Category Archives: John

Conversations Before the Cross #5: Come Out!

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Fifth Sunday in Lent/A • March 22, 2026

Ezekiel 37:1-14 * John 11:1-45

Throughout this season of Lent, we’ve been overhearing Jesus’ conversations. We heard him talk to Satan, responding to each temptation to live from his own needs with God’s Word and a determination to live that Word. We heard him tell Nicodemus about new life by being born from above, from living as a child of heaven. We heard him offer a woman at a well in Samaria living water, flowing from the love of God, baptizing her in a way that opened the way to new life. We saw him heal a man born blind and the conflict it caused when his eyes were opened and he believed in Jesus. Now we come to this story and there are so many people, so many conversations going on that it’s hard to hear Jesus directly. What do you hear in the story?

See how carefully John invites us into the scene. Bethany is a suburb of Jerusalem. Mary and Martha are gathered there; Lazarus, their brother, is deathly ill. I know this scene and perhaps you do as well. It’s played out in hospital waiting rooms every day. Right now, at Harrisburg Hospital, at Hershey Hospital, some family is gathered, waiting, talking, worrying. Nothing has changed; nothing is different, then, now. Their brother has been sick, perhaps for a long time. Everything has been tried; nothing has worked. Now they try one more thing. Jesus has a reputation for healing and he’s their friend. So someone, another friend perhaps, is sent to get him. Imagine their hope, their last hope, that Jesus will swoop in and save the day. 

But he doesn’t. In fact, after the messenger arrives with his frantic plea, Jesus doesn’t rush off, Jesus doesn’t interrupt whatever he’s doing, Jesus stays where he is, the text says, two more days. The story invites us into an irony that reflects our own fears. When the messenger arrives, asking, begging Jesus to come to Bethany, his disciples are afraid. “The last time we were down there, people rioted and we barely got out with our lives!”, they remind him; that’s what it means when it says they were stoned. At the moment Jesus is asked to intervene and prevent Lazarus’ death, the disciples urge him not to go because they’re afraid of death.

This delay is one of the most interesting parts of this story. It lifts up our own question, doesn’t it? Why doesn’t Jesus come when we summon him? Here I am Lord, here’s what I want. That’s the subtext of a good deal of prayer life, I suspect. Here’s Lazarus’ family reaching out in what they think is their most needy moment. When he does eventually arrive, they can’t let it go. But, as John Fairless observes,

If Jesus had arrived on their timeline, He would have healed a sick man. Admirable, certainly—a demonstration of compassion and power. But John, the writer, has a deeper revealing in mind. Healing the sick was routine in Christ’s ministry. Raising someone dead for four days is categorically different. [John Fairless, “Divine Delay”]

The disciples don’t want to go because they’re scared; Jesus waits because the moment isn’t right yet.

When his disciples were discussing the man born blind, he told them, “I am the light of the world.” Now he gives them an example of living in the light and makes his way to Bethany. There he encounters first Martha and later Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, and each one confronts him with an accusation: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They are grieving, they are hurt, they are angry and their anger and faith have mixed into a bitter blindness. Swirling around this entire conversation is a group of other mourners as well and emotions run high. Jesus is himself caught up in the moment; the text tells us “Jesus wept.” Grief is real; hurt is real. Jesus doesn’t tell them, “Oh, stop”, he enters into the moment with them. He weeps; he mourns.

Now I imagine we’ve all been to a funeral and probably to that time before the service, calling hours, wake, different names for the same moment. Usually there is a casket or an urn at the front of the room and a line leading to it with a grieving family off to one side. I don’t know what you think of as you wait in that line but for many, it’s what to say to the family. What comfort can you bring? What story can you share? So I imagine this scene like that: the family and friends gathered around as Jesus, Lazarus’ great friend, comes forward through the crowd. See him walking slowly? See him weeping? Now he comes to the opening, he tells them to roll away the stone and they object: the odor of death will escape. But the grave is opened and suddenly he speaks, he says what no one imagined or expected, what none of us would say:
“Lazarus, come out.”

Jesus shouts: “Lazarus, come out”, the same word—‘shout— is used at his entrance about the way the crowds shout “Hosanna!”, the same word is used days later when the same crowd shouts, “Crucify!” The crowd changes from moment to moment; Jesus never does. His voice doesn’t come from an impulse. This is what we often miss about Jesus. I don’t believe he suddenly decided to talk to Nicodemus or the woman at the well; I don’t believe he suddenly decided to heal the man born blind. And he doesn’t just call Lazarus out of the tomb because they are friends. Jesus lives from who he is. He says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is the quality of his life that inspired and continues to inspire: he doesn’t act like resurrection, he is resurrection; he doesn’t act like he loves, he is love. 

