Category Archives: Year A

Sixth Sunday in Easter

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Normal Love

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor • © 2017

Sixth Sunday in Easter/A • May 21, 2017

Click Below to Hear the Sermon Preached<

There’s an old story about a church that called a new minister with a reputation as a fine preacher. Sure enough, on his first Sunday he gave an amazing sermon. People cried, people laughed at the funny parts, and many were deeply stirred. The members of the pulpit committee were roundly congratulated and everyone felt this was a great start.

The next Sunday there were smiles as people arrived and quiet as the pastor began. Everyone was startled when his opening turned out to be exactly the same. In fact, the whole sermon was the same. Some people hadn’t been there the first week, and they thought it was a fine sermon, some said they were glad to be reminded of some of his points. But on the whole, there was a bit less reaction. There was even less the third week when he again gave the same sermon, some said word for word.

As it happened, the Board of Deacons was meeting that week and of course someone asked the question on everyone’s mind. “Pastor, that was a fine sermon you gave last Sunday and the Sunday before that and the first Sunday but do you have any others?” The Deacons were quiet as they waited for his answer. After a moment, the pastor quietly said, “I have lots of them and as soon as I see you are doing what I preached in this sermon, I’ll go on to the next.” How do we connect God’s Word to life? How does what is said turn into what is done? How does imagined world of God’s way turn into the every day decisions we all make?

If you love me, keep my commandments

That’s the problem Jesus is facing in the passage from John we read. He knows his time with them is almost over and he’s teaching them about the time to come. How will what he has taught turn into how they live? How can his life and his message extend into their lives and the message those lives carry on? Over the years, along the way, he has built a relationship with them. They’ve seen him heal, heard him preach, watched him deal with individuals. They’ve learned to love him; felt him love them. Now that love becomes a bridge to the future. “If you love me, you will keep my commandments,” he says.

What are these commandments? Jesus isn’t Moses: he doesn’t give his followers a tablet with a nice set of bulleted commandments, he doesn’t hand them an operator’s manual. Yet according to the gospel writers, he does explicitly command some things. First and foremost, love god with your whole self and then as well, love your neighbor. Forgive endlessly. And there is the implicit command of his practice, the way he includes people his culture calls sinners, women, poor people, rich people, everyone, into the community of care at his table. There is the promise of abundance he preaches in the parable of the sower and by feeding the multitude and his own statement that he came to give abundant life. So we do have a set of commands and his own command is that living from these is the test of loving him.

Culture versus Christ

This is what Christians often miss because we confuse Christ with culture. There is a content to Christ’s commands and we can see it, hear it, act on it. Racism is never Christian because it contradicts Christ. Excluding people because of who they are, because they are gay or female or transgender is never Christian because it contradicts Christ. Oppressing people for gain is never Christian because it contradicts Christ and destroys the abundance God gives. So when Christian churches and Christian people endorse and live this way, it’s a sign they don’t love Christ, they love the culture that supports such sin.

What happens when we do live out his commands? The first thing to know is: you can succeed. We often speak of love as if it were an object or a hole in the  ground; we speak of “falling in love” or being blindsided by love. But love can be an intention, a decision that we will, every day, deal with everyone we encounter with kindness. Love is a commitment to kindness and just as exercising changes our physical body, practicing love changes our spiritual self so that as we do it, we are transformed. We come to see it as natural, as needed. Paul says in 2nd Corinthians that he is compelled by the love of Christ. All Christians know this feeling: because we love Christ, we must love others, even when we don’t want to or it’s inconvenient. 

Succeeding at Keeping Christ’s Commandments

We can succeed at this. Years ago I led a weekly chapel service for preschool kids, I was struggling to figure out how to condense the theology of love into something three year olds could understand. I came up with this idea: one nice thing. So I started talking to them about doing one nice thing each day. I gave little stars for reports of a nice thing; I had them chant it with me: “One nice thing! One nice thing!” It probably sounds silly and simplistic. But a few months after I started the one nice thing campaign, a mother who didn’t go to church came to me and asked to talk. She said that she and her husband weren’t church people and she had been unhappy when we announced the chapel services. Her little boy liked the preschool there, though, so they kept him in class. And then she paused and said, “I hate to admit this. I don’t want to admit this. But I have to: you have made my child better” She went on to say that suddenly he was coming to her and asking what he could do for a nice thing. He was doing things; he was changing. So whether you are three or 93 or somewhere in between, you can do one nice thing; you can succeed at keeping Christ’s commands. And if you try, you will.

Failing at Keeping Christ’s Commandments

There is another thing that will happen if you intentionally set out to keep Christ’s commands: you will fail. Maybe it’s a bad day, you didn’t sleep well, you’re growls and you’ll encounter someone who annoys you. Maybe you’re just not feeling well; maybe you’re feeling under appreciated. We all have those days. You beep at the guy in front of you who is taking two seconds too long to move after the light turns green; you say something unkind under your breath. You let your doubts dominate your thinking at a meeting. We all fail at living out Christ’s commands. The first disciples did. One of the mysteries I’ve been thinking about most of my life is that the gospel accounts depict the first disciples as such bumblers. At the feeding of the multitude, they are worried about the budget. When Jesus announces he is the Christ, they argue with him. They fight to make a hierarchy within their ranks instead of accepting equality with Jesus. They don’t believe in his resurrection; they run away when he’s arrested. They fail.

It is when we fail that we discover the importance of forgiveness. And it’s when we experience forgiveness that we begin to give it. Forgiveness is the key, according to Jesus, and it’s endless. “How many times must I forgive?” The disciples ask. Endlessly, Jesus answers. And he demonstrates this. When Jesus is arrested, Peter denies him three times; what’s worse is that Jesus had predicted as much. Think about the shame he must have felt when he met Jesus after the resurrection. Yet what does Jesus say? “Feed my sheep”. Jesus forgives him, embraces him, sends him on a mission. He means to do the same with you, and with me.

Normal Love

When I was teaching Sociology, we spent a lot of time on the concept of norms. Norms are simply the invisible rules which guide our behavior moment to moment. Go into a room with a table and chairs, you know to sit on the chair. That’s normal here. Two thirds of the world doesn’t use chairs but here we do. It’s normal. We have rules for all kinds of things. Now what I love about this church most of all is that love is normal, inclusion is normal. A young woman who doesn’t speak English shows up at the door on a snowy night; what’s the normal reaction? Here it’s to take her in, spend endless hours figuring out how to talk to her, feed her, help her.

A young man shows up one Sunday, a college student, who tells us he’s headed for the ministry. What’s the normal reaction? Here, it’s to embrace him. People drive him to church every Sunday; we give him a chance to try out his preaching. We celebrate his graduation. This is from a letter I received from Bryan’s mother about the impact of this normal love.

Thank you so much for all that you and the entire Albany congregation have done for Bryan during his three years at Sienna. Your love, support and and caring have ben overwhelming.

What I love about this church is that love is normal here.

When Christ Compels Us

Now today is a special day: our Annual Meeting. It’s a moment to look around, size up where we’ve been, celebrate it and more importantly think about where we’re going together. Like the minister with whom I began, I want to simply say about that journey what I said on my first time in this pulpit.

Some may look around and see what isn’t here, see small numbers, think it means small potential. But Jesus did not send out a multitude; he sent out just 12 people, about half the number who gather here most Sundays. Sometimes they failed; sometimes they succeeded. But they gave the world this wonderful gift: his vision of love made normal. And in that gift, they found a spirit. As Jesus said, they weren’t alone and they discovered that in that Spirit, miracles were possible. Making love normal always does this: it always incubates miracles.

So as we look forward, make sure you see not just what’s here but what’s coming here, see the impact of normal love, see the vision of Christ. For wherever we go, we will be on the right path when we go where Christ compels us, where Christ leads us, where Christ’s love becomes our gift to the world For whom Christ gave his life.

Amen.

Mothers Day Sermon

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Cords of Compassion

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor © 2017

Mothers Day • May 14, 2017

To Hear the sermon preached, click below

The desert gives up its heat at night as fast as darkness consumes a windowless room when the light switch is turned off. In the shadow of a bush, a child, a boy on the edge of manhood lies crying and a little way off his mother is bent in anguish, crying as well. In that moment, for the first time in the Biblical story, something unimaginable happens: from heaven itself, the voice of an angel, a messenger of the Most High, speaks to the woman and asks, “What troubles you?” The cries of mother and child have been heard in heaven. They’re dying of thirst; she’s perishing from grief. In that moment, this Egyptian woman, a person who has no part in the inheritance of God’s people, is heard and for the first time in the whole Bible story, an angel opens her eyes and she sees, miraculously, an oasis: a garden with water, a place where life can be sustained. Her name is Hagar; her son is Ishamael. God loves them; God saves them.

