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Finders Keepers

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

All Saints Sunday • November 2, 2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 • 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 * Luke 19:1-10

This is how God starts: everything in order, light and darkness separated, land and sea, a fruitful creation, two people set in a garden. Then the people decide they want to be like God and it all falls apart. There’s violence and shame and sin and it’s a mess. It’s like when you go through one of those periods where you don’t clean, the dishes pile up, the bed’s a lump of twisted covers and sheets and you can’t face it all. 

So God starts over; washes it all away in the Flood, teaches boat building to Noah and Noah goes on a cruise, God promises not to do this again, the waters recede and everything is in order. Then people spread out, they decide to be god like, build a tower and God has to scatter them and invent languages, and it all falls apart.

So God starts over: whispers to Abram and Sarai a promise about a land where they will be God’s people and that they will have children and become the beginning of a blessing to the whole world. God makes a covenant with them, sends them on a long journey, gives them a child, and it all looks good. Then it falls apart. There’s violence, there’s division. The people of God go off to Egypt and become slaves.

So God starts over: gets Moses to go to Pharaoh to say, “Let my people go”, because on the whole, God hates slavery. It takes some doing to convince the Egyptians but eventually God’s people leave slavery, wander around, doubting God some, complaining some, but God gives them a set of rules, Ten Commandments, makes another covenant with them, promises the promised land. They get there and then it all falls apart. They don’t live by the covenant, they think other Gods look like more fun, and they think they can be Godlike themselves.

So God starts over: sends prophets, gives them a Word. One of them is Habakkuk. He lives in a time of deep division. The Chaldeans, a people from present day Iraq, have defeated God’s people but it’s before the final devastation of Jerusalem. He sets out the problem.

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?

1:3 Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.

1:4 So the law becomes slack, and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous; therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

But what’s the solution? Habakkuk says, “the righteous live by their faithfulness”.  But what about the rest? 

I’ve summarized the whole Hebrew Scriptures and perhaps you noticed the repeated, “So God starts over.” This is God: ever faithful, always trying to get back to that garden moment, like someone cleaning a house, making the bed, doing the dishes, putting things away. That’s what Jesus is doing: Jesus is God’s cleaner. And today we heard how he does it. Did you get it? Did you understand it?

It’s a simple story. Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem. Just a little before this, he’s told his friends for the third time that he’s going to go there and be crucified. No one wants to hear that but he keeps telling them anyway. Now, Jerusalem is up on a mountain. To the east is the Dead Sea and above that is the Jordan River. There’s a deep, deep valley, it’s actually so deep it’s below sea level. There’s a place at the river where you can ford and there’s been some kind of village there since about 9,000 BCE. There are fresh water springs and palm trees. Out to the east is the wilderness; off to the west is the winding road up the mountains. The city that’s grown up there is named Jericho and it’s one of the oldest cities in the whole world. To get to Jerusalem, you first have to go through Jericho.

That’s what Jesus is doing: he’s in the last stage of going to Jerusalem. It’s like taking the train here from Philadelphia; when you get to Elizabethtown, you know it’s time to get ready to arrive. When you drive up from Baltimore and hit the turnpike, you know it’s time to get over for the Harrisburg exit. He gets to the edge of Jericho and meets a blind man; Luke doesn’t name him, Mark says his name is Bar Timmaeus, which means more or less “Timothy’s son”. He cries out to Jesus; the crowd tells him to shut up but Jesus stops, has Tim brought to him, heals him because of his faith. 

It’s a sign: Jesus has been dealing with so many people whose eyes work just fine but who are blind to the way God’s love just falls on the world like rain. Jesus has been dealing with so many people who are blind to God’s hope for all of us to treat each other with that same love. Timothy’s eyes are now open and he can see fully what he had glimpsed in faith, that Jesus is the Son of God, come to show that love.

They move on into Jericho itself. I’m sure there’s a crowd, after all Luke says that at one point Jesus had sent out 70 people to share the good news about him with others. There are a group of women who have supported him all along. There are the 12 disciples. Just try to walk down Green St. with 12 guys following; you’ll end up stopping traffic. It’s the same thing here. 

If you’ve ever been to old cities, you know that the streets are narrow for the most part with the occasional open plaza area. That’s how I imagine this. There’s a small crowd, some running ahead, some behind Jesus, some trying to stay next to him. Surely news about him has gone ahead and there are people who stop what they’re doing to see. 

Now, I know you’ve all been to a parade and you know how it goes: there are always people in front of you. You always have to decide how hard you want to push and if you’re like me, it’s not that hard. That means going to a parade tends to be looking over people’s heads; not that fun. There’s a guy there in Jericho who has an additional problem: he’s short. He’s not going to look over anyone. This isn’t the first time he’s had this problem, so he does what I suspect he’s done since he was a kid, he climbs up in a tree. His name is Zaccheus, which means ‘Innocent’. But people there don’t see him as innocent;  they see him as a very bad man. He’s the chief tax collector there in Jericho which to most people means the chief cheat. He’s rich, and perhaps he’s not shy about showing it; drives a fancy chariot, has more than three sets of clothes, has enough food every single day. Being a tax collector means he’s ritually unclean; he’s not welcome at worship. 

But there he is, up in the tree, can you imagine him? He wants to see Jesus. Isn’t that like you? Isn’t that like me? I used to preach from a pulpit that had a little brass quotation on it I saw every time I was there, it said “Sir, we would see Jesus”. So, Jesus is coming down the street, with this whole crowd, some just want to be around him, some want him to solve all their problems, some want to touch him. Maybe the tree is in a little square, and the crowd flows in. There are sycamore trees, a kind of fig tree, and there are palm trees, maybe there’s a pool of water, and there’s Zaccheus up in a tree and this is just the reverse of what Zaccheus had in mind. It isn’t a story about Zaccheus seeing Jesus: it’s about Jesus seeing Zaccheus.

Zaccheus is rich but he isn’t popular. He’s rich but he isn’t liked; no one invites him to coffee, no one comes by his office just to hang out. People avoid him. But Jesus sees him and calls out to him, “Come down, I’m going to your house for dinner.” Wow! Imagine Jesus inviting himself to your home. Imagine Jesus seeing you and calling you out by name. “Salvation has come to your house,” Jesus says. But it’s not a popular saying; Luke says that everyone grumbled. Everyone in that crowd feels they are better than Zaccheus; he’s an unclean, unpopular, unrighteous guy. Why is Jesus making a big deal over him? Why is Jesus actually going to his house, planning to eat with him?

It isn’t some great act of repentance by Zacccheus; he isn’t going to change his life on the spot. He’s already pretty much doing good, he says he gives half his income to the poor, he goes beyond what’s required when he wrongs someone. But that all comes after Jesus has announced he’s coming to Zaccheus’ house. It’s not the reason for it, it’s Zaccheus reacting to the grumbling. No, there’s something else at work here and it’s this line near the end: “he, too, is a son of Abraham.” He’s part of the promise, he’s a child of God. It doesn’t matter that he’s rich; it doesn’t matter what he does for a living. He’s a child of God. A lot of those children have gotten lost and Jesus is all about finding them, guiding them back to the family, reminding them of who they are. He wants to remind us as well.

Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “I’m nobody; who are you? Are you nobody too?” So many live as nobody. Jesus comes to remind us of who we are. He sees Zaccheus and he sees what the grumblers have missed: that whatever else he is, whatever he has done, he is a child of Abraham, he is God’s child, a child of blessing and promise. Now today is ‘All Saints Day’ The word ‘saint’ has come to mean someone recognized as extraordinarily good but originally and always in the New Testamet, it means any follower of Christ. Paul says in Christ we have been adopted into Abraham’s family. So what Jesus says about Zaccheus he could say about you or me: this person is a child of Abraham. This person is a child or promise. This person is a saint. This person is a child of God.

Jesus mission is to find the children of God and keep them home with God. Surely that is the real meaning of All Saints. We look back to friends and family we have known and loved; we remember them. Behind them is an even longer line of those who came before. All these are God’s children. All these Jesus came because he finds God’s children and just as the prophets said, intends to restore them to God. 

