Category Archives: Worship

De Nada: Learning the Lord’s Prayer 4

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Fourth Sunday in Lent • March 6, 2016

The summer I turned 14, I had an operation to remove most of my thyroid. When I woke up, I hurt every time I lifted my chin; it took all summer to heal. I was left with a bright red raised scar of which I was painfully conscious. I made up stories about it: that I’d been in a knife fight, and I wore a lot of turtle neck shirts. The scar faded but I still saw it every morning, first thing, in the mirror. I still explained about it, increasingly as I got olde,r to people who hadn’t noticed it. It’s still there. Do you have scars? Don’t we all? What would it take to heal them?

“Forgive us as we forgive,”Jesus says. Let’s start with the problem. I’m sure you noticed when I quoted Jesus, I left something out. In both versions of the Lord’s prayer, he doesn’t say “Forgive us…” He says, “Forgive us…” and then there’s a word. If you grew up Methodist or Catholic it’s trespass; if you grew up Congregational, it’s debts. If you have been around Lutherans, chances are you say ‘sins’, which is also popular in a lot of newer churches. Forgive us our debts. Forgive us our trespasses. Forgive us our sins. What does he have in mind?

This is the point where there is a temptation to wander off and show you what I know about Greek, the language the New Testament is written in. I could talk about this for a long time, long enough for you to snatch a nap. But I’m not going to. For one thing, it’s too early for a nap and for another, Jesus didn’t say the Greek word either. Jesus almost certainly spoke Aramaic, not Greek. And he used an Aramaic word here. What does it mean? That’s hard to say. Say trespass and you think, or at least I do, of going to a construction site and taking lumber to build a tree house. But I’m not sure Jesus was worried about lumber or boys or tree houses. Say debt and I think of my credit card bills; did Jesus care about credit scores? Probably not.

So we’re left with sins. That’s a tough one. Congregational ministers don’t talk about sins much anymore; we leave that to Baptists. When we do, we tend to like to talk about sins we don’t do. I remember once sitting with a bunch of ministers at a meeting. This was quite a while ago, when “a bunch of ministers” meant middle aged men who are a little too jolly and can tell you to a decimal point the average attendance at their church and who tend to be a bit fluffy. It’s not their fault. Every church has someone like Arvilla or Joanne who makes cakes and things and it would be rude not to eat them. We grow out of concern for their feelings.

So we are sitting there, munching on pieces of cake some woman in the church had prepared. It was long enough ago that the big issue was gay folks in church. I always thought this was a weird issue; I mean we’ve always had gay folks in church, the real issue wasn’t about having them it was about letting them be honest about who they were without fear. So they were discussing this and gay marriage and most of them were against it. They could really talk about the sin of homosexuality, Bible verses and all. It was impressive. I didn’t have much to say. So I just sat there eating cake and I looked around and realized every one of us was married to a woman. And every one of us was overweight.

So when it was my turn to talk, I said that I thought the cake was really good and since we were all straight there, and all overweight, maybe we should talk about the sin of gluttony, of eating too much. Then I shut up and tried to think how I could get another slice of cake and the table erupted. They did not think this was appropriate; they thought I was making fun of them. We’d all rather talk about someone else’s sins than our own. But we all have them, just like we all have scars.

What does Jesus mean? The word he uses certainly means doing wrong. In our culture, we tend to associate sin with sexual stuff but Jesus actually talks more about economic sins, that is, the sin of letting money get in our way. The word he uses also means “foolishness”. Now that’s something because throughout the Hebrew scriptures there’s a constant play between the notion of being wise—doing what God wants—and being foolish—doing whatever we want, regardless of what God says.

In fact, the original sin had nothing to do with sex, it rose out of the desire to be God like. The serpent says to Eve that she can be like God and she goes for it, inviting Adam along with her. It’s the choice of self over God that makes her stumble.

In fact, The same word also means stumble. That’s something I can understand: I stumble frequently. I mean, I’m walking along and not paying attention and POOF! ouch. Something brings me to a halt. So foolishness, stumbling. Those are part of what he’s talking about, along with scars from injuries and things that make us cover up what we’ve done because we’re ashamed. So from here on out I’m going to use the word ‘sins’ but I trust you to remember it means all these things: scars, selfishness, stumbling.

What he says then is this: Forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others. Look what he does here: he connects these two. That is to say, the experience of forgiveness—being forgiven—is linked to the expression of forgiving: forgiving someone else. You get both or you get neither one. Think of the story of the prodigal we read this morning. You know, I have to admit right here that there is such a temptation for me to preach on this text instead of going along with the Lord’s Prayer. I’m trying to resist but if this sermon goes over 45 minutes, you’ll know I failed. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m going to try to resist; come back in three years, when the text comes up again, and hear a sermon on it then.

I just want you to notice one thing in the story. When the son returns, his father embraces him. Wow: would you do that? Think how angry the father must have been when the son left. That dad knew just what would happen, parents always do. And it did. So the son comes back; there must have been a temptation to say, “Ok, fine you’re home, I’ll give you one more chance.” There must have been a temptation to set a condition on that love but he never once does: he just embraces him. That’s forgiveness. We usually talk about it as the father forgiving the son but there must have been something between them, some ugliness for the son to want to leave and what his bad experience helped him do was forgive his father. The father embraces his son; but the son also embraces his father. It’s the mutuality of the moment that inspires. We can’t experience forgiveness without expressing forgiveness; we can’t express forgiveness without experiencing it.

Forgiveness is a key part of Jesus’ mission. One of the things that angers his opponents is forgiving sins. When his own disciples ask for a rule on just how much forgiveness they have to do, when they want a church policy on forgiveness, he tells them 70 times 7, meaning—unlimited, unlimited forgiveness. The reason is something we talked a bit about last week: Jesus wants us here and now, in the present, in the presence of God. We can’t get there without forgiveness, which means we can’t get there without forgiving, since the two are so tightly linked together.

We can’t get there because of what I call “the ghosts”. The ghosts are all those things in our past that influence our behavior in the present. Maybe someone hurt you in the past; you’re not going to talk to them again. Maybe someone made you angry in the past; you’re not going to have lunch with them again. Maybe someone betrayed your trust; you’re not going to trust them again. We could go on and on but here’s what Jesus knows: all these ghosts in our past are whispering in our ear who not to talk to, who not have lunch with, who not to trust. Look at the story of the prodigal again: all the elder brother at the end talks about is the past, the past where he worked, while his brother went off to play. All our stumbles, all our scars, all our sins are still there, all our past is still there, all our hurts are still there, until they are forgiven. All our guilt about the times we made someone stumble, the time we injured someone, the times we sinned against someone are still there, until they are forgiven. It’s all about the past but as William Faulkner said in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” As long as all that past is still influencing us, it’s here and we’re living in the past.

How do we do this? I think many of us just assume somehow it will happen, like grass growing, like geese returning in the spring. Jesus calls us to choose forgiveness and t these are some of the choices we can make. One is simply to focus ourselves on the present and future. I mentioned last week how hard it can be to choose the present sometimes. Nevertheless, hard choices train us spiritually. When we live in the present, we choose what’s here, not what was here. A second thing we can do is to control our own internal conversation. A woman I know who was terribly hurt through the betrayal of some people she trusted said, “I wanted to stop reading the obituaries with hopeful anticipation. That turned out to be too much. So I started with just not reading the obituaries.” One person I know said about forgiveness, “Every time I got angry, I would just pray. Sometimes the prayers were angry but they were still prayers.”Prayer turns us toward God and God is love. When we let that love in, we heal.

If you are serious about praying, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done”, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, there’s no option, there’s no choice: you have to learn to forgive; you have to learn to accept forgiveness. Forgiveness, forgiving: they mean to put the past in the past. They mean to embrace the present; they mean to let us feel God’s embrace. Neither is easy.

Forgiveness comes in many flavors, from dealing with little bumps and scratches to a full on, long term process. Either one begins with a choice: I’m not going to live in the past, I’m going to choose to walk forward with Jesus, and shoo away those ghosts. Like my friend said, stop reading the obituaries, if that’s the one step you can take. Refuse to remember the hurt. Of course you will remember it—at first. But what we refuse to bring back, subsides. Like the scar on my neck, things fade and if we let them fade, we are free to move forward. We’re still going to stumble and that’s where the dailiness of this prayer comes in: every day, we need to forgive to move forward, every day we need to be forgiven, to move forward along the way of Jesus.

We can do it because we’re following Jesus; we can do it because it’s where he’s going. Remember what he said on the cross? “Forgive them.” He hopes we will do the same, when we stumble, when we sin, when we believe our scars are so obvious no one could love us. He wants to heal those scars; he wants us to feel forgiveness for our sins. He means to make us over into the people God intended. So we can choose to keep stumbling along on our own, keeping track of every hurt, every failure of hope, every time someone wronged us. We can live in that past—or we can get up, get going with Jesus, asking forgiveness and accepting it as well.

I don’t really speak Spanish but there’s a Spanish expression I love. You say it when someone says “thank you” or “I’m sorry”: de nada. It means something like “It’s nothing”. When we come to God, with all our scars, all our stumbles, all our sins, Jesus wants us to know God says, “De nada”—and embraces us. He wants us to practice that by doing it for each other. “Forgive us our debts, our trespasses, our sins, as we forgive our debtors, trespassers, those who sin against us.” If we pray it, if we do it, if we learn it, one day we discover: we know that God is hears the prayer, and we can go home to our true home.

Amen

Got Anything Good? – Learning the Lord’s Prayer 3

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Third Sunday in Lent • February 28, 2016

What do you need every day? I suppose most of us have a daily routine: clean up, something to drink, something to eat, something to do. Most of this is a matter of choice: what do you really need? We can go about three minutes without air; more if you are a trained diver. The average person can go three days without water, although some have survived longer. We can go about three weeks without food; Mahatma Gandhi survived a 21 day fast. We can go a long time without light but it disorients us and distorts our time sense. Solo sailors on long voyages often report hallucinations; Joshua Slocum, the first person we know to have survived a solo circumnavigation, reported a period when he believed someone else was on board, helping him navigate. Simon and Garfunkel famously sang, “I am a rock, I am an island” but in fact we can’t survive in isolation: we need things, we need each other.

The first human experience is a fulfillment of Jesus’ prayer. An infant must be fed, must be cleaned, must be held or the child will not survive. An infant can’t provide these things. Instead, as we all know, babies develop a complex way of signaling their needs and making life unpleasant for unresponsive parents. “Give me” is in that sense our very first prayer, and if it isn’t for bread, it is the same prayer. Give me what I need. The need is supplied: the supply is gift and in the gift a bond of love is formed. “Give us our daily bread.” Last Sunday we talked about the first request of the Lord’s Prayer: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Just as that prayer turns to the heavenly father, this prayer asks the heavenly father toward us, toward our needs. Like an infant asking for milk, like a child hungry for dinner, we come to God: “Give us our daily bread.”

Bread was both symbol and fact of daily life in Jesus’ time. Surely he means to remind us of Israel’s time in the wilderness, when the cry for bread was answered by manna, a bread like substance on which the people fed and which came as the gift of God. Surely he means to remind us of the great feast Isaiah imagined. Bread there is what sustains, and the feast itself is the gift of God, a gift to be given to everyone: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat!” Surely he means as well to remind them of the great time when they believed a crowd would go away hungry and miraculously all were fed.

On their return the apostles told Jesus all they had done. He took them with him and withdrew privately to a city called Bethsaida. 1When the crowds found out about it, they followed him; and he welcomed them, and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed to be cured. 12The day was drawing to a close, and the twelve came to him and said, “Send the crowd away, so that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside, to lodge and get provisions; for we are here in a deserted place.

There they are, in a deserted place, a place that must have felt to them like a wilderness. No McDonalds, no Stewarts, no Dunkin Donuts, not even a gas station in sight. Yet even there, bread is provided. They bring what they have to Jesus, intending obviously for him to get the message: five loaves, a couple of fish, not enough, not nearly enough. Yet when he blesses what they have, somehow everyone is fed and there are 12 baskets of leftovers. “Give us this day our daily bread” reminds us that our source is not ourselves but the gift of God.

The importance of the gift is part of the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Do you remember the story? Jesus is baptized; immediately, he is called into the wilderness. Some versions say he was led there; some that he literally “thrown into the wilderness”. The wilderness is more than geography or climate, it is the place where Israel met God, where God formed the people and gave the covenant. Jesus is in the wilderness, according to the story 40 days, a Biblical number that really means “complete”.

While he’s there, he’s hungry, and the tempter comes. Jesus has just been embraced and heard the Spirit call him the son of God; now the tempter takes this great blessing, this wonderful moment, and turns it around: “If you are the song of God, command this stone to become bread.” You know this temptation, don’t you? You’re at home; there’s food in the fridge you could make, but you’re hungry and there are potato chips so… What would it mean to be hungry and told you could easy as waving turn stones to bread? Stop relying on God and God’s way: just do it yourself. Most of us know this temptation because so often we’ve given into it. We substitute things we make for bread that satisfies: the list is endless, from career success to how we look, how much we make, how many likes we have on Facebook. Jesus replies to the temptation by turning to God’s Word, saying that we do not live by bread alone.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Bread is easy for us to get today. We stop into a store, pick some up off a rack, the only difficulty all the choices: white, whole wheat, rye, whole grain, cinnamon, so many types. But in Jesus’ day, bread had to be made, then as now, from basic ingredients: flour, oil, yeast, baked in an oven. Most people didn’t have these things on their own. You might raise the grain; but it had to be milled, and for that you traded grain. You might have olives to make oil, but you needed a press, and you might trade for that. Ovens weren’t individual, they were a community resource, a place where people gathered together to bake together. They were a focus of community life, like the village well, a place to go and talk and laugh and share and gossip and finally take the hot loaf of bread from the oven. So when Jesus speaks of being given our daily bread, surely he has in mind this sort of community. You can raise lentils and make lentil stew on your own but it takes a whole community to make bread. This is the effect of bread. So it is with us. We sing, “One bread, one body, one Lord of all”, at communion, reminding ourselves that sharing the bread of communion binds us into the body of Jesus Christ. For as the Apostle Paul said, “The bread which we break, does it not mean [that in eating it] we participate in and share a fellowship (a communion) in the body of Christ?”

So: packed into this one prayer we remember and acknowledge we live not alone as a result of our own efforts but within a community, where so much of what we need comes not as reward but as gift. There is one more thing this prayer has to teach: it says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus teaches here as he does elsewhere a focus on the dailyness of life, the nowness of our lives. I’ve been going to the yoga class here on Tuesday nights for a little over a year, off and on. I’m not very good at yoga; I have trouble keeping up with the poses. I struggle along, better some weeks than others. But the hardest thing for me at yoga isn’t the poses or the effort or the stretching it is the constant encouragement to be present, to focus on that moment and not let my mind wander off to other places. I live with a constant future tug; there’s always next Sunday’s sermon, next month’s worship, next year’s strategy. So given the chance, my mind will happily go off there, thinking about what’s going to happen Sunday, what’s going to happen Easter. Jesus means to bring me back, I think, as he does with each of us. The manna in the desert was a daily thing; in fact, only on the day before sabbath could more than today’s need be gathered, anything over would go bad. “Give us this day our daily bread” means to bring us back to today: what do we need today to live as God’s people?

We have seen already how Jesus’ prayer means to turn us to a relationship of loving intimacy with God when he begins, “Our father”, or as I suggested, “Hiya Dad”. Then he moves to inviting God’s rule in our lives: “Thy kingdom come”. Now in the prayer he asks us each day to focus on today, to remember thankfully how we are sustained by God’s gifts; to remember that live from God’s gifts. So this week, each day, every day: let us indeed pray with Jesus, seeking to live as the body of christ, sustained by the bread of life.

Amen.

Who’s In Charge Here? – Learning to Pray the Lord’s Prayer, Lent 2

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by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Second Sunday in Lent • February 21, 2016

A fisherman and his wife lived in an old dirty hut alongside a lake in Bavaria. Every day the fisherman went out to the lake and every day he returned with his catch. One day, the fisherman’s net caught a golden fish. The fish spoke to him and said, “If you throw me back, I will grant you any wish you desire.”
The fisherman thought about it, and being of simple means he could think of no want, so he let the fish go. Upon returning to the dirty old hut that night, he told the tale to his wife.