Mothers Day

Today is Mothers Day in our nation, a celebration begun in 1905 by Anna Jarvis, who began by memorializing her own mother and then campaigned to make the day a national holiday. By 1914, the day was proclaimed by President Wilson and celebrated all over the country. Ironically, Jarvis herself became so angry at commercialization of the day that she campaigned against it and was arrested for disturbing the peace. For people who grew up singing, Faith of Our Fathers and other songs that exclusively portray God’s love in patriarchal terms, it’s hard at times to realize that the Bible has no gender barriers in communicating God’s love. So I thought this would be a good day to speak about three unusual mothers whose stories are like a series of lenses, focusing God’s love through their lives to make it visible to us.

The Story of Hagar: God Hears Her Cry

Take Hagar, for example. We celebrate God’s covenant with Abram and Sarai in which God promised land and blessing and descendants as numerous as the stars. At this promise, they leave the settled place of their origin and live on a pilgrimage with no certain destination. Throughout the journey, the promise of a child remains unfulfilled. At last, seeking to bring about by human means what God doesn’t seem to be doing any other way, Sarai turns to the best reproductive technology of her time. She takes an Egyptian slave named Hagar to her husband, gives her to him as a wife and bluntly tells him to sleep with her and produce a child. This kind of surrogate child bearing was common the ancient near east and in this case it’s effective. Hagar conceives, a child is born, named Ishmael and all seems well.

But it isn’t well; it never is when we try to substitute our own time and trouble for God’s plan. Fertility, child bearing, are the ultimate means of value in that world. Sarai’s childlessness makes her envious of Hagar; Hagar’s success at having a son makes her despise Sarai. It doesn’t take much imagination to think how long and awful that quiet war must have been. Finally, Hagar runs away. But she returns after God speaks to her in the desert. For years thereafter, she lives a twilight life: as to Abraham, a second wife, as to Sarah, a despised slave. The boy Ishmael grows. Finally,, in the fullness of Gods’ time, Sarah does conceive; she also bears a son and names him Isaac. Now there is a new problem: Sarah is determined her son will not share the inheritance with Ishmael. So she bluntly tells Abraham to get rid of Hagar. Upon a day, he does so, giving her the barest minimum, a sack of meal, a skin of water, to survive for a time in the desert. It’s a way of killing someone out of sight. When the meal and water run out, Hagar knows the time is up; she puts the boy under a tree, hoping not to see him die. That’s the scene with which we began. Realize who these people are: Egyptians, slaves, people outside the care of the community. But not outside God’s care. It’s a mother’s cry for her son that first calls forth an angel.

The Story of Bathsheba: Sustaining Love Leads to Blessing

Let me share the story of another mother. She’s not a great example; she’s not a character we often talk about in church. More than a thousand years after Hagar, God’s people have created a kingdom, raised up a king, seen him cast down, replaced by another man named David. It’s the dawn of a golden age remembered ever since for David becomes the focus of a new covenant when God again promises permanent presence with God’s people. But David’s virtue is God’s favor, not his own moral character. One day he sees a young woman, desires her, and they have an affair. David arranges to have her husband killed; the woman, named Bathsheba, becomes pregnant but loses the child. In his grief, David loses himself for a time. Yet he comes back; together, David and Bathsheba have another child and name him Solomon.

Solomon is not the obvious heir but his mother maneuvers him into becoming king after David and his rule becomes an almost mythic golden age. The Talmud calls him a prophet, so too does the Quran. It is Solomon who begins the process of writing down what we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures. But without Bathsheba, there would be no Solomon: it is her perseverance and faith the lead to his life. Without it, we would have no Genesis, no Exodus, no record of how God saved God’s people and covenanted with them. It is Bathsheba, often depicted as an evil temptress, who laid this foundation for us.

The Story of Gomer: God’s Mother Love

Let me tell one more story. Three centuries or so after Solomon, his kingdom has split in two. The northern half, called Israel, has become a place where the rich get richer by oppressing the poor. They have failed to keep God’s covenant and God responds as God always does by calling forth a prophet, a person to speak God’s word. His name is Hosea and his call is to speak about the nations’ faithlessness. Like many prophets, he uses vivid pictures. This is a tough picture to present, so I’m just going to read exactly what it says in the Book of Hosea.
When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.”

The wife he takes his named Gomer and she has two children. It’s not a pretty story; it’s like describing an operation to remove a tumor. We hope the result is good but the details are difficult. Gomer’s story and the prophecy of Hosea are a terrible indictment of Israel and it’s faithlessness. Over and over again, the rich have violated God’s commands. Over and over again, Israel has failed to live out God’s rules for a community of care.

Yet in that story this light shines out. After all the terrible words of indictment, after all the lists of reasons to punish Israel, after God offers the awful image of an unfaithful wife, God comes back to the core problem of love. Just as Hosea loves Gomer, God loves Israel.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and offering incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of compassion, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.

Now cords of compassion are very simple. I know that every parent here can remember how toddlers run away at the slightest inattention. Israelite mothers, working in the fields, came up with the same solution sometimes used by parents today: a sort of leash to limit how far the child could go, how much trouble he could find. The name for this mother’s leash is a cord or compassion.

Stories of Mothers Showing God’s Love

These are stories of women who do not fit the mold of mothers. I suppose somewhere today someone is talking about Mary the Mother of Jesus or perhaps Sarah, Abraham’s covenant partner whose child Isaac is the sign of covenant fulfillment. I wanted to share these stories because they are not just Biblical stories, they are emblems of how God uses the most unusual mothers as well as the ones we more often remember to let some love in. Gomer becomes a mother precisely to demonstrate faithlessness but in the demonstration, the surprising insight is given that God is not limited by some rule of rewards and punishments in dealing with us; God does not give up even when we are given over to faithlessness. Bathsheba is often a symbol of temptation and adultery but she is also the gateway to the golden age of Solomon when God’s Word is written and wisdom is given. Hagar is an Egyptian slave. Hundreds of years later, the tables will turn, the Hebrews will be enslaved by Egyptians and God will hear the cries of those mothers but here God hears this mother and for the first time sends an angel. Who would have thought someone so outside the boundaries would be the gateway for God’s messenger and God’s message?

These stories are meant to break our boundaries as well. Somewhere today, Syrian mothers are crying; can you imagine heaven hearing them? What should we believe then, when someone tells us they are outside the boundaries of compassion? Somewhere today, some woman is trying to put a life back together after a faithless marriage; is it really enough to say what goes around comes around or is there more, is there some way we can enact God’s surprising love that stops the merry go round and lets people off?

This is Mothers Day; it’s become a day to honor women and that’s a noble, and worthwhile thing. Shouldn’t it be more? Shouldn’t it be a day when we hear in the image of mother love, the voice of God saying, “I drew you with cords of compassion; I could never let you go?” For surely, in covenant, in faith, we are the people bound by cords of compassion; we are the people meant to make those cords clear to those who have not understood they are God’s children. In the love of God, there are no boundaries, there is only the endless grace of trying to raise up the children of God to celebrate God’s love by becoming a blessing every day.
Amen.

Second Sunday in Easter

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A New Song

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – ©2017

Second Sunday in Easter/A • April 23, 2017

John 20:19-31

Click Below to Hear the Sermon Preached

What Do You Know?

“I know what I know if you know what I mean.” It’s a line in a song by Neil Diamond, recorded some years ago by Edie Brickell that has rattled around in my mind ever since. How do I know what I know? What do you know? How do you know it? 

I asked the ushers to hand out objects today so you’d have something to touch while we thought about this. After all, a basic way we know things is through our senses. So take a moment: touch what you have, feel it, is it sharp, smooth, what does it feel like? What does it smell like? I won’t ask you to taste it but if you’ve ever cared for a small child you know that we start out with no inhibitions about putting things in our mouths; is there any parent who hasn’t had to run at least once yelling, “Take that out of your mouth”? 

So we know what we know because we touch it or taste it or smell it. We connect those things with memories. If I walk into the house on a day Jacquelyn is home and smell garlic, I know we are having something Italian for dinner and I smile: not only because of the future food but because I remember how nice it is to have dinner with the family. Just the scent of the garlic is enough to bring on a whole raft of memories: I know what this time will be like in some way. 
Pictures can do the same thing sometimes.

The last few years have seen an explosion of photographs. There was a time when a standard 35 mm camera shot a roll of film with 36 exposures. So if you were out taking pictures you had to think: is this scene worth one of those frames? Now it’s common to shoot 36 exposures of the same scene just to make sure you got the shot. Why are pictures so important? Because they remind us of what we know. This past week, I went to see Taxi Driver, an old 1970’s movie about a lost soul in New York City in 1973. Sitting there in the dark, with the pictures of bell bottoms and vaguely Indian hippy clothes and the tawdry culture of pre-Giuliani New York, I felt as well my own memories, I remembered experiences of those times. I think that’s why our ancestors drew pictures of hunting on cave walls: it was their photography.  What do you know? How do you know it?

I’m asking this question today because it’s a core problem of the resurrection. Of all the things we know, one of the most basic is that dead is dead. Benjamin Franklin said in a letter to a friend once, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The resurrection flies in the face of that certainty. What are we to do with it? What are we to do about it? What are we to believe?

The Disciples and the Resurrection

This isn’t a new problem. The gospels depict Jesus telling his disciples several times that he would be crucified, die and then rise again. John has him saying,

So the Jews answered and said to him, ‘What sign do you show to us, since you do these things?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he said this; and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had spoken (John 2:18-22)

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Matthew quotes this saying:

An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:39-40).

and then again,

From that time Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day (Matthew 16:21).

One might have thought there would have been a crowd of witnesses at the tomb if his disciples had believed him. Evidently they didn’t since only the women go and they go to prepare a corpse, not acclaim a risen Lord. It’s only in the moment of finding the tomb empty and meeting Jesus again that the women believe in the resurrection and when they do, they tell the disciples, disciples who apparently don’t believe them. So if in your heart of hearts, you don’t believe the women, the Easter story, take heart: neither did the first people to hear it.

We Are Toddlers

The problem we have is the same as the one Thomas the Twin has. Remember him? In the reading today, he says,”Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Doesn’t that describe most of us? We want to see: we want to touch. Like a toddler with a toy, we only know what we can get our hands around, we only believe what we can get in our mouths. The resurrection flies in the face of everything we’ve ever been told or known or seen. “I know what I know,” we say to it, like Thomas. Want me to change? Show me something. I wonder if that isn’t the same problem many of us have with the resurrection. We are toddlers too: before we believe in something impossible, we want to see it, touch it.

Of course, no one saw the resurrection. Search the scriptures, there’s not a single eyewitness account, not one. Instead, what we have accounts, many accounts, of the experience of encountering the risen Lord. Paul says more than 500 people, both men and women, had such experiences. So the key to understanding what John is telling us may not be Thomas’ question but the earlier experience of the disciples. Remember that moment? They are locked in a room. Now there’s one reason we lock rooms: we’re afraid of something. The leader of this movement has been executed for a political crime; surely the authorities will be after his followers. They’re afraid, meeting secretly behind a locked door and suddenly there he is, the Lord, coming through the door. No grave can keep him down; no door can keep him out. “Peace be with you,” he says. And it is.

“I know what I know.” What these followers of Jesus know is simple: that when they get together, he’s still present with them. When they sit down to dinner, as they did with him, he’s still present with them. When they love each other, he’s still present with them. When they share his love with others, he’s still present with them. They feel it; they know it. Perhaps for Thomas it is seeing this acted out that matters. Perhaps for you it is and if that’s true, look around, look for him: he comes and goes wherever people live in love and remember him.

There is a game small children play at a particular moment: it’s called peek-a-boo. You’ve played it, we all have. You know how it works. You cover your eyes, say, “Where’s Maggie? Where’s Andy?” and then open your eyes or uncover them and there they are. The child does the same thing.

Peek a Boo

Peek-a-boo, it turns out, is a very important game. We don’t come believing the world is permanent; we don’t come believing things stay here when we are asleep or close our eyes. That’s one reason children cry so inconsolably at bedtime. Wouldn’t you cry if you thought the whole world would end when you closed your eyes? So we teach them. Look: it’s still here, I’m still here. Peek-a-boo. Close your eyes: it’s safe. Open them: still here. Over and over again, until they know it, believe it, until we don’t remember not knowing it.

It’s like learning a new song. One of the first times I went to my church youth group, Harry Clark, our minister sang a cool song called, “Dem Bones”. It has endless verses and no one ever wrote them down. It has a chorus: “Dem Bones gonna rise again: I knotted it, knowed it, knowed it, Dem bones gonna rise again!” I didn’t know that song but gradually, over years of listening to Harry, I began to learn it. I learned the verses and even though I’m not much of a singer, I learned to lead it. I knew I had it one day when I was a newly minted youth minister and I had to lead a song at a retreat and I started it up. “Dem bones gonna rise again”.

Learning resurrection life isn’t about pretending to believe some event hundreds of years ago. It is about learning to move to a new rhythm, sing a new song. It is like being a child who has discovered that just as the world doesn’t go away when you shut your eyes, God’s love doesn’t go away when you die. Peek-a-boo: still there, always there, permanently there.

Amen.

Easter Sunday

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Lost & Found

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Easter Sunday/A • April 16, 2017

Matthew 28:1-10

A few years ago, our family was driving from Omaha to Kansas City to attend a convention. When we got to the hotel, we settled in. For Jacquelyn, that means unpacking clothes; for me it means setting up the computer, getting online, setting up my iPod for music. I had one of the first iPod and it was a prized possession. So you can imagine how I felt when I discovered it wasn’t there—not there in the bag, not there in the car. What do you do when you don’t know what to do? You do what you know. I knew I’d had it on my belt in the car and I searched and searched, moved the seat back and forth until finally it dawned on me that somehow my iPod was gone. Then I remembered something. At a rest area where we’d stopped, there was an odd little thunk noise I’d ignored. With a sick realization, I suddenly knew the iPod was gone: left an hour or more up the road, gone for good. It was lost and all I could do was rant at my thoughtlessness and sputter in anger. I didn’t know what to do so that’s what I did.

When You Don’t Know What to Do

What do you do when you don’t know what to do? You do what you did last time. You do it whether it worked or not; you do it whether it makes sense or not. Most of our life is cooked up from a series of recipes. What should we do? Look at your handbook; look at your cookbook. But there’s no handbook for Easter, no cookbook for resurrection. We’ve just heard the story of two women in the midst of something unimaginable; one of those stories you read in the newspaper and wince about, one of those tales you hear and think, “thank God that’s not me”. Their friend, their leader, the man who guided their lives and gave those lives light has been crucified. They don’t know what to do so they do what they did the last time someone died: they’re on the way to bury him properly. But they’re about to experience an earthquake, they’re about to come face to face with the real Easter. This is the Easter story: you start out to bury Jesus and end up proclaiming his life. You lose your friend and find the Lord.

Can you see them on the way to the tomb? Like a group preparing a funeral lunch, like people setting up the tables and chairs, they’ve come to properly bury Jesus. They wonder about the difficulty; they’ve brought the things they’ll need. Ancient Palestinian tombs were places where families gathered for picnics, where they went to remember and they are going to get everything ready. They are following a map, as we do, the map of grief. We look at its ways, we check off its steps. They are not prepared for Jesus’ death; nothing prepares us for death. But they are prepared for him to be dead. They know what to do: they do what they did last time. Matthew tells the story with care. Everything is just as expected. It’s early, just after dawn; the soldiers are guarding the tomb, the world is quiet, Jesus is dead and buried. They are doing what they did last time.

At the Tomb

But at the tomb, everything changes. Matthew says there is a kind of earthquake; perhaps the true earthquake is the stunning surprise when their map suddenly disappears, when last time is no guide to this moment. For Jesus isn’t there. None of the gospel accounts tell the details of the resurrection; all the accounts agree on this stunning surprise: that the women went to a tomb, expecting the dead Jesus and found he wasn’t there. What they did last time, what they believed from their past, what they knew about things staying the same suddenly didn’t apply. Instead, they meet this strange angelic figure; instead, they are told three things: go, tell, see. Go tell his disciples he is going to Galilee, going home, and there you will see him. The surprise of Easter is that Jesus is not done with them; Jesus is not done with us.

It was, we are told, in the breaking of the bread that Jesus was seen. It is when we together believe and act from the faith that Jesus is not done with us that we will see him. Today, this day; tomorrow, and all the tomorrows, may you see him with you. For he is not buried long ago and if we seek him there, we will not find him. Instead, we should look where he said: going ahead of us, inviting us to follow, where he is going next.

