Category Archives: Year B

Give Thanks for the Appetizers

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Thanksgiving Sunday • November 24, 2024

Joel 2:21-27, Matthew 6:25-33 

It was the year nothing went right. May was in college in Georgia; she decided to go to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. So Jacquelyn and I were on our own. Then, a friend of ours named Tara was going through a difficult time, so we invited her to come visit. I volunteered to cook, so the women could visit. Now Tara and Jacquelyn both love Victorian home and our town was full of them, so on Thanksgiving Day itself I set about cooking the meal I’d planned while they took off for a walk around our town. 

The real challenge of a dinner like this is getting everything to come out on time. I’d researched the traditional dishes and put a turkey breast in to brine the night before. I patted it dry, rubbed it with oil and spices and put it in to roast, setting the timer according to the directions in Betty Crocker. I chopped and mixed and spiced the various side dishes and got them going. I had everything timed and thought I was doing fine. I was doing the “blast turkey with high heat then turn down” method, so after a half hour, I intended to turn the oven down; instead I turned it off; mistake number one. I didn’t realize what I’d done and thought we were on course. The kitchen mess was mounting when the women returned, talking about how hungry they were and that the house smelled great. They started to pick up bits to eat in the kitchen, I shooed them out, sternly ordering just like my grandmother used to do, “No snacking! You’ll spoil your dinner!” I checked the turkey; not done. They complained about being hungry; I snarled back, “No snacking!”  We waited; I checked the turkey again and it clearly wasn’t cooking. I finally figured out what had happened—along with the fact that we were a solid hour or more from being having dinner ready. Meanwhile, the rolls had burned beyond redemption. Mistake number two. 

It’s a scary thing to tell two hungry women dinner is delayed. I frantically looked around, saw a baguette, sliced it up, spread it with some garlic and tomato sauce and bits of onion, put it on a plate and took it to the women, announcing as if I had planned it all along, “This is the appetizers.” I was so frustrated, angry at myself for my mistakes, feeling like nothing was going right when I heard from the other room the song the choir sang last week: “Give Thanks with a grateful heart.” Except the words were different; instead of,  “Give thanks with a grateful heart”, they were singing, “Give thanks for the appetizers.” We all laughed. The turkey eventually finished. I dropped it on the floor taking it out of the oven, it didn’t matter; we were still laughing about the song. We still do. 

Our Thanksgiving celebration is like the Susquehanna, a river with many sources. Some are harvest festivals, which both the English and the Native Americans celebrated. Some of the streams are legends: no one called the people at Plymouth ‘Pilgrims” for almost 200 years. So there was never a “Pilgrim Thanksgiving”. And we have no record they ate turkey at all on that day; most of the meat was venison, much of the meal was fish and seafood. There is the long history of Thanksgiving celebration in the Biblical record, the New Testament commands to give thanks and most of all the deepest current, which is the power of giving thanks to transform us.

Where shall we dive in? Let’s start with the message we read earlier from the prophet Joel. We don’t know much about him or his time. One thing that’s clear: he preached his Word in the midst and aftermath of a time of fear and desperation. Hordes of locusts had eaten crops and people were afraid. It’s fear Joel addresses here, fear that robs hope, fear that paralyzes. To this fear he says, 

Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!

Do not fear, you animals of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit, the fig tree and vine give their full yield.

O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the LORD your God; for God has given the early rain for your vindication, God has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain, as before. [Joel 2:21-23]

He begins with the ground of faith, the history of God’s blessing, and follows the rhythm of creation from land to animals to the trees that bear fruit and the vines that give wine. Only then does he come to us: the children of Zion. God’s first and foremost blessing is creation itself; God’s creation is the ground of hope. “Do not fear…be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things!” The answer to fear isn’t redoubled effort, it isn’t what we do at all; it is a Thanksgiving that remembers and appreciates what God has done and invites us to hope in what God will do. The final movement of this song is faith: “You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other.” [Joel 2:27]

Jesus is also addressing fear in the passage we read earlier because our fears make us worry. 

31Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
[Matthew 6:31-33]

Matthew has wrapped this saying into a summary we call the Sermon on the Mount. We don’t know the exact setting but it’s not hard to guess. Jesus is on the road with his disciples. There must have been times they wondered where the next meal would come from, how they would raise the funds they needed for the ministry, for their own needs. Just like Joel, Jesus calls them to remember God’s creative blessing. He asks them to look around at the lilies, at the birds;
he invites them to put God at the center and give thanks. Thanksgiving is the real cure for fear. Thanksgiving is the doorway to hope.

We’re living in a fearful moment. The locusts of our fear of terrorism and different people are trying to eat up our hope. It’s a story that sells ads, so the media is urging them on; it’s a story that gets attention, so some people who want to lead are telling us the solution is to get rid of the locusts. Last week, I quoted Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, and it’s line, 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

It is especially important that we remember and take to heart the lessons we heard today. Our hope is there; our worry can only be satisfied by the peace of remembering God’s providence and power.

In this moment, in this week, it’s good to remember the Thanksgiving story. It is so overlain with legend and lore that it’s hard to remember the real details. This is the Thanksgiving story. A group of refugees who wanted to worship in the Reformed way, like us, fled persecution in their native land. They went to Holland, where they formed a little cultural enclave. But they don’t really fit in; their religion is different, stricter, their values are different also. So they returned to England and contracted to found a colony in Virginia. Half of the people going weren’t part of the original religious group; they were called ‘strangers’. After a terrible yoyage, they go off course and end up in Cape Cod in November. A measles epidemic had decimated the native population; these new settlers survive by stealing corn from caches those vanished natives left behind. They settle in a protected bay and name it after their departure city: Plymouth. They have a hard time fitting in but some of the native people, the Wampanoag, in the area help them out, teach them how to get along, and they adjust, they adapt. Almost half of the original 102 settlers die the first winter. But eventually they learn to grow corn and other things, they learn to eat the local seafood, clams, lobster and so on. They learn to hunt. 

A year or so later, things are going well. They decide to take a few days off and plan a feast. They invite their neighbors who take one look at the food and decide to supplement it with local meats. Later, the whole experience is romanticized and becomes a kind of living legend. The refugees are now called the Pilgrims. They go on to found churches and communities; they create a culture of congregational democracy that trains people to live in hope, believing God is present and they have a purpose. We are meant to be that people. We are their children. Let us like them, like faithful people in every time, from Joel to Jesus to Plymouth to York, give thanks, the thanks that remembers the Lord our God is in our midst.

Sometimes things succeed; sometimes they fail. The Thanksgiving dinner where nothing went right? It’s remembered by all of us as a wonderful, special one. Somehow, the song—give thanks for the appetizers—the act of giving thanks even when hungry, the choice to see the gift and goodness rather than focus on the failure and fear it transformed the moment. It can transform any moment; it can transform us. Give thanks—this week, always. Give thanks for the appetizers; give thanks to the Lord above. Give thanks and see if it doesn’t grow into a harvest of grace.

Amen.

All Fall Down

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

26th Sunday After Pentecost/B • November 17,2024

Daniel 12:1-3, Mark 13:1-8

Ring around the Rosie, Pocket full of Posies

Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down

Did you sing this when you were a kid? It’s an old, old folk song. It makes me think of happy children dancing in a circle and giggling when they fall down. Some historians today believe it may have originated during the dark tide of the bubonic plague. The “rosie” are the marks of the  plague, the ashes are the thousands of corpses burned. Some estimates are that about half the people in Europe, 50 million, died in a period of seven years. Whole villages were depopulated and it took Europe over a hundred years to begin to recover. I know this is a dark way to start a sermon, but today our gospel reading asks us to look at what happens when things fall down.

The poet William Butler Yeats asked this question in a piece called “Second Coming”. The opening stanza reads, 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

What happens when things fall apart? Why does God let things fall apart?

Surely the place to begin is with our central prayer, which begins, “Our Father”. Hosea compares God’s love to a mother’s love. Now every parent knows there is a fundamental dilemma in raising a child: there is what’s right, what protects the child, yet there’s a need to give that child the freedom to grow and make mistakes and learn from them. I’ve seen this in my own parenting. When my older kids were young, we lived in a little village in northern Michigan. The kids could go off on their own and mostly did. I didn’t worry too much. Then there was the day I got a call: Jason is lying down in the middle of Route 22. Now our village had lots of tourists in the summer, so we all looked forward to the time in the fall when they left and things were quiet. My son and two of his friends decided to celebrate this moment by lying down in the middle of the main street through town. It was just one of those dumb boy things. Of course, there was a long discussion about why we never, ever lay down in the street, a discussion that began with, “What were you thinking? You could have been killed!”. As I recall, his response was essentially, “Well, we didn’t think of that.” As far as I know, he never did again. Should I have kept him home?

Throughout the story of God’s people, there are dumb, lying in the street moments. When Israel decides it wants a king, for example, we hear in 1 Samuel 8 about all the terrible things a king will do. Nevertheless, Israel insists on a king and God, sighing I imagine, gives them one. Much of the rest of the Hebrew scripture is devoted to the terrible things that result. By Jesus’ time, Palestine is a Roman protectorate, with a puppet king. Jerusalem is a big city up on its mountain. Over the previous century, the temple has been rebuilt into a huge structure. The rebuilding began in 20 BC and took about 40 years; it was still going on when Jesus and his disciples were there. Now these are guys from the rural north and I can imagine their reaction to seeing this temple. Mark says, “As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” [Mark 13:1} It makes me think of the first time my mom took me to New York City and I saw the Empire State Building. Maybe you’ve had the same experience: going to the big city, seeing the big buildings.

The temple was meant to be a lighthouse of God’s love and justice, but it had become instead a headquarters for the rich to oppress the poor. We see that weaving through the sayings of Jesus over and over again. So when the disciples are marveling at the towers and the stones, Jesus replies that it’s all going to fall down. In reply to their comment, he says, “13:2 Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” [Mark 13:2] He goes on to say there are going to be terrible wars and conflicts. Everything is going to fall apart. Then he goes on to say something else: all of this destruction is not the end—it’s birth pangs, it’s the beginning of something new.  

What does Jesus finally say we should do when these things happen, when things fall apart? Keep awake. Stay alert. That message comes through parables, that message is explicit in this story. The verses we read this morning are part of a larger section which includes predictions of persecutions and concludes with a parable about the need for watchfulness. The final word: “Keep awake” [Mark 13:37b]

What this means is first, staying alert, watching for new ways to share God’s Word, looking for ways to invite others into Christ’s church. . I don’t know what your experience here was when the COVID 19 Pandemic forced closing of churches. I know that where I was, we didn’t handle it well. We hadn’t kept up with the technology to share our services with over the internet, we didn’t have active social media accounts, we didn’t have the capability to stream anything. The technology was there; others used it for various purposes, but we were a very traditional church. It reminds me of an incident in a Massachusetts church in the late 1700s. Then, the new technology was Franklin stoves: heat right there during worship. I remember reading the minutes of Annual Meetings at a church in Chelmsford, MA, where year after year this was brought up, year after year voted down until finally it passed, at which point a Deacon who had opposed it said that he was sure God would find a warm place in hell for people who needed heat in church.

In Albany, we were much the same about steaming and online ministry for a long time. We missed the boat. We weren’t alert to the possibilities; I think we often still aren’t. We miss the chance to invite others, share with others. Some of you know that I post my sermons online weekly. What you may not know is that every week on average those sermons are viewed about 30 times. That’s close to double the people who hear them here in this lovely place. What would it mean if we made a larger commitment to a digital ministry, to reaching out? We don’t know.

Keeping awake means keeping hope alive. Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Invention of Wings, tells two parallel stories. One is a biography of the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Abigail. Raised in the early 19th century in the slave supported culture of Charleston, South Carolina, they became leading advocates of the abolition of slavery and later of full equality for women. The other story is fictional but just as important; it’s the story of Handful, an enslaved girl given to Sarah Grimké at an early age, who grows up with a mother determined to seek freedom. For more than 20 years, she and her mother pursue various strategies until finally she escapes north, to Pensylvania and freedom. Along the way, she and her mother are beaten, worked, defiled but they never give up hope. We honor our history here in many ways yet how often do we talk about our hope? Shouldn’t we be as focused on where we are going as where we’ve been? No one would walk a path facing backwards; we know enough not to do that. But do we know enough to turn around and look forward to where God wants us to go as a church?

Keeping awake means keeping connection. We often miss how encouraging our presence here is to each other. I’ve been here just about six months; already I can look around and see when someone is missing. I’m sure you can do it much better. Over the years, I’ve heard more excuses for why someone doesn’t go to church than I can count. They mostly come down to, “I didn’t want to go.” We seldom think: maybe I should go because someone else needs me there. One of the best things about this church is the way we honor connections. I never visit someone in the hospital or a nursing home that they don’t have cards sent from other members. I never visit without hearing how important those cards and our prayers are to them. I know in my own experience how much it lightened me when I was sick and received those cards.

 Keeping alert, keeping focused on the future, keeping connection, these are all ways of keeping awake. They are the way Jesus tells us to respond when things fall apart. He says these are birth pangs. Now, I think it’s a bit dicey for a man to talk about birthing. There are some things I’m totally clueless about: why someone gets up one day and decides to change her hair color, how to put on eyeliner, how to clean so it satisfies Jacquelyn. Birthing is one of those things. So this week, I’ve been asking friends who’ve had babies about their experience. I got some truly answers, but the best of all was close to home. When I asked Jacquelyn, she told me about birthing May, how there was a young woman in the next room screaming, how it was busy in the ward. I asked her if it hurt and she said, well, yes of course but you don’t remember the hurt, you remember the delight.

I think that says what Jesus hopes. Yes, things do fall apart; yes, things are going to fall apart. Don’t get attached to what looks impressive and big in this world. It’s going to fall because only God endure forever. Yet when things do fall apart, remember: it’s not the end, it’s birth pangs. Keep awake—alert, connected, focused on the future—and know that beyond what’s ending, beyond the birth pangs, there is the delight of God’s presence waiting.

Amen.

There Is Love

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

World Communion Sunday • 20th Sunday After Pentecost • October 6, 2024

Genesis 2:18-24 • Mark 10:2-16

I’d just moved to Boston to go to seminary, and I was excited and nervous. This was long before Starbucks and coffee house culture; we just had diners. So I went in one and asked for a coffee. The man said, “You want dat regulah?” Not wanting to look like I didn’t know what I was doing, I said, “Sure.” He gave me a cup of coffee with cream in it. I always drink my coffee black; so I said, “Oh I didn’t want cream,” and asked him to replace it with a black coffee. He said, “You asked foh regulah.” What I learned is that while black coffee is how it comes regularly in Michigan, in Boston, “regular coffee” is coffee with cream in it. Since then, I’ve had to deal with lots of similar misunderstandings. In Spain once, I thought I ordered olives—“olivdes”—but ended up with snails. England is especially hard because they use the same words for different things. We all know what a biscuit is, right? Except that in England it’s a cookie. Never order biscuits and gravy in England. I mention these differences because this morning in our gospel reading you heard the word ‘divorce’. Some of us are divorced; others have walked with friends or family through divorces. So when you heard that word, you probably thought you knew what it meant. But just like biscuits, just like olivdes, just like regular coffee, we need to be careful and not apply our own ideas to what Jesus is saying. Instead, let’s look at what this means for his time and his way so that we can hear what he’s really saying.

Let’s begin by remembering where we are in Mark’s story of Jesus. At his baptism, he heard a voice from heaven say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Just before this, he’s taken two disciples up a mountain and again, a heavenly voice has said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Twice already he has told his disciples that he’s going to be handed over to the authorities, killed, and will rise again after three days. They are now on the way to Jerusalem, where this will be fulfilled. Along the way, there are a series of confrontations where he’s asked to debate tricky questions of religious law. That’s what’s happening here. This is a political question: the most famous divorce there was when King Herod divorced his wife to marry his sister-in-law. It was preaching against this that got John the Baptist executed.

When we think of marriage and divorce, we think of two people dating, falling in love, having a ceremony that celebrates their unique commitment to a relationship of intimacy with each other. We know this hope doesn’t always blossom. Sometimes there are choices, sometimes there is abuse, sometimes it becomes clear to one or both that this relationship cannot continue. So we provide for either person to ask for a divorce, and we have a whole legal framework that tries to equitably divide up property and responsibilities for children. But Jewish custom was different in Jesus time. Marriage was less about intimacy than about a contract, called a ketubah. The ketubah specified a bride price and provided a property settlement. After the ketubah was signed, there was often a period of being engaged, up to seven years. Then a formal marriage ceremony would be held. Women could not ask for a divorce; only a man could initiate a divorce by filing what is called a get. Women and children were often abandoned after a divorce. There was no requirement for child support or property division. This is what’s being discussed here.

The Pharisees in the passage set out the law of Moses regarding divorce; it’s what I’ve just described. A man files a get, the divorce is finalized. All is according to the law of Moses. Perhaps Moses realized not all marriages work and provided an out. But that bit of grace has become a law. Jesus goes to the core of the matter. He wants to go behind Moses’ law and back to the original intention of God. He says that Moses wrote this law because of the hardness of hearts of people and reminds them of God’s hope at creation. 

We miss some of the significance of the story of creation in Genesis because of translation issues. What happens there is that God takes some mud from a creek, forms a human shaped doll, just as Jewish children did. These dolls were called adamanh; we translate this as a name, Adam, and use gendered language to make Adam male. But this isn’t a male, isn’t Adam, it’s an adamah.Then God breathes life into the adamah. In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for Spirit and breath is the same. So the adamah becomes a living being by God sharing spirit/breath. 

God says it isn’t good for the adamah to be alone and tries out all kinds of creatures as partners, but it’s only when God takes some of the substance of the adamah and makes another being that the adamah recognizes a true partner. The word is ‘aged’, which means helper but has the sense of equal. Sometimes God is described as our aged, our helper. It’s only when the two are together that they are described as man and woman, actually as husband and wife. The story concludes, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” This part always make middle school confirmation classes giggle, but it’s really a sign of intimacy.

Sometimes this happens and it’s amazing and wonderful. We also know sometimes it doesn’t. This is true of much of life. God hopes we will live in covenants that express justice and loving kindness, that we will provide for everyone to live out the fulfillment of their gifts as children of God. We know that doesn’t happen as well. When we think of marriages breaking down, we often think of adultery, but it’s just as common for marriages to break down because the couple are not helpers to each other, not partners. So we provide in our common life, legal ways to say, “Look, I need out of this marriage. I need a divorce.” We provide a legal process for this. But what about the spiritual process?

Jesus has an answer for that as well. First, he refuses to endorse the abandonment of the vulnerable, of wives and children. Second, he picks up a child. We’ve seen him lift a child before; here he touches them, often a sign of healing. He says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” What he seems to be signaling is that when adults have wandered off God’s path, the solution is to go back to being a child. He speaks in other places about being born from above; he invites us to become a new person. This is the key to moving beyond divorce: to reflect and repent, to see that if you have not lived up to God’s intention, you need to change and start again, like a child. The solution isn’t law: the solution is grace.. 

This text has been turned into law in a way that often hurts people. Jesus heals; Jesus hopes. He lifts up God’s hope that we will live in equal, intimate partnerships, in just covenants, and when we don’t, he summons us to repent and become like children. This is a hope meant for all people. Today is the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that finally recognized the right of LBGTQ people to publicly celebrate marriages partnerships. We should be proud the United Church of Christ has been and continues to be a leader in accepting and affirming this hope for all people. 

I come to this text as a person who has been divorced and remarried. I know what it means to take a hard look at yourself, to realize you need to change. There is a song that says, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.” Sometimes what we should sing is, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of change, standing in the need of forgiveness, standing in the need of grace.

Jesus preaches this; Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love among us. And God’s hope is that just as we received the spirit at our creation, we will share it. We will heal and hope and in those partnerships, in our communities, there will be love.

In a few moments, we’re going to share together communion, the great memorial of grace. When we say, “This is his body, broken for you,” it reminds us that we are also broken. When we say, “This cup is the new covenant in his blood,” it reminds us that Jesus offers not law, but love. Peter, Paul and Mary sing a song about marriage and love. One of the verses says,

Oh the marriage of you here has caused him to remain
For whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name
There is love. there is love.

Amen. 

Action This Day

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

18th Sunday After Pentecost/B • September 22, 2024

Mark 9:30-37

Early in World War II, when the British army had been flung off the continent of Europe, defeated in the Far East and thrown back in the Mediterranean, it seemed to many that the best the nation could do against fascist powers in Germany and Italy and Japan was to retreat to its island fortress and lick its wounds, hoping for a negotiated peace. But Winston Churchill thundered publicly that they would never surrender. When he was given memos from his military staff about their inability to make progress, he had a habit of writing on the memos in his own bold handwriting, “Action this day!” Churchill knew that defeat was not simply surrender, it is also the conviction that nothing can be done. He never stopped insisting that things be done and if not all of them worked, so be it. Action this day!—nevertheless. Action this day—every day. Today’s reading from Mark is an action plan for disciples.

To see the story we read in Mark in context, we need to go back a bit. Once again the lectionary has skipped an important event. This time, it’s the transfiguration. Because Transfiguration has its own appointed Sunday, the lectionