond and sit on a big rock that was there before this was Pennsylvania. On an impulse, you reach down and pick up a little stone, throw it out as far as you can into the pond, where it makes a splash and a little wave. The circle of the wave moves out, slowly, the only disturbance on the pond. Outward and outward, as far as you can see.

Now come back and let’s talk about Jonah and this funny last chapter. Last Sunday, we left things in a fine state. Jonah heard God’s call, repented, went to Ninevah preached the greatest one sentence sermon of all time judging from the reaction. Everyone in Ninevah repented—changed!—stopped doing evil. God repented too: decided not to destroy them. It seems like that’s a place to ring down the curtain, doesn’t it? Time to celebrate. But we have this last little bit and it may be the most important part of all. 

Jonah’s Story

Jonah knows God has repented and it makes him mad. Isn’t it annoying when you tell someone they’re going to be in trouble and then they somehow wiggle out? Jonah has had a hard time getting to this point, he had three days in the belly of the fish, he had the whole business of finding out after that he still had to go to Ninevah, he had the trip to Ninevah. He had looked forward to seeing the whole city destroyed. It’s what they deserved. Now, that’s gone; God has repented. Jonah knows God and suspected this might happen; he thought God just might change his mind and make the whole trip useless. So he’s pouting. Do you know what I mean by pouting?  He’s mad, but instead of letting it out, he gets dramatic. “…now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” [Jonah 4:3] It’s a hot day, that dry heat that is just unrelenting and God is trying to coax Jonah back like a mother pacifying a child. So God makes a tree grow up just to give him some shade and Jonah sits under it in a little shack he’s built.

Jonah Pouts

But the next day, right at dawn, a worm starts to chew on the tree; God sent it, like God sent the fish and the tree. There’s a scorching east wind that gets under the shelter. “The sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint.” [Jonah 4:7f] Once again, Jonah is angry and once again he pouts: “It would be better for me to die than to live”, he says. Do you know this feeling—the desperate sense that you just can’t take anymore? We speak of “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”, a proverb that picks up the experience we all have when just one small thing is too much to bear. When my son Jason was 12 or so and couldn’t have something he wanted, he would say, “I’m having a bad life.” This line was always delivered after great sighs; usually it was spoken in response to one of those parental inquiries, “What’s wrong Jason?”—“I’m having a bad life.” Jonah is having a bad life.

We have a bad life too, at times, so it’s important to see how God responds. First, God asks whether Jonah’s anger is appropriate: “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?”, God asks, and Jonah of course says, “I do…I’m angry enough to die.” This is God’s response: you didn’t grow this vine, you didn’t tend it, you didn’t do anything for it; the vine grew up overnight and now it’s gone. But here you are angry because I decided to save Ninevah’s 120,000 people. I love God’s description of these people: they can’t tell their right hand from their left. And many cattle too, God says. Now the word that we translate ‘cattle’ really means all the animals there. Stunning isn’t it? For a month we’ve been reading and thinking about this city, about its destruction and salvation, did you ever think about the cattle? Here’s Almighty God, not fooled at all by the repentance of the city, knowing there is trouble ahead—they don’t know their right from their left, they’re children morally!—and God still has time to care about the cattle. God cares about the dogs, the goats, the little creatures e don’t even see most days. God’s circle of care is bigger than we ever thought.

Whom do you care about? Who does God care about? Is your list looking more like God’s? That seems to be the heart of the story of Jonah. Remember what we said at the beginning? This story uses an ancient time as its setting, but it was written down for God’s people when they were feeling smug and distinct. They’d come back from exile and pushed out all the foreigners. What a scandalous story in that context: a good religious man does all the bad things and the bad Gentiles do all the good things. And God cares for them all, teaches them all, saves them all. It’s scandalous: it will never work. But it does. God is there, in the process of each day, stretching people, teaching, growing the circle of care.

Growing Our Circle of Care

I’ve had to grow my circle. Almost 30 years ago, when my kids, Jason and Amy were almost grown, I moved far from them. It was hard and I started making a daily practice of sitting in the church’s sanctuary and praying for both of them. I’d take a few minutes to picture them, think about what they were going through, and ask God to work in their day. After a while, Jacquelyn and I were married and I became a parent to May, so the prayer time had to grow to include them. Amy got married to Nick: now I had six to pray for each day. Jason married Jenelle, Amy and Nick had Maggie, the list kept getting longer. By then I’d added onto it whoever was sick in the church. Then I went to a conference and someone suggested praying for all the members of your church daily: reading their names from a list. Amy and Nick had Andrew and later Bridget. Jason and Jenelle had Jude and Jonah. The list just kept getting longer. I added parents: my mother, Jacquelyn’s mother and father. There’s no end and that’s what God let me discover: I can’t draw a little line and say, “These are it, the rest don’t belong.” The list was like the circle in the pond: it just kept growing and now it’s grown to include all of you.  

It’s not easy to grow your circle. It means thinking of what people want and need who aren’t like you. Sometimes we fail. For a few years, I attended a Presbyterian church in Milwaukee. A group of Hmong people had settled nearby after being refugees and they wanted to be part of the church. They liked their new church so much that the Hmong women made a banner to hang on the pulpit. Hmong banners are beautiful, full of intricate tiny stitches that make vibrant patterns and the cloth is dyed with saffron, so they are bright orange. The pastor hung the banner one Sunday. But the session met soon after and declared that since orange isn’t a liturgical color, the banner would have to come down. 

The people on the session, their version of a the consistory, weren’t bad people. They were faithful Christians, they loved their church. They had been brought up seeing green, red, white, blue and purple banners, the liturgical colors. That saffron colored banner with its bright orange? They just couldn’t stretch enough to take it in. Maybe they repented eentually; I moved away shortly after the banner controversy. Honestly? I don’t think God cared about liturgical colors. I think God loved that banner. I think God likes a rainbow of colors, after all that’s the sign God chose for a covenant after the flood. I wonder what would have happened if they had stretched their circle, seen that the banner was a glorious fabric of devotion, woven those folks into the heart of that church. 

God Is Shaping Us

God is shaping us, shaping our history, expanding the circle. To be the people of God is to consciously choose to be a part of this process. It means to understand we are not here on our own and our choices are not ours alone to make. We have a purpose, the same purpose we had from the beginning. At our creation, Genesis says God placed us in a garden and told us to keep each other company and take care of the garden. That’s still our purpose and God wants to stretch us to fit it. Of course we don’t always succeed. But look at the story of Jonah:  the only one who succeeds there is God. Jonah runs away and ends up back where he started. It doesn’t matter that we don’t always succeed; God has given us repentance as a tool so we can come back, come home, remember our purpose and start over. Wouldn’t today be a good day to begin? It takes some stretching: remember, there are all those cattle, all those people, all of creation. God means to stretch us out until we finally know our right from our left, until we know the big love of God is big enough for all, big enough even for each one.

I started with a pond. Genesis says God stilled the waters at creation: God is everywhere in the pond. And God drops us in, and the effect of what we do spreads like the waves farther and farther, far beyond what we know. We may never know how much a kind word, a prayer for someone, an invitation matters. There are all those people God cares about and means us to Care for. And then of course: also many cattle.

Amen.

Go!

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

13th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 18, 2024

Jonah 3

Today’s reading from Jonah is every preacher’s fantasy. We’ve seen Jonah hear God’s call, run away, be hurled into the sea, rescued by God’s hand. He’s changed by the experience. He learns, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord,” and when he’s left on the shore, God again calls him in just the same way to go to Nineveh and announce its destruction. 

The text tells us Nineveh was a great city that would take three days to walk across. Imagine Jonah coming into Nineveh, tired, thirsty after a long trip. He’s determined to finally do what God called him to do. He walks a third of the way into the great city and says, “‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ It’s a one sentence sermon. It doesn’t have an engaging introduction doesn’t have three points, it, it doesn’t have a focus on what the preacher hopes will happen. Just: “…he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” What do you think he imagined would happen? 

Repent!

What actually happens according to the story is amazing. What happens is that everyone takes him seriously; everyone repents! The king makes repentance a legal duty. I’ve been preaching over 50 years, and I’ve never had a reaction like this. I’ve had people walk out, leave the church, get mad; I’ve had people tell me something I said inspired them or that it was a good sermon, I’ve even had people applaud. Never once in all that time did the whole place rise up and say, “Wow!! Jim is right! We need to change our ways right now!” What is going on here?

The key is the reaction to the sermon: repentance. Notice Jonah doesn’t preach repentance; he never says, “God’s going to destroy the city unless you repent.” He just says God’s going to knock it all down. But the response of the people is immediate. The outward signs of repentance are fasting and wearing plain clothes; the text calls it sack cloth. When the King hears about Jonah, he changes his clothes and fasts along with everyone else.

No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. [Jonah 3:7bf]

Look how complete this is: not just the king, not just the nobility, not just the peasants, even the animals are going to repent. This is funny, isn’t it? We have a little dog named Ellie. She’s a good dog but once in a while she gets something she shouldn’t have. She likes paper towels; when she gets one, she runs away and hides, she knows she’s being bad. When you get it back, she looks up and is sincerely repentant.

‘Repent’ isn’t a word we commonly use except in cartoons about silly street preachers. What does it mean? At its heart, repentance means two things. One is recognizing you’re wrong; the other is changing your direction. Most of us have had this experience. Maybe you’re driving somewhere you’ve never been; you have directions, but it just doesn’t feel right. Eventually, you admit you’re wrong and stop and ask for directions, you turn and go the right way. The last time this happened to me, I was on the way here. I stopped at the Starbucks over off Market Street shortly after I started here; I knew Locust Grove Road went all the way there. I was feeling good about finding my way in this new place, turned left off Market, right on Locust Grove Road to that place where it splits, and happily followed the yellow line off to the left. Iit took me a few minutes to figure out I’d made a wrong turn, stop, go back and get on the right road.

Three Repentances

This story is all about repentance; it’s all about change. Remember where we started?—with Jonah running away. God said, “Go to Nineveh”. But he didn’t; he went to Joppa and got on a ship for Spain, the opposite way. It takes a great, life-threatening crisis to get Jonah to turn around; it takes being in the belly of the fish for three days to get Jonah to repent.

Now we come to a second story of repentance by the community of Nineveh. The text imagines people hearing the threat of destruction and immediately repenting. Wow! Furthermore, the King gives us the reason: “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’ [Jonah 3:9] Just like Jonah, the impetus for change comes from a crisis that threatens their very lives. What’s going on here?

Jonah is pictured as a prophet from about the 700’s up in the north, in the kingdom of Israel. That was a time when Israel’s society had left the justice envisioned by God’s covenant and traded it for systems that produced a few rich people and many poor people. They had left faithful observance of God’s covenant and there are several prophets in the Bible who denounce this. They prophesy a coming judgement but unlike the Ninevites, no one does anything about it. Ultimately, Israel is conquered by people whose capital is Ninevah. What seems to be in the background here is a comedy with a serious thought: look, those awful Gentiles over in Ninevah repented but God’s own people did not.

Why don’t people repent? Why don’t we change? Of course there are institutional reasons: some people benefit and they don’t want to give that benefit up. But I think also the familiar, the customary, gives us a sense of comfort. We like things as they are. Change can feel threatening. One of my churches wanted, so they said, to grow. They called me as their pastor for that precise purpose. Yet one Sunday after church when I was new, one of the ladies in the church took me aside and said, “We hope you will get new people in the church but we hope you will get our sort of people.” I knew what she meant: don’t change anything. 

There’s a third repentance, a third change in Jonah’s story, although we don’t always see it that way. Remember Jonah’s whole message was “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed”. But at the very end of this part of the story we have this amazing result: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it”. [Jonah 3:10] God changes God’s mind! Is this a little bait and switch? “I’ll threaten them but if they behave, it’s all good.” As someone who grew up hearing, “Wait ’til your father gets home” as the ultimate threat, this surprises me.

A Lesson from Dad

Yet, I also remember one of my dad’s most effective lessons. I was 16, it was winter, and I had the car and had been explicitly told to do whatever errand I was sent on and not to go anywhere else because it was snowing. But I had a girlfriend. I had the car. So stopped at her house. When I left, the wheels spun, the car shifted, and I hit a sign with the back. Not enough to hurt anyone; too much damage to go unnoticed. It was my first accident and it scared me. 

My mother was furious when I got home; my dad was out. I was shaken up, and I went to bed, but not to sleep. I knew I was in serious trouble. I heard the door when my dad came home, felt the time when I knew my mother was telling him, heard him come upstairs. I knew I was in for it. The door opened, and I laid there and in a moment, my father, this stern man who had always been the ultimate threat, quietly said, “Your mother told me about the car. Are you ok?” I blubbered and said yes. He nodded and then he said, “That’s all that matters. Get some sleep.”, and closed the door. That moment of grace and care did more to change me, make me a more careful driver, than any punishment could have done.

Jonah’s story climaxes with three stories of repentance, three stories of change. Jonah has changed his view of God. He knows now that his own judgement is not enough. He’s answered God’s call. The people of Nineveh, facing a crisis, find the courage to change. Even the king sits in sackcloth, hoping God will repent. And God, whose children these are, whose beloved children, is so pleased, the disaster is averted. God repents. The forty days come and go; the disaster never occurs. Perhaps when our fears don’t happen, there is a lesson to be learned as well.

Years after the comment about bringing in “our sort of people”, that church did begin to grow. It wasn’t easy and it took changes, changes that weren’t always comfortable. But I remember smiling one day, looking at the back of the church, where that same lady was happily chatting with one of the new members, a woman who came to us in desperate straits, whom the church embraced, who had become, like the lady, a deacon, a sister in Christ in the covenant of that church.

Following Jesus

Change is hard. Repentance is hard. But what does Jesus say? At the beginning of his ministry, the very start, Mark tells us, “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ Repentance—change—is the gateway to the gospel. And isn’t our call, all of us, to share that good news, that God’s love, embodied in Jesus Christ, has changed us? Amen

The Deep End

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Exploring With Jonah – Part 2

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

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor ©2024

12th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 11, 2024

Jonah 2:1-10

When I was seven or eight, our family belonged to the Hopewell Country Club, and we spent summer days at the pool. Everyone had a little rubbery circle worn on your wrist or, if you were cool, around your ankle. The band’s color defined what part of the pool you could use. But like all kids, we saw boundaries more as a challenge than a limit. So sometimes, we’d slip under the ropes and floats that marked our zone. There would be a few moments of stolen fun but inevitably your mother would yell, “Get out of the deep end! Get out of the deep end!” What my mother knew was that I needed to be near a wall. The deep end of the pool was a mysterious zone where danger lurked. Even later when I had passed the swimming tests and taken a diving class, the deep end always gave me a little shiver. 

Jonah in the Deep End

Life has deep ends. Sometimes there are boundaries and markers that warn of our approach to the deep end; sometimes we find ourselves in the deep end with no warning at all. Have you been to the deep end? Today’s reading is about Jonah in the depths, in the deep end. , but it is as much about what to do when you are in the deep end. Last week, we read how God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, a great and evil city and how Jonah ran away from God. He took a boat for a foreign shore, but God hurled a wind that threatened the boat and the sailors hurled Jonah into the water. There, drowning, he was swallowed by a big fish. That’s where we left him last week, in the belly of the fish. 

He says,

You cast me into the deep,
   into the heart of the seas,
   and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
   passed over me.
Then I said, “I am driven away
   from your sight;
how shall I look again
   upon your holy temple?”
The waters closed in over me;
   the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped around my head
   at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
   whose bars closed upon me for ever;”
[Jonah 2:3-6a]

The deep end of life is the place where you feel yourself far from God’s care, distant from God’s presence, distant from God’s call. 

The Deep End

We arrive at the deep end in various ways. Sometimes an event overwhelms us and we feel God has deserted us. We go to the doctor and suddenly hear awful words that change the afternoon; a friend or a family member dies or is killed, and we cannot see the sense or find comfort, and we rage at God and feel deserted. 

Other times, the deep end is a place we have gone on our own. Our society has a pervasive amount of information about dangers. We know how dangerous heroin and cocaine are. We know how dangerous smoking is. We could list hundreds of other things we know are bad for us. We see glittering commercials about casinos; we hear next to nothing about the toll of those addicted to gambling whose desperation becomes a deep end that destroys. Every year, every day, people voluntarily take the first steps into the deep end. Once there, they discover it is a one way journey that not only destroys them physically but often spiritually as well. The deep end is the place where we cannot feel God’s presence, where we feel alone and desperate. 

Have you been to this place? The fish gets all the attention when we remember this story: we like happy endings and the fish is the happy ending. But before that there is real terror here. There is real fear. People in recovery from alcoholism or other addictions often speak of hitting bottom. Jonah speaks of “the pit”: it’s the same place. Many experiences have a pit. A woman said, “I think I hit rock bottom about 3 weeks after my husband left, and now I’m slowly swimming back up. But I’m a wounded swimmer.” 

Jonah is a wounded swimmer when the fish swallows him. Most of us are wounded as well at one time or another. So Jonah’s experience is ours. We have been to the pit: we have been to the deep end. But there is hope in the deep end. Joseph Hart, writing about the impact of trauma and crisis, notes,

When an accident or disaster strikes, to say nothing of a deliberate act like torture, the old ways in which we saw the world no longer make sense. We ask, “How could this happen?” and “Where was God?” And by slowly struggling to answer such questions, we develop a new and deeper understanding. We grow.

Hart goes on to describe a doctor who had built a successful practice and earned many honors. At 62, he suffered a heart attack followed by a stroke. He lost the ability to drive or practice and he lost his purpose. Eventually he had to be hospitalized under a suicide watch. But with his purpose gone, he found a spiritual core and rediscovered his religious faith. Eventually he found a new purpose and new meaning in life.

Jonah Finds a Purpose

This is what happens to Jonah. Jonah finds purpose when he responds to God’s call. He starts up when he starts back, back to God, back to God’s hope for him. 

7 As my life was ebbing away,
   I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to you,
   into your holy temple.
8 Those who worship vain idols
   forsake their true loyalty. [Jonah 2:7f]

Here is the key to purpose and to a way back from the deep end: to rediscover God’s hope for your life, to hear God’s call to you, to put God’s purpose at the center of your own life and make that purpose the guide to every day. 

We often try to fight the deep on our own. We avoid admitting we’re in the deep end. “I can handle it,” we say. We try to cope, moving faster and faster until we can’t see where we are from the frantic spin. Surely in the midst of the storm Jonah swam like crazy, but the answer wasn’t to swim harder, it was to go where God wanted him to go. Swimming harder won’t help if you’re going in the wrong direction. 

Every Sunday we pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” Temptation is an experience when we are seduced into believing we are enough, we can set our own course, live from our own purpose. That path leads to the deep end. One of the reasons for a church is to help us avoid the deep end if we can. But the good news, the truly great news, is that even in the deep end, even when we think we are lost forever to the love of God, we are not. God is waiting, even in the deep end to hear us, to lead us, to rescue us. What Jonah learns in the deep end is that God has heard him. And knowing that God has heard him, he finally is ready to live from God’s call. 

Are You In the Deep End?

Have you been to the deep end? Are you there now? There are many who are. I said last week and I say again, this is a church in transition. Saying that brings to mind the pastoral search, but it’s not just about a new pastor. It’s also about sharpening and sharing our understanding of God’s call and purpose for this church. Surely part of that call is to help people come back from the deep end. After all, the church is meant to be a hospital for sinners, not a hotel for the saved. 

We left Jonah last week in the deep end, in the belly of the great fish. Today we heard him say, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”  [Jonah 2:9b] The fish leaves him on the shore, but he’s not the same Jonah that left. When we have been to the deep end and learned that indeed, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord”, neither are we, neither is anyone. What do you imagine Jonah thought there, wet, sea weed tangled around him, maybe bruised from his landing? I wonder if he remembered God’s call? I wonder if he was just happy to be alive? He’s back where he started; no progress made at all. But perhaps God has made some progress, for Jonah is not tv he same person he was when he ran away. We’ll leave him there on the beach today, and come back next week. 

God’s Call

We need a week to think about our call as well. Sometimes when we imagine a calling, we think it’s big and important, and we know that we are neither. But God’s call comes into our lives in many ways. Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.” May what you do this week indeed be full of great love.

Amen.

Meet Mr. Jonah

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Exploring the Book of Jonah #1

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

By The Rev. James E. Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

11th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 4, 2024

Scripture Jonah Chapter 1

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Superman! We all know who Superman is; we know at least part of his story, we know he has a cape, most of us know he passes the day working as mild-mannered Clark Kent. Whether we watch an old 1950s episode of Superman or the latest movie, all individual Superman stories have the same plot: something happens, Superman appears and saves the day, an evil genius arises and finds a way to weaken Superman who is temporarily out of action. During that time, the evil genius creates mayhem, but Superman eventually triumphs and saves the world. But we go; we watch.

From the days of our ancestors gathered around fires, stories have intrigued us and the best ones are always old. Think of the story of a special man with a single flaw: his pride, his anger. When he gets angry, he does something shameful that ultimately proves his undoing. You’ve seen this story a hundred times in various forms, but the amazing thing is that it was already old in Jesus’ time: it’s the plot line of Homer’s Iliad, which is actually titled, The Wrath of Achilles. We love stories and this summer we are going to try an experiment: we are going to spend this month exploring Jonah. Why Jonah? Because Jonah is a book with you and me in it: it is a story that invites us to share our own stories of God’s call in our lives.

Meet Mr. Jonah

I know as soon as I said Jonah, a lot of us raced ahead to the whale. Actually, there is no whale, it’s a big fish, and we’ll get to that along the way. Don’t be in such a rush! Even Superman movies start by introducing him before they get to all the gee whiz stuff and introducing Jonah is just what I have in mind today. Today, we’ll meet Mr. Jonah and make it clear how we can use his story to help us understand what God is doing right here, right now. In the next few weeks, we’ll see him struggle with God’s call, just as we often do. 

Was there a real, historical Jonah? The answer is: possibly—and the real one may have nothing to do with our story. How can that be? Think of our own stories. Do you remember Davy Crockett? Some I suspect are already humming the Davy Crockett theme song in their heads. Davy Crockett wrote a brief story about some of his adventures, but others expanded on them, and he became a legend in his own time. In our imagination, he’s a courageous warrior and a man of simple but true homespun wisdom he finally gave his life in a fight for freedom at the Alamo. The facts of his life are quite different. Crockett abandoned his family to go hunting and the fight at the Alamo was actually an insurrection. What interests us about Davy Crockett is not his biography but his legend and the story of a man making a way in the wilderness.

Even if we don’t know much about the historical Jonah, we do know enough to imagine him. Just like us, he has what I call the Daily Problem. He needs to eat every day, he needs something to drink every day. He has a to-do list. He gets annoyed with his neighbors sometimes. He has a father—remember, Jonah son of Amittai?— who probably gives advice he doesn’t want sometimes. He is associated with a little village up in the north of Israel with a name that translates something like “wine press place”, so I like to think of him living in wine country, just like we do. He’s described in 2 Kings as a prophet, so his job is preaching and healing there. I imagine he has the same set of aches and pains we all have at times. 

Jonah’s Call

Jonah’s story was told among a group of people wrestling with what it meant to be chosen by God. That had always been Israel’s faith: God’s special care for them. But eventually, Israel was conquered, her people deported, and they had to ask how it could be that God would desert them. If you have ever felt deserted by God, if you have ever felt alone and afraid, you know just how they felt. Why were they defeated? Why had God abandoned them? Would God ever change and take them back? They asked these questions, and they began to tell this story of a man just like them who heard God’s call and how he acted.

Jonah’s story begins with God’s call.

Go to the great city of Ninevah and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. [Jonah 1:2] 

Have you ever been to Nineveh? I thought not. But maybe you have in a way. Nineveh is the place you fear, the place where you are a stranger and everyone is your enemy. To this day, Israel remembers how the Assyrians, whose capital was Nineveh, conquered the northern tribes 700 years before Christ and deported them. The whole ancient world knew Nineveh as an emblem of torture and cruelty and irresistible violence. It brought to mind the same darkness the word ‘Auschwitz’ does for us. 

But here is God saying, as if it were nothing, go to this foreign, fearsome, place and tell them to repent. Now that can only have two results. Either they will laugh at you—or believe you and take it out on you. Imagine God calling you to go to New York, the financial capital of a great worldwide empire, to announce its destruction. Maybe you would be laughed out of town; maybe you would be jailed as a threat. Neither choice is good. 

That’s what Jonah thought too. Maybe he thought God made a mistake; maybe he just didn’t like the odds. What he does about the call is run the other way. He goes to Joppa, a busy port, and buys passage to Tarshish, The writer assumes you know the geography but just in case you don’t, let me explain. Nineveh was a city in what’s now Iraq; the ruins are still there. It’s about 550 miles east of Israel. Tarshish, on the other hand, is about 2,500 miles west, somewhere in southern Spain. It was famous as a Phoenician city that exported tin and other metals.

Running Away from God’s Call

Jonah runs away. He thought Tarshish would be beyond the presence of the Lord. How far do you have to go to get away from God? Jonah thinks Spain but he’s mistaken. The Psalmist asks “Where can I go from your Spirit?” [Ps 139:7] God is everywhere. Jonah sails off west, but the sea can be ferocious. It’s an image the Bible frequently uses for chaos. Creation, according to Genesis 1, begins with a primordial dark tossing sea called in Hebrew, “Tohu Bohu”. God’s power is controlling the sea, and that theme is repeated over and over again. In the midst of the storm, the sailors want to lighten ship. They throw Jonah overboard, a sad necessity to them, perhaps to him the end of the voyage. 

The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. [Jonah 1;17]

But God isn’t finished with Jonah. He’s swallowed by a big fish.

See?—no whale. Sorry, I didn’t write the story, I just preach it.  

We Are God’s Tools

There’s a lot to think and pray about here. First is the whole idea of a call. What is your call? What is our call as a church? Most of us have tools of some sort. I don’t mean just the screwdrivers in the garage, I mean things we use to get things done: the broom, the vacuum, the flipper for your eggs. Every single one has a purpose and if we don’t use the right tool, we do a poor job. I have a hammer, just a regular old carpenter’s hammer. But it lives down in my basement, two flights of stairs away from where Jacquelyn is asking me to put a nail in the wall to hang a picture sometimes. And you know, I’m just lazy enough that often I look around for something to hit that nail with: maybe the flat side of a wrench or the handle of a screwdriver. It doesn’t work very well. Every task has an appropriate tool and caring in creation is the main task God has set humanity. We are the tools God uses and calling is simply being the right tool for a purpose of God’s. We look around and say, “Oh, that’s a Phillips head screw, I need the Phillips head screwdriver,” or “I need the big sauce pan that has a lid.” God looks around and finds one of us and knows we are the right tool for God’s purpose.

But a hammer doesn’t have a will of its own; we do. So we get to choose. Jonah chose to run away and in all honesty, so do we sometimes. But God’s purpose doesn’t change; it doesn’t in this story, it doesn’t in history. What changes is our willingness to say yes to God’s call, yes to God’s purpose, yes to living from God’s purpose. 

Your Call

What is your call? Maybe you know already; maybe you haven’t felt that movement of the heart. Hearing God’s call takes some listening. Often when we think of prayer, we think of what we say. But prayer can also be simply listening, being still. God’s call is there if we are quiet enough to see it, hear it, feel it. Moses was a middle-aged fugitive who’d made a new life in a foreign country. He worked as a herdsman, married the boss’s daughter. One day he was out with the flocks, and he noticed a bush burning without being consumed. Now the rabbis say hundreds of people had seen this and passed it by. But Moses turned aside. Moses went and listened and God called him to an incredible, amazing life leading his people out of slavery. What part of God’s purpose are you uniquely, wonderfully made to accomplish? And what is the call of this church? What purpose of God’s is it meant to serve, meant to accomplish?

I’m going to end with that question and I hope this week you’ll think about and pray about your call. I hope this week you’ll think about and pray about the call of this church. We’ll leave Mr. Jonah there in the belly of the fish for now and see what happens next week. What happens when you run away from God’s call? What happens when you embrace it?

Amen.

Leftovers

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A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ

by Rev. James Eaton ©2024

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost/B • July 28, 2024

John 6:1-21

This text includes two stories: Jesus feeding more than 5,000 people and Jesus walking to his disciples across the water. Because of the constraints of time, I’ve chosen to deal only with the first story in this sermon.

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.
– The Jewish prayer over bread, also used by Muslims.

Give us today our daily bread.
– The Lord’s Prayer

Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat
– Table grace at Michigan State Youth camp

Every culture has a way to say thank you at the beginning of a meal. In our home, May and I usually cook, but it’s Jacquelyn who offers the prayer: “Heavenly Father, thank you for this food and the person who prepared it.” We say grace because we know, deep down, we are not of ourselves enough: we need to be sustained, every day, by our daily bread.

Bread is interesting stuff. Sometime about 14,000 years ago, someone somewhere figured out that if you ground up grains, mixed them with water, and put them near a fire, the grains turned into something good to eat. Later, they discovered if you added something bubbly like beer, which we know is over 5,000 years old, the result was even better. Ever since, bread has been the common food of common people, and it weaves in and out of the whole Bible story. 

What to Do When 5,000 Show Up?

At the beginning of the story we read in John, Jesus has gone off to a mountain to meet with his disciples in private. Remember that geography is theology in the Bible: “The mountain” is frequently where God encounters prophets, from Moses at Mt. Sinai to Jesus later when he is transfigured. Mark says withdrew to let his disciples rest. John just says they went off by themselves and Jesus sat down. Sitting down is the position from which a rabbi teaches, so perhaps that’s what Jesus had in mind. Clearly, it’s a private party. But five thousand men show up – and their wives, significant others and children. What to do?

What amazes me about this story every time I go back to it is that it is so like us. I’ve been sitting with church committees for almost 50 years and every time a crisis occurs, the first thing that happens is someone talks about the cost. Philip does it here: “Two hundred denarii wouldn’t be enough.” Two hundred denarii is about eight months wages for most people. It’s an astounding sum. What’s the next thing we do, once we figure out we don’t have the money for the project? Don’t we look around to see what we do have? Andrew: here is a boy with five loaves and two dried fish. I’ve always wondered about this boy: it doesn’t say he offered his lunch, it doesn’t say he volunteered to share. These aren’t big loaves; the average lunch for a peasant is three barley loaves. Barley loaves are coarse and not as tasty as wheat bread; it’s what poor people eat. 

It’s easy to rush over the details that come next, but we shouldn’t. Jesus tells everyone to sit down; the Greek word here actually means “to recline”. That’s significant because poor people in this time ate standing up but rich people at feasts recline at table. He’s asking them to eat like they’re at a rich, wonderful banquet. Then Jesus gives thanks. “Blessed art thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” He starts distributing the bread and the fish, and it turns out there is more than enough for everyone.  If you grew up in a church where they’re comfortable with the supernatural, this is miraculous. If you grew up where preachers like to make things more natural, maybe you’ve heard that everyone just shared the lunches they’d brought—as if that wouldn’t be a miracle as well. It doesn’t matter which road you take, they both get to this place: there is this miraculous abundance in God’s care. 

What God Does

This is what God does. At creation, God makes a world with everything we need and then says to people, “Take care of it.” Eat whatever you want, God tells them, except from the tree of the experience of good and evil. In the wilderness, when God’s people are hungry and whining, they discover manna, a bread like substance that occurs naturally. God feeds people twice at the request of Elisha, once with leftovers. No wonder every religion, every culture, has a way of saying thanks: at it’s foundation, what we need to survive is all gift.

We say grace, but what if we really gave thanks? What if we gave thanks for each part of the meal – main dish, potatoes, vegetables—hopefully dessert! Someone raised that chicken, someone plucked it, packed it, put it out for us to buy. Someone grew the vegetables which needed rain and sun and earth. What if we gave thanks for those as well. It would take a long time to say that much thanks. Even just the bread would take a while if we thought of all the ingredients – water, yeast, oil, flour. The wheat alone contains miraculous abundance. Annie Dillard writes,

So far as I know, only one real experiment as ever been performed, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little strands placed end-to-end just about wouldn’t quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6,000 miles. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 166-67)

Jesus gives thanks—and there is miraculous abundance. My favorite part of this story is that there are leftovers. Remember where we started? We can’t afford it, there isn’t enough, we just have a little bit—now the disciples are scurrying about with baskets taking up the leftovers.

Some people want to seize Jesus—don’t let him get away, they cry. They wanted to make him King by force. Isn’t this like us too? We want to own Jesus, we want to make him our king, we want him to heal us, feed us, just us, not the others. But he slips away; he always does when we try to take charge of him. The only way to stay with Jesus is to stop making him ours and let ourselves belong to him. At the end of this story, he’s back where he started, up on a mountain.

Leftovers

The disciples have a new problem: taking up the leftovers. The text calls them “fragments”, the same word used by early Christians for the bread used in communion. What did they do with all those leftovers? Did they make bread pudding? Did they hand them out the next day? John doesn’t tell us, he moves on to Jesus using the image of bread for himself: “I am the bread of life”, he later says. 

And the boy, how did the boy react? Someone packed him a nice lunch: five loaves is a lot for a peasant boy and a couple of sardines to go along. I bet he looked forward to that lunch; boys get hungry and here he had everything he needed to be full, possibly something that didn’t happen every day. Going hungry isn’t something you forget. My dad grew up on a farm in Michigan and remembered going hungry. We always had enough to eat in the home where I grew up, but dad insisted that every dinner had to include a plate of bread, even though we seldom ate it. Did the boy give up his lunch voluntarily? Was he disappointed? John doesn’t say. But John does say everyone had as much as they wanted. So we know that at the end, the boy was full: he had enough.

