Category Archives: Advent

Come This Way! – Advent 2

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Listen to the sermon being preached at the link below

Come This Way, This Way Out

Advent Directions 2
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Second Sunday in Advent/A • December 4, 2016
Isaiah 11:1-10

“Come this way, this way out! Leave everything, come this way, this way out.” I hope never to hear those words because they are what flight attendants say during the evacuation of an airplane. If you’ve ever flown, you know how long it takes to board an airplane: the stop and go of the line down the jet bridge, the search for a place for your bag, stowing things and settling into your seat. It takes about half an hour to get a 143 seat airplane boarded and ready to go. It takes 90 seconds to evacuate it; that’s the FAA standard.

Who can say, “Come this way, this way out?

I can only imagine how confusing and frightening a landing that requires evacuation must be. As soon as the plane stops, flight attendants open the doors, blow the slides and then, despite their own fears, they stand by those doors loudly yelling, “Come this way, this way out! Leave everything, come this way, this way out.” In fact, they are tested every year on their ability to do this, with a critique if they aren’t loud enough. “Come this way, this way out! Leave everything, come this way, this way out.” Reading this scripture today, imagining the situation in which it was preached, thinking about our own situation today, makes me long sometimes for someone who can say: “Come this way, this way out!”

Who can give hope?

Here’s the background. God’s people have been defeated. Maybe you know what that feels like; maybe you’ve been part of a political campaign that lost, maybe you’ve been fired from a job or suddenly had your direction changed because of a defeat. This defeat of God’s people was violent and unexpected and at its end, King Zedekiah and thousands of Jews were taken captive by the Babylonians and forced into exile near what is today Baghdad. They felt, in the language of the scripture, “clean cut off”. Their sense of defeat deepened when King Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, died. Who would lead them? Who would stand as the symbol of their nation? Who would give them hope?—hope they might return, hope they might have a future? That’s the moment into which Isaiah announces,

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. [Isaiah 11:1]

Coming Out of the Present and Into God’s Future

“Who’s Jesse? What kind of hope is this, based on someone I’ve never even heard of!” That takes a bit of explanation. Long ago, God’s people were ruled by a king who veered off God’s path. So God did what God always does when there’s a roadblock, what we do when there’s a detour: God backed up and tried again, took a different route. God sent Samuel to anoint someone who would be a new king, a righteous king. Samuel was sent to a man named Jesse and his son, David, was chosen. David wasn’t perfect but somehow God loved David and he became the emblem of God’s favor. So to say that a shoot would come out from the stump of Jesse is to say, “Don’t stop hoping, don’t stop believing: even an old stump can send out new growth.” And if there is new growth, if God can send up a new shoot out of the tree of covenant and care, there will indeed be someone to say to the people in exile, “Come this way, this way out.”

It’s hard to identify new growth. It’s hard to know who to believe when you’re desperate and looking for a way out. I once heard Tony Campolo talk about the difference between leadership and demagogues. He said that the problem of liberal churches is that for so many years we said there are no demons when people often felt defeated by them. So demagogues, false leaders, false prophets attract attention by saying, “Yes, there are real demons.” The problem is that demagogues go on to say, “The demons are in them!” So they lead attacks on some them: Jews, immigrants, anyone who can be defined as different. True leaders, on the other hand, know there are demons out there. But what they say is: the demons are in us and we need to change. We need to come out of our present and into God’s future.

Change isn’t something that occurs easily. One of the things that always makes me laugh is that here we are, Congregationalists, proud of our Pilgrim heritage, and yet who were the Pilgrims? People who gave their lives to changing their society. Bit by bit, they invented many of the democratic institutions we take for granted, from a written constitution—the Mayflower Compact—to the town meetings that originated as the Annual Meeting of Congregational Churches.

Coming Out and Changing

Here we are, Congregational Christians with this heritage and more importantly the emblem of the cross before us at all times, an emblem that reminds us Jesus gave up his life to change the whole world. Yet every time I’ve become the new pastor of a church, I’ve heard the same thing early on: “Please, don’t ask us to change where we sit.” Well, I understand that. I am sympathetic to that. I like where I sit, I like doing things the way I’ve always done them.

Traditions are rich for me. There’s a prayer I often share for the offering that begins,

“We offer here our treasure and our goods, and some of it is gold, and some is myrrh and some is frankincense.”

You’ve all heard me share this prayer. I learned it sitting in the Pine Hill Congregational Church listening to Harry Clark, who became my mentor, my friend, my spiritual father. Sunday after Sunday he shared it. When I became in my turn a pastor, I shared it every Sunday for years and then later as one among the offering prayers. I asked him about the prayer’s source once; he told me he had no idea, it was something his pastor said every Sunday and he just picked it up. It’s a tradition; it’s comforting. It’s where I sit.

Following Jesus

But there are real demons loose. And if I just sit comfortably, I am not following Jesus, who never sat anywhere long. We focus on the stories of Jesus; maybe we should pay more attention to the spaces between the story where we read over and over again, “Jesus was on the way.” But which way? What way out? Isaiah’s prophecy isn’t just that there will be someone to tell us, “Come this way, this way out,” it also tells us how to recognize this person.