But All Saints is not just the past; it is the present as well and the future. This is a wonderful congregation. What is said in Second Thessalonians about those Christians so many years before us could certainly be said here.

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. [2 Thessalonians 1:3]

That same spirit of the saints is here. It’s here and Jesus is looking at us, as he looked at Zaccheus, saying the same thing about us, that we are children of God, hoping we will recognize each other in that way, act in that way.

So when we hear him talking to Zaccheus, we should hear him talking to us as well, saying the same thing. “This too is a child of God…and today salvation has come to your house.” May that blessing live in your hearts this week and always. 

Amen.

Turn

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Reformation Sunday • October 26, 2025

Luke 18:9-14

When I was little, maybe five or six, I hated making my bed. I didn’t care about my messy room with dirty clothes and toys scattered about. My mother did care and we fought about it endlessly. Finally, one day, she sat me down, and showed me a list. “This is your Do It list,” she said. There was a line for my making my bed, picking up clothes, and some other things. “If you can check off everything each week, you will get a prize. Well, I didn’t care about making the bed, but I did care about prizes. So I started doing the things on the list and I did get some prizes. This little interaction is exactly how religion worked for many centuries. There was a sense that God had a To-Do List and if you faithfully checked it all off, you’d get a prize. The prize might be a good crop, it might be a peaceful life, it might be a good life after death. Whatever the prize, you were buying it by doing your list.

That’s what’s going on at the beginning of the parable Jesus tells. It’s another “two guys” parable; we had one recently about Lazarus and a rich man, we’ve had others. In this one, we start out with a good guy. He tells us he’s a good guy right from the start. “The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” The tax collector is the other guy; we’ll come back to him in a bit. “I’m better than all these, God!”—that’s the beginning of his prayer. Then he goes on to tell God he’s done his To-Do list: “ fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” This is actually beyond what he’s required to do. He’s proud of his religious accomplishment. He’s completed the list, he’s ready for his prize. Let’s set him there on the shelf for a few minutes while we think about this system of relating to God by completing a to-do list.

It’s an ancient system. Hundreds of years before Jesus, we hear the prophets talking about how some people speculating on how much it will cost, what they will have to do, to get God’s favor. The first Christians were close to the message of Jesus but within a few hundred years, they were overtaken by Roman culture which included this idea of how you got to God. They also took over the Roman system of hierarchy: someone at the top, a few just below, more below that, and so on down to regular people. They called the ones at the top Archbishops, the ones lower bishops, and they had other titles down to priests. All these over time came to be more interested in power and wealth than the pure light of God’s love.

A thousand years later, this produced some beautiful cathedrals, an elaborate ritual for worship and a deep spiritual emptiness. Some people began to look for another way. They thought the Bible should be in a language everyone could understand. John Hus in Bohemia said this and inspired followers who fought for this new way. John Wycliffe in England translated the Bible into English. Both were killed as heretics but their ideas lived on. A hundred years later, Martin Luther criticized the system of To-Do lists and the corruption of the church around him. This time, some of the princes backed him. When Papal delegates came to Prague to negotiate, they were thrown out a window you can still visit.

But Luther wanted to keep the structure of the church with all its hierarchy. It took others to see that hierarchy is not God’s plan. John Calvin suggested a kind of church governed not by princely bishops but by the people themselves, electing a consistory of leaders who, along with the church’s pastors, would govern the church. His ideas spread through parts of Germany and especially Holland. They were added to by a man named Ulrich Zwingli so that a set of ideas about how to worship began to come together and catch on.

Those ideas generally included four things. First, that a church was not just everyone who lived in an area but a group of people who were covenanted, promised to each other as followers of Christ. Send that being part of a church meant understanding you were saved by faith in Christ, not by completing a To-Do list. Third, that the way to know Christ was through the scripture. Finally, they created churches that were governed by the people in the church, usually through something like our consistory. These ideas…covenant, consistory, conviction, conversation with the Word, became the foundation of what was called the Reformed churches, and they spread through parts of Germany and Holland. In England, the same groups were called Presbyterians—‘Presbyter’  is the Greek word for Elder, the title given to the clergy of these new churches. In England, another group took the idea even farther and said that each Congregation was complete under Christ. They were called Congregationalists.

By the 1700s in Germany, life was tough. Wars had devastated the economy and people were forced to worship however their ruler wanted. That drove many to immigrate to the new colonies in America. William Penn offered these Reformed people land and freedom of worship. So, many Germans came to Pennsylvania and in 1725, just 300 years ago, sponsored by the Dutch Reformed Church, they met and held their first service of communion. I imagine it was cold that day; this is Pennsylvania after all and they were in the wilderness near Lancaster. But their hearts were warm. Gradually, this way of worship, with its emphasis on covenants, and a direct peace with God spread. Eventually some of them got together with some Lutherans and founded this very church.

I’ve been going through our family album, I hope you’ve stayed with me. This is who we are: we believe everyone should be able to read the Bible for themselves, everyone should be able to come to their own way with Christ without a To-Do list or a bill from the church. We believe our church should be governed by us and it is. Someone asked me a while back, knowing I had retired four years ago, how it was to be back running a church. I said, “I’m not running it, I just preach there, the consistory runs it.”

So now I want to take that guy we started with off the shelf, remember him? He’s busy telling God his To-Do list is complete and how great he is, how righteous. But there’s another guy in the story. That guy isn’t righteous. He’s a collaborator with the Romans; he’s a tax collector. And it’s worth hearing his prayer too: “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ [Luke 18:13] This is his prayer; this is his faith, that God’s grace can rain on him even though he isn’t a righteous man. These two are standing far from each other. The Pharisee is alone; the tax collector stands far off. Jesus says this parable is meant for those of us who trust their own righteousness, that is the righteousness that comes from completing your To-Do list. But Jesus says it is the tax collector who goes home justified. 

One writer said about this,

At the end of this story, the Pharisee will leave the Temple and return to his home righteous. This hasn’t changed; he was righteous when he came up and righteous as he goes back down. The tax collector, however, will leave the Temple and go back down to his home justified, that is, accounted righteous by the Holy One of Israel. How has this happened? The tax collector makes neither sacrifice nor restitution. On what basis, then, is he named as righteous? On the basis of God’s divine fiat and ordinance!

God’s grace is experienced in our faith, not in a To-Do list. We can’t make God love us; we can only believe God already does. That’s the message of the whole Reformation; that’s the message of the scripture. Turning towards each other, turning towards God is the way. 

Amen.

Promises, Promises

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

19th Sunday After Pentecost/C • October 19, 2025

Jeremiah 31:27-34 • Psalm 119:97-104 * 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 * Luke 18:1-8

As many of you know, in December I’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of my ordination. I hope you’ll all celebrate with me on December 7th. It’s been a long run, God has been good, and perhaps because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of my experiences. One I miss is youth ministry. That’s a work for younger people but when I was younger, it’s one I loved. I particularly remember my first group as a youth minister. They were a great group of teens, and I remember them that way, although today they would probably be retired. One of the things I most loved was retreats. We were in Massachusetts, near Boston, and one of our members would lend us a ski chalet occasionally. 

The first couple of times we went off to Vermont, I planned the whole weekend, meals—it’s never good to let a youth group get hungry!—activities like sledding and some worship time, ending with a communion service around a fireplace. By the third time, I turned the planning over to the kids. They came up with a great schedule, but they left off the communion service. I didn’t want to take away their sense of authority, so I left the schedule as they planned it. 

The final night that year, we were all gathered in blankets, some of them quietly smooching in the back, and someone said, “Hey Rev, what about communion?” I pointed out that they hadn’t planned this. And then someone, who I am sure has since sat on a Consistory or a Church Board afterward said, “But Rev, we ALWAYS have communion!” Quickly they all agreed: I had failed to do what we always do!  We didn’t have any grape juice or bread, but we did have root beer and hot dog buns so we made do, and honestly, it was one of the most deeply moving services of communion I’ve ever shared. Maybe it was the root beer.