An Easter Story

One of the great bedrock proverbs of our culture, a saying we hear in our heads and recite to each other is, “People don’t change.” But in fact people do change, people change every day and that is resurrection. In his book, New Mercies I See, Stan Purdum tells about a little baby that would not have survived if he had not had the right people in the nick of time.

Lucille Brennan had lived a hard life, but found faith in Christ in her mid-fifties and turned her life around. As a way of making up for being such a poor parent to her own illegitimate son, Lucille became a foster parent. The director of the Department of Children’s Services considered Lucille one of their best foster parents and asked her to take one of their sadder cases.
Little Jimmy, five months old, had been beaten unmercifully by his mother’s live in boyfriend whenever he cried. Jimmy had been so emotionally damaged that now he wouldn’t cry even when he was hungry or wet or cold. Everyone was afraid that the damage was permanent. Lucille determined that Jimmy needed to be held, and held a lot. So for weeks, Lucille did everything one-handed. Her other arm was busy cradling Jimmy, who remained silent as ever.
Jimmy wouldn’t cry to tell her he was hungry, so Lucille made it a point to feed him on a regular schedule. Lucille would get up in the middle of the night and check on him. Sometimes he was asleep, but other times he just lay there awake and quiet. When she found him like that, she picked him up and rocked him until he drifted back to sleep.
Of course Jimmy went to church with Lucille and the entire congregation heard the sad story of this baby who was too afraid to cry. On the fifth Sunday after Jimmy had been placed in Lucille’s home, the pastor was well into his sermon when he heard something and stopped talking. It was a little cry. And when people turned to look, they saw Lucille with a big smile on her face and tears pouring out of her eyes. But the crying sound wasn’t coming from her, it came from the bundle she held in her arms.
Eileen, who was sitting next to Lucille, stared as the little boy took a deep breath and started crying louder. Finally, Eileen couldn’t contain herself and in an action unusual for a bunch of quiet Lutherans, she exclaimed, “Praise the Lord.” At that same time the entire congregation broke into an enthusiastic applause – probably the first time in history that worshipers had applauded because a child cried in church.

Do you see that this story is the Easter story? A woman, a person, finds resurrection and lives her life from it, giving life to others. She embraces a baby who’s silent and dying. Through her embrace, Jimmy learns to cry. Now if you search the scripture, you will find this ever present reality: God hears cries. Whether it’s Hagar in the wilderness, or Jimmy in church, God hears cries and makes them the occasion for grace. Someone changed: someone loved, someone was saved by which we mean able to grow up into the person God hoped.

Resurrection Is Where We Are

We come to the tomb today. It’s important to recognize where we are today. It’s important to know this place. This is the tomb. This is the cemetery. This is the world. It may be pretty. It may be familiar. It may look nice and smell sweet but this is the tomb. The world is a tomb and our call is not of this world, our call is not in this world. We are called like the women of this story to get up and get going. Jesus is not here; Jesus is gone, Jesus is gone to Galilee, Jesus is gone to glory. Where is Galilee? It’s back where he came from; it’s back where we come from, it’s home. Resurrection is where we are, not some other time or place. So get up: don’t be afraid, if he could escape the tomb so can you. Get up: you’re not done, you’re not finished but you aren’t here to do what you thought, he has a new purpose and a different mission for you. Get up: go where he told you. Get up: go find him.

It was, we are told, in the breaking of the bread that Jesus was seen. It is when we together believe and act from the faith that Jesus is not done with us that we will see him. This is why we’re here together. It’s not just Lucille that taught Jimmy to cry; it was a whole congregation who loved and nurtured. Jesus never works alone; he always gathers people together. We are among the people he gathers. So in our going, we go together, helping each other, nurturing each other.

Today, this day; tomorrow, and all the tomorrows, may you see him with you. For he is not buried long ago and if we seek him there, we will not find him. Instead, we should look where he said: going ahead of us, inviting us to follow, where he is going next.

Finding Jesus

We will find him where he said: in the eyes of the homeless, in the service of the hungry. “I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,” he says. We will find him when we make the resurrection of those around us as important the decoration of our tables. We will find him when we are more interested in following him than finding our own way. We will find him when, as Paul says, we have the mind of Christ in our own mind. Then,, then indeed, Easter will come not only for us, but from us. Then, our church, our lives, will proclaim this glad news, “He is risen!” for he will be risen, risen in us, and we will have found him.

We’ve been thinking about conversations with Jesus for six weeks. We’ve heard them, I’ve preached about them, we’ve imagined them. It’s time for our own conversation with Jesus. For if we believe he is alive, wouldn’t he still be talking with us, sharing with us, meeting with us? And here is the question we ought to be asking, all of us, every day: what now, Lord?

Amen.

Right Here, Right Now

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Conversations Before the Cross #5:What Now, Lord?




A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Fifth Sunday in Lent/A • April 2, 2017

John 11:1-45

Most mornings at our house begin the same. Waking up, getting out of bed, dressed while an excited dog runs back and forth, urging me on. We go downstairs, hook up the leash, out the door and then open the garage door to reveal the day. This past week, several of those openings have revealed a cold, rainy backyard. Now Lucy hates rain, hates being wet. There she is, straining at the leash, pulling me forward until she comes to the rain. I see her look out, recognize the situation and then she just stops, as if to say, “I’m not going out there in this.” Every moment is a gate between the past and the future; every moment comes with a context and holds possibilities. Today we’re invited into this final moment before Jesus comes to Jerusalem, today we are invited to face the darkness of death and see the possibilities of resurrection. Today we are asked to stop in this moment and consider our own lives in the light of these other lives. What then? What now?

Conversations Before the Cross

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

Dealing With Death: Avoidance

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

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

Jesus doesn’t listen to them. When his disciples were discussing the man born blind, he told them, “I am the light of the world.” Now he gives them an example of living in the light and makes his way to Bethany. There he encounters first Martha and later Mary, the sisters of Lazarus, and each one confronts him with an accusation: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They are grieving, they are hurt, they are angry and their anger and faith have mixed into a bitter blindness. Swirling around this entire conversation is a group of other mourners as well and emotions run high. Jesus is himself caught up in the moment; the text tells us “Jesus wept.” So here we have a second response to death: weep, mourn, grieve. If the rational process of avoiding death fails, the emotional process of grieving offers a path.

Jesus at the Grave

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

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

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

A Third Way: Calling People to Life

We’ve seen two ways to deal with death: avoidance and acceptance. Jesus offers a third—faith in the resurrection, faith in the power of life, faith in the love of God so that even in the midst of death, we remain alive to God, as Paul will say later, transformed. That faith can bind us together into a people gathered in the name of Jesus. Just being a church doesn’t guarantee that; there are plenty of churches who are gathered around a shared culture or a determination to preserve the past.

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

Facing the Darkness

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

Called by Jesus

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

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

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

Palm Sunday

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Palm Sunday Communion Table First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

Right Here, Right Now

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Palm Sunday/A • April 9, 2017

Matthew 26:1-11

To Hear the Sermon Preached, Click Below

“I love a parade”. It’s a comic line in the movie Life of Brian, sung as the bloody procession to the cross goes on. It’s a thought many of us have at times. I grew up going to parades on Memorial Day; the route passed in front of my grandparents’ house and it was always a big day; ranks of soldiers, some fresh from wars, marching, bands, military vehicles and the Trenton fire trucks, notable because unlike normal fire trucks, theirs were painted a sort of grayish beige. Later there would be a picnic and the men would play horse shoes and drink beer and eat oysters.

Do you love parades? For years many of us have come to Palm Sunday like crowds to a parade, waving bits of greenery, anxious for the happy sermon of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem after all the dark Lenten texts. We love the parade: but what is the purpose of the parade?

The Palm Sunday Parade

Perhaps if we pull back and see the parade in context we’ll understand it better. Jesus and his followers have mostly moved through small villages on their journey. Last week we followed him to Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem and into Judea where he has already encountered opposition. Now he’s going up to Jerusalem: up, because Jerusalem sits on a small mountain, Jerusalem because it is the capital city, the center of Jewish life.

Along the winding path are crowds of other pilgrims because it’s Passover. Well, parades always mean crowds, don’t they? They are singing the songs of Passover, of pilgrimage, they are looking forward to the celebration and the holiday and running underneath it all is the reminder of how God once defeated a mighty military power, Egypt, for that is the heart of the Passover story. Who knows when God might act against the Romans? We know that Passover often led to riots. Three thousand were killed in a Passover riot near the time of Jesus and these crowds are restless.