Now he calls Lazarus: “Come out!” And now there is a faint. The family wanted healing, Jesus brings resurrection. Now there is a noise from inside the tomb, now there is the sound of stumbling feet, now there is a shadow moving, moving toward the light from the darkness, just as the man born blind moved from blindness to sight, just as the woman at the well moved from her loneliness to love. “Come out, Lazarus!” And Lazarus stumbles forward, wrapped still in the linen cloths with which bodies were bound in that time. Jesus offers a new command: “Unbind him and let him go.” And they do. Notice that in each command, Jesus invites others to take action. He tells others to move the stone; he doesn’t pull Lazarus out of the tomb, he calls him out; he doesn’t unbind him, he asks the whole group there to do this. Jesus works through a community around him, commanding, inspiring, calling, showing them what to do and inviting them to do it.

The fundamental Christian mission is to go to where the power of death is working and call God’s children to life, to go to darkness and bring light. Perhaps a story from almost two thousand years ago is so distant it seems irrelevant. But there are still times when Christians are called to go into tombs and bring life. In 1940, Holland was overwhelmed by a German assault and captured almost in a few days. Soon the Nazi focus on eliminating Jews made itself felt. In Amsterdam, a large theater was gutted and used as a detention center and nearby another called the Creche, was used to gather Jewish children. A small group of Dutch resisters, both Christians and Jews, began to work to save these children. Despite the increasing risks, for the next three years they organized networks to smuggle children out of the creche to homes in northern Holland and other places where families would hide them and help them. The creche was meant to be the first stage of a tomb for these children and so it was for thousands. But thanks to the efforts of these who walked into that tomb and spirited them out, hundreds of children were saved.

But it’s not simply a story of heroes and happy children. Many of the group were lost to the Gestapo, arrested, tortured, murdered. Darkness is powerful; death does not give up. The only power greater than death is resurrection, the only thing that can keep the light alive is the power of God’s love. All along his journey, Jesus has faced conflict and threats. We saw the anger of the Pharisees last week when he healed the man born blind. We know that the charge, “He eats with sinners,” was frequently used and that included people like the woman at the well certainly. Beyond the reading for today, John tells us that the raising of Lazarus leads directly to the plot to arrest and execute Jesus. Remember how Jesus’ conversation with Satan ended. Satan did not say, “I give up”; instead, we’re told, he left him for a more opportune time. Now that time is coming. The darkness is closing around him even as he himself brings light. I wonder in that moment what his followers thought; I wonder what we would have thought, what I would have thought. I read this story and I want to rejoice but it scares me as well. I wonder: what now Lord?

For the story of Jesus calling someone to life from death isn’t just history; it is the present too. Over and over in my ministry I have seen this happen. Some person, nurtured by a congregation, comes alive. Perhaps it was a woman whose life had been bound by walls of oppression; perhaps it is a man who turns a life around. Perhaps it is someone who only comes to church for a little while and then moves on. This is what sustains me on my journey. I’ve seen Jesus call people to life. I’ve felt Jesus call me to life.  

Every moment is a gate between the past and the future; every moment comes with a context and holds possibilities. As we go out each day, we have to choose among those possibilities. How will we choose? The power of resurrection comes into our lives when we face the day, face the possibilities, face the choices with this question first: what now Lord? What now? If we ask, surely he will answer; if we ask, surely he will show us how to walk in the light, how to live following the one who is life. Amen.

Note: The account of the Resistance group working to save children is found in The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage

Conversations Before the Cross 4

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A Man Born Blind from Birth

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Fourth Sunday in Lent/A • March 15, 2026

John Chapter 9

What are his references? That’s a question most of us ask in one way or another from time to time. Employers ask it: no one hires someone without at least trying to find out how they did previously. And the answer doesn’t always have to be positive! I was fired from my first job as a ministerial intern in seminary after a long period of conflict with the senior minister. A while later I began looking for a new job and found a church and minister that really excited me. I told them about my experience, trying to be objective, not trying to hide any of the details; I remember the minister interviewing me saying, “So, you resigned from your last job? I said: No, I was fired. The minister said he didn’t feel a need to check my references, but of course he did, so he did something ministers do under the circumstances: he called a friend in a church nearby. So not long afterward I was called into the senior minister’s office to hear him say, well I decided to do a little checking on you after we talked, so I called a friend who knows the situation in the church where you worked…and he said the guy you worked for is crazy and being fired there is an honor!