“You should have asked him for a nice cottage,” she said. “I would love to move out of this filthy hovel.”
So the next morning, the fisherman approached the lake and called out for the fish. The water bubbled and the fish surfaced. It asked, “What do you want?”
“It’s not for me, but my wife. She would like a nice cottage to live in.”
“Your wish is granted. Go home and see.”

The fisherman returned home, and sure enough their filthy hut was replaced with a nice cottage.
The next morning his wife said, “Go back and ask that fish for another wish. I want to be the Princess of Bavaria and live in a fine castle!”
The fisherman said, “Oh no, wife. That is too much. Do not make me ask the golden fish for such a thing. Let us be happy in our nice cottage by the lake.”
But his wife insisted and persisted, and eventually he agreed to ask the golden fish for this wish.
He went down to the lake, and the water was choppy. He called for the fish and its head appeared above water. It said, “What do you want?”
“It’s not for me, but my wife. She wishes to become Princess of Bavaria and live in a fine castle.”
“Your wish is granted. Go home and see.”

The fisherman returned home, and sure enough the cottage was replaced with a castle. There were battlements and guard towers and soldiers all around. His wife greeted him splendidly dressed as a princess.
The next morning his wife said, “Go back and ask that fish for another wish. I want to be Empress of Prussia and live in a grand palace!”
The fisherman said, “Oh no, wife. That is too much. Do not make me ask the golden fish for such a thing. Let us be happy in our Bavarian castle.”
But his wife insisted and persisted, and eventually he agreed to ask the golden fish for this wish.
He went down to the lake, and the water was boiling and turbulent. He called for the fish and its head appeared above water. It said, “What do you want?”
“It’s not for me, but my wife. She wishes to become Empress of Prussia and live in a grand palace.”
“Your wish is granted. Go home and see.”

The fisherman returned home, and sure enough the castle was replaced with a grand palace. It was larger, with more soldiers, more battlements, and more guard towers.
He went in to see his wife and said, “Surely you are happy now. There is nothing greater than being the Empress of Prussia, and no palace greater for you to live in.”
She said, “We shall see. I want to sleep on it and discuss it on the morrow.”
In the morning, she roused the fisherman and said, “Go back and ask that fish for another wish. I want to be the Pope, and live in the grandest palace of all.”
The fisherman said, “Oh no, wife. That is too much. Do not make me ask the golden fish for such a thing.”
She said, “Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, they only let men become popes.”
But his wife insisted and persisted. He said, “Let us be happy in our Prussian palace!”

But she said, “I want to become like God, and order Nature to do my bidding, and tell the sun and moon when to rise and command the stars in the sky above!”
She extolled and cajoled, and eventually he agreed to ask the golden fish for this wish.
He went down to the lake, and the water was dark and roiling. He called for the fish and its head appeared above water. It said, “What do you want?”
“It’s not for me, but my wife. She wants to become like God.”
“Go home. She is sitting in your filthy old hut.”

So the fisherman returned home, and all was as before. He and his wife cleaned the old hut, and lived out their days in peace.
There are many versions of this story, the one here was taken from
The Story of the Golden Fish

What did you think while you heard this story? Did you sympathize with the fisherman or the wife? Can you imagine just wanting more, like she did, more space, finer things, more power? Did you know from the beginning how it would end? I went searching for stories of people who wanted to be in charge this week and there were so many I was overwhelmed. I knew from the beginning in each how it would end. So did you, I expect. Here’s my question: if we know how it will end, why do we keep doing it?

The Bible has stories of people like this. One is right near the beginning, but we often remember it wrong. Adam and Eve are newly created, without anything covered. They live in a beautiful garden doing a little weeding here and there, taking care of it and in the middle of the garden there’s a tree they’ve been told not to touch. One day a serpent points out the tree to Eve and Eve, who is the first theologian, expounds God’s Word regarding the tree. But at the end, Eve takes the fruit from the tree and shares it with Adam. Why? It’s not clear from the story exactly. But we all know don’t we? I told this story to a group of children once. One of them said, “Why did God tell them not to take that fruit, it just makes you want it more when someone says don’t eat it.” Yeah: she had it right—we just want more, until like the woman in the story we have so much that we have nothing. We fall. We live in the midst of the storms of life, and we think if we just had more, more power, more money, more something we could still the storm and sail safe.

Theologians have names for this: “original sin” is one, “total depravity” is another. Those are deep dark concepts, caves that take some time to explore, you need to put on a head light and have some equipment to go spelunking there. But you don’t need all that to know what we’re talking about; you really just have to look in your own heart. You just have to think about why we buy powerball tickets when the prize gets over a hundred million dollars. You just have to look at how we run things when we’re given the chance. Look at our own history. The Puritans are kicked around England until they finally leave and come to Massachusetts. “They came for freedom!”, our happy history teaches us. Truth is, once they got settled in, they turned around and started kicking other people out, sent them to Rhode Island. Yes, we want to be king and sometimes even that isn’t enough.

Jesus lived in a highly structured society, a hierarchy where wealth and gender and where you came from mattered. It mattered that you were male; it mattered that you had money. It mattered whether you were Roman or Jewish or Samaritan. All these things and many more were set against the human desire for more and the competition was often bloody and violent. It was a time of peasant revolts, it was a moment when Roman soldiers crucified thousands up and down the roads around Jerusalem. So we read these words in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”, calmly, quietly. But to Jesus and to the ones who first heard them, these were fiery words, fighting words, scary words. For kingdom is a political term and kings that will tolerate wandering preachers take action when the preaching turns to kingdom.

But Jesus doesn’t seem to be raising a political movement. Instead, as he does so often, Jesus is speaking beyond politics to the deeper reality of human souls. Living in a moment when the Roman empire was worshipped as a God, he calls his people back to this one fundamental reality: we are here to serve God, praise God, worship God. All the human agencies, all the human divisions, everything human is nothing compared to the majesty of God’s rule. That’s part of the lesson in the story of the fisherman. A poor couple are given an unbelievable chance to better themselves. Imagine them waking up in the nice cottage described at the beginning: running water, a beautiful setting. But it doesn’t satisfy. So the places get bigger and better: a castle, a palace. The drive focuses on power, as it always does. What is more? Be a queen, be an empress, until finally it ends with the desire to be God. We are back to the garden at that point: seeking the thing that will make us not just more but most.

Jesus calls us back from this journey to destruction. “Who’s in charge here?”, he implicitly asks. Is it the relentless drive for more?—or can we choose to understand ourselves in a different way? “Thy kingdom come” says first and foremost that we are not living on our own; we are living in the realm of a greater power, subject to a greater command than our own desires. To honestly pray “Thy will be done” is to say my own will, my own desire is not the most important. And in that moment, all those human things matter less than that one fact, that one will, God’s will. What is God’s will? That’s easy, it’s written all over the scriptures, all over the religious traditions of thousand years. “Love God, love your neighbor as yourself.” All the human categories of Jesus’ time and ours fall apart before this great command. Gender, money, celebrity, race and where you came from—they mean nothing compared to this one great command and the desire to live not from our own wills but from the will of God. It’s hard to live this way. Yet this is the choice Jesus puts before us: live from yourself, in the world where differences matter and the great drive is more, or live in the realm of God’, the kingdom of God, asking every day, “Thy will be done.”

This week I saw a movie that expressed this thought fully. It’s called The Finest Hours and it tells the story of a group of four young Coast Guardsmen in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, who were charged in a great storm to go out into the North Atlantic and rescue men on a ship that was sinking. I’m a sailor; I stay home when the waves mound up, when the wind blows beyond a certain point. “Small craft warning” means stay in port. But I’m just sailing for myself; these men had a higher calling. So knowing they are risking their lives, they go out into the terror of the sea to redeem the lives of strangers they’ve never met. “They say you have to go out, you don’t have to come back”, is an old Coast Guard mantra. These are people living from a greater ethic than more; they know what it is to give your life to a greater cause. In the event, they were successful; 32 men were saved that day. They were saved because four men lived not from what they wanted but from what they were called to do.