So much of church life is like that: we do what we’ve always done. We assume that’s the right way to do things. Jacquelyn and I spent last week in Prague in the Czech Republic, and we visited several cathedrals because they are so beautiful. Every one has the same form: there’s an altar at the front, a high pulpit on the side, pews,, side chapels with statues everywhere and they always have enormous amounts of gold and stained-glass windows. Honestly? I can’t imagine actually worshiping there; it’s not what we do, it’s not how we do things. Yet I know that people have worshiped there centuries longer than they have here. I know that they would find what we do strange and different. We do what we’ve always done but what about when things change? Can we change what we do and learn new ways?

Today we heard two oracles from the prophet Jeremiah. He lived in a very difficult time in what is now Israel and was then the kingdom of Judah. If you listen closely, you may have noticed that each of these pieces began the same way: “The days are surely coming…” Scholars call this eschatological, a big word that simply means look up from the present stuff and see the goal that’s always there. No matter where the Steelers are on football field, the goal is always there. No matter how the Phillies are doing in any baseball game, home base is always there. When someone begins to cook, they always have in mind the meal that will be shared. “Surely the days are coming!”—God has the goal in mind, Jeremiah wants us to see as God sees, toward that goal, toward the final feast.

His message is twofold: first, the immediate future is disaster; second, the ultimate goal is there and everything will be fine. He’s living like the people of Ukraine are now, under assault. The leaders of his day were so confident God would be on their side, they took on the greatest military power around. In that day, it was Babylonia, an empire based in what’s now Iraq. What’s happened here is that God’s people have lost the war. Jerusalem is destroyed; think of those old pictures of bombed out cities in Germany or France in World War Two or the recent pictures from Gaza with miles and miles of rubble. Jerusalem is rubble; the Temple, the focus of all their worship, is rubble. The leaders of the community are being led to exile; Jeremiah himself becomes an exile. Many are dead, all are suffering. 

Jeremiah’s message before this passage is that this is God’s doing. Because the people of God have not lived out God’s justice, have not followed God’s covenant, God has destroyed them. But that’s not the goal; that’s not God’s ultimate plan. Instead, Jeremiah brings this word.

And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. [Jeremiah 31:28]

The goal is out there: we just have to get there. The path may lead through defeat, but it shouldn’t include despair. The path may lead through foreboding and fear but it’s going to the  fulfillment of God’s plan. The path may lead through the valley of the shadows but it leads ultimately to the glory of the mountain top.

Now we live in a difficult time as well. Our city hasn’t been destroyed, but we are assaulted every day by news of gun violence. We hear about almost unthinkable things going on in other cities where the government is deploying our military to assault our own people. We are being asked to turn against people who aren’t citizens and the rules of our civic life, our constitution, are being changed in ways we never imagined possible. 

Last week, one of the most moving moments was walking through an ancient synagogue, now a museum, where the names of 80,000 Jews who were murdered by the Nazis are inscribed on wall after wall. What’s important to know is that Shoah, the holocaust, began with a long campaign of lies that Jews were somehow different, alien, and it’s humbling and scary that it took the cooperation of people just like us to accomplish.          

So we live in a difficult time as well. What does God’s Word say about living in such times?First, that this moment is not God’s ultimate goal; God’s goal is the joyful, abundant community of God’s people, living in justice, reflecting God’s love thankfully and endlessly. “The days are surely coming…”, Jeremiah says, when God will make a new covenant. The new covenant is that we will want to do God’s will. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”, God says. Now in ancient Jewish thought, the heart was not a romantic center; it was the center of a person’s will. This is a prophecy about a time when we all want to do what God intends.

How do we get there? That’s the question we ask every day. Everything is going to be fine eventually, “Surely the days are coming…”, but what about now? How do we live now? For that, we turn to the other readings. Paul wrote to Timothy in a difficult moment as well. The first thing he commends is simply to persist

…continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. [2 Timothy 3:14f]

The same thought comes through the parable we heard in Luke. Judges in Jesus’ time had enormous power; there was no system of appeals. Their word was final on all kinds of cases. But what about when they are wrong?

Jesus asks us to imagine a woman who just won’t give up. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? We can imagine this woman. Maybe it’s a small town, maybe she just keeps bugging the guy. “Give me justice!” Over and over again; he sees her in the market, she comes to his home, she’s there when he sits in judgment. The story tells us that he “neither feared God nor had respect for people”, a way of saying the guy just makes it up as he goes. You’d expect him to blow her off, wouldn’t you? But Jesus points out that actually what happens is she wears him down with her persistence. She never stops, she never goes away, and eventually she gets her way. The point isn’t that God is like the judge, it’s that persistence pays off.

We are all carrying around a bunch of ideas from our past about how things should be. But we live in a changing time, and it’s going to call for some new ideas, some new ways. It’s time for a new covenant. So God is asking: can we change? Can we let go of the old, persist in our faith in God and not in the forms of what we do?

Two years ago a horrific moment of violence occurred when gunmen took over 200 hostages, one of whom was an infant,  from a musical festival in Israel. An enormous amount of hate and division has come from that act powered in part by grief over those hostages. A synagogue in Detroit remembered the hostages by putting 240 chairs and a crib out on their lawn. This past week, the last living hostages were returned as the beginning of the promise of peace deal in Gaza. The synagogue marked the moment by removing most of the chairs; a few remembering hostages who have died but whose remains haven’t been returned were left. The ceremony also marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Jews of that synagogue and the large Islamic population in Detroit. They are trying to persist in their faith but also recognize this is a new time that calls for new efforts to embody God’s love. 

“The days are surely coming…”, God says. In the meantime, it’s up to us to listen to God’s Word, persist in faith that God’s ultimate goal will be accomplished and embody not what we’ve always done but what God is doing. What God is doing is always the same: a justice that sees all people as God’s children and a love that embraces every single one. This is God’s promise; these promises are the foundation, the only foundation, for building our lives together.

Amen.

All Together Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

World Communion Sunday • October 5, 2025

Luke 17:5-10

One of my favorite musicals is The Music Man. Do you know this show? It concerns a con man in early 20th century Iowa named Harold Hill. His swindle is that he gets people to believe there is trouble in their town only he can solve and only by creating a boys’ band. He sells them instruments, he sells them uniforms, he sells them on the idea that he can teach them to play the instruments and march in the uniforms through what he calls “The Think Method”. This simply consists of thinking you can play. Now, I was a trumpet player when I was a boy and part of a band. I can tell you that thinking won’t make your trumpet sound sweet, that takes practice. I was part of a marching band for a while and it’s less about thinking than drilling on making each step exactly the same as the last so that you stay in line. So none of what he says is going to work. There is a wonderful moment in The Music Man when Professor Harold Hill is found out, arrested, brought in handcuffs to the school where the boys are assembled along with the town and told to prove the band can play. He takes up his baton, and with the most unbelieving expression possible, says, “Think, boys, think”. 

I wonder if that’s the same expression Jesus had when he said the things we read today. Jesus was no con man, but he’s been teaching and preaching for a while now. The part we read pictures him alone with his disciples. They’re on the way to Jerusalem, and he’s told them already that there he’s going to be crucified and said discipleship with him means a cross. Yet they just don’t seem to get it. Do we? Just before this section, he talks about forgiveness.

So watch yourselves. “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them.

Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.” [Luke 17:3f]

Just after this section, Luke tells us that they are traveling along the border between Samaria and Galilee, on the way to Jerusalem. 

These two snippets tell us where Jesus is: he’s crossing borders. He’s calling his disciples to cross them with him. Cross the border from guilt to forgiveness; cross the border from one place to another. In those moments of crossing, the disciples ask, “Increase our faith.” It’s funny, but I’m not sure if we get the joke. These are disciples, followers, but here they are, ordering their Master like he’s a servant. So Jesus gently reminds them of their relationship to him—and ours. They all understand the relationship of servants and master, and he invokes it here: Will a servant be thanked for doing what he was done? Everyone knows the answer. Servants—and disciples—are meant to follow the Master, not have the Master wait on them.