What are his references? It’s a question that creeps into our relationship with Jesus in one way or another. We see his story through the glasses of our common sense, our life experience and our own individual histories. We look for the points in these histories that can connect and explain his story. These are Jesus’ references. There’s nothing new about this process, the earliest Christians did the same thing. They were in many cases Jews who looked for a special person from God, just as God had sent Abraham, Moses, Elijah, David and Elijah. In many ways Jesus met these expectations, but in others he did not. The story about the man born blind from birth was remembered because it spoke to the questions of Christians trying to live their daily lives in harmony with God’s intention—trying to understand whether Jesus of Nazareth was a part of that intention.

This story matches the story of the church. It is our story. We also are people who encountered Jesus, were changed by him and now live in a world where his presence is not always apparent. We look forward to a final time when our Lord will appear beside us and we will be able to see him and touch him. Our problem is what to do in the meantime. This is finally an individual challenge: remember, neither the blind man’s friends nor his parents, neither the crowds nor the Pharisees, were any help to him in understanding how to live with his new sight. There is a mystery here, a mystery that lies at the heart of the way God loves us. For in the structure of our relationship with God there is a scandalous particularity, an individuality, that shakes the foundations of every life that takes it seriously. “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?”, the Psalmist asks, and the answer is always someone’s name, some particular name, some particular person. 

Why one person and not someone else? Why you and not me? Why me and not you? This scandal, this particularity, lies near the heart of all our questions about suffering and meaning. Who is this blind man that he should be healed—while others remain blind. Is his moral life more faithful? Does he pray more deeply or more eloquently? Is his faith stronger or in need of strengthening? Nothing in the text answers such questions, nothing in the action of the story gives any explanation. So it is with us, isn’t it? Since ancient times, one strand of thought in Israel held misfortune and disability and disease to be the direct consequence of sin, sometimes a consequence carried on through generations. There is a part of our religious impulse that always wants to quantify. So much sin, so much grace: measured out like the sugar and flour of a cake mix, balanced off like the weights on a jeweler’s scale. But Jesus directs attention away from the surface to the deeper realities of the situation. Sin is related to grace, of course, but not as the disciples think. The man’s life is not a result of his own action but is part of the structure of God’s revelation. The blind man is about to become the living gospel, the person who bridges the gulf between God and human being.

“Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall go for us”, the Psalmist asks, and the answer is always some particular person at some particular moment of time. So Jesus came to a small village for a moment and opened a blind man’s eyes. We tend to think of such characters as special, different, not like us, but the fact is that he is precisely like us. He is a young man who has overcome the obstacles of his life, found a trade and is working industriously at it. He is just like us: pregnant with the possibility of epiphany, capable of becoming the candle by which the divine flame of God is seen to burn and give light. The disciples want to give this man a practical explanation, almost a scientific one. “Who sinned?”, they ask, “This man or his family?” But to Jesus the man’s circumstances including his blindness are an occasion for showing God’s presence. “This happened so that the work of God”—some translations say glory of God—“might be displayed in his life.”

The Pharisees of the story are puzzled because Jesus doesn’t follow what they expect: His references are nonexistent and his behavior is scandalous. Since they don’t know who he is they concentrate on the how: their concentration on the question of how Jesus healed the man is so striking that he finally asks if they also want to become his disciples. They are seeking a clue to the who through the how: They want the regular procedures followed; they want the rules to apply to everyone. They want to know who Jesus was: where he came from, where he’s been, what schools h attended, how he learned to heal. There is comfort in the past: it is predictable, it is safe, it can’t get out of hand and surprise you. “We are disciples of Moses,” they tell the man.

But they’ve forgotten Moses was once a wild, free spirit on fire with God. They’ve forgotten the Moses who asked to see God, though that was against all rules. They remember only the rules Moses left. Moses said, “Keep the sabbath holy” and they have transformed that into something else entirely: don’t work on the sabbath. They can’t see that healing is holy; they only see Jesus breaking a rule. Finally, they conclude, he can’t be from God. They don’t know his references and so they simply say, “As for this man, we don’t know where he comes from”.

But the blind man is amazed at this: here are the religious and political authorities of his life puzzled. 

Now that is remarkable! You don’t know where he comes from yet he opened my eyes. If this man were not from God he could do nothing! 

This is the ultimate testimony of the believer, the follower of Jesus Christ: that our lives have been changed, healed. And that this is so, regardless of how the world may see or understand that change. Sometimes the change is remarkable and radical. Sometimes it is internal and quiet. Sometimes it leads to moments of soaring courage; more often to the simple endurance of living life hopefully each day. The blind man’s history hasn’t changed but now he lives with vision. He is healed. His future is new; as Paul said, “In Christ there is a new creation.” Christ calls us to a new creation, a creation beyond the rules we knew and lived by.

“Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?” This blind man—this particular life, at this particular moment—is the means by which God chooses to work and call others. Who would have thought God would choose such people: a nine or ten year old shepherd, a blind man sitting by the road side. You, me, the person sitting in the pew next to you: are these really the means by which the Almighty God chooses to work and become known? Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? It’s us: there isn’t anyone else. The people of these Bible stories are not the heroic figures we romantically assume. They are people who are busy about their lives and getting on with them. People who have their own hearts and hopes but who are changed when they become the particular way God’s work is demonstrated and moved forward.

The blind man’s story is our story as well, if we are the followers of this Jesus of Nazareth. The blind man is not any more prepared to become the visible agent of the invisible Spirit than you or I, and the whole event causes considerable disruption in his life. Friends desert him. His parents refuse to defend him. The religious and political authorities of the village and the area cross-examine him and threaten him and are finally puzzled by him. Through all this, the agent of his change—Jesus, the one who caused the change—is nowhere to be found. If this is, as I suggested, intended to be not only the story of the blind man but the story of the church and therefore our story as well, what does it suggest the task of faithful Christian people is?

The clue to the answer is near the end of the story. After all the shouting has died down the man meets Jesus again, though of course he doesn’t recognize him—remember, he’s never seen Jesus before. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks, and when the man asks who this is, Jesus reveals his identify: the man replies, “Lord, I believe.” What is the most important task of believers? Perhaps it is simply to be believers—to live as believers—to keep living as believers. This is, a simple and yet enormously difficult formula. Our culture, like the culture of the first century Christians who remembered this story, is hostile to Christian faith and seeks to erase it by a concentration on the technological question, the question of how things are to occur, how life is to be lived. So our culture constantly offers us formulas: take control of your own life, read this book, listen to this speaker, see this therapist, try this diet. In this culture, our faith offers not a how but a who: Jesus of Nazareth, God’s anointed, the Christ who comes into the world. We offer an invitation: not to take control of your own life but to offer your life to God who is known in this man.

To respond in this way is anything but easy. It’s striking to realize how difficult the blind man’s life becomes after he is healed. His friends and family desert him, his trade is lost and the local authorities keep after him. Does he have moments when he wished he had his simple life back, wished the l light would go out again and he could sit by the side of the road begging? Perhaps, but what the story suggests is a man so transformed by this experience that he can hardly imagine his former life. At the end of the story, when he knows Jesus, the text simply says “he worshipped him”. Christian faith is finally this: the ability to worship Jesus, not because you have been given satisfactory references but because you have seen what he has done and know that if this man were not from God, he could do nothing. What are Jesus’ references? You are—I am—we all are together. “You are the Body of Christ and individually members of it”, Paul says. We are the ones he is healing; we are the ones he has taught to hope. Hope is ultimate healing. It comes not from a reference or a technique but from a decision about whom you will believe and what you will worship. 

Nowhere is that decision more clearly defined than at the end of this story. There finally we have the alternatives we also face. The blind man responds to Jesus simply when Jesus reveals his identity: “‘Lord I believe’..and he worshipped him”. The Pharisees are still fussing, still asking, “What are his references?”. By the end of the story, the blind man has a vision that lights his life; the Pharisees are blind. 

We walk in a forest throughout our lives. There are dark shadows that stretch out; there are places where the path is not clear. There are dangers and difficulties and moments when the way opens on inexpressible beauty. As we walk through this forest, we must ultimately decide whether we will trust the vision of Jesus Christ or stumble blindly, hoping on our own to avoid the pitfalls. Nothing guarantees our choice. Putting a cross on the sign does not mean we will not act like Pharisees inside. Only our decision to freely embrace Jesus as a guide can keep us on the path; only our commitment to come to him, as the blind man did, whatever our lives, whatever our history, and simply say, “Lord, I believe”.

Amen.

Conversations Before the Cross 3: Samaritan Woman

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Third Sunday in Lent/A • March 8, 2026

John 4:5-42

I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too?

Those words were written in the nineteenth century by Emily Dickinson but I wonder if they might not stand for the thoughts of the Samaritan Woman as she trudged down the hot dirt path to Jacob’s Well and saw a strange man sitting there. One more man who would by his averted glance, his sitting aside, demonstrate his contempt for her and all she was. One more person who would demonstrate indeed that he believed she was nobody. She’s walking down the path at the middle of the day, the sixth hour. It’s an odd time to fetch water; water is usually fetched at the beginning and end of the day by young women who gather happily at the well. This woman has set herself aside and comes at the middle of the day for reasons about which we can only wonder. She is a minority in a culture of disdain. She is nameless even here in the Gospel. She is a woman in a patriarchal society, she is a casualty of relationships. All these things are like boundaries around her. 