“Thy kingdom come,” Jesus prays and invites us to pray: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The transition is clear and critical. For it is when we live from God’s will, when this prayer condenses into lives that bits of heaven become evident on earth. When we lives out this prayer, we are making heaven on earth. For the true heaven comes not from miracle fishes or bigger and better palaces, not from more, not from us at all. Heaven comes when the kingdom of God appears. This is the mission of Jesus Christ. The gospel of Mark says it all:

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.’ [Mark 1.14bf]

Jesus comes to bring heaven to earth by proclaiming God’s rule, living from God’s rule. And his words and his life confront us with this choice: will we make his prayer our lives? This morning we read the story of a storm he stills. We all face storms; they blow into our lives and challenge us and ask, “Who’s in charge here?” When we pray, when we live, saying indeed, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done”, the storms are stilled; heaven is brought to earth.
Amen.

Hiya Dad – Learning the Lord’s Prayer 1

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This past week New Hampshire conducted its presidential primary and the thing that struck me most was not the results but the process: individuals going to candidates at forums, meetings, even on the street and asking questions. It made me wonder: what would you like to ask Jesus? Suppose he appeared to you as he did to Peter, to John, to Mary, to Paul. Suppose you had just a moment, as they had, what would you ask?
The gospels are full of questions. Rabbinic teaching to this day is a dialogue: a question is posed, the rabbi, the teacher, ponders the question in the light of Torah and tradition. So the greatest prayer in our worship comes, not as a teaching from nowhere, but as a response to a question.

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.”
Jesus answers, according to Luke, with what we now call, The Lord’s Prayer, beginning, “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

But this prayer comes not only as a response to the disciple’s question, it comes as a response to God. The sailor in a storm, the soldier in a battle, the spouse in a hospital waiting room, pray in response to something larger, some great event that moves their spirit. In the same way, our prayers are evoked, our prayers come in response to God’s great creative work. Wherever we go, there are moments of beauty that call to us, that speak to us, and the response is a prayer.

Surely the disciple asking the question knows how to pray. Prayer has a long history, so long we can’t mark it’s origin. Anne Lamott famously said there are just two real prayers: “Help me help me help me” and “thank you thank you thank you”. Surely in the dawn of human consciousness, both prayers were offered. For in that dawn, living on the edge of survival, humans must have felt the same fear we feel when we are threatened. And in that fear, their souls must surely have cried out for help, help from some power greater, some force stronger, some actor who could change things in their favor: “help me help me help me”. So too, in times of satisfaction, when the hunt was successful or perhaps appreciating the beauty of a moment, of a scene they had come upon, their hearts opened like ours and they said, as we do, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Over centuries, those simple prayers became ritualized, formalized into specific words. Humans imagined a rich former time when gods walked and they invoked them with prayers and worship they believed would benefit their communities and themselves.

In Jesus’ time, prayers were public performances. Ancient near eastern religion included the adoration of statues meant to symbolize gods and ceremonies that were intended to mimic their actions. In Babylon, for example, a New Year’s festival involved leveling the great dirt road outside the city, constructing a platform on which the king rode into a stadium where he slew a lion, replicating one of the stories of the god Marduk. Roman religion was practiced at great temples, through a system of sacrifices of animals. Much of the ancient near east practiced such prayer. We have a reflection of those ceremonies in Jesus’ teaching. Matthew’s gospel precedes the Lord’s Prayer with Jesus’ condemnation of ceremonies his disciples must have seen. He speaks of a procession of prayer, with a trumpet going first; he speaks of people standing in synagogues and on street corners, loudly proclaiming their prayers. Instead, he tells his followers, go to some place private and offer a prayer that looks like this—and then he teaches the Lord’s Prayer.

With this history of ritualized, public prayer, where the words of the prayer themselves are specified, where the point is the effect on the crowd, and the honor the prayer receives, the prayer Jesus teaches and its context is striking. First, he teaches that prayer is private: its location is in the quiet room of the soul. Prayer is not a public ceremony, it’s a private conversation.

Second, he begins his prayer with a shocking statement of intimacy: “Our Father”. It doesn’t sound that intimate in English, does it? We miss the effect. In Jesus’ original language, however, the opening word is “Abba”. Now Abba is a term of intimacy; it doesn’t so much mean, “our Father”, as “Daddy” or “Poppa”; you can supply another word if you wish. The Bible is perfectly comfortable with images of God that imagine a mother’s love, in fact the prophet Hosea pictures God like a woman working in a field, drawing us with what are called cords of compassion. What the text really means is a sort of leather leash mothers used to keep track of children while they worked. In loving families, parents are often called by some word, some name, that is less a name than a claim of relationship. Instead of saying, “our father”, I think sometimes we should begin this prayer, “Hiya, Dad”.

Imagine that; try it out in your head: “Hiya Dad”. It claims something about God, and at the same time it says something about you too, doesn’t it? It claims a relationship imperishable, unbreakable. It speaks not only the identity of the one addressed but also our own place. For no equal calls someone Daddy, no other power speaks this name; it is a child thing, to say it is not only to say who God is, it is to say that we are children of God. This is the meaning of “our Father”: that we have an imperishable, intimate, unbreakable relationship with God defined by God’s care for us and God’s intention to help us grow up. It is to say that we are before God children, who may at times run off, get into trouble, but ultimately are called back and cared for by a power greater than we can imagine, nurtured by a love we cannot escape. Calvinists have a name for this love, they call it “violent grace”. It means simply that God can save us even when we don’t want to be saved. So indeed, to pray, “our father”, abba, is to recognize God loves us even when we don’t want to be loved, even when we, like an angry adolescent, say to God, “You’re not going to walk with me, are you?”

“Hiya Dad” claims a relationship and the relationship precedes anything else. There is no thank you here, no request for help, nothing but that one shocking claim: you and God together are bonded in some way that is beyond any earthly attempts to break the bond. Perhaps that’s why he immediately locates this parent “Our father who art in heaven.” Where is heaven? Another time thought of the universe as layered, earth here, heaven above, some kind of underworld below. But heaven is much more than geography. Heaven is the place where God’s intention is fully realized, where God’s rule, God’s will, is fully expressed. To say “who art in heaven” is also to claim a relationship, it is to say that we have a home there, we have a home in heaven with this dad, this parent, this mom. For part of the heart of the relationship is to say, this is who our people are, this is where we come from. One of my favorite camp songs says, “I’ve got a home in glory land that out shines the sun…” Maybe you know it. Heaven is home, a true home, and like home, we come home through this prayer. It’s meant to transport us, remind us who we are: children in the home of the loving God.

So the final part of the opening of the prayer shouldn’t surprise us: “hallowed be your name.” I guess more misunderstanding comes from this than any other part. When I was a kid, I didn’t know the word ‘hallowed’, I thought it meant ‘hollowed’. I didn’t understand why God’s name would be hollowed out, like a gourd. Hallowed is actually, of course, just an old English way of saying, “Great!” or “Praised!” It is a reminder, right form the beginning, of God’s greatness.

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Hi dad, I remember home, and how great you are. Perhaps Lamott is right in general about prayer but this prayer does not begin with anything God has done for us, or anything we hope God will do. It isn’t about doing at all at the opening. Before the doing, before the hope, there is just this great, ringing affirmation of relationship. Hiya dad—I’m yours, I’m your child; I know you’re in heaven—I know you are my home. Hallowed be thy name—I know your greatness, your goodness, and I live within it. This is the beginning of Jesus’ prayer and it’s meant to be prayed as the beginning. Right from the beginning, before we ask, before we are asked, we are meant to remember: whose we are, who we are.

This week, I want to give you an assignment, and it’s simple. Just prayer this one line, this one sentence, each day as a prayer. Do it right: go somewhere private, alone, no cell phone, no TV, no screens at all, just you and the quiet. Breathed, wait until you are calm and then pray the prayer. And then, see if you can find your own words. What word expresses the intimate caretaker for you? Where is the home of that one? What praise would you give? “Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” We are meant to pray this in our homes, in our hearts. Let us indeed claim our relationship and our home with God for we do indeed, have a home in glory land that outshines the sun.
Amen.

What Happens?

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Transfiguration Sunday/C • February 7, 2016

“You are my beloved”. Twice, the gospels tell us, heaven opened and Jesus heard in his deepest soul God speaking these words. Once at his baptism; again, late in his ministry, when he took his closest friends up a mountain and they saw how like the great prophets Moses and Elijah he was. Because we aren’t reading these stories in order, we miss some of the context. Before this, he has healed and offered hope; before this he has taught his friends his path will lead to a cross. They have argued with him, feared for him, followed him. Now he shines with the vision of this mission, now he is transfigured, altered, like the wick of a candle, as the love of God burns and sheds light in the world. What happens on the mountain? How many have asked this? Yet if we truly look, we will know what happen because we see it ourselves at times. We have been thinking about how to live together in the covenant community of Christ and last week we heard the most important principle of all: to live from the permanent love of God. What happens on the mountain? What happens when we live in the love of God?

Let me tell you a story. There was once an old stone monastery tucked away in the middle of a picturesque forest. For many years people would make the significant detour required to seek out this monastery. The peaceful spirit of the place was healing for the soul.
In recent years, however, fewer and fewer people were making their way to the monastery. The monks had grown jealous and petty in their relationships with one another, and the animosity was felt by those who visited. The Abbot of the monastery was distressed by what was happening, and poured out his heart to his good friend Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a wise old Jewish rabbi. Having heard the Abbot’s tale of woe he asked if he could offer a suggestion. “Please do” responded the Abbot. “Anything you can offer.”

Jeremiah said that he had received a vision, and the vision was this: the messiah was among the ranks of the monks. The Abbot was flabbergasted. One among his own was the Messiah! Who could it be? He knew it wasn’t himself, but who? He raced back to the monastery and shared his exciting news with his fellow monks. The monks grew silent as they looked into each other’s faces. Was this one the Messiah?

From that day on the mood in the monastery changed. Joseph and Ivan started talking again, neither wanting to be guilty of slighting the Messiah. Pierre and Naibu left behind their frosty anger and sought out each other’s forgiveness. The monks began serving each other, looking out for opportunities to assist, seeking healing and forgiveness where offense had been given.

As one traveler, then another, found their way to the monastery word soon spread about the remarkable spirit of the place. People once again took the journey to the monastery and found themselves renewed and transformed. All because those monks knew the Messiah was among them.

Let me tell you another story. Almost 16 years ago, I stood in the chancel of another church, a church where I had been the pastor for five years, a place I knew well. But on that day, another minister was at the center, directing our worship, a man who is like a father to me. And as I stood there and looked out at the congregation, Jacquelyn appeared in a white dress at the back and there was a light around her. In moments she was next to me, a few moments later we were married. We were changed, changed by love, and that has made all the difference.

One more story. Two years ago, I was still healing from a wound from which I thought I’d never recover. I was only just beginning to believe the astonishing sense I’d received from God that I wasn’t finished, that God had more for me to do. I read the information about this church and set it aside; Jacquelyn insisted I read it again, contact the committee and I did. A few months later I came here for the first time, stood in this pulpit and addressed you and, just like the day with Jacquelyn, we made a new covenant. We were changed, changed by love, and that has made all the difference.

What happened on the mountain?. In those moments, those disciples saw Jesus in a new way and a new covenant began. We often live in the past. We use it to draw lessons, we use it to guide us, to help us avoid hurts. But the gospel wants us to see ahead, not just behind. Transfiguration is a glimpse of the future, of where we are going, of a moment when we can see that God has been doing the same thing all along, in Moses, in Elijah, now in Jesus: reaching out to embrace us, inviting us to embrace each other.

I tell these stories this morning because transfiguration doesn’t just happen on a mountain far away, it happens in our lives, it happens when we open ourselves to God’s love, when we take a moment to look up from our wounds and let God’s love embrace us. John Sumwalt tells of a friend who had a powerful experience of the holy. She wasn’t sure who she could tell. She couldn’t think of anyone in the church and ended up sharing it with a Buddhist priest. He told her “not to try to dissect it for meaning, pick away at it or anything else – but just to let it sit. His words were “Hold it in your heart. It may be years before you even catch a glimmer of understanding.” Whenever heaven opens and God’s love is so evidently, clearly, showered down, a difference is made; all the difference is made.

What happens on the mountain is that the disciples see Jesus in a new way. They see him as the child of God, embraced, loved. What happens when we see each other that way? We gather in the name of Jesus who was transfigured on the mountain and as the continuing expression of that covenant community of disciples. Like them, I think we often misunderstand him; like them, we aren’t always ready to follow immediately where he’s going. But when we do, when we ourselves hope in that love, have faith in that love, practice that love, what happens? Christ comes; God blesses. And the kingdom is here, right here, among us. Today I want to close with a poem from Malcom Guide.

For that one moment, ‘in and out of time’,
On that one mountain where all moments meet,
The daily veil that covers the sublime
In darkling glass fell dazzled at his feet.
There were no angels full of eyes and wings
Just living glory full of truth and grace.
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.
Nor can this this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.

What happens on the mountain can happen, does happen.
May it happen in your life this week.
Amen.

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One More Thing

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Fourth Sunday After Epiphany • January 31, 2016

“Jesus is Lord!” Two weeks ago, we heard Paul explaining to the Corinthian Christians, a divided church that this is more important than all their differences. Differences of opinion, differences of gender, culture, even belief, none of these compare to the unity of living with one Lord. We heard him compare this life to being a body, the body of Christ. “Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it.” Last Sunday we heard how just as the body needs different parts for different functions—an eye to see, an ear to hear and so on—we need as one body different gifts. This is a core part of being a Congregational Church because we believe we are a complete church in Christ. We believe God has given everything we need here to do what God hopes. Surely among those hopes are that we will remember members not here; so we have members who are gifted at staying in touch. Surely among those hopes is that we will sing God’s praise; so we have members who play and sing and lead us in that way. Surely we need people to organize our missions, serve communion, and we have people who are gifted at these things. Each of us has gifts given by God and together, in the sharing of our gifts, God’s work is done, Christ is present, for we are the body of Christ.
“Jesus is Lord!” That is our faith and mission. How can we turn that faith into mission? How can we live it day to day? That’s Paul’s intention in this part of his letter to the Corinthians. After answering the Corinthians, after explaining how much more important their unity in Christ is than their differences, he comes to this moment. Steve Jobs used to stand on a stage each year and explain the great things the Apple corporation had done and various new products. But he was famous for saving his announcement of really ground breaking things like the iPhone for the send and introducing them with the phrase, “One more thing…” Now Paul comes to the end and says in effect, “one more thing: love”.
It’s a chapter often read in the context of marriage: at weddings, anniversary celebrations, recommittals. I once was asked to read it at the funeral of a beloved spouse. It’s one of the most familiar parts of the whole Bible. But if we know it by heart, if in your head you were saying the words as they were read, do we do it in life? Jesus said, “Love your neighbor” and his life is a parable of love. Paul has told the Corinthians to love; now he teaches them, and us, how to take that principle and turn it into verbs. He sets the issue squarely right at the beginning.

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. [1 Cor 13:1-2]

Now Paul knows, as we may not that in fact many of the pagan ceremonies his audience remembers did indeed involve cymbals and gongs other instrument, symbolic ways of getting God’s attention. He also knows some of the Corinthians claim to have more faith than others and finally, then as now, the ultimate sign of Christian commitment was being martyred; these are people who know people who have died for their faith. How could their sacrifice mean nothing?
But love is not an emotion, love is not a pretty poem, and Paul proceeds to describe it a series of verbs. They’re like a mirror. Just listen to them, let them roll around in you for a moment: love is patient; love is kind; love bears all things, love believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Paul teaches by telling us what love is not as well: envious, boastful, arrogant, rude, irritable, resentful. None of these things are part of love. The toughest one for me is this one: love does not insist on its own way. That’s tough. You know, I work hard at being right about things. And when I’m right, when I’m sure I’m right? I know I tend to insist on my own way. I know I’ve insisted on it even when it wasn’t loving. God forgive me. I’m not the only one who does this, either. In fact, when we were first married, Jacquelyn got so tired of people, me in particular, insisting on their own way that she created a sort of rule. It works like this. If you insist on your own way, and someone else insists on a different way and it turns out you were wrong, you have to turn around three times to the right and say, “You were right, you were right, you were right” and then turn around three times to the left and say, “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong.” We call it doing the dance. And honestly? I hate doing the dance. But when you do the dance, you discover something; you can’t do it without laughing. The other person laughs and somehow things are better; love is restored. Love does not insist on its own way.
One of my favorite movies is Harvey. It’s is an old black and white movie with Jimmy Stewart and the premise is simple. Elwood P. Dowd has a good friend who is a pookah, a sort of six foot tall rabbit with magical powers. Oh, one more thing: Harvey, the pookah? He’s invisible and given to hanging out in bars. It’s a comedy in which a simple, happy man is sent to a psychiatric hospital for being happy, for not living by the world’s values. He explains it this way, “”In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart…or oh, so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” Love doesn’t insist on its own way; it’s not smart, it’s pleasant.
Now if we are honest when we truly look in the mirror of these verbs, most of us will see our own flaws. Paul has a reply. He says that now we see in a mirror darkly and the we live as children who are still growing. So if we haven’t fully grown into this vision of love, it’s ok; we are meant to keep pressing on, keeping the prize in mind, keeping the vision alive. And this is the most important function of a church. We are a school for love. We are meant to learn here how to be patient, how to be kind. We are meant to learn how we can be together without insisting on our own way. We are not these things now; we do not always work together this way now. We insist on our own way, we measure our differences. But we are learning, we are learning to love.
The most important step is simply to decide to live this love. In Harvey, Elwood P. Dowd is seen by a psychiatrist named Dr. Chumley. Over the corse of the story, Dr. Chumley comes to believe in Harvey and near the end of the story he says, “Flyspecks! Flyspecks! I’ve been living my life among flyspecks while miracles were hanging out downtown.” Dr. Chumley has come to a realization; love trumps smart, love trumps being right, love trumps everything.
When Paul has held up the mirror of love, he says one more thing. The Corinthians are doing things day to day. Paul wants them to see that everything they are doing is temporary. Isn’t it the same with us? My father taught me lots of wonderful things but he also taught one thing that was wrong. He taught all of us, “Work comes first.” He taught us that our value was our profession. That’s our culture; that’s our way.
But Paul is teaching something beyond our culture, Paul is preaching something beyond our world. Paul is teaching and preaching the love of God in Jesus Christ and the final thing he says ought to be part of every thing we do here. He says this: “Love never ends” and he says that in all the world, only three things ultimately remain: hope, faith and love. Now we live day to day; we try to make a difference day to day. That’s a good and important thing. We are making a difference; we are making things better for some. But the most important thing we can do is be a school for learning to love because all these other things we do, all our work, our efforts—only the parts that have to do with faith, hope and love will last.
Jesus is Lord! Indeed: and our Lord has said love one another. We are meant to be his body, we are meant to live our lives as his, loving and loved, growing in love, sharing his love until the light of the love of God shines in every darkness every day.
Amen.

The Importance of ReGifting

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The Importance of ReGifting
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Second Sunday After Epiphany/C• January 17, 2016

“Tradition!” — that’s how the wonderful musical, Fiddler on the Roof, begins, a story of life in a shtetl, a close knit Russian Jewish village, challenged as the larger world with all its diversity seeps in and seeks change. I couldn’t help thinking of that song this week as I read Paul’s words to the Corinthian Christians. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is a description of how to live together as a church. Now, for the last two Sundays, we’ve been hearing about how the light of God’s opening heaven has come into the world. Today and for the next two Sundays, I’d like to think with you about Paul’s description of how to take that light and make it shine in a way that lights up the world. Jesus said, “No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar, but on the lamp stand so that those who enter may see the light.” [Luke 11:33] How do we take the light of God’s love in Jesus and light up the world?
Paul is trying to keep the flickering light of the Corinthian Church shining. It’s about 20 years after Jesus and the church is about ten years old. It’s old enough that the initial exuberance of just being a church is gone and they’re starting to argue among themselves. Who are these people? Some are life long Jews who got kicked out of Italy; they grew up with Passover and candles and hymns and stories about Abraham. Now they’re putting these things in a new context, understanding them in new ways. Some of them are pagans, people who grew up worshipping different gods. We don’t really have anything like that in our culture. In ancient Corinth, you went to a different god depending on what you needed: one for prosperity, one for wisdom, one for healing and so on. They didn’t grow up with the Jewish stories, but they’re learning them. They do know what feels spiritual, though, that’s a current that runs through all religions. And of course there are all the usual human differences: some are older, some younger, some married, some single, some are richer or poorer.
All those things are making them separate out in the church. Paul’s whole letter is about finding unity in the light of God’s love. So far he’s talked about several topics and now he’s turning to one of the most important: gifts.  We’ve just come through a season of gift giving, so when I say that word, you might think immediately of something in a box wrapped with pretty paper and maybe a bow. Put that gift back; the gifts we’re talking about here are something inside, something we all have already. Let me start with someone you’ve never heard of: Bill Benish. Bill was a classmate of mine in high school. We were part of the geeky bunch; for me it was word, for Bill it was math. In Algebra, he would get up at the blackboard and something just took over. He had a gift; he saw how the numbers and the variables and all of it went together, I guess. I didn’t particularly, but I could see him and it was like seeing a beautiful dance. He got me through Algebra; I helped get him through English. I lost track of him over the years. But I still remember that sense of the gift.
Do you have a gift? Is there something that gives you an amazing joy to do and always has? There are a wide variety of places online that will let you answer a bunch of questions and then suggest what your gift is. Maybe sometime, somewhere, someone did what used to be called vocational testing and said here you go, this is what you should be. Often someone simply recognizes our gift. When I was in ninth grade, our English teacher gave us an assignment to take a simple story and re-write it in some way. I wrote it as a play. I spent hours at my mother’s typewriter and after I turned it in, she called me up to her desk. Now that was a scary thing; it usually didn’t mean something good. She had my paper and she looked at me and said, “I’ve been trying to figure out who you are here and now I see: you’re a writer.” I don’t know that at the time what she said fully registered; I was just grateful I wasn’t in trouble. But her comment did make a difference and the truth is, I’ve earned my living my whole adult life writing and speaking.
Now the Corinthian church is like any church, like this church. There are people who do things, people who say things, some lead worship, some are better singers, some are good cooks, some are seen as spiritual leaders. One thing they have that we don’t is people who speak in tongues. What are tongues? In all religions, there have been people who experienced a kind of ecstasy that makes them move or speak in ways that are passionate and often hard to understand. It’s not unique to Christian churches; there are Hindu ecstatics, Muslim ecstatics, Jewish, Buddhist, all kinds. In Corinth, there are some people who have this gift and they are acting as if it means they are more spiritual, more in contact with Christ, better in some Godly way than others. And that, of course, is leading to division.
So Paul is speaking to this issue. He starts with a breath taking statement of inclusion: “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” Wow: think of the meaning of this—doesn’t matter if you’re straight, gay, male, female, rich, poor, Jewish, Gentile, whatever, if you are saying “Jesus is Lord” we have to acknowledge you, include you, as part of the family of Christians. That’s likely to be uncomfortable because there are people who affirm this that I don’t agree with about other things.
Once Paul announces this threshold, this equality, he goes on to talk about the places where we aren’t equal: the matter of gifts. He acknowledges there are a variety of gifts, of activities, of ways of being.

To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit,to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.

Then announces a fundamental equality in them: all are given by God and all are given for one reason: the common good.
Most of us have some sense of having gifts, but do you know the purpose of your gift? 
Eric Liddell was a Scottish runner in the early 20th century but also a committed Christian leader. Born at a mission station in China, he returned to Scotland to study and run. His emphasis on running didn’t always sit well with the strict Scottish Presbyterians. The move Chariots of Fire is in part his biography and he says, defending his desire to compete as a runner,

I believe that God made me for a purpose, for China. But he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure. To give it up would be to hold him in contempt. You were right, it’s not just fun. To win is to honor him…

To use our gift is to honor the giver. Nowhere is there more joy, more energy, than in fully realizing God’s gifts for then we indeed become what God hoped. Paul lists off various gifts and affirms this, sees them each as something come from God, with a purpose. 
For every gift contains a purpose. The first part is recognizing that it is a gift. There is something in us, a kind of pride, that often whispers we are our own, that what we are is solely because of our own accomplishment. When we recognize who we are is not simply ours but a result of the gift of God, the door opens to gratitude. When have you thanked God for your gifts? When have you simply quietly said to God in prayer, thank you for the exuberance of this spirit? When we know ourselves as the result of God’s gifts, we come to know ourselves as well as the vehicles of God’s gift. The second part of that process unfolds when we take up the purpose of the gift. Paul says: for the common good. Our gifts are not meant simply for us, they are part of God’s provision, God’s plan. One of the fundamental beliefs of Congregationalists is that each church is completely empowered by Christ to do the work Christ intends. The means of that empowerment, that energy, are the gifts of its members. So when we use our gifts knowing them as gifts, in gratitude, for God’s purpose, we build up the energy and mission of Christ. Giving our gifts gives God pleasure and fulfills God’s plan.
This is what I call regifting. Have you done this? Someone gives you something for Christmas and it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t work for you, you don’t need it or want it. But you know someone who might like it. So you wrap it up, you give the gift to them. I used to go to a party after Christmas every year where people brought something to regift. What Paul seems to be saying is that your gift is meant to be regifted, that is shared, with the larger world, and in particular the whole church. That’s why you were given the gift; that’s it’s purpose and when gifts are regifted, they expand, they grow.
Every person here, each one of us, has a gift to give. Every visitor, everyone who walks in our doors is full of gifts waiting to be discovered, used, expressed. Today we’ve read several pieces of scripture. I’ve chosen to speak principally about the reading from First Corinthians. But I want to remind you finally of the Gospel reading. In that reading, according to John, Jesus performs the first sign that he is indeed the Christ. The sign is turning water into wine at a wedding. I want to close with this thought for you to carry home. There must have been many, many guests at the wedding at Cana. Yet of all of them, all the invited guests, perhaps dignitaries, the bride’s parents, the grooms, the bridal couple themselves—all of them!—only the servants see the miracle, know the miracle, experience the power and presence of Christ. When we ourselves give our gifts, knowing Jesus as Lord, then we too are servants and then indeed, we shall, we do, experience the power and presence of Christ and the exuberant joy of regifting what the Spirit has given us.
Amen.
© James Eaton 2016

All Washed Up

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All Washed Up
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Baptism of the Lord Sunday/C • January 10, 2016

“How have I ever deserved such love?”

 A woman asks this question near the end of The Danish Girl and I wonder if it is Jesus’ question at the end of his baptism.
I imagine it as a hot day; this is desert country after all. The stories about John tell us there were crowds but what’s a crowd? Twenty people? A couple hundred? Thousands? We don’t know. John is a striking figure, a man evidently filled with the Spirit of God, who speaks a fierce message, calling people to repentance. He’s on the shore of the Jordan River. This is the river that had to be crossed centuries before by God’s people to enter the promised land. This is the water that had to be waded, this is the stream that stood between them and the fulfillment in history of God’s love and covenant. Is there a line to be baptized? Did Jesus stand behind others as one after another they came to John, talked to John, heard him pray and then felt him forcefully plunge them into the water, let the water cover them like someone drowning, and then lift them up, wet, wondering what comes next, clean, ready for the next chapter. Now Jesus comes; now he looks at John, now their eyes make a private space only they understand. Now John is taking Jesus in his arms, as he has with all the others, now Jesus is plunged into the water, there is perhaps that instant of fear so instinctive when we are underwater, now he is lifted up and heaven opens, Jesus hears what we all want to hear, “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is baptism.
Baptism is rare here and in church life, we’ve become fussy about the rituals that surround We have considerable evidence for baptism, both of children and adults, in the early church. The Didache, a collection of sayings and teachings probably written about the same time as the New Testament says this about baptism.
Concerning baptism, you should baptize this way:

After first explaining all things, baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in flowing water. But if you have no running water, baptize in other water; and if you cannot do so in cold water, then in warm. If you have very little, pour water three times on the head in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Before the baptism, both the baptizer and the candidate for baptism, plus any others who can, should fast. The candidate should fast for one or two days beforehand.

This is great news if you’re one of those people who think details aren’t important; bad news if you’re a ritual maker. What says is that the form of applying the water, the part that most interests us, doesn’t really matter. Use running water—if you’ve got it. Use a few drops if that’s all you’ve got. 
The formula, the amount of water, the exact things we do—really don’t matter. And by the way: the last line, about fasting? That clear direction is almost universally ignored. But it’s the details that most interest us. As one writer says,

Baptism has become its customs, once meant to celebrate its meaning, but now the only meaning of the celebration: a time for dressing the baby in something outlandish, an occasion of presents and promises and family.   And none of this has anything to do with profound and dangerous journeys of the spirit.   The danger of water and demons,  the spirit journey, the profundity, have gotten lost in ritual huzzahs, so much so that most Christians, in their own profound journeys, do not think of them as part of their baptism. 

I know from my own experience how true this is. Once, years ago, in the midst of pronouncing the formula, “in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit”, my voice caught and the last phrase wasn’t heard. The next day I got a phone call from the church moderator; a person had called him claiming the baptism was invalid and the child’s immortal soul was in danger because I had supposedly left out the full phrase. I didn’t know how to treat seriously the idea that someone’s salvation could be determined by whether I coughed in the midst of claiming it.
But if the details don’t matter, what does? The clues are in the scripture we read this morning and they have nothing to do with measuring out water. Isaiah says,

But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

This word is addressed to people who feel themselves lost. Every day the news shows us pictures of refugees from Syria and other places. Israel had become refugees and this is God saying, “You’re not forgotten: you’re still mine.” There’s a reason every baptism begins with a question: “What name is given this child?” We name a person at baptism in a way that honors them uniquely but also connects them with a family, a heritage. Whose are you? You are God’s own child, regardless of your age. Baptism is a reminder we’re not on our own; we belong and we belong to someone, to God. In the visible church, here, we are meant to be the emblem of that belonging. Baptism is first, then belonging.
But it’s also a response to fear. Swimming is taught to children these days and we forget that for most of history and still today in many places, people fear water. In fact, that primal fear is deep within us. Water is dangerous. Once my son was teasing me about not playing sports; he talked about having the courage to go out on the soccer field, knowing he might get bruised. I pointed out that I sailed and commented, “Every year, some sailors die when they drown.” It was a poor joke yet it had a truth: water is dangerous. Baptism began as a way of making sacred what we feared. In John Irving’s novel, The World According to Garp, a family retreats to a home on the ocean shore in New Hampshire. There’s a beach and the children are warned about an undertow that can suck them down. Misunderstanding, the way children do, they call it “the undertoad”. I know about the undertoad. Once, long ago, I was on a beach in New Jersey, swimming while my parents watched a few yards away. The undertow—the undertoad!—caught me, swirled me around and I’ve never forgotten the fear of that moment. “When you pass the waters,” God says, “I will be with you”. When the undertow grabs you, you will still be God’s.
But it’s not all water; baptism is more than being washed up and set down fresh and fancy. Acts tells the story of an early church mission. Someone has gone up to Samaria and baptized some folks there. They didn’t ask the Deacons, they didn’t follow the ritual, they just went ahead and did it. But somehow, the baptism wasn’t effective and the disciples know this because there has been no evidence of the Holy Spirit among these folks. We don’t know what this means; we only have this little testimony. Yet clearly the early church knew that baptism wasn’t simply a human act of applying water; it had a deeper, transforming significance. Today, baptism has become about the water; God meant it to be about the Spirit, the breath, the wind that blows through life. In the beginning, Genesis says, the Spirit of God blew on the face of the waters and it’s from this ordering that creation follows. Baptism is meant to be a sign of a deeper spiritual blowing in us that causes us to live out the gentle, loving, forgiving way of Jesus. No amount of water can do that; it takes the Holy Spirit. Our task as baptized Christians is to nurture the presence and experience of that Spirit in those who come here, those God sends.
The final clue I want to call attention to this morning is simple and direct. At the end of the account of Jesus’ baptism, it says, “heaven opened”. We live in a world caught up in the details of earthly life: what to wear, eat, how to get through the day. What we miss if we forget our baptism is that heaven is open; God is calling. The question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?” has a simple answer: you don’t, you can’t. We don’t deserve love: it is pure gift, the gift of the God to whom we belong, whose children we are. If we believe we are indeed, God’s people, if God has given us the Spirit to bind us and energize us in living out love, if we know heaven is open to us, then indeed, we are loved in a way beyond deserving. You are my beloved, God says to Jesus: you are my beloved, God says to you.
The movie I mentioned earlier, The Danish Girl, is a fictionalized account of a real person, a man named Einar Wegener, married to Gerda, who discovered within himself a female identity he named Lili. It was a time and place with little understanding about such things and as Lili emerged and his life became living as Lili, as Einar receded and this woman became fully alive, he faced the conflict of being a woman living in a man’s body. At first treating this as a problem to be solved, Lili and Gerda struggled to find a way forward. Ultimately, Lili became the first person known to have undergone a series of operations to remake the body to match the identity as a woman. What’s clear from the real history, not as clear in the movie, is that there were years during which Lili faced the conflict of hiding her real self, living in shame, keeping the secret. Finally, near the end of the movement, Lili sees how loved she is, asks the question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?”, and answers it in the only way it can be answered. 

“Last night I had the most beautiful dream…I dreamed I was a baby in my mother’s arms…and she looked down at me…and called me Lili.”

The dream is being called by your true name: known in your true self. And loved. Like the mother in the dream, like our father in heaven, God is calling out to us, loving us, loving us beyond anything we can or ever will deserve. In the moment we see this, in the moment we know this, heaven does indeed open. And that is baptism. 
Amen.

Wonder Wonders – Epiphany Sunday – Jan 3, 2016

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You can hear this sermon preached by clicking here

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor • Copyright 2016 All Rights Reserved
Epiphany Sunday/C • January 3, 2016

Among the figures that populated my grandmother’s nativity scene, none were more impressive than the Three Kings. Made of carved wood and painted in bright colors, the Kings sat on camels linked together by gold colored chains and they had little treasure boxes that fitted behind them, boxes which opened and could be made to contain real treasures: bits of gold from the chocolate coins my grandfather gave us or some other thing that became a treasure just by being secret. I never cared much about the cattle or the sheep or the fat little shepherd boys but my brother and I played with the Kings until their chains broke and one of the camels lost a leg. Even broken, their gold almost rubbed off, the Three Kings seemed to contain the real wonder of the nativity just as they contained our treasures. Obviously we weren’t alone in our fascination. The fascination and emphasis we put on Christmas is unique to our culture; Eastern Christianity, most European Christians and the rest of the world spend far more time on the celebration of Epiphany than on Christmas. It is their moment for gift giving and reflecting on God’s gifts. Too often for us, Epiphany comes as an after thought to Christmas: a time to finish vacuuming the pine needles and get back to normal. Today I want to call you out from the normal to a story that promises to let your heart swell with joy and invites us to wonder.
Perhaps it’s best to begin by putting the creche figures back, letting go of the stories that people have made up, and seeing what Matthew tells us about the Magi. Magi means “Wise Ones”—and that’s what they are; only later did a legend grow up that named them and called them kings. The Magi were astrologers: watchers of the sky who look for meaning in the stars, relating patterns in the planets to prophecies. Suddenly one night they see some conjunction, some stellar event in a region of the sky called the House of the Hebrews and their prophetic books tell them that there is a special king expected in the land of Judah. So they go: packing up, joining a caravan, just as settlers once crossed this continent by waiting in St. Louis for a wagon train. They take the ancient caravan route, the route that Abraham would have traveled, the route traveled by merchants and slaves and conquerors for thousands of years and about a year or so later they come to Jerusalem.
What does it feel like when you get somewhere after a long trip? Maybe you were in the car for days and the wrappers from old hamburgers and drink cups litter the back seat. Maybe your airplane finally lands and you impatiently wait for the aisle to clear, grab your stuff and hurry into the airport only to realize you’re not sure which way to go. Once arrived in Jerusalem, surely the Magi would have found rooms in some tavern, cleaned up, hired a translator, made an appointment to see King Herod. This is a small country they’re visiting, after all; they themselves are from a richer, older capital. Stil,l visiting a King is serious business. They are there, but not all the way there yet. Last October, Jacquelyn and I went to Spain. We flew for what seemed an endless time until we landed in Barcelona. But Barcelona wasn’t where we were really going; that was a little town somewhere up the coast. We just assumed we could get directions but the directions were in Spanish. Thank God for the kind woman who spoke Spanish and told us how to find the train station!
The Magi need directions for the birth place and they just assume that since this is such an important event, the King will know all about it, will know how to get there. I imagine them putting on their best robes, their finest first century version of a power tie and business suit, eager to get the final directions to complete their long trip. Now they wind through the narrow streets of the city, fending off beggars and peddlers; now they come to the palace and various staff pass them from one to another until finally they are part of a line to see King Herod. Finally they are there, called forward. There must have been some ritual greetings, like the President and a foreign leader doing a photo op. Finally, they ask: “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.”Silence. Herod looks at his advisors, who turn away. Some meaningless greeting, some vague words, must have been said to put them off. “Please enjoy our hospitality while I consider this question.” All we have is Matthew’s comment that Herd was frightened and called his smartest advisors together to ask the same question: where is this child? They read the prophets and tell him Bethlehem’s the place. So Herod calls the Magi back in, this time secretly. He tells them Bethlehem, tells them to find the child and come back and report.
The story offers two reactions to the birth of Jesus. The Magi come to pay homage. They don’t know Jesus, they don’t know anything about him. They just know that something about him makes heaven shine in a new way. Something about him lights up life. They want to see more of this light; they want to give thanks for it. They’re come in wonder; they come with gratitude symbolized by gifts. The most important detail about them isn’t the robes or the crowns or even the gifts. Matthew’s readers would have passed right by those things that grab us and seized on something we miss: they are gentiles. They are outsiders, people from outside the covenant of Moses, people who don’t eat kosher or observe any of the customs of good Jews. They’re outsiders and yet they come in wonder, simply seeking the light God’s shining on this moment.
Herod can think only of securing his own position. He wants to know where Jesus is so he can pursue his own plan, his own goals. The conflict that will bring Jesus to the cross is already in motion right here, right from the beginning: cross and crown are at war right from the start.Just outside the boundary of this story, Herod will do what the powerful always do: use violence to prevent change. Power always seeks to remain powerful. Herod is the ultimate insider, just as the Magi are outsiders. So right from the beginning, God is using outsiders, visitors, to shake the foundations of God’s people, to change them, to open them so God’s purpose of spreading the light of love can move on, move forward, move outward.
This story asks us the same question the old spiritual asks: Which side are you on? Put another way, What light lights your life? The word Epiphany means manifestation or showing forth, as a light shines. The light in which we walk, the light that lights our lives, does show and it does make a difference. We know this about color and light: sit in a red room, psychologists tells us, and you somehow become more aggressive. The same is true of your life: the light in which you see things is a matter of decision. One camp song says, “I have decided to follow Jesus”. What have you decided? What purpose drives your journey? The Magi and Herod both go to Bethlehem but only the Magi come in wonder, seeking God’s wonder; only the Magi see Jesus. Herod comes with soldiers, power, violence but Jesus is gone by then, escaped by God’s hand. Now today lots of people show Jesus’ name around for their own purposes. Like Herod, they have their own agenda and only see how he might fit their needs. But still, now as then, there are people, often excluded, who come in wonder, who see the light of God’s love. And God wonders: where are we going? where will we go? Amen.

New Communion

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What does communion mean to you? It alway amazes me how we become caught up in how communion is done rather than what it means. First Congregational Albany passes out trays of broken bread and small cups of grape juice. Over at the Roman Catholic Church, they dip the bread (called intinction) and somewhere in the area I’m sure there are people who go up and kneel at a rail. All of these mean to make us present with Jesus as he sacrifices himself in love of God and love of us.
This coming Sunday, we’re going to try communion in a little different way. We’ll have a light breakfast, sing hymns, pray, listen and discuss scripture and then share of the things on the table a communion that remembers that this is just what Jesus did: took what was there, what God had provided, and made it something eternal.Come share communion, come share his love!