For this is not the only parade going on. At almost exactly the same time, Pilate is also coming to Jerusalem. Just like our parades of soldiers and military vehicles, the Romans used parades to show off their might. So on the other side of Jerusalem, there is another parade going on, Pilate and his Roman soldiers, banners in the breeze, swords at their sides, shields and spears held high, are marching into Jerusalem as well, a vivid demonstration of the power of the Emperor and the King he has appointed here, Herod Antipas.

The people around Jesus know about this other parade but they also know God has promised a King on David’s throne, not a puppet like Herod. They remember the words of Zechariah,

Tell Zion’s daughter,
 “Look, your king’s on his way, poised and ready, mounted 
On a donkey, on a colt, foal of a pack animal.”

Hosanna!

So when Jesus appears, riding a donkey, surely a shout goes up. “Hosanna!” Hosanna is a cheer; throwing your garments and greenery down is like putting out the red carpet, it is saying that this person is so important, even their donkey must not touch the ground. Hosanna to the King who comes in the name of the Lord. Now to us, this doesn’t sound so awful; often Palm Sunday celebrations include the shout. But to the Romans, to Herod, to the Temple Priests, it is treason. No Kingdom has two kings. Inevitably, one gets rid of the other. If Jesus comes as king, the reigning king will surely seek to kill him. Already, even before he arrives, there is a plot to arrest Jesus; even as he is acclaimed, others are seeking to destroy him.

The Lord Has Need of It

So here we are: crowds happily shouting, police plotting, Jesus riding, the disciples smiling, all moving slowly up the paths to Jerusalem. But how did we get here? We have to back up in the story to understand and perhaps to understand the whole story. There is Jesus, riding on a donkey. Where did that donkey come from? How does a man who owns nothing suddenly get a donkey?

Of course if you were listening as we read the story, you remember Jesus told two of his disciples to go to a village and get a donkey. Just like that: go to the village, you’ll find a donkey with a foal tied up, go untie them and bring them along. Now donkeys are the cars of the first century. So just imagine if I said to one of you on a Saturday night, “Hey, we need a car for church tomorrow. Go out to Slingerlands to this address and get one.” What would you say? How hard would you laugh? I wonder how the disciples reacted. Even more, I wonder about the owner of the donkey and the colt. These represent a substantial investment. I imagine somehow Jesus must have talked to him. There must have been a moment when he told this guy, “Hey, I need your donkey.” What would you say? What did he say?

“The Lord has need of it.” That’s what the disciples are told to say. It’s a simple phrase. “The Lord has need of it.” Think of the money in your purse or your wallet right now, right here. Imagine someone saying, “The Lord has need of it.” Now think of something more valuable. You know, we have a boat in Baltimore. I love that little sloop. Thirty five feet of classic water lines with a wood interior, sails like she knows the way with hardly any help. She’s a better sailor than I am, I just try to keep up with her. Now I tried to imagine hearing, “The Lord has need of it” about my boat this week. And I confess, I don’t know what I would say, how I would respond.

So I think about that donkey owner and I wonder if he had a bad night. I wonder if he was up early, peeking out, hoping against hope that the call wouldn’t come, that what he had been told wouldn’t happen. I imagine a quiet early morning as he looks out and sees the moving shadows the disciples, hopes they are going somewhere else, knows they are not. Finally they are at his gate; he opens it, they look at each other and say what they’ve been told: “The Lord has need of it.” It’s just the three of them and the animals and he has to make a choice. Right here, right now he has to decide.

“I have decided to follow Jesus,” we sometimes sing. But what about when it’s a decision right here, right now? Of course, in the story, he turns over the donkey and her foal and the disciples go off with them to Jesus and the rest, well, we’ve already talked about the rest: the parade, the entrance, the shouts as Jesus rides that donkey that he has because someone when it counted, right here, right now, said yes, met Jesus without Jesus even being present, met him in the decision to do what the Lord needed.

For the story of Holy Week, all the stories of Holy Week, from this parade to the other parade, the one that goes to Golgotha, are all about people meeting Jesus. We’ve been talking about the conversations before the cross and now it’s coming near and all these meetings, all these conversations, ask us about our own conversation with Jesus, about whether we are ready to meet him ourselves.

Meeting Jesus

Joanna Williams is a retired Presbyterian minister, who shared this story of meeting Jesus.

In the years that I’ve been a minister, I have known some winning churches and lots of winners in them. One who comes to mind is a young man in my first congregation, an advertising executive on the rise in his profession. Every Tuesday night he volunteered at the foot clinic for the homeless people who made their home in our church gymnasium. Robert was his name. He was the nattiest dresser I had ever seen. I can picture him now in my mind’s eye, wearing a crisp shirt, red suspenders.
I see him sitting on a stool before the chair on which one of our homeless guests is sitting. He takes the guest’s feet and places them in a basin of warm water. He takes a towel and dries the feet. He applies ointment to their sores. The ritual ends with the gift of a clean, white pair of socks.
I see the man in the chair, as he slips his socks on, brush a tear from his own cheek-a tough guy whom no one has touched with tenderness in a very long time.
I once asked Robert, the advertising executive on the move, why he came to the foot clinic every week. He brushed me aside, saying, “I figure I have a better chance of running into Jesus here than most places. That’s all.”
I watched him week after week. I realized as I watched him that I was developing my own sort of double vision. I was seeing Christ in the stranger that he served. I was also seeing Christ in the one who was finding deep meaning in his life through serving others.

Jesus comes to Palm Sunday riding a donkey but more importantly he comes because some disciple had the faith to say when the call came, “Yes, Lord!”

Right here, right now, we are being asked to meet Jesus, to follow him, to go with him throughout this week. We all have schedules to keep, things to do but this is what this story tells us about our time: “The Lord has need of it.” You’ve heard the conversations before the cross: now it’s time for your own conversation. Jesus has come to Jerusalem: has he come to you? Can you hear him say about your own time, your own life, right here, right now, “The Lord has need of it”?

Amen

Conversations Before the Cross 3: Samaritan Woman

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Conversations Before the Cross 3: Samaritan Woman<

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Third Sunday in Lent/A • March 19, 2017

John 4:5-42

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
– Emily Dickinson

Those words were written in the nineteenth century by Emily Dickinson but I wonder if they might not stand for the thoughts of the Samaritan Woman as she trudged down the hot dirt path to Jacob’s Well and saw a strange man sitting there. One more man who would by his averted glance, his sitting aside, demonstrate his contempt for her and all she was. One more person who would demonstrate indeed that he believed she was nobody.

She’s walking down the path at the middle of the day, the sixth hour. It’s an odd time to fetch water; water is usually fetched at the beginning and end of the day by young women who gather happily at the well. This woman has set herself aside and comes at the middle of the day for reasons about which we can only wonder. She is a minority in a culture of disdain. She is nameless even here in the Gospel. She is a woman in a patriarchal society, she is a casualty of relationships.

Boundaries

All these things are like boundaries around her. The boundary of Samaria: as much a psychological boundary as a national one, one of those boundaries human beings create which seems to outsiders artificial and yet to those who observe it is crucial to identity. How many years have we heard about the troubles in Ireland and yet which of us could distinguish between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant? But the distinction is life and death there.

Years ago the television program Star Trek had a show in which the crew of the Enterprise visited a world of enormous conflict between two races who were half starkly white and half deeply black. Captain Kirk, trying to make peace, arranges a meeting between the leaders of the two factions. He says, “I don’t understand, you’re both half white, half black.” But both combatants look at him in amazement. “But Captain!”, one replies, “He’s white on the right and black on the left; I’m black on the right and white on the left!”. Jesus asks the woman for a drink and she’s amazed!

How Would You Respond to a Stranger?

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” There she is with all her boundaries and someone enters her space. What do you think she expected? What do you expect when you, as a woman, walk into a public place and there is a strange and threatening man? I asked this question in Bible Class and every woman there said the same thing: “I’d avoid him”. She expects to avoid him, she expects to endure his silent contempt, she expects to be nobody. But he asks for a drink. And before he’s done, she’s begging him for living water.

There’s nothing more basic than a drink of water. Jesus asks for a drink and the woman asks for living water, the woman who was nobody, the woman who was nobody. The church is looking back and this is what they are remembering: once I was nobody. “I once was lost and now am found”, we sing. I once was nobody and I had living water poured on me and I became someone. One by one Jesus crosses the boundaries that have isolated this woman. He asks for water as if she were a friend; he offers living water as if she were family. He makes the well again a place to share for her, though she had been alone. Jew, Samaritan—we’re both thirsty, he seems to say. She wants to talk theology: a way to put the boundaries back. “What about where we worship”, she asks; “worship in spirit wherever”, he replies—that’s what God really wants.