Today, there are many voices wearing Christ’s cross but demanding that he follow them into division. So perhaps World Communion Sunday, this Sunday, is especially important. It began not far from here, in Pittsburgh, in 1933. That was a time when denominations were fiercely competitive, anti-Semitism was officially promoted and racism was rampant. The Shadyside Presbyterian Church began the service as a way of reaching across boundaries of faith. It was promoted by the National Council of Churches beginning in 1940, as the whole world sunk into the violence of a second World War. Today, it stands a reminder that Christ does not belong to us; we belong to Christ. Anyone who tells us that Christ is on one side or the other of political or ethnic conflicts is lying. The call of Christ is beyond the sides, bigger than any of them, a call from the God who loves all. 

Today, all over the world, Christians of every theology, every tradition, every background, every nation, unite to share communion. So we need to see at this table not just those of us here, but people of other colors, other traditions, other customs. It’s a reminder that we all follow Christ. And in that reminder is a miracle waiting to burst forth. 

When Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, begins to conduct the boys’ band, something magical happens. The boys, it turns out, have actually practiced and can get some noise out of the instruments. But it’s not noise the parents hear: the parents hear the sweet melody of their children making music. The camera lets us see what they see. One man cries out, “That’s my Davey!” And somehow, the boys are transformed; they become the band they had imagined.

Christ’s call is for us to become the disciples he imagined: faithful, loving, forgiving. Like Prof. Hill, he raises his baton. Like Prof. Hill, he calls out, “All Together Now”. And waits to hear us.

Amen.

Pay Attention

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

16th Sunday After Pentecost/C • September 28, 2025

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 • 1 Timothy 6:6-19 • Luke 16:19-31

“Which side are you on? Which side are you on?” It’s a line from an old union organizing song; in my head I hear Pete Seeger singing it. But it’s also an ancient question it seems people have always asked. As far back as we know, our stories, our sagas, our poetry speak of sides. Homer’s Iliad, the great story of a war between Greeks and Trojans imagines sides, and the Bible is full of them: Hebrews and Egyptians, Israelites and Canaanites. Genesis traces our division all the way to the first brothers, Cain and Abel, with one being murdered. Which side are you on?

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus 

The story we read from Luke is the Jesus version of a much older parable. It was always obvious that life had immense inequities. Some are rich; some are poor; some live out on the couch of comfort while others huddle on cold cement. Like the parable we read last week, it begins, “There was a man…” Between that story and this one, we’ve skipped Jesus castigating the clergy there for their attachment to riches. Last week we heard about a dishonest manager who finally uses his dishonesty not to enrich himself but to make relationships; now we hear about another man, never named, who is already rich and doesn’t really understand that it’s relationships, not riches, God wants. 

The situation imagined in the parable is common. There is a rich man; there is a poor man. The rich man has good food, good friends, good everything. He feasts every day; he dresses like a king, for only kings could afford clothes made with the expensive purple dye. The poor man has nothing. He’s hungry and sick; he has the first-century version of no health insurance: he lies in the street with sores, unable to even fend off the dogs. His name is Lazarus, but he’s not the famous Lazarus resurrected by Jesus. He’s all the unhoused folks we see on street corners; he’s the person who lost their home and doesn’t even have a car to live in. 

But, we’re told, at death things reverse. Lazarus, the poor man, is carried to heaven by angels. The rich man? The text simply says: “He died”. In the afterlife, they find their fortunes reversed. The poor man cuddles in the lap of Father Abraham, the revered patriarch and companion of God; the rich man is in a place of torment. This is meant to be a metaphor, not an actual description of the after-life. Jesus has borrowed from the Greeks the concept of a two 

Long before Jesus, similar stories were told of a profound reversal of fortune. “Remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony,” Abraham says in response to the rich man’s complaint. The moral seems to be that God seeks a kind of even keel, a balance, and that the more unbalanced we are, the more we should look for reversal in the future. Be careful if your side is up: in the cycle of life, up comes just before down.

Beyond the Story

Other ancient Near Eastern versions of this story end here, with balance restored and the positions of the men reversed. What’s truly curious about this story is how Jesus has used the story to go on and make a profound point about our relationship with God. Consider the conversation in the afterlife. 

What’s clear almost immediately is that the rich man has learned nothing. He tells Abraham to send Lazarus to get him a drink, as if he still was in charge, as if even there, his comfort was the most important priority. When he is refused, he still doesn’t understand the new state of things; “…then send Lazarus to warn my brothers,” the rich man says. Even here, the rich man can’t see Lazarus as anything but a servant, a means of getting what he wants. Abraham replies that his brothers have Moses and the prophets, a way of saying, they have the scriptures. “But if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent,”

But will they? What will it take to get some attention, some attention for God, some attention for God’s purpose and rules? This story is being remembered and told in a church with amazing similarities to ours. The first century was a time of cultural ferment. All around the people for whom Luke’s gospel were written was a rich cultural buffet with many options. Philosophers and preachers held forth on street corners. It was a prosperous time and some were rich; many were poor. Rome made peace throughout the Mediterranean world and trade thrives in peace time. We know that in the time Luke’s gospel was first read, items from Spain were found in Palestine, Egyptian wheat was eaten in Rome, British goods traveled to Iran and the world was full of choices. But in a world of choices, a noisy world full of the clamor of the market, how is it possible to hear God’s voice and God’s word?

Pay Attention Please

Paul makes the same point in a letter to Timothy. Perhaps the most misquoted verse in the entire Bible is Paul’s statement that “…the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil…” [1 Timothy 6:10] Sometimes we say, “Money is the root of all evil,” but that’s not what Paul has in mind. He knows that money itself has no moral value, it’s just a way of keeping score. Money is an energy stored: so much work, so much sold, so much earned. It isn’t money that’s evil; the evil comes from fixing our focus on money. 

What Paul knows is that anything in this world that so occupies us, so consumes us, so captures us, takes our attention from God. That’s what he means to address and that’s what Jesus is lifting up as well. God wants our attention. The ministry of Jesus, the preaching of the prophets, all are a way of God saying to us, “Pay attention please!”

Here is the issue, presented at the end of the parable: if someone comes back from the dead, will even that be enough to get our attention? This is a Christian scripture; this is a Christian question. We gather every Easter to say, “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed,” but is even that enough to get our attention? But then we look at our calendar, we look at our checkbook, we hear the voices of all those who want us to do something, and we begin to respond. Someone needs a ride; someone needs a job done. We make their approval or material things or some other worldly thing become our goal, and it draws us like the North Pole draws a compass. In the midst of it, the voice of God is often lost. Even our religious life can become a part of the noise. American religion increasingly is about what we do. In many churches, the whole emphasis is on getting saved, saying the right formula. Our prayers become to-do lists for God, delegated duties that are beyond our ability.

But what is God saying in the midst of all this noise? God is saying pay attention. And we will never hear the rest until we do pay attention. The first act of faith is not to memorize a catechism or believe something, it is to take God seriously enough to stop doing, stop saying, and start paying attention. The first act of faith is not to say your prayers; it is to stop and listen The first act of prayer is not to ask, it is to listen.

Jesus Listened

Jesus listened, and the amazing thing is that he heard both Lazarus and the rich man. He heard God erasing the sides, refusing the sides: he saw that to God they were one people, regarded with one love. He heard the suffering of the Lazaruses of this world, of course, and all the accounts of his ministry include healing. But he also heard the desperation of the rich ones too. He never stopped listening to the Pharisees, even when they opposed him. He tells them this story: they are the audience here. He invited them to stop choosing sides and follow God in choosing to share with each other, forgive each other, embrace each other.

Which side are you on? It’s second nature for us to choose sides. We do it in sports, we do it in music, clothing, style. When I bought a Nikon camera years ago, I discovered I hadn’t just bought a camera, I had become a part of the Nikon tribe; there were people who got angry at me because I had that brand of camera. We do it in our politics. The last Presidential election was particularly nasty. I see people losing friendships because of it. Now I love politics, I’ve been involved as a volunteer and sometimes a professional for years. But here it has no place; this is not a place for choosing sides, this is a place for paying attention to God.