The boundary of Samaria: as much a psychological boundary as a national one, one of those boundaries human beings create which seems to outsiders  artificial and yet to those who observe it is crucial to identity. How many years have we heard about the troubles in Ireland and yet which of us could distinguish between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant? But the distinction is life and death there. Years ago the television program Star Trek had a show in which the crew of the Enterprise visited a world of enormous conflict between two races who were half starkly white and half deeply black. Captain Kirk, trying to make peace, arranges a meeting between the leaders of the two factions. He says, “I don’t understand, you’re both half white, half black.” But both combatants look at him in amazement. “But Captain!”, one replies,  “He’s white on the right and black on the left; I’m black on the right and white on the left!”. Jesus asks the woman for a drink and she’s amazed!  “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?”  There she is with all her boundaries and someone enters her space. What do you think she expected? What do you expect when you, as a woman, walk into a public place and there is a strange and threatening man? I asked this question in Bible Class and every woman there said the same thing: “I’d avoid him”. She expects to avoid him, she expects to endure his silent contempt, she expects to be nobody. But he asks for a drink. And before he’s done, she’s begging him for living water. There’s nothing more basic than a drink of water. Jesus asks for a drink and the woman asks for living water, the woman who was nobody, the woman who was nobody. The church is looking back and this is what they are remembering: once I was nobody. “I once was lost and now am found”, we sing. I once was nobody and I had living water poured on me and I became someone. One by one Jesus crosses the boundaries that have isolated this woman. He asks for water as if she were a friend; he offers living water as if she were family. He makes the well again a place to share for her, though she had been alone. Jew, Samaritan—we’re both thirsty, he seems to say. She wants to talk theology: a way to put the boundaries back. “What about where we worship”, she asks; “worship in spirit wherever”, he replies—that’s what God really wants.

Finally, something happens that saves this from being theoretical and that’s the moment when he asks about her husband; that’s the moment when it becomes concrete, there’s a moment when it becomes personal. There’s a story about a woman in an evangelical church who was very judgmental. One day she got the Deacons to invite a noted fire and brimstone preacher to visit. He said, “God is going to judge everyone! Everyone who has take the Lord’s name in vain, you’re going to have God’s judgment!” “Amen!”, the woman shouted. “Everyone who has looked with lust is going to have God’s judgment!” he shouted. “Amen! Preach it!”, she said, rocking in her pew with her enthusiasm. “Everyone who gambles and plays bingo is going to have God’s judgment!”, he yelled. And the woman stopped rocking and said to her neighbor, the one who had won $5 just last night with her at bingo, “Well, now he’s stopped preaching and gone to meddling.” It’s one thing to talk about theology; it’s another thing to talk about personal things, private things. “Call your husband”, Jesus says. That’s personal. “I don’t have a husband”, the woman replies. Whatever this woman’s history, and the church has imagined all kinds of histories for her, we know this: she has been dumped. We know it because the text says she has had five husbands and under the law of the time, she couldn’t divorce anyone, women couldn’t divorce their husbands, so five men husbands have left her. What does Jesus say to her? We don’t know; the text doesn’t t tell us but it is clear that whatever he says, she comes away from the encounter with a tremendous sense of acceptance, a deep feeling of having been heard and cared for, because her response is to ask, “Can this be the Christ?” He knows her: from his knowledge, she takes the courage to know him

It is the experience Paul talks about:

 You see at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrated God’s own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” 

God didn’t wait for us to get right, God came when we were sinners, when we were a mess. God already knew us. That affirmation about God is at the core of what it means to be Christian. Christian life doesn’t start when we know God nor is it founded on what we say about God. Christian life begins when we know God already knows us and loves us.

The church has all too often forgotten that we come from God’s knowledge of us to our knowledge of God. We have fenced the communion table, we have created boundaries which kept people like this woman out. I want to say this one thing about the communion table: the invitation is for sinners. This table is a symbol that God is coming to us where we are, to give us the possibility of going to what God hopes for us. This table is a place to receive the food that can nurture us. And what is that food? Not just bread and grape juice. These are just symbols. They are symbols of God’s nurture, they are symbols of God’s call to move beyond the boundaries, beyond what we are, to what we can become. 

Just like Jesus with the Samaritan Woman, every day we encounter people who don’t expect much from us. They don’t know you are a Christian; they don’t know you at all. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility of someone being nurtured. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility to share the well, to share the living water. God has for each one of us, for me, for you, this plan: that you will be a blessing. And everything you need to be a blessing is right there if you will look around and see it. That looking around begins with the woman’s question. When she leaves Jesus, she says, “Can this be the Christ?” What do you think? Can it? Can you believe this is a Christ who can care for you despite all the boundaries?

What this finally means is: can you believe in hope? It’s frightening to believe in hope sometimes; it’s scary to believe in a hope beyond reason. The movie Shakespeare in Love is the story of the young Will Shakespeare writing a new play he calls Romeo and Ethel, which you may know more familiarly as Romeo and Juliet. The movie has a romantic subplot and several conspiracies which all gather momentum near the end, as the play is put on stage. There are all kinds of obstacles and as they occur people keep rushing up to the stage manager and wringing their hands. To each in turn he replies, “It will all work out”. “How”, they ask. “I don’t know” he says. It will all work out—How?—I don’t know: over and over again. That’s the hope Paul talks about; not a hope founded on reason, a hope founded on the faith that there is a God whose love is so powerful it can break the boundaries, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call out of nothing creation, there is a God whose love is so powerful it called Jesus Christ from death back to live, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call you to the same life. Share it, live it, offer it, as living water, as you share the well this week. 

Amen

A Generous Pour

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Trinity Sunday/C • June 15, 2025

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8 * Romans 5:1-5 * John 16:12-15

I grew up with two brothers. When my father was about to yell at one of us, he’d preface it by standing straight, hands on his hips and asking loudly, “What do you think you’re doing?” I hated that question, and I swore I’d never do it. Yet when I became a stepfather, I still remember the first time I stood over one of the kids, hands on my hips, and loudly asked, “What do you think you’re doing?” My father was inside me, and he’d taken over. We all have these people from other relationships inside us. It’s not just people we’re close to, either. I grew up in New Jersey in the heyday of the New York Yankees, when Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were stars. Baseball was what boys did in New Jersey in those days, but I was really, really bad at it. When I see a ball coming at me, my first instinct is to get out of the way, not catch it. So I was kind of an outcast and to this day, when Jacquelyn and May want to go to a baseball game, something they love, they really prefer to leave me behind, because the voices of those boys telling me how awful I am are still there. Now just as we have these different persons inside us, God has persons inside, so we speak of a “three in one” God. The name for this is the trinity; today is Trinity Sunday and I want to invite you to think about God with me and about how that all fits together.

I want to start with the Holy Spirit. This morning we read from proverbs about Wisdom raising her voice. Sometimes when we think of the Holy Spirit, we miss the whole scripture witness about the nature of the Spirit. I was chatting with someone last week, and they mentioned that when they think of the Holy Spirit, it’s like Caspar the Ghost. That’s easy to see: after all, many of us grew up with Caspar cartoons and Caspar is a friendly sort of ghost. Many of us are old enough to remember when liturgies and prayers often referred to the Spirit as the Holy Ghost. But the Biblical witness about the Spirit isn’t a ghost, it’s more like a wind. In fact, Hebrew uses the same word, ‘ruach’, for ‘breath’, ‘wind’ and Spirit. Greek is the same way: it uses the word ‘pneuma’, which gives us all kinds of words related to something wind or breath related. So the first thing to think about with the Holy Spirit is that it is invisibly animating. We don’t see the wind, but we feel it, we don’t see the wind, but we see its effect, we don’t see the wind, but we know it’s there.

The second thing we see the Spirit doing in Scripture is announcing. The Spirit comes in dreams sometimes, sometimes in visions. The Spirit acts as a messenger between God and our lives. Jesus mentions this in the piece we read from the Gospel of John. He says that he has more to say and that. “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. [16:13 ]” This is why the most important moment in prayer is not when we speak but when we listen for the Spirit to speak in our hearts. 

So animating, announcing and there’s a third thing the Spirit does: appreciating. The reading from Proverbs has this wonderful image. It asks us to imagine God busily creating: the mountains are being shaped, the heavens established, beaches carved out and Spirit…

… I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race. [Proverbs 8:30f]

I like to think of this as being like a parent, building a sand castle on the beach with a child who runs back and forth, brings buckets of water, maybe stumbles in the sand but delights in what’s built, what’s done together.

So inside God is this person of the Holy Spirit, animating, announcing, appreciating. But there’s another aspect of God we might call the architect. Traditionally, we’ve talked about God the Father and that’s a fine description except it’s gendered and God is not particularly male in scripture. Sometimes male language is used, sometimes female. It’s when we paint God in our image that gender slips in. This aspect of God reminds me of when I worked on a survey crew, laying out roads. In the suburbs of Detroit, there’s a whole group of homes to this day that sit where they sit because someone I never saw laid out a blueprint and along with others I helped turn that blueprint into home lots for building houses. That’s how I think of this part of God: an architected, creating the plan. I may not see the whole plan, I may only see a little part, but I trust that the plan is there, and my job is to follow it as closely as possible.

That brings us to the son: Jesus Christ. The son functions in this trinity of divine by presenting it in a human form. Want to know what God looks like?—look at Jesus. Want to know what God wants?—listen to Jesus. Want an invitation to make your life in God?—Jesus is all invitation. In Jesus, also, we see the pattern God intends for all of us: submission to God’s will, God’s intention. There’s great joy in living with God, but there are painful passages, too. It’s God who sends Jesus to the wilderness; sometimes that’s where we find ourselves. And the cross is the ultimate example of submitting your life even to death.

Now for some, the Trinity is helpful; for some it’s not. It wasn’t for me, in fact, the Trinity is the reason I’m not a Methodist. When I was 12 and in Confirmation, my family went to a Methodist church. The pastor taught the class and when he got to the Trinity, I said something like, “That makes no sense.” He responded by telling me it was a mystery; I told him he just didn’t understand it. Later, someone called my mother and explained it would be better if I didn’t come back to confirmation. We moved not long after that and after a bit of searching found a Congregational church where they cared more about the gospel of God’s love than the Trinity, and they were happy to have me. So if the Trinity isn’t helpful to you, that’s fine; leave it on the shelf, there are lots of other ways of thinking about God.

But what’s most helpful about the Trinity isn’t the details, it’s the relationships. What we should get from thinking about God as three in one is that God is all about relationships. God comes to us not as just one idea, one thought, one picture but as a loving, intimate community. Spirit, Son, Father. How we see God makes a difference; there are so many people who can’t cross the threshold of a church because they only see an angry, glowering face. It’s up to us to show them how God comes to us in many ways. The important part may not be the particulars of each one as much as that they are a divine community of love. 

That’s in the scripture we read today, too. Remember the reading from Romans? It’s part of a much longer section in Paul’s letter to the new Christians in Rome. He doesn’t know them yet, but he’s heard about them. He knows they are struggling; Rome is a tough city and there are occasional persecutions of Christians. There are arguments between Christians also about what they have to do to be part of the Christian family. Paul cuts right to the heart: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” We live in a difficult time as well, so that ought to speak to us. I don’t know about you, but reading about all the conflicts all over the world and right here in our own country, I could use a little peace. I could use a lot of peace. 

So first: through this community of God, we are offered peace with God. More than that, out of the abundance of God’s love, we’re being filled. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”, he says. Wow. What a wonderful image: our hearts like a glass, with God pouring love, not just a little, not just enough but a generous pour. Now I wanted to share something about the Trinity today because it’s the day for it, but the most important point isn’t just how we think about God; it’s that God is trying to pour love into our hearts, today, tomorrow, every day. So much that it overflows; so much we can share it. Isn’t that our hope as a church? That the love poured into us, into you, into me, into all of us together will overflow here and lift our whole community.

Amen.

The Unsung Carol

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

First Sunday in Christmas • December 29, 2024

John 1:1-14

Christmas continues today. We left here Christmas Eve in darkness lit by candles that symbolized celebration of God’s embrace by coming to us in the person of an infant. It was Christmas Eve, though; Christmas came later. But where did it begin? When did you hear the first Christmas carol this year? When did you see the first decorations? We decorated here right after Thanksgiving and entered the season of Advent, anticipating Christmas coming. 

Christmas Begins

Where does Christmas begin in the Bible? I suppose some would say when Mary and Joseph begin the journey to Bethlehem. Luke suggests it begins with Gabriel telling Zechariah he would have a son, who would become John the Baptist. But hundreds of years before this, Isaiah had said, 

For a child has been born for us,
   a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
   and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
   Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace [Isaiah 9:6]

Mary connects the beginning to Abraham and Sarah: “[God] has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever” [Luke 1:54f] Matthew seems to agree; he begins the story of Jesus by showing how he is connected to Abraham in a long genealogy.