Getting Personal

Finally, something happens that saves this from being theoretical and that’s the moment when he asks about her husband; that’s the moment when it becomes concrete, there’s a moment when it becomes personal. There’s a story about a woman in an evangelical church who was very judgmental. One day she got the Deacons to invite a noted fire and brimstone preacher to visit. He said, “God is going to judge everyone! Everyone who has take the Lord’s name in vain, you’re going to have God’s judgment!” “Amen!”, the woman shouted. “Everyone who has looked with lust is going to have God’s judgment!” he shouted. “Amen! Preach it!”, she said, rocking in her pew with her enthusiasm. “Everyone who gambles and plays bingo is going to have God’s judgment!”, he yelled. And the woman stopped rocking and said to her neighbor, the one who had won $5 just last night with her at bingo, “Well, now he’s stopped preaching and gone to meddling.” It’s one thing to talk about theology; it’s another thing to talk about personal things, private things.

“Call your husband”, Jesus says. That’s personal. “I don’t have a husband”, the woman replies. Whatever this woman’s history, and the church has imagined all kinds of histories for her, we know this: she has been dumped. We know it because the text says she has had five husbands and under the law of the time, she couldn’t divorce anyone, women couldn’t divorce their husbands, so five men husbands have left her. What does Jesus say to her? We don’t know; the text doesn’t t tell us but it is clear that whatever he says, she comes away from the encounter with a tremendous sense of acceptance, a deep feeling of having been heard and cared for, because her response is to ask, “Can this be the Christ?” He knows her: from his knowledge, she takes the courage to know him

When the Lost Are Found

It is the experience Paul talks about:

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

God didn’t wait for us to get right, God came when we were sinners, when we were a mess. God already knew us.

That affirmation about God is at the core of what it means to be Christian. Christian life doesn’t start when we know God nor is it founded on what we say about God. Christian life begins when we know God already knows us and loves us
.

The church has all too often forgotten that we come from God’s knowledge of us to our knowledge of God. We have fenced the communion table, we have created boundaries which kept people like this woman out.

I want to say this one thing about the communion table: the invitation is for sinners. This table is a symbol that God is coming to us where we are, to give us the possibility of going to what God hopes for us. This table is a place to receive the food that can nurture us. And what is that food? Not just bread and grape juice. These are just symbols. They are symbols of God’s nurture, they are symbols of God’s call to move beyond the boundaries, beyond what we are, to what we can become.

Who Do You Meet?

Just like Jesus with the Samaritan Woman, every day we encounter people who don’t expect much from us. They don’t know you are a Christian; they don’t know you at all. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility of someone being nurtured. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility to share the well, to share the living water.

God has for each one of us, for me, for you, this plan: that you will be a blessing. And everything you need to be a blessing is right there if you will look around and see it. That looking around begins with the woman’s question. When she leaves Jesus, she says, “Can this be the Christ?” What do you think? Can it? Can you believe this is a Christ who can care for you despite all the boundaries?

What this finally means is: can you believe in hope? It’s frightening to believe in hope sometimes; it’s scary to believe in a hope beyond reason.

The movie Shakespeare in Love is the story of the young Will Shakespeare writing a new play he calls Romeo and Ethel, which you may know more familiarly as Romeo and Juliet. The movie has a romantic subplot and several conspiracies which all gather momentum near the end, as the play is put on stage. There are all kinds of obstacles and as they occur people keep rushing up to the stage manager and wringing their hands. To each in turn he replies, “It will all work out”. “How”, they ask. “I don’t know” he says. It will all work out—How?—I don’t know: over and over again.

That’s the hope Paul talks about; not a hope founded on reason, a hope founded on the faith that there is a God whose love is so powerful it can break the boundaries, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call out of nothing creation, there is a God whose love is so powerful it called Jesus Christ from death back to live, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call you to the same life. Share it, live it, offer it, as living water, as you share the well this week.
Amen

Conversations Before the Cross 2: Nicodemus

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Conversations Before the Cross 2: Nicodemus

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

Second Sunday in Lent, Year A • March 12, 2017

John 3:1-17

Nicodemus Speaks – A Monologue

I know you must be thinking, is it really him? Yes, it’s me: Nicodemus. My name isn’t in any of the lists of disciples, it isn’t on the board with those who understood right away, those he called that came. But I came to him too—only I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t understand him, not then and sometimes, not now. He was a strange man, Jesus was, strange in a way no words can describe. It wasn’t the way he looked, it was the way he looked into you, the way his eyes saw down deep into the soul. I’ve never forgotten his look, I’ve never doubted he saw through me, into me. Has anyone ever looked through you, really looked?

I was younger then. I worked hard and made a place for myself in the community. Some called me a ruler and many consulted me, I wasn’t rich like a Roman but we did ok; my family never wanted for anything. When they asked for help at the synagogue, I was glad to have my name right up there on the list of the “Angels” who built the place. When the school needed scrolls, I helped out, and I sat on the Board of Trustees for a while and later the City Council.

People respected me and it felt powerful. Yet, with all the good things, all the powerful things, I sensed there was something more. I was successful at business—but that only made money. The shekels flowed but my soul was still restless. Then I searched for something more in the respect of others—but that only meant people nodded to me in the market and I got a better seat in the synagogue.

One day I heard about this rabbi. Some said he was a revolutionary; some said he was a healer. Some said he was dangerous and others said he was just a disciple of John the Baptist who had set out on his own. There was a whisper too, a whisper never openly mentioned but there nonetheless that he was the Messiah.

Do you know about the Messiah? The Messiah is really a story for children. Someday, it is said, God will send someone like Moses and David who will—what? It’s never clear, never concrete. Someday a Messiah will come and lead a revolt against the Romans, some say, or perhaps the Messiah will come and everyone will be rich, or perhaps the Messiah will come and we’ll all go on another exodus out in the wilderness. Who knows? But this man—this Jesus—he didn’t seem to be raising an army like some did, he certainly wasn’t getting rich, and as for leading, he seemed more bent on getting to Jerusalem than out back in the desert. But the whispers came, again and again, and my soul was restless and somehow, in some way that made no sense, I wanted to meet him.

It was impossible, of course. The scandal would have been too much; I could have lost not only the respect of the others on the council but a hefty bit of business too. Still, I wanted to see him. I heard he was traveling with a group and I wondered what it would be like to be part of that group. Finally, I knew I couldn’t resist; I had to see him. One night, when it was dark, when no one would know, I snuck out.

Finally I found him. I don’t know what I expected: someone bigger, certainly, someone grander. The truth is, he was just a man, like you or me. Except: he had those eyes, those eyes that looked through you. His eyes held me while someone who didn’t seem to be a slave washed my feet. We’d never met, but he wasn’t interested in all the things I usually say, the things we all say, when we meet someone for the first time. Things that would let him know…well, who I am…how important I am. I tried being very polite, called him Rabbi although he didn’t look like he was educated. “We know you’re from God,” I said, and complimented him on his work: gotta be God to do healing.

But he wasn’t impressed. He said the strangest thing: that you had be born from above, from heaven, to see God. I stood there, thinking, this is it? this is the great Messiah? this is his best shot?—born from heaven? I tried to point it out: “How can anyone be born again,” I said, and I said you can’t go back, you can never go back. It’s that way with all of life: there’s no going back. One chance, that’s all you get, one, no more, no do-overs, no second chances. People say they forgive and forget but they really never forget they forgave. Born again from heaven indeed! It was ridiculous.

He sat there…quiet, quiet like a dark night when you sit alone, quiet like a morning before the day starts. He sat there and finally simply said, “Don’t be astonished.”
How could I not be astonished? How could anyone? He began to talk about the spirit, the breath of life, blowing this way and that, blowing where it will, as if God is as aimless as a toddler at play.

He didn’t just talk either, suddenly he began to move, almost like a dance and it seemed as if I was dancing. Only for a moment but there it was that moment, and in that moment I remembered when I was young and we used to dance and play in the square, when we were children and I caught the spirit of it. And then it was gone, gone like the light from a candle snuffed out, just the smell of smoke to remind you it ever was.