Following Jesus 

I want to follow Jesus. Following Jesus means first, paying attention to God. When I pay attention to God, what I see is that God is beyond the sides. God is beyond the divisions. Our God is the God of all: rich and poor, alike. So the more we can do to live as binders together, stepping over the division of sides, the more we will find ourselves following in the footsteps of Jesus. That’s why our church continuously offers a chance to do things that recognize people. We do it individually when we baptize someone. We do it when we act in mission together, as we’ve done with the Christian Churches United. We do it individually when we bring a coat or some food. All these are ways of paying attention to God’s call in Jesus Christ to mutual care.

Which side are you on? Only when we realize the sides are just human inventions will we finally find ourselves where God has been all the time: beyond the sides, caring for all, listening to all, loving all. And it is when we know how God has loved all that we also come to the most powerful realization of all: that God loves each of us.

Amen.

The Very Bad, Awful GuyWho Got It Right

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Luke 16:1-13

Jesus loved bad guys. Over and over in the gospels, we hear echoes of this; the good guys constantly grumble that he “eats with sinners”. Who are these sinners? Well they are people who have jobs that make them unacceptable: undertakers, tax collectors, and so on. They include guys who are just a little sketchy and guys that don’t always do what is conventionally the right thing. This is a story about a guy like that. He’s not a good guy; he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad guy who finally does the right thing.

To understand this story, it’s important to understand something about life in Jesus’ time. The whole country was ruled by a foreign power, Rome, and most of their economy is agriculture. Wine from Palestine was sent to Rome, so were figs and dates and olives. These are crops that take a lot of individual effort. Plant a potato, and it just sits there in the ground until it’s time to dig it up. Plant grapes, and you have to tend them all year long. You have to make sure they are up on stakes off the ground, you have to make sure they have the right amount of water. Olive trees take a generation to bear; you reap a crop your father or grandfather sowed. But most of the people doing all this work don’t own the land they farm. Just like rich people are buying up homes today and renting them out, Judah in Jesus’ time was full of landlords. Some of them were rich men from Rome; they bought up a vineyard or some acreage. They wanted the money from the crop but they weren’t about to go out and work for it. So they hired people or they had slaves. Somebody had to supervise all this of course, so they also hired managers. Managers could act with the force of the owner, we call that power of attorney today, it meant that they were in charge.

That’s what Jesus is asking us to imagine: a manager. A guy who runs the farm. He hires people, he fires them; he makes sure they put in a full day’s work, he makes sure everything is done on time. Even today, most farms run on credit. You go to the bank in the winter and borrow the money to buy the things you need to put the crop in, seed, tools, whatever it’s going to take. Where does that money come from? Today it comes from a bank but in Jesus’ time it came from someone like the manager. Farm managers took a cut of this and we know from documents archaeologists have found that they charged huge interest rates, often 50% or more. This makes you a lot of money; it doesn’t make you popular. This lets you get ahead financially; it doesn’t make you many friends. 

Most of the people around Jesus are peasants; they know all about this system. They know all about managers who squeezed them for interest, they know all about being forced off the land when a crop didn’t come in and they couldn’t pay back a loan. I’m guessing they don’t much like managers; I’m guessing they see them as very bad, awful guys. I suspect some of them might have been cheering inside when the story starts out with the manager being fired; “Got what he deserved,” I hear them thinking. 

This is actually the second in a series of three parables about bad, awful guys. The first one is what we often call “The parable of the prodigal son”. Remember that one? A kid goes off and squanders part of his dad’s property but the really bad, awful guy is the older brother who refuses to welcome him home. Next week we’re going to hear about a really bad, awful guy in hell but I’ll save that for next Sunday. So here between those two stories is this one about this manager and I think he qualifies as a very bad, awful guy. 

For one thing, when the story starts, we’re told that he’s been fiddling the accounts. He’s been fired for embezzlement. That is to say: he was stealing from the company, from the man who owned the farm. That’s bad. Now he’s got a problem: he’s lost his job, and he lives with people he’s been cheating for years. He says, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.” In other words, he’s not about to go work like any common peasant. What else can he do? And then he has an idea: he’ll fiddle with the accounts again.

One by one, he calls the debtor farmers in. He asks them how much they owe. Now loans in this time were written differently than ours. If you owe say, $10,000 on a car, the loan says, “$10,000” and then it gives you an interest rate separately; your payment is some part of the loan and the interest. But in this time, the loan as quoted as the amount borrowed plus the interest. So a loan amounting to 50 jugs of oil is written down as 100 jugs; a hundred containers of wheat might be a loan of just 80 or so. What the very bad guy is doing is knocking off the interest. 

Imagine these people for a moment. They’re laboring under harsh, exorbitant loans. When they’re summoned, surely they’re scared: what if this man who controls their livelihood is going to make some new demand? What if he wants a bribe, what if he wants more interest? Imagine being summoned to the bank and told they’re going to cut your mortgage in half. Imagine getting a letter from a credit card company saying, “We’ve decided to cut what you owe us in half.” Joy hardly describes it, does it? This very bad, awful, guy, this manager who is losing his job, has a great plan in this crisis: he’s going to create joy right here, right now, and hopefully it will carry over to relationships that will sustain him. That’s his plan, after all: “…when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’

This is flagrantly dishonest. There’s no way around it: what he’s doing is wrong according to the standards of any society. So it’s a tough parable. In fact, all week long, listening to the podcasts that help me think about texts, I’ve been hearing pastors complain about having to preach this parable. This is a very bad, awful guy but at the end, his dishonesty works. “His master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly,” the parable ends. This is a joke; this is funny. We all know that no master is going to commend his kind of dishonesty.

You can see in what comes after how hard people struggled with this story. Generally, scholars tell us that parables end with the story and the applications were added on. We see this in various places but this is the only one where we have not one, not two but four different interpretive comments. Three of them contradict the plain sense of the story.

“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.

If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?

And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? [Luke 16: 10-12]

None of these really catch the story’s meaning which is revolutionary. All of them seem to be a way to restore the conventions of the time. So, why does Jesus tell this story? What does he have in mind? 

We have to go back to the beginning of the parable to see that. It  begins with the bad guy worried about relationships. He’s facing a crisis; his whole way of life is about to fall apart. He’s going to have to depend on people. In this crisis, he acts in a way that goes against the rules of his time and his job. In the same way, Jesus is asking people to understand the coming of the Kingdom in him is a crisis that calls for new relationships, for changing how they’ve been living. We’ve heard his parables about the ultimate value of finding the lost; we’ve seen him welcome the lost to his table. The point is back in the parable of the prodigal son, right at the end, when the father tells the older brother who is pouting about the welcome of his lost brother, “This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” [Luke 15:32] Against the value of finding the lost, the value of good accounting is nothing. 

Recognizing the crisis of finding the lost is the point here. That’s how Christianity spread in its first years. We hear stories in Acts of mass conversions but the truth is, historians believe Christian faith spread little by little and largely because of the example of people of faith. About the middle of the 200s AD, for example, a massive plague spread through the Roman Empire. Scholars believe it might have been something like measles. People were dying everywhere; Rome itself, the city, was collapsing. We’ve all been through a horrible pandemic, we know what that’s like. The basic response of people in that time was to flee and they fled family, friends, communities. But Christians didn’t flee; they cared for the sick. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage said,

bring yourselves to the sick and poor, and help them. God said love thy neighbor as I have loved you [“Litany for a pandemic”.
America Magazine. 222 (10): 18–25.] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Cyprian#:~:text=%22Litany%20for%20a%20pandemic%22.%20America%20Magazine.%20222%20(10):%2018–25.

It was recognizing that relationships of care and love meant more than anything that spread Christianity. It still does.

Now we live in a time of crisis, also. We’ve been through a plague caused by a virus, we’re in the midst of a plague of gun violence. We’re a small church and of ourselves we may not be able to solve these problems. But we can live our faith every day; we can remember that even the very bad, awful guy, finally got it; the question is, will we. Jesus started with a group about half the size of the people who worship here most Sundays; 300 years later, his way was the official religion of the whole empire.