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. [Isaiah 11:6-9]

The sign is peace; the sign is safety. When we make safe places, we follow Jesus.

Sometimes this is a personal moment. We know the demons of division are loose in our land. Recently, two Asian women went to an event in Brooklyn and then did what we all often do, they stopped at a cafe for something to eat. There a man began to loudly attack them. Apparently, he thought he could depend on others; that no one would stand up for people who looked different, for women. He was wrong. When the police were called, they refused to back him up. A man confronted the racist and the racist sprayed him with pepper spray and got arrested. There have been a number of similar incidents. It’s why many people are wearing safety pins today, a sign that says, “I’m safe and I will make a safe place for you.”

Making a Difference

Does this make a difference? It can make all the difference. The Jewish Foundation for the righteous lists many stories of people who rescued Jews during the holocaust. I was especially struck by something one said in response to a child’s question. He was asked if he considered himself a hero. Knud Dyby was a Dane and a member of the King’s Guard. When the Nazi’s conquered Denmark in 1940 and attempted to raise their flag over the capital, he helped take it down. He was a sailor and knew the best routes out of Copenhagen. In 1943, when the Germans ordered the round up of Danish Jews, he participated in the effort that helped over 7,000 Jews escape to Sweden. Asked, “Why did you risk your life to save total strangers?”, he said,

It was our duty, it was just something one did; …there was a sense of outrageous indignation that anyone would harm their fellow compatriots, their neighbor humans – their neighbor kids, their grandmothers, members of their community, no matter what religion they espoused. [https://jfr.org/rescuer-asked/knud-dyby/]

Perhaps these two incidents don’t seem connected. But the demons of the holocaust grew powerful years before. They grew when no one stopped the first Nazi from abusing a Jew in a cafe; when people looked away from the little violence of small moments.

Come This Way, This Way Out

It doesn’t happen often but it does happen: an airplane is stopped, the doors flung open, the chutes deployed and brave flight attendants stand at the door yelling, “Come this way, this way out, come this way, this way out.” So too, our mission is to say to those whose hope is dissolving like a sunny day overcome by clouds, “Come this way, this way out—out of the darkness of division, out of the darkness of hatred, out of the darkness of conflict and hate.

“Come this way, this way out”—there is hope and the emblem of that hope is Jesus, a man who offered his life as a picture of what it looks like to live in the experience of God’s love, the emblem of that hope is Christ, who invites us to make his life our lives. This is the invitation, the same with which we begin every worship service: “The peace of the Lord be with you.” It is a way of saying to the darkness, to the violence, “Come this way, this way out.”

Amen.

You can read more stories about rescuers by clicking here

Come On Up! – Advent 1

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Advent Directions 1:
Come On Up
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Advent 1/A • November 27, 2016

Listen to the sermon being preached at the link below

Advent is an Interruption

Today I suppose many of us are turning from gatherings at which we celebrated the last great moment of fall, thanksgiving, toward the holiday season. In our house, that will mean brining boxes of decorations down from the attic, sorting through them, telling the stories that go with each one and putting them out. It will mean cleaning and making lists of things to do. Jacquelyn will be working on airplanes full of people traveling for the first time; I will be busy as well, considering our church has something planned for each weekend in December. We’ll all be busy. But here and now, today, God is calling in the midst of our lists and memories and decorating: stop! look! listen!—pay attention. God intends to interrupt us. Advent is an interruption.

The oracle we heard this morning is an interruption. We tend to take the Bible for granted, rarely remembering that somewhere, somehow, someone took bits and pieces, some written, some sung, some remembered and put them together into the books we know today. The Book of Isaiah starts out with a dark word of condemnation and then suddenly, out of nowhere, that Word is interrupted by this prophecy. The same prophecy also occurs in Micah; it’s as if God was saying, “This is so important, I want to make sure you get it so I’m going to repeat it!”.

The Lord’s Mountain is a Beacon

The oracle starts out with something strange because it’s not true today: “In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established as the highest of the mountains…” [Isaiah 2:2] Now anyone who knows the geography of Judah can tell you that Mt. Zion, where the Lord’s house is located, where Jerusalem is and has been for more than 30 centuries, is not by any means the highest mountain. It’s not the highest in the world; it’s not the highest in that area. What does Isaiah mean? What does God mean by saying that it shall be raised up? One image of what we raise up is the beacon. Since ancient times, people have raised up beacons along shorelines; we call them light houses. Groping along in the fog, sailing in a storm, light houses, beacons, raised up and shining forth are not only a guide but a source of comfort. All sailors know their home light house. Isaiah is asking us to imagine that in the future, Jerusalem is raised up like a beacon, like a lighthouse.