That was it. We argued a little more. He acted like he was the one who knew things and that I was—what? a child? I’m wasn’t a child then. I went home and when the door slave asked how my night went, I told him to shut up or get sold and the next day I snipped at my wife. I thought it had been a waste of time, all of it, the walk, the visit, the conversation.

But somehow I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I’d remember bits of it at odd times. One day a guy that’s rented some fields from me for years came to see me. Behind in his rent, of course, he always is, and he stood there with his hat in hand, cringing and suddenly, mumbling how he knew me, knew what I would say, what I would do, suddenly I started to laugh, I laughed so hard and I said, “Go in peace, friend, go in peace, you owe nothing this year: payment for the laugh.” I don’t know why I laughed, my accountant was stunned when I told him about the whole thing. But it felt good: new, that was it, it felt new, like I was new—just for a moment. There were other days like that, and, to be honest, a lot where I was the same old me. It seemed like there was something in me, something I couldn’t explain, something I could only express.

My wife said after a while that she didn’t know me anymore, it was like some stranger had been born in me and immediately I thought of his words, born from above. I began to lose money in the business; I couldn’t bear to throw anyone out of their home, and word got out, rents stopped coming in. They threw me off the council at the synagogue after a meeting where I suggested we leave the building open in case someone needed a place to sleep at night.

My kids are furious: they say I’ve spent their inheritance on the food pantry I helped start. I don’t know, I’m not sure what’s happening. I only know that my life has changed. It’s what he said, it’s a new birth. And every day I get up now and—I’m like a kid again. Like a child!— perhaps just childish some days.

Is he the Messiah? I don’t know—I only know I met him one night—I only know, it’s like I’ve been born again.

Conversations Before the Cross 2:

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

The black and white flickering picture on the screen highlights the dark points of farm implements, makes the wrinkles on faces stand out, tells us the movie is sometimes long ago. It’s the beginning of the Wizard of Oz, but it begins with the dust and dreary farm and the harsh black and white light. We’re in Kansas in the depression. Dark clouds forming a funnel, an image burned on everyone who’s ever lived in tornado country as disaster in motion, and suddenly the house is lifted, Dorothy with it, whirling through the air. When it lands and she opens the door suddenly the world is transformed: it’s now in color. Perhaps you know the story, how Dorothy sets off to find the wizard and a way home. Along the way she meets the Scarecrow, who wants a brain, the Tin Man, who desires a heart and the Cowardly Lion who begs for courage. Each is invited to come along and each has to ask the same question this conversation asks us: do you believe in the possibility of transformation? Can the world change color, can the leopard change his spots, can the whole world change—can you change?

Nicodemus Comes to Jesus

That’s the question Nicodemus is left pondering. He comes to Jesus at night, when good Jewish men are locked up in their gated homes. He is a substantial man, well off, presumably married with kids at home. He’s respected, a leader in his community and his synagogue. Yet something brings him out, some need, some emptiness. Long after Nicodemus, St. Augustine would write, “Lord, you have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” [Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1] Perhaps he has a restless heart. Perhaps he’s just curious.

He comes to Jesus with courtesy, calling him Rabbi, a term of respect, roughly comparable to “Reverend” or “Teacher”, and he says that he knows Jesus “came from God”. He’s been impressed by the signs Jesus has done. Presumably, he means the healing which was an important part of Jesus’ ministry. He doesn’t ask a question; he simply comes. What would you have asked? What do you want to know from Jesus?

Perhaps Jesus is used to such seekers; perhaps he simply sees the restless heart before him. He says, simply, directly: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”

What do you hear Jesus saying? We are so used to American cultural religion with its emphasis on what we do, on the gospel of achievement applied to salvation, that we may hear the familiar phrase, “You must be born again.” But that’s not what Jesus says. First, he doesn’t command anything. There’s no imperative here. It’s a simple, flat statement: “No one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”

I think Nicodemus must have heard the born again part, as we often do. Because he immediately focuses on the physical: no one can be born again he says. We apply the same thought, often, to ourselves. Nicodemus makes the obvious argument: grown up, grown old, we can’t go back ad start over. “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”

Can We Change?

Isn’t this really what most of us think? You are born, you grow up, you learn things, you experience things. You have some tough times; you have some good times. At times you prosper, at other times you don’t. Through it all you accumulate all those bits and pieces that make you, you. And among them are some scars, some injuries that left a mark. Maybe it was a marriage that didn’t work out; maybe it was a loss, maybe it was a friend who isn’t a friend any longer. Maybe you never quite lived out some dream you had earlier on. How do you go back and restart after all that?

I’ll tell you a secret only two people in the world know: I wasn’t that great a parent to my oldest child. I didn’t know how to be a parent, I certainly didn’t know how to parent a girl. I didn’t tell her how proud she made me nearly enough, and I wasn’t kind enough, and I didn’t know how when she raged to think, “Well, she’s 13, it’s just hormones,” and walk away, so I yelled back. I’d give a lot to go back and change that. But I can’t.

Maybe you have something like that, something you wish had been different but never will be. So maybe you agree with Nicodemus: you can’t go back. If you do, then it’s so important that you listen closely to what Jesus says. Because you and I and Nicodemus have all misunderstood Jesus if we thought he was talking about going back. He says,

’You must be born from above.’
The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” [Matthew 3:8]

Born Again or Born from Above?

Jesus isn’t talking about being born again at all. He’s talking about being born of the Spirit: being reborn. Jesus isn’t talking about undoing the past: he’s asking about the future. The wind blows where it will: it’s hard to predict, it’s hard to see. So is the future, and the question isn’t what about the past, but what are you going to do about the future? Can you live as someone born new today from God’s Spirit?

This starts with seeing. How many of God’s blessings do you see each day? How do you see other people. We are being asked today by a great political movement to see people of other faiths, Muslims particularly, as fearful. Do you see others, strangers, as children of God, the same God who loves you? Can you see this way? Can you start, not over, but fresh each day, freshly looking out for what God is doing. There was a moment when Western surgeons learned to treat cataracts which were often the cause of people being blind from birth. Annie Dillard talks about some of these people in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, concluding with this case.

…a twenty-two-year-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but ‘the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features. She repeatedly exclaimed, 
‘O God! How beautiful!’ [Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 30f]

Jesus invites Nicodemus to a new life, not to a do over of his old life; not to be born again but to be born from above, into a new spiritual life.

This, he says, is his purpose:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

The first step is to believe and begin the journey.

What happened to Nicodemus? We don’t know; the gospel never mentions him again. But sometimes it takes a while for the seeds of the spirit to sprout and blossom and bear fruit. There is a moment when the Tin Man, the Scare Crow and the Cowardly Lion think the gifts they seek, the new life they hoped to find, will never happen. What happens then? The wizard gives them each a gift to recognize the gifts they already have. The Scarecrow gets a degree, the Tin Man a heart and the Lion a medal for courage. What about you? What would it take to change your life? What would it take for you to believe that’s possible, that you can be born from above?

Perhaps it is to simply to see God’s love, the way that girl saw the world. Maybe one of your wounds is that somewhere along the way, someone suggested God was sitting like a judge, writing up everything you’d ever done wrong. Maybe your list is long. Then listen: God is here, not to judge, but to love; God is here, not to judge, but to save. God is here, inviting you to start fresh today. God is here: how beautiful.

Amen.

Conversations Before the Cross 1: Sermon

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Conversations Before the Cross #1:
Satan Speaks

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

First Sunday in Lent/A • March 5, 2017

Matthew 4:1-11

Click Below to Hear the Sermon Preached

The Best and Worst Day of Your Life

What was the best day of your life? Go there for a moment: remember it. Was there a party? Were you with a few people, family, a crowd or were you alone? Was there cake? There’s often cake on the best day of your life. What did it smell like? How did it taste? Did you know then it would be the best day of your life? I mention all this because Jesus’ baptism must have been about the best day of his life, even though there is no report about cake. I don’t think chocolate cake had been invented yet, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. But there was a crowd, his friend John and wow: a voice from heaven! Even when Jacquelyn and I were married, there was no voice from heaven, though she looked like an angel. “You are my beloved child, I’m pleased with you.” Some of us live our whole lives waiting to hear that; it must have been amazing.

All of this is a prelude, it turns out, because no one gets to live in the best day of their life forever and for Jesus, the next day is terrible. It’s like living in Albany, having it hit 70 degrees one day and then a couple days later barely making 16. Ouch: things sure can turn around. In the life of Jesus, the turnaround is to go from heaven opening to being driven into the wilderness and going hungry for 40 days. No cake; no food at all. Just the dangerous, daunting, desert wilderness where all you can hear is your empty stomach begging to be filled. This is the site of temptation: this is where temptation always occurs, when we are empty. How can I get what I need? Isn’t that the question that leads to temptation?