It’s hard to know how seeds will grow. Jacquelyn and I drive over the I-83 bridge almost every week, headed to her work. She drives, so I get to look around. The other day, I looked at the river, at the still standing pillars from the bridge that collapsed and I noticed something amazing. On the top of one of them, a tree is growing. Some time in the past, a seed landed there, I guess. There was enough dirt to let it germinate, start growing and so far the winds and the rain and the storms haven’t been able to push it aside. It’s right there, it looks to be about three feet tall. It’s small: a sapling. But it’s there, it’s doing what trees do, taking in some nutrients, taking in water, taking in sunlight, making oxygen, growing taller. 

What about us? We’re small but we’re here and every Sunday we come together to strengthen each other, pray, remember the way of Jesus. I hope, like that little tree, we’re growing up in Christ too. God hopes this. What do you hope? What will you do about it?

Amen.

Making God Smile

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

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Interim Pastor • © 2025

14th Sunday After Pentecost/Year C • September 14, 2025

Luke 15:1-10 

One of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen is a just born baby learning to make mom smile. Have you seen this? A few years ago, I went to visit a mom with a new baby, a friend and church member. I expected her to be glad to see me; I expected her to be proud to introduce me to her child. What I remember is standing by the bed, ignored, irrelevant, as her new daughter tried out expressions, clasped tiny fingers and stared endlessly into her mother’s eyes, eyes that never left her. The sounds were happy; mom’s smile was quick and constant. After a few moments, she looked up at me, just a little embarrassed, as if caught at something and said, “I’m sorry, I’m totally entranced.” Calmly, enthusiastically, that new baby learned to make each of us smile at her and we did. So when we read in this text: “…there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”, it’s not hard to imagine the experience: we are meant to learn to make God smile like a baby teaching mom, and Jesus is giving lessons.

That’s a nice, feel good message for a Sunday morning. But does it have anything to do with our real lives? How do we make God smile; do we have to smile ourselves? How often we’ve settled for a bland, smiling Christianity that never hears, never sees, the fear and trembling of those around. How often we’ve gone home, scripture read, songs sung, sermon preached, as if the word, the songs, the preaching existed only in a world of endless smiles, while we ourselves live in a frowny face place where things hurt, and we constantly fear the next wave of grief or disaster will overwhelm us. Can we hold on to the smile of God in such moments?

Perhaps we begin to understand how when we see that Jesus teaches God’s smile comes out of being lost, the experience that so terrifies us that we will do almost anything to avoid it. The Bible has two images of being lost. One is wandering in the wilderness, a place full of life-threatening danger, where the things we need—food, drink—are unavailable. God’s people are formed in the experience of wandering the wilderness and Jesus himself is forced there after his baptism. Lost in the wilderness, Jesus meets a tempter who offers easy answers; he hangs on to being lost, until God finds him—the story concludes, “Angels waited on him”. Another experience of being lost is grieving. Over and over again in the prophets, in the Psalms, we hear the anguished voice of God grieving for lost Israel, which has broken its covenant and left its Lord.

We heard that in the reading from Jeremiah this morning. Jeremiah lived in a time of incredible violence. His home, Judah, went to war with the much more powerful Babylonia and was defeated; Jerusalem itself was destroyed, its leaders and many others exiled to Babylon. 

I looked on the earth, and it was complete chaos, and to the heavens,
and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.

[Jeremiah 4:23-27]

Defeat meant feeling deserted by God. The people were lost.

When have you been lost? When has the darkness descended until you didn’t know if there was a path, much less how to find it? There are griefs, there are losses, that leave us lost, wandering, uncertain, unsure, unable to find our way on our own. These past few weeks have seen two murders for political purposes and children shot at their schools. I know every time I read about this, it makes me feel lost.  

When Jesus speaks about the lost, this is what he means. There is nothing more helpless than a lost lamb. A lost dog will wander around and often return home. A lost cat will find its way back. Pigeons home; even a child may ask the way. Lost horses frequently return. But a lost lamb will not come home, will not return, will not come back. It will simply lie down and bleat its fear and the very sound becomes an invitation to predators: easy kill. What should be done about the lamb? The sensible thing of course is simply to abandon it; it’s gone, and leaving the herd might endanger it. Yet here Jesus lifts up the lost lamb as the occasion that leads not only to a satisfied smile on the part of a shepherd but also: “…when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me…’” The joy of the shepherd overflows into a party that invites his friends and neighbors. 

The same is true in the other image Jesus shares. A woman’s dowry was often worn around her neck in his time; to lose a piece was to lose the chance at marriage. Have you done what this woman does? Lost a wedding ring, an engagement ring, a special paper: searched and searched, moved papers, cleaned the whole house, cleaned out a drain, searching until it was found? Again: her joy overflows and creates a community of joy around her. Her joy, his joy, makes God smile.

We live in a whole nation of the lost today. So many are afraid of losing homes; so many have lost jobs. Sons and daughters have been lost in wars. And there are so many voices of fear, angry voices, little Satans really—for Satan just means ‘tempter’ and what they tempt us to give in to the idea that we can fix ourselves by abandoning others, that we can fix ourselves by hurting others. That’s why we have such a plague of violence. Three hundred fifty years ago, Congregationalists, English reformed church folks just like us were scared too, and they let themselves get whipped up into literal witch hunts because someone said that would fix everything. They took their fear out on the least of their communities. This happens today: same thing in a different day and it has nothing to do with the life of Christ or the mission of Jesus. 

What Jesus does is just the opposite: he welcomes people, sinners, the lost, everyone to his table, to this table right here. The mystery Jesus offers is that the solution to being lost is to find someone; the joy of finding will overflow and create a whole community of joy. So he gathers the lost, sometimes called sinners, and he eats with them. He invites them to his table. Who belongs at this table? Everyone who has ever felt lost. Everyone who has ever wandered—everyone! Gay people and straight people belong at this table; young moms and widows and the unemployed and the rich and middle-aged guys who are wondering why just working harder doesn’t make them happier and women who are trying to figure out what to do after the kids are grown, single people and working people and retired people and people who have never been inside a church in their lives. When we gather them at the table of Jesus, when we find the lost and bring them in, we’re helping Jesus and God smiles: there is joy in heaven.

We know this instinctively and sometimes we practice it. One of the great things we do here is the clothing closet. It’s a simple process: we all have clothing we don’t wear, don’t need. So do others. So we gather it up, size it, make it ready, and give it away. It’s just like what Jesus does with Gods’ grace: gives it away, free to anyone in need. We do other things as well. Christian Churches United helps us work with other churches helping people who are lost get found. It’s the fulfillment of our prayer to walk in Christ’s way.

Timothy states the purpose of Jesus bluntly, clearly: “Jesus came into the world to save sinners”  If we are followers of Jesus, doesn’t it make sense that we would be on the same mission? This is the beginning of a new year of programs here. It’s a time to think about vision. We need to ask: what is Jesus doing? What can we do to help? And when we ask, we’ll hear this call from the deep heart of God’s Word, Jesus came into the world to save sinners. When we ask, we’ll remember what Jesus said: finding someone who needs God and didn’t know it, helping someone who needed us and didn’t know it, is a reason to rejoice, a thing that makes God smile. That’s it, that’s my vision: make God smile. Let God’s smile shine, until we can see where we’re going, until we know we aren’t lost, we’re on the way God had in mind all the time.

Amen.

How Much?

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

13th Sunday After Pentecost/C • September 7, 2025

Jeremiah 18:1-11 • Philemon 1:1-21 • Luke 14:25-33

“How much is that doggie in the window?” is a silly song from 1952 that reminds us of one crucial fact we all face almost every day: we count the cost of something. If you remember the song, you probably remember the Patti Page version, but I remember my mother singing it. Little did I know then how much of my life would be tangled up not in the cost of the doggies but the cost of food, rent and other things. We drive a lot, so I check the cost of gasoline; May and I do the grocery shopping, and she does an amazing job of keeping costs down with that. Every Saturday, after we check out, we look at the total bill, and we’re pleased if it’s less than the previous week. What’s true for us as families is certainly true for our church; I know that we have folks who work hard at keeping costs down here and every year we have to approve a budget, a plan for spending throughout the year. But we seldom think about the cost of our spiritual life. What if we asked, not how much is that doggie in the window, but how much will it cost me to be a Christian? How much will it cost to follow Christ? That’s exactly the issue in today’s gospel reading.

Luke says, “Now large crowds were traveling with him…” [Luke 14:25a] The setting for this section isn’t a little group of committed disciples, it’s the larger crowd around Jesus. Some barely know him; some have been healed by him. Some have taken on the task of caring for him and his disciples. And some, I imagine, just got attracted to the crowd. Some people like crowds; some people can’t resist being part of what feels like a large movement. So we have all kinds of folks with him, traveling with him. And at some point, he says something startling to the crowd: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” [Luke 14:26] Wow! That sounds harsh, doesn’t it? We aren’t as family based today as people were in Jesus’ time; most families don’t live in multi-generational homes with an old patriarch running the show. Still, what does he mean by saying that following him is going to mean losing your whole family?

Partly, I suspect, Luke is reflecting the reality of the people to whom he’s writing. We know that the conversion of people often split families in the first century. Just because you went out and were carried away by this new preaching, this new faith, it didn’t mean your dad agreed or your brother or sister or even your wife and kids. I grew up in a home where my mother went to church and dragged me along. My father read the New York Times on Sunday mornings. If he had any Christian faith, I never heard about it. I got involved in a church when I was 12, and it gradually became the center of my life. There was youth group on Sunday nights, camp for a week in August, weekend retreats two or three times during the school year. I learned to be a leader there, I felt the confirmation of God’s call. I knew God meant me to be a minister, but I didn’t tell my dad. Finally, in college, he was questioning my choice of courses one day and I blurted out, “I’m going to be a minister.” He asked why I didn’t want to do something worthwhile with my life. Although he later more or less reconciled to what I did, it was always a point of division between us. So I hear this in that context: yes, faithful life is going to divide people, including families.

Jesus seems to want people to consider that as they think about the way forward. He tells these two short parables. In one, he points out that if you are going to build something, first you sit down and consider what it’s going to cost. In the other, he offers the image of a king, getting ready for war, making a plan. Both seem to be on this point: count the cost, so you are ready to pay when the bill comes due.

I wonder if Philemon counted the cost. We don’t know much about him, just that he must have been an early Christian and a well-to-do one. He’s able to host a church in his house. I couldn’t do that, could you? We’d never fit in our little living room! But here is Paul writing to Philemon, calling him a beloved coworker, mentioning people he knows, and greeting the church in his house. I have a sneaking suspicion that all these nice words are there partly to grease the burden of what Paul wants. Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, is hanging out with Paul and Paul wants to keep him. None of us own slaves; I’m not sure that we really understand what Paul’s asking here. But suppose I borrowed your car, as your pastor; maybe mine had broken down. You have an extra, you agree to lend it to me, and I drive off. Now suppose I wrote you a letter on church stationery with some wonderful words about what a great Christian you are and then explained that I wanted to keep the car permanently; I could mention, “I am more than bold enough in Christ to command you to do the right thing, yet I would rather appeal to you on the basis of love.”

That’s a little different, isn’t it? I mean lending a car for a day or two, that’s one thing, but cars are expensive. So are slaves. Paul begins by saying what a loving, wonderful, Christian Philemon is and then gives him something terrible: the chance to prove it in a way that is costly. And beyond the cost, there is the social sanction. The Roman world is built on slavery; Paul is asking Philemon to treat his slave Onesimus not as a slave but as a brother, a “beloved brother”. Paul wants him treated the same way Philemon would treat Paul: “welcome him as you would welcome me… If he has wronged you in any way or owes you anything, charge that to me…” and then goes on to say, “I say nothing about your owing me even your own self.” 

We don’t know what Christian faith had cost Philemon to this point; we know that it cost him Onesimus. Oh, he got Oonesimus back—but the slave Onesimus was lost to him forever. Instead, he got a brother in Christ. We don’t know anything about what happened to Philemon, but we do have traditions that there was a Bishop Onesimus who is credited with being one of the ones who preserved the letters of Paul. Without him, we might not have Romans or the letter to the Corinthian Christians or Thessalonians or any of the other letters of Paul. Think what might have been lost. Now, this letter has a darker history also; it was often used in the 19th century to justify slavery itself. Paul isn’t confronting the whole structure of slavery with all its terrible violence; he’s simply advocating for one particular slave, raising him up. So let’s be clear: nothing here is endorsing slavery, whether it’s legal bondage or the terrible labor conditions that amount to slavery that still exist. He’s raising up on particular slave, calling him a brother. And he’s giving Philemon the chance to pay the cost of discipleship. 

That cost can be steep indeed. Jesus lays out it out plainly: “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” It isn’t easy to carry a cross; it’s much easier to wear one. In 1942, German leaders met to plan the murder of all European Jews. Today there is a growing movement in some circles to pretend this didn’t happen or that it was exaggerated. It’s taken this long to pretend this because the generation of soldiers who liberated those camps are mostly gone; the survivors of them are gone as well. But the truth is that Germany from the 1930s to the 1940s was a place of arrests by anonymous men, prisons that housed torture chambers, and lawless executions. 

In that time, a group formed called the White Rose. It was small and nonviolent; they published leaflets in Munich denouncing the Nazi regime’s crimes and oppression and calling for resistance. Most were in their early 20s. They were arrested in the spring of 1943; they were subjected to show trials where they couldn’t speak and their leaders beheaded. Others were sent to be murdered at camps like Auschwitz. Many were Christians, and they surely are people who understood what it meant to bear a cross. They bore it nobly, and they remind us today that there is a cost to discipleship, there is a cost that cannot be paid with a check, that can only be paid with life itself. 

Sometimes the cross is just that: a death given in memory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his life. Sometimes it is something hard: treating your former slave as a beloved brother. Sometimes it’s much more simple: helping Christian Churches United or others care for people in need, treating them like children of the same God who loves us all. It’s easier to wear a cross than to bear one, but Jesus has told us that only when we bear the cross can we be his disciples. How much will that cost? Only you know.

Amen.

Watch This!

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

12th Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 31, 2025

Jeremiah 2:4-13 * Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 * Luke 14:1, 7-14

These past weeks as schools started up again, a huge source of anxiety has blown up like a balloon. That anxiety is the question going on in the minds of middle school and high school students everywhere: who will I sit with at lunch? Lunch at a middle school or high school is a minefield. There is the cool kids table; you know you can’t sit there. It’s invitation only and how you get an invitation is a mystery so big even AI can’t solve it. There are tables with nerdy boys; no one wants to sit there, it’s a mess. Maybe there’s a band kids table but what if you aren’t in band? I’m sure you can make up your own groups; I imagine most of us can remember this moment. The goal isn’t just to eat lunch; the goal is to Become Cool. That goal animates so much of life. At one end of things, there is the entire fashion industry, devoted to demonstrating what you have to wear to be cool. Remember the 1980s shoulders for women? They were cool; they aren’t anymore. Why? No one knows. At the other end of the struggle to Be Cool are kids, and they are not immune. It’s said that the most common last words for middle school boys in Texas are, “Hey, y’all, watch this!” I don’t think that’s limited to Texas; many of us shiver when we remember some of our own exploits.

Today’s reading from the Gospel takes us to a dinner party with Jesus. Once again, like last week’s reading, the occasion is Shabbat, the sabbath. It’s common to invite someone to share a sabbath meal. Luke says they were watching Jesus closely. Perhaps it’s because in the part that was skipped, he once again healed someone on the sabbath. Surely there’s some controversy about this but no one brings it up here. This is a time and place where “Being Cool” is everything; historians call it “an honor culture”. Your life, your work, everything is woven into your honor, just the way in school, everything counted for Being Cool—or not being cool. One thing that demonstrates your coolness is where you rank at the table. 