Now a beacon has a purpose and the purpose is to draw travelers. But this vision of Isaiah is astonishing because the travelers it imagines drawing include…well, everyone! “Many people shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.’” Who does Isaiah have in mind, who are these “many”? Only a moment later, Isaiah pictures the Lord judging between nations, making clear who the many are: all of us. Amazingly, surprisingly, it’s not just the nation of Judah, it’s not just the children of Abraham, it’s everyone, everyone is being summoned to walk in the light of the Lord.

Together-And Divided

All of us together, all of us walking together: that’s not our best thing as people. What we are best at is figuring out how different we are. In this culture, that often has to do with skin color. In other cultures, it has often has to do with religion. In some cultures it’s a matter of birth. Jacquelyn and I have been watching a series about Queen Elizabeth II, and the British royal family and it’s made me wonder what it must be like to have your whole life dictated by the family into which you are born. India has a system of castes and even today, though legally banned, the caste into which you are born influences your life. We mark differences by clothing, food, custom. When we come to a meeting, for example, we assume we will sit in chairs; two thirds of the world’s people don’t use chairs. How can we meet with them?

God’s Future: Inclusive

So when God asks us to imagine all of us together, walking together, it is an interruption; it is not what we normally do, it is not what we ever do. When will this be? “In days to come…” So now you know: now we know, this is where we are going, this is God’s vision of our future. This vision has three parts. First, it is inclusive: many come, nations come, peoples come and when they come, they are coming up from where they are to a higher understanding. This is not just a trip, it’s a pilgrimage, a place to experience God’s Word as a living reality: “For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” [Isaiah 2:3b] God means to interrupt our journey and invite us to a pilgrimage. Like a mariner anxiously wandering who suddenly sees the loom of a light house and knows his or her position, God is creating a beacon to show us where to go.

God’s Vision: Peace

Second, this is a vision of peace. “…they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” [Isaiah 2:4b] Did you catch the last part: war forgotten—“neither shall they learn war any more.” Rick Atkinson has written a series of books with a painfully detailed account of World War II. His account focuses on the individual experience of people caught in the war and in his first volume, An Army at Dawn, he traces how plain American men had to learn to become killers in order to win battles.

War is not natural; it is learned. Yet thinking over my life, I can’t think of a time we weren’t at war. I grew on stories from World War II and was born as the Korean War ended. I loved playing with toy soldiers and my friends and I endlessly acted out little battles. Perhaps like you, I remember the fears of nuclear war and atom bomb drills in schools. I was formed intellectually in the antiwar movement of the 1960’s and ordained as the Vietnam War ended. Much of my adult life has been lived with the rhetoric of a war on terror. What if that were interrupted: what if we stopped learning war?

God’s Vision: Walking Together in the Light

The third part of this vision is simple: walking together in the light. Isn’t this what we do when we are with someone we love? Early on in my relationship with Jacquelyn, I remember vividly how she told me, “I want someone to hold my hand.” We all want someone to walk beside. Bruce Springsteen’s song, Land of Hopes and Dreams, imagines a great train on the way to a land of hopes and dreams. He sings,
You’ll need a good companion now
For this part of the ride
Leave behind your sorrows
Let this day be the last
Tomorrow there’ll be sunshine
And all this darkness past
And then he goes on to describe the passengers on the train,
This train…Carries saints and sinners
This train…Carries losers and winners
All of us: saints and sinners, winner and losers, all children of God, all together, all on a pilgrimage.

Today and Tomorrow

This is not where we are today. We are still divided into groups. We are still learning war. We are still walking so often in darkness. That is our present. What Isaiah preaches, what God means to do is to interrupt that present with a hope about our future, a vision of that future.

Have you seen glimpses of this? I have and often the glimpses come in a particular circumstance. The Snow Goose is the story of a hump-backed man with a hand shaped like a claw so hurt by the way others draw away that he himself retreats. He’s a painter and a photographer and a sailor; he buys a lighthouse and a salt marsh in England and there he lives alone, sailing the shore and caring for birds. His name is Philip Rhyader, but no one calls him that; to the villagers who whisper about the ogre out by the lighthouse, he’s “that odd looking chap” or simply “Rhyader”.

But one day a girl from the fishing village comes to him, holding something: a wounded goose. She’s desperately afraid of the ogre by the lighthouse but she’s heard he has healing powers. So she goes to him, shows him the goose. Together, they work to splint the bird’s wing, together they nurse it back to health. Her name is Frith and one day, he hears something strange and wonderful. The goose is almost healed; she’s happy. And she calls him Philip. In the act of healing, Philip and Frith have become friends.

Advent is an Interruption

Isaiah’s vision is a reality meant to interrupt the reality we take for granted. Today as we begin the season of Advent, God means to interrupt us, interrupt our shopping, interrupt our plans, interrupt our lists to remind us that we are not people of the present: we are people of hope. I have seen the present but I have seen this vision sometimes, I have caught glimpses of it, and those most often when, like Philip and Frith, people share together in some healing, some peace making, some gathering. Then indeed, then quiet as a breeze or the beam of a lighthouse, everything is interrupted and I hear, we hear, the call to come up, up from where we are, to the hope of God’s vision; to come up and walk in the light of the Lord.
Amen.