This is what God wants: for us to feel the fullness and thanksgiving is both the method and the appropriate response. Fullness is not an amount but an attitude, a spiritual state Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna in 1942 when he was sent with his family to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Two years later he was sent to Auschwitz, where his family was murdered. Even there, he said thanks. He says in one place,

The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours of camp life was the awakening…We then began the tussle with our wet shoes, into Which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen… One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly minutes, I found a little bit of comfort: a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight

Even in the heart of darkness, even in the midst of evil, God intends our fullness. The writer of Ephesians prays, “…that you may be  filled to the full measure of all the fullness of God

How Wonderful to Be Full

This story is one of the few told in all four gospels. I think it’s told because it helps us understand who we are. We are the people who pick up the leftovers of God’s grace and give them out so that need everyone will have what they need. We are the people who pick up the leftovers of God’s grace and share them out as fragments that can fill someone with the full measure of God. It’s what we do every time we open the clothing closet; it’s what we do through Neighbors in Need and countless other missions. It’s what we do every time we welcome someone; it’s what we do every time we share communion. We take up the leftovers of the bread of life, share them out, so that all can indeed, like the boy, like the disciples, like the crowd, have what they need. We share them out as God’s blessing. 

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.

How wonderful to be full. May you be full today.

Amen.

Everyone Welcome

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Ninth Sunday After Pentecost/B • July 21, 2024

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Listen to the Sermon Here

What is the last project you finished? Maybe it was something small, like cleaning the house or mowing the lawn. Maybe it was big: moving or retiring after a long career It’s what’s going on at the beginning of today’s reading in Mark. Two weeks ago, we read how Jesus sent the disciples out in pairs to heal, and now they’ve just returned. Imagine how tired they are; think how excited they are. “We did it!,” they must have said and felt. Jesus tells them to come tell him everything, somewhere they won’t be interrupted. It doesn’t work: everyone barges in on them.

Jesus Had Compassion

Can you visualize this? Jesus and his friends get in a boat again. The sail goes up, they trim it, but the wind is against them. That’s called a lee shore, a lee is the side away from the wind. It’s hard to tack out from a lee shore, they aren’t making much progress. The crowds see them and run along the shore, following them. Later, we find out that they don’t get where they are going, they certainly don’t get the private celebration intended. Jesus looks at the people running on the shore, the ones pointing at them, the ones carrying sick people hoping for his touch and the text says, “He had compassion on them.” We’ve felt this too, haven’t we? The other night a friend told a story about a cat that used their backyard as a home base all summer. Then it got cold. One day he saw the cat, half frozen, brought it inside, warmed it, fed it. He had compassion. Thirteen years later, the cat still lives with them. Jesus has compassion. So they land the boat, and he turns to the crowd.

Jesus had compassion. He says that the people are like sheep without a shepherd. Now that’s a phrase with a long history in scripture. When Moses is near finishing his time leading God’s people, he prays,

“May the LORD , the God of the spirits of all mankind, appoint a man over this community 17 to go out and come in before them, one who will lead them out and bring them in, so the LORD’s people will not be like sheep without a shepherd.” [Numbers 27:16]

God appoints Joshua to carry on the leadership. ‘Jesus’ is the Greek form of the Hebrew word Joshua. 

Shepherd is the main Jewish image for a good leader. Ezekiel and Zechariah both use the image of a shepherd to judge the leaders of their day. And you heard Jeremiah use the same image in his prophecy. Bad kings are called bad shepherds. Remember last week when we read about Herod Antipas who executed John? Clearly Mark wants us to compare Herod and Jesus as shepherds. Our lectionary has left out the feeding of the 5,000 which is the next thing in Mark; you’ll hear about that in John’s version next Sunday. Jesus has compassion on these strangers, this crowd. Did you notice he doesn’t sort them out into groups? He doesn’t ask who is with him, who is against him, he doesn’t ask who is Jewish, who is Gentile, he doesn’t measure who deserves compassion. He has compassion on all of them. When they come ashore, the text says, people recognized him and began to bring the sick so they might be healed.

Jesus Heals Everyone

Now healing has a context for us that’s different from what it means here. We have in mind someone sick or injured who gets treatment and is cured. But here we have a Greek word with a much more expansive meaning. It means more than restoring health. It’s the same word that is used for being saved; it’s the same word that’s used for being cured or helped. It really means being restored to peaceful wholeness. Jesus restores people to a peaceful wholeness that lets them take up relationships and give their gifts as God intended. That’s what Jesus does; that’s what he sends his followers to do.

We see it in Paul’s ministry. He says in Ephesians, 

Remember that at one time you gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision” –a circumcision made in the flesh by human hands–remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. [Ephesians 1:11-13]

Paul is trying to heal divisions in the church at Ephesus. There, those who grew up as Jews and those who grew up at Gentiles are fighting, and he wants them to heal their division. The specifics don’t matter. We could substitute any set of divisions. We could talk about black and white people, progressives and evangelicals, Republicans and Democrats. Wherever we look, there are divisions that leave us in separate camps, railing about the other people.

Following Jesus Means Healing

We are meant to be people who heal divisions. Jesus looks at the crowds and has compassion; so should we. But what does that look like? It looks like Harriet Tubman. As a young, enslaved woman she was abused and injured, but her injury led her to have visions. She made an arduous, frightening escape to Pennsylvania in 1849. For many, that might have been enough. But Tubman wasn’t satisfied; she had compassion on her family, so she returned, despite the risk of being re-enslaved; she led her family to freedom. Then she went back for others, over and over again. For ten years, she risked her life freeing people. She fought in the Civil War and afterward retired to a city in New York where she opened her home to the elderly and destitute. This is healing; this is following Jesus. Tubman became a shepherd and she shepherded person after person to freedom and peace.

It’s good to remember a saint like Harriet Tubman. But most of us aren’t called to that sort of heroism. In our day-to-day lives, there are moments when we get to decide whether we want to offer a helping hand, a healing gesture. These gestures often feel trivial to us, but sometimes have the power to change the course of someone’s life.

This kind of transformative experience happened to Bill Price when he was 15 years old.

It was the fall of 1972, and Price was attending a reunion for a summer program he’d taken part in a few months before. He remembers standing outside at the end of the day, catching up with friends. Eventually, everyone said their goodbyes — leaving Price standing by himself.

“And sometimes when you’re alone, it’s OK,” Price said. “Sometimes when you’re alone, you feel bereft and abandoned. And that’s the way I felt then.”

Nearby, another group of teenagers stood laughing and talking.

“I found myself wishing so much to be a part of that group,” Price remembered.

One of the people in the group was a person named Wendy Westman. She and Price had only met in passing at the summer program a few months earlier. As Price stood there, feeling increasingly lonely, Westman turned around and asked him if he’d like to join her group.

“My life was transformed in that moment,” Price said.

Westman reaching out sparked a realization in Price: He could offer that same kindness to anyone, at any time.

“It’s so easy to see someone who seems left out and alone and notice them, say hello to them, be kind to them,” Price explained. “And my realization was [that] that is a gift that we can all give.”

Price went on to become a psychiatrist. A primary part of his job is being kind to his patients, listening to them and being attentive to their needs. Price attributes his understanding of the importance of kindness to that moment when he was 15 years old.

“To the extent that I’m a good person in my life today, it’s probably due to Wendy Westman inviting me to join her group,” he said.

[https://www.npr.org/2023/05/16/1176122566/kindness-good-news-caring]

Think how that moment of healing his loneliness led to so many others being healed

We Are the Fringe of His Cloak

We all know what it means to live in the midst of an epidemic. We all remember the way COVID-19 changed our lives. Sociologists tell us that today there is an epidemic of loneliness. There’s no vaccine and it doesn’t require masks; in fact, it requires unmasking, sharing ourselves, sharing God’s love. Harriet Tubman risked her life because of that love to heal and help slaves to become the free people God intended. Wendy Westman didn’t risk her life, she never was in danger of anything more than being rejected. But her gesture helped and healed.

Every day, in the news, on Facebook and other social media, in conversation, we’re invited to participate in division, to talk about the Others, to point fingers or buy into some new conspiracy theory about what They have done. But every day also: we’re invited by Christ to walk a different path, to heal, to look at others, all others with compassion. To remember that regardless of how important our divisions seem, God’s love doesn’t recognize them. Because in God’s love, there is just one embrace: everyone welcome. At the end of this reading in Mark, it says, “…wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak, and all who touched it were healed.” [Mark 6:56] We are the fringe of his cloak; we are meant to be the place where divisions and lives are healed.

Amen.

The music in the audio version of the sermon is called “Savfk – The Travelling Symphony” and is under a Creative Commons (BY 4.0) license.

So Much, So Little

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost/B • July 14, 2024

Mark 6:14-29

Who is Jesus? That’s the question that ties together the bits of Mark’s Gospel we’ve been reading this summer. We read these like a serial, as individual episodes, but together they are meant to form a longer story and to invite us into that story. Let’s remember where we were at the end of last week’s reading: Jesus, after being rejected at Nazareth, sends out his 12 disciples with specific instructions. Next Sunday, we’re going to read about their return and how the crowds gather, hoping to find healing with him. Last week we heard Jesus’ neighbors ask, “Who is this that teaches with authority?” Next week, he tries to go off privately with the disciples but people who’ve never met him recognize him and gather around him. Who is this Jesus? He heals, but he also does something unique: he authorizes others to heal, he creates a community of healing and hope.

The Story So Far

So let me start today by going back to last week’s reading and picking up one of the threads: the sending out of the disciples. He sends them out in pairs; no one goes alone. He tells them to pack light. I think I’m a pretty good packer and I pride myself on traveling light. On our last trip, I needed clothes for about 10 days, toiletries, chargers for my earphones, phone and iPad, special converters to let me use Spanish plugs, a jacket, a tie in case we went out fancy, a couple of pairs of shoes. I take a bottle of water and toss in some snacks for the airplane ride.      It took a suitcase and a backpack to hold it. But listen again to Jesus’ instructions. 

He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.

Wow! Now that’s traveling light. The staff is a walking stick and tool and in a pinch a defense against wild animals. But they have no airplane snacks. They don’t have any money, no bag, not even a clean shirt.

You see what he’s done? Many of the disciples come from prosperous families; they own boats, they own nets, they fish, one is a tax collector, which means he’s kind of an accountant. But he’s making them weak; he’s making them vulnerable. When they get hungry, they can’t stop at McDonald’s; they have to ask for food. When they get cold, they can’t just get a hotel room; they have to ask for hospitality. He strips them of everything but the clothes on their back, the sandals on their feet and a staff and says, “Ok, now go share the good news.”  

Next he gives them instructions for dealing with people they meet. They’re going to have to find places to stay and when they do, he wants them to appreciate that place. So no hoping they get a better offer! And he gives the best advice ever for dealing with those moments when someone turns them down, or they fail: “dust off your feet.” As a pastor of churches, I’ve seen so many people offer ideas, only to have them shut down by someone who says, “Oh, we tried that; it didn’t work.” That person never dusted off their feet. They are still carrying the dust of that failure, and they can’t see this is a new time, new people.

So that’s where we were last week. Jesus had sent these people out and what’s coming next week is the return of these disciples. They’re going to come back and tell Jesus everything they’ve been doing and there going to be a great gathering of people who need Jesus and the disciples to heal them. That’s where we’re going.

Today’s Reading: John and Herod

So we know where we’ve been, we know where we’re going. How does this week’s reading fit It starts with the same question, “Who is Jesus?” We’re given a list of the possibilities: Elijah, the prophet it was thought would return some day, a prophet like the old ones or John the Baptist, returned from the dead. Wait a minute: what’s this about John? Remember John the Baptist? He was a preacher who was baptizing people at the Jordan, including Jesus. Just like Jesus, John gathered a following proclaiming the Kingdom of God was near. Just like Jesus, he made the authorities nervous. He made some real enemies at Herod’s palace because Herod got himself into a twisted situation. He divorced his wife, the daughter of another king, which causes a small war. Then he takes his brother’s wife as his. John has been preaching that this is wrong, that it’s sinful, and that rulers who commit adultery and sin before God shouldn’t be obeyed. That got him arrested; that will pretty much get you arrested in any time.

Now I’ve wrestled all week with how much about to say about Herod and this court. Herod was not supposed to be king; he had to out conspire four older brothers and his father to get there, probably getting some of them murdered along the way. He’s king because the Romans made him king and the Romans made him king so he’d keep taxes flowing to them. He’s doing that and using his share to build a whole new city up near Galilee called Tiberius, where almost as an afterthought, he’s throwing small farmers off the land. As to the court, I’m going to assume we’ve all seen enough of some version of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to let our imaginations supply the details. You can bet everyone there has more than two tunics, most have a closet full. They have money in their belt, they not only have a bag, they have a set with designer labels. They’re not worrying about hospitality, they’re worrying about how to get ahead of whoever is just above them. 

The social life of these people is parties, where they can snipe at each other behind their backs, eat, plot, make deals. At one of these parties, Herod’s step-daughter does an amazing dance and Herod’s so pleased—or so drunk—he tells her he’ll give her anything she wants. She’s a smart girl; Mark calls her Herodias, but her name is really Salome. She asks her mom what she should ask for. Now remember, her mom is Herod’s former sister-in-law who’s now become his wife; she’s the one John the Baptist was complaining about. So she tells Salome, ask for John’s head on a platter; the girl goes back, asks for that, and Herod decides to give it to her.

 What’s interesting is how Herod responds. Marks says, “The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her.” Think what that means. Herod respects John. We’ve already been told, 

Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.

John is Herod’s conscience. But Herod has other worries: he needs to look strong. He isn’t really; he’s only as strong as people think he is. They need to know he means business, so he has John executed, to prove how tough he is, how strong, how much in charge. The story ends, “When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.” We’re going to hear much the same thing after Jesus is crucified.

Who Is Jesus?

Who is Jesus? When he is crucified, there’s a sign over him that says, “King of the Jews”. The people that crucify him can’t think bigger than someone like Herod. They think having so much means greatness. But even on a cross, Jesus embodies a kind of glory kings don’t understand. There, it’s the power of a king condemning him; there, it’s the power of the love of God forgiving them. Herod eventually loses out in a power struggle and ends up exiled in the south of France. His life becomes so little. Jesus rises from the dead and gives hope for centuries, to us today; his life means so much. 

Who is Jesus? I was struck by a post on Facebook recently that said,

We want the war horse – Jesus rides a donkey.

We want the eagle – The Holy Spirit descends as a dove.

We want to take up swords – Jesus takes up a cross.

We want the roaring lion – God comes as a slaughtered lamb.

We keep trying to arm God = God keeps trying to disarm us.

Herod the king is in his palace. He has so much, but he’s afraid, so he kills a righteous man. 

Jesus is in a village. He has so little, but he’s so confident of the power of God, he sends out his followers without a change of clothes.

Who is Jesus?

Who is Herod?

Which one are you following? 

Amen.

Falling Forward

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2024

Seventh Sunday After Pentecost/B • July 7, 2024

Mark 6:1-13

Jacquelyn and I like to travel to Spain. One of the benefits of her being a flight attendant is that we can fly inexpensively, so once a year we pick out a new place and pre-see it. What I mean is, Jacquelyn watches travel videos about the place, I look at suggested things to see. We get a sense of what it’s like to walk around before we ever set foot in the place. I mention all this because we’ve been reading through the first chapters of Mark’s Gospel, and that’s what he’s doing: giving us a tour, a preview, of what it looks like to walk with Jesus. So far, we’ve been to Capernaum, which is a bit like going from York to Harrisburg, we’ve been across Lake Galilee to an area that’s mostly Gentile and back again. We’ve seen him attract crowds, heal people in amazing ways, we’ve been amazed as he stilled a storm, so amazed we had to ask, with his friends, “Who is this?” Now he’s come home; now he’s back in Nazareth, where everyone knows him and his family lives. What can we learn about our life following him from this moment?

I wonder what it’s like for him to go home. Is he tired after his trip? Your mother is always glad to see you, so there’s that. It turns out he has a big family: four brothers, some sisters. Are some of them married with little kids running around? Moms always have some special thing they make for returning sons; my mother’s was coconut cream pie. The story says on the sabbath, he gets up and preaches at the synagogue. That was hard, I’m sure. I’ll let you in on a little preacher secret: it’s a lot easier to preach to a crowd of strangers than a little group who know you. I remember my first sermon at my home church. I was just 18 and they all knew me, I’d been leading the youth group and speaking in worship for years. They were proud to have one of their own going into the ministry. Everyone was very nice afterward but I heard someone say to my mother, “You must be so proud of Jim”, to which my mother replied more or less, “Well yes but you know it’s hard to listen to someone preach when you remember changing his diapers.”

So Jesus preaches in the synagogue; this is actually the last time in Mark we hear about him in a synagogue. It’s not clear what sort of reaction he gets. “Where did this man get all this?” Commentaries are divided on whether we should read this as praise or sarcasm. I think the latter and I think that because of what follows. Remember where we’ve been with Jesus: to the neighborhood, where he healed a man with a withered hand, though a storm he stilled, across the lake to Gersa, where he exorcised demons, to Capernaum where a woman was healed by just touching his clothes, and where he raised a little girl who had been thought dead. One amazing moment after another, but here at home, it says simply, “He could do no deed of power there…” Jesus is amazing until he gets home, where he fails. Right there, in front of the home town crowd, in front of all those family members, all those people he grew up with: nothing, fails, can’t do anything.

I know what that feels like. I worked in a growing church during seminary and when I graduated, I went out to a little Congregational church in Seattle that said they wanted to grow. There were about 25 of us most Sundays, a group that had split off from a large church downtown and bought a small building in the northern suburbs. I knew what to do; I’d read all the books on how to grow a church, I had the technique down. It took me a year but I convinced the church we should go out and call on people in the neighborhood. Now our neighborhood was a strange mix of everyone from single moms to retired folks to up-and-coming workers. I was sure this would work. It took hours and hours of planning, we printed up a really nice brochure, rehearsed what to say and finally off we all went one day. Our little group made about a hundred visits. I had calculated that we should expect to get a ten percent return, so figuring some of the visits would produce whole families, we got ready for 20 or 30 new people. We made sure there was extra food for coffee hour and waited. Nothing happened. No one came: not one visitor showed up on Sunday. The only immediate result was that some woman called me during the week and asked if we could help take care of her mother. It was a total failure. I was depressed for months. 

Jesus fails; we all fail. Are we failing as a church? Are we failing as churches? Last year, about 4,500 Protestant churches closed in the US. I could go on and cite statistics about church attendance and other measures, but that would just be even more depressing. What can we take from Jesus’ failure? What does he do? What Jesus does is keep teaching. “He was amazed at their unbelief. Then he went about the villages teaching.” The other thing he does is send out the twelve in pairs. He gives them authority, he gives them directions. I’ll say more about that next week but for now, notice that what Jesus does about failure is to expand his ministry by sending out six pairs of healers. Notice when he sends them. It’s not after a mighty work; it’s when he fails. Jesus fails but he fails forward because of his faith in God.

That doesn’t look like failure, does it? Maybe the problem is our definition of success and failure. In Seattle, our definition of success was a lot more people sitting in pews. That didn’t happen. What did happen, though, was smaller and harder to track. The people in that church didn’t come from the neighborhood and had never cared much about it. But after some time walking around there, meeting people, they started to care. We changed some rules about membership; we learned to be grateful and welcoming when someone did show up and a few of those people stuck. We had a small choir you had to audition to join; we got rid of the audition and just let anyone sing, including a woman who couldn’t read a note of music but had a beautiful voice. The church building was next to an elementary school. We had discovered there were a lot of single parent families and after talking to the school social worker, we discovered there were a lot of kids who went home to empty houses, so we created the first latch key program in Seattle, an after school program where volunteers helped kids do homework, played games and fed them a snack. 

I’d love to say that the church took off and grew into a big, strong place, but it didn’t. When I left a couple of years later, it was still small, but it was a different place. It was a congregation where people were busy with various ways of helping in that neighborhood. At the end of this story in Mark, no deeds of power have been done. Except this one: those twelve guys who have just been following Jesus around are now off, practicing what Jesus preached. Is that success? What do you think? What is success following Jesus? Is it looking rich and powerful, or listening to him and doing what he says? This is what he says: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’  [Mark 1:15]. Every day,, we hear bad news: Jesus says, “Believe in the good news.” This is the good news: you are a child of God; so is everyone you meet. Living in the kingdom means acting like it. So does living in the neighborhood. Amen.