But it’s the Gospel of John that has the longest view. He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1] and goes on with some of the most abstract language in all the gospels. Many years ago when I was in seminary, when I was a lot smarter or thought I was, I could quote this part of John in Greek from memory. But just being able to quote something doesn’t mean we know it. We have a little dog named Ellie. When she was a puppy, we put a push button bell by the door to the backyard. The theory was that when Ellie needed to potty, she would go step on the button that rings the bell, and we’d let her out. And she learned to ring the bell. She didn’t do it the way we intended to, however; she just rings it whenever she wants to go chase squirrels. But what’s kind of funny to see is that Ellie thinks the bell operates the door. So if she rings it, and we don’t let her out, she just rings it again—and again and again and again. Bible memories can be like that: we recite them over and over but if we don’t know the meaning, nothing happens.

In the Beginning

So let’s break this down a and see if we can figure out what it means. Let’s start with “the beginning”. What is that? What is your beginning? Perhaps you have a “first memory”, usually from when you’re about three or four. But that’s not your beginning. We might say your beginning was when you were born, or when you were conceived. Sometimes there are stories about these. My family legend is that I was born while my dad took his final exams in college. Of course, the Bible begins with creation: in the beginning God created, Genesis 1:1 says.  “What happened before that?” I remember asking a Sunday School teacher once; she told me not to ask such questions, but the truth is she didn’t know and neither do I. There is no before when there is no time and in Genesis the first thing God does is to create day and night, that is to say, time itself. So John is saying, that in the beginning—when there was no before—the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The Word: what is that? We know something about words. If you’re a parent, maybe you remember the first word your child spoke. Is there anymore eagerly awaited sound than that first “Mama” or “Dada”? Just like Ellie learned to ring the bell to get us to open the back door, babies learn to make a sound we call a word to summon us. That word defines relationships: “Mom” also means “Feed me! Change me! Cuddle me!” It’s the first step to controlling the world. Now, I have to do something I hate doing; I have to teach you something about Greek, the language in which the whole New Testament is written and the language in which many early Christians read the Old Testament too. In Greek, what we translate, “Word” is ‘Logos’. Logos means more than just words, it stands for the whole business of putting things in order.

Putting Things In Order

We know something about putting things in order. Jacquelyn and I share a big walk in closet. I’m messy, and the closet has gotten chaotic over the last month or so. Shoes all over the floor, summer and fall and winter clothes mixed, luggage out of place. So this week when she had some time off, Jacquelyn took on the job of organizing the closet and she succeeded brilliantly. Now you walk in there, the shoes are on racks, matched, my shirts are grouped by color and they all face the same way. I have to say, until Jacquelyn brought her sense of closet order to my life, I’d never thought about whether the shirts were grouped or faced the same way but there they are. Genesis describes creation the same way: God puts things away, night gets separated from day, land from water, plants, animals, everything right down to you and I. And the term for this in Greek is Logos, and it’s translation for us is Word. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” means putting things in order.

Now we all live with orders for things, places for them. Some of us do better than others but we do as well as we can. In our house, one cooks, another cleans up. The pots and pans go in one cabinet, the bowls go in another. There is a time for work, a time for sleep. There are other orders too. There is the way that atoms and molecules are bound and structured, the way that heavenly bodies and gravity keep the solar system spinning, the way that chemicals bond and become blood and move the oxygen and nutrients we all need around our bodies. I have no idea how this all works, honestly. I almost flunked chemistry. But I know there is an order to it all, and because of that order, we live and without that order our lives would be impossible. 

God is in the Order

So what John is saying is that right from the beginning, “in the beginning”, God was in the ordering of everything, that just like Jacquelyn matching up the shoes, God is in the order of the very tiniest and the greatest things. 

But what does this have to do with Christmas? Remember what he goes on to say: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.[John 1:14] Christmas is this order, this Word, becoming a child, a person, one of us, living among us. Think what Jesus does: he heals people, which is to say he sets them right, he casts our demons, he sets people back in order, he offers glimpses of how things should be in his teaching. How should we treat one another? “Love one another as I have loved you,” he says. He embodies the love of God which is the Word of God, the order of God and that is the glory John means when he says, “We have seen his glory.” Christmas is the Word becoming flesh.

The Real Christmas

This is the real Christmas carol and it’s often unsung. It’s easy to miss the real Christmas for the wrapping and bows. The real Christmas is God putting us right, ordering us, reminding us to live as children of God, seeing the image of God in others. It’s easy to go through life like Ellie, ringing a bell without knowing how the door really opens. Christmas means to teach us to open the door to love in our lives. It means living that love every day.

Christmas continues today—if that love lives in our hearts, if that light, shines in us. The most important question for our church isn’t “How can we keep going?”; it’s how can we shine the light of Christmas here? What do you think? What can we do together, to make sure it’s clear that Christmas continues with us? 

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.