It has some consequences for your dinner too. Pliny the Elder was a Roman who described a dinner party in the same period. 

…[the host] set the best dishes before himself and a few others and treated the rest to cheap and scrappy food. He had apportioned the wine in small decanters of three different kinds, not in order to give his guests their choice but so that they might not refuse. He had one kind for himself and us, another for his less distinguished friends–for he is a man who classifies his acquaintances–and a third for his own freedmen and those of his guests. [https://www.romansinfocus.com/sites/www.romansinfocus.com/files/Pliny to Avitus.pdf]

Pliny was horrified by this practice, but it certainly went on. 

Luke shows us Jesus confronting this system of hierarchy and privilege. His comment is simple: 

When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host, and the host who invited both of you may come and say to you, ‘Give this person your place,’ and then in disgrace you would start to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down at the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he may say to you, ‘Friend, move up higher’; then you will be honored in the presence of all who sit at the table with you. [Luke 14:8-9]

Simple advice and yet what it means is to overturn the whole system of hierarchy. What if we all ignored the cool kids? What if their table meant nothing? 

I’ve seen this in operation, I’ve seen this come true. I grew up in the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, the NACCC. Every year they hold an annual meeting and its concluding event is a big banquet. Most years, I went through the same anxiety the middle school kids are going through. What table should I sit at? How could I network in a way that might help my career? How could I up my cool, in other words? 

Then I went with Jacquelyn. I still remember going into the first banquet with her; I was nervous as usual, I was wondering where to sit, as usual, I was watching tables fill, as usual, but this time, Jacquelyn was quietly holding me back. I scanned the room and so did she but while I was looking for a cool table, she was looking for something else: an empty table. She found one, pulled me along, and said, “Let’s sit here.” I didn’t know how to say, “No, No No! What if no one sits with us? What about the cool kids table we might get into?” So I just sat down. Gradually, the table filled up. I don’t remember who sat with us; I do remember that from then on, every year, we sat at an empty table. Somehow, though, it was all right; we met some people we might not have chosen. Just as important, instead of being anxious, I learned to enjoy the banquet for what it was: a time of fellowship and connection.

Jesus lives like us in a society that puts a lot of value on some, and very little on others. You signify who’s who with all kinds of rituals: where you sit, who greets you, who you greet. But in the kingdom he preaches, the tables are turned: everyone has value, the last are first, the first last, and the only value that counts is faithfulness to the God who is love. The cool kids are going to hate this; the cool kids do hate it and their first century representatives eventually crucify him for it. But they can’t kill him, they can’t kill this idea: that we are all children of God.

The first step to practicing this is noticing others. Look around: see each person. Each one is a gift of God. See them as a child of God. Each one is God saying: “Watch this!—here’s one of my children.” When we do that, the effect transforms us. It begins here, with us, every Sunday, in the welcome we offer. The reading from Hebrews begins, 

Let mutual affection continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. [Hebrews 13:1-2] 

This is the key: noticing others, showing hospitality that doesn’t discriminate between the cool kids and the rest. 

We don’t know what God is doing all the time; we do know what God has done. So it makes sense to pay attention, notice God’s children, to welcome strangers, knowing even before we know them that they are children of God. Who knows? You just might end up welcoming an angel. 

Amen.

By Faith

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 17, 2025

Jeremiah 23:23-29  • Hebrews 11:29-12:2 • Luke 12:49-56

…since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us [Hebrews 12:1]

What witnesses surround you? We all live with them, we remember them in stories, we are guided by examples. Do you have a favorite recipe you got from your mom? Maybe a teacher helped you imagine your adult life. Sometimes those witnesses are very present; sometimes we’re not even conscious of how they influence us. Our church has a family story as well and Susan Nelson works so hard at gathering and maintaining the materials that tell that story; we all owe her a great debt. I often take a moment to look at the model of the log church, our original meeting house, and wonder about the people who worshiped there. I wonder if one day another pastor of this church will look back at this time and wonder about it as he or she hears stories about Pastor Sue and how she was such a blessing here after a long search. It’s good for us to share stories and that’s just what the writer of Hebrews is doing in today’s reading.

This section actually started back with what we read last week. Even before that, the writer begins, “Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” [Heb 11:1] Then the writer begins all the way back with Abel, moves through Noah and Abraham, includes Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, Moses and the Exodus, and then through all those mentioned in today’s reading. Hebrews is part of the earliest church and most of the Christians for whom this was written are Jews; this is their family story. Not all the names and stories are as familiar to us: do you remember Rahab? She helped Joshua spy out Jericho. Gideon defeated the Midianites and tore down altars to Baal. Samuel was the judge in Israel who first anointed a king and David is the great emblem of a godly King. These are the family stories; these are the witnesses, the ones who stand behind these Christians who are hearing this just as we heard it read today. “This is who you are,” the writer is saying—to them, and to us.

Who is hearing this sermon? We think that Hebrews was written about 60 AD, so it’s about 30 years after Jesus has ascended. There may have been about 6,000 Christians, mostly in Jerusalem and the eastern Mediterranean. There are churches in Greece, probably in Rome. They’re having a tough time. Most are Jews; some are converts from the worship of other gods. Now Roman gods weren’t simply religious; they were part of the civic life of places. Each city had a patron god and, they were worshiped at festivals. We see the same thing today in many places where the label is Christian, but the real theology is politics. So Christians were seen as unpatriotic. 

Being unpatriotic means you could get in trouble with the Roman authorities. Christians were persecuted in some times and places; we have legends of martyrs from the period, beginning with Stephen who was stoned to death. This is part of the family story too: Hebrews says, 

Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— [Heb 12:35b-37]

This is the family story: it goes way back to Abraham and Sarah, it comes forward to friends in prison, friends stoned, friends who have died for their faith. They know that faith in Christ is not easy; they know it can mean division. 

These are the people for whom this was written; these are also the people for whom Luke is offering the sayings from Jesus we heard this morning. It’s a strange passage, isn’t it? Luke in particular goes out of his way to call Jesus, “the prince of peace”. Yet there’s nothing peaceful here. “I have come to cast fire upon the earth,” he says. Wow! Umm… no, thanks? What we’d really like is just to live out our lives peacefully? Fire is scary. 

Yet there’s a great truth here. Fire can be violent and deadly, but in the ancient world especially, it’s thought of as a way of purifying. We still do this; if something happens with the drinking water in the pipes, we’re told, “Boil water” and the way we do that is by lighting some kind of fire or heat. Jesus talks about division as well, and that can scare us. The Roman world was patriarchal; families were ruled by the eldest male. I can’t imagine he was pleased when some family members became Christians. I remember the early 1960s when boys grew their hair out to look like the Beatles. Just long hair was enough to set off my dad and most other dads.

So here is the little group of Christians, some divided from families, some afraid to go to family dinners like Thanksgiving because they are divided from the family. The writer of Hebrews is reminding them that there is a long family story of faith of which they are a part. They are not alone; they are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. 

Now that’s a lesson for us as well. We are living in a time of great division. Churches have divided over issues like marriage for all, over politics, over whether to have a praise band and so many other things. In the midst of the arguing, Hebrews wants to remind us: we are not alone, we have a cloud of witnesses, watching, sustaining us. And they hope we will simply look to Jesus, Hebrews calls him the pioneer and perfecter of faith. It doesn’t matter that we don’t agree about the length of hair, or the type of music; it doesn’t matter that we vote for different people; it doesn’t matter that we don’t agree about other things. What matters is one thing: are we following Jesus? 

In a few moments, we will share communion. I hope you see the others here sharing this symbolic meal. I don’t mean just the people in this room but the others as well who are sitting with us. The few who came here so many years ago and began this church; the ones before them, who inspired them, taught them. The one who will come after us. I hope you see the cloud of witnesses.

…since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us [Hebrews 12:1]

So indeed: let us run that race, following Jesus, knowing we are part of the cloud of witnesses to the love of God in this place.

Amen.