Temptation in the Wilderness

“Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” Matthew, Mark and Luke all include this story, apparently using two different versions they combine. Since no one else is present, we an only conclude they are relying on Jesus’ own account of his time in the wilderness. Geography is theology in the gospel. To go from the Jordan River into the wilderness is to go backward on the journey of God’s people. There, just as they did, Jesus is hungry, thirsty, and there he faces temptation. He faces it alone: the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove has flown off; the voice from heaven is silent. Jesus, as the song says, has to walk this lonesome valley by himself.

Alone, hungry, vulnerable, Jesus fasts for forty days and nights. Here is the first thing to learn about temptation: it often comes when we are most vulnerable. Today we rarely practice the spiritual discipline of fasting in Protestant churches but our fathers and mothers in the faith did. We took over Thanksgiving from the Pilgrims; seldom mentioned and almost never included in Thanksgiving is the fast that preceded it. Today, the Lenten discipline of giving something up has fallen into disfavor but giving something up, taking something off the table of possibility induces temptation. It walks us into the valley where Jesus walked.

Imagine him there in the desert. He’s lost but beyond worrying about direction. There is a moment when you become so focused on your hunger that nothing else matters. This is the moment he hears the voice of temptation; this is the moment, alone, hungry, vulnerable he is like us, on his own, facing temptation alone. Three temptations are mentioned but in a sense, they are the same temptation. All of them circle back to this simple principle: who’s in charge here?

If you are the Son of God

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” This is the first test. 
A few days before, he is acclaimed as Son of God, but what does that mean? The first temptation is to use who he is to sustain himself on his own, to feed himself. God fed the people of Israel with manna, bread, in the wilderness; why shouldn’t the Son of God feed himself by making bread appear? It is a test: if you are the Son of God—the question suggests that perhaps he is not the Son of God after all. Does he believe in what’s been said? Does he believe in his own call? And can that call, that power, be used for himself, to meet his own needs? The second temptation, to recklessly throw himself out into the air, depending on the angels to save him is like it. Both ask: do you believe who you are? Show it by using the gifts of God not for God’s purpose but for your own.

The Wizard of Earthsea is a long story about a young wizard who becomes so proud of his gifts that he uses them to show off. But in showing off, a dark side of him splits off and the rest of the tale is a story of how that darkness darkens the world until finally the wizard, Sparrowhawk, must confront the darkness. Along the way, he learns this most important lesson: that all gifts are given with a purpose and the purpose is to serve others and serve the larger unfolding, blossoming purpose of the creator. The challenge of the temptation to Jesus asks whether he will serve his own needs or stand in humility and serve the unfolding purpose of God. Why am I hungry, he must have wondered: the answer is so that in hunger, he can learn humility.

The final temptation in the wilderness sums all temptation up because it asks who Jesus is serving. All the kingdoms of the world are offered, a way of summing up worldly success; only serve me, the tempter says.

Jesus Facing Temptation

How does Jesus face these temptations? He faces them by living from God’s Word. Today we live in such a self-regarding culture that worship is often judged by the standards of entertainment. “I really enjoyed that,” someone will say, and there are endless advertisements for preachers to help us make worship more fun, more interesting, more light-hearted. But worship is really a way to come back to the Word of God. This is what finally answers temptation and it is the only thing that answers it. Three times Jesus is tempted; three times he quotes back God’s Word to the tempter.

We all walk through times of temptation. We all walk through wildernesses. We all face questions. Tracy Cochran writes,

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. “[Quoted byTracy Cochran, In the midst of Winter, an Invincible Spring, Parabola, Spring 2017, p. 26]

If we want to find the adventure, we have to walk through the temptation and answer the question of who we are serving.
This year, this season, this Lent, I hope to walk with you, listen to God’s Word, listen to the characters in the story, listen to their questions. Here is the first and most important and the tempter is asking it every single day: who are you serving? Ranier Rilke, a German poet said in a letter to a young friend,

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” [Rainier Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1903.]

This season, we are challenged to live the questions God’s Word asks, to confront them, to wonder with them, to let them live in us and change us.
Amen.

Conversations Before the Cross 1: Satan Speaks

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Conversations Before the Cross #1: Satan Speaks

A Monologue by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

First Sunday in Lent/A • March 5, 2016

I thought today would be a good day for me to come and explain. I get called Satan but what does that really mean? “Tempter”—it’s just a title. Now this business with Jesus: you have to look at the whole picture, at what I was trying to do as well as what happened, not just some made for the Bible story written down years later by someone who wasn’t even there. Maybe you’ve had problems yourself with the press. So I’m here to set the record straight.

I’d like to point out that no one has ever suggested I harmed Jesus in any way out in the wilderness. Read the story: there’s no violence, no coercion, no threats. The truth is, I saw him as a young man in need of a mentor. It gets lonely being God’s loyal opposition. You come to a point in your life and look around at what you’ve done: sure, it amounts to something but who is it for? Who’s going to take over someday? I was out for my walk in the world and all of a sudden it hit me: him! This intense young man. It isn’t that easy to find people like that. Most people go stumbling along, just trying to avoid the next pothole. It’s hard to get people to think of eternity as anything other than an insurance plan, to see it as the fabric of what is and isn’t, to be ready to argue about its shape and texture and color. He was that kind: consumed by eternity every moment, breathing it the way most people breathe air.

I didn’t want to hurt him, I just wanted to help him, to teach him something about the ways of the world. “Son of God” is a great title but you need a little street sense, too. You need someone to take you around, show you the ropes, teach you to play an angle. I wanted to offer my services as a guide.
I knew it might not be an easy sell. I’ve had a lot of bad press over the years and I have to admit there have been some…excesses.

No one’s perfect. I understand that the business with the fruit from the tree of life isn’t quite what was intended but I continue to believe I was technically correct. That is to say, when that woman quoted what had been said about the fruit, I knew immediately that it sounded too extreme and all I did was say so. And of course I was right, they didn’t die, at least not at once. I admit I could have been a little more careful. Hey, she should have been more careful, right? Caveat emptor: let the fruit buyers beware. You have to take care of number one first and if she didn’t, well is that really my fault?
But I understand that even though I think I have operated in a way that is approximately above board and in many cases more or less correct, some stories have painted me in an unfavorable light. The business with the fruit; that thing with Job, which again, was not my fault, just acting under orders. So I knew that I needed to win the confidence of this Jesus and I thought: I know what he needs and I’ll jus help him.

So I went out to the wilderness. By the way, if you have any thoughts of doing something like this, I highly recommend you go to Palm Springs or Florida instead of the Judaean wilderness. Better yet, if you feel that somehow your soul would benefit from sitting around in the hot sun, why not just go to a tanning salon? But of course there he was, out there in the wilderness, typical young man, do it the hard way. So I dropped in. And I thought, ok, start with the basics, let him show off a little. The truth is, frankly, that I hadn’t had any lunch, so when I noticed we were alone, I quietly suggested he make us some bread from the stones. Simple trick, Moses did more or less the same thing, I thought it would be a natural beginning. Is this so wrong? I’m sitting in the heat with a guy who is obviously hungry. Can’t you study or meditate or whatever just as well on a full stomach? That’s all I thought: put some pounds on the guy, he’s a little thin.

Well, of course, he comes back with a Bible verse, like a Rabbi or something. So then I thought, let’s have a little fun and whisked him off—at my own expense I’d like to point out—to Jerusalem. We both knew there’s no way the security angels are gonna let this guy hit the ground. I just thought, hey, a little free jumping, no bungee cord needed, step off and fly. Live a little, doesn’t that make sense?

All I wanted was a little compromise. I wanted to say, you can’t really go the whole way with the big guy, no one does, not really, so why not compromise a little. I mean, a little religion is good, especially on your tax return but you don’t have to take it so seriously, do you? You don’t have to let it interfere with your life. But he wouldn’t, wouldn’t have it.

He missed a great opportunity: wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t play, wouldn’t…compromise.“Worship the Lord and serve him only.”—that’s it, all he said. Is that any way to live?

What could I do? What could I say? He was a hard case. I was getting hungrier by then. First things first, you have to take care of your own needs before anything else…and, well, I did notice that storm cloud his father uses to mark entrances with up over the next mountain and I knew he wouldn’t understand, he is so …definite. So I left. I thought…maybe another time. But I’m still looking…looking for people who want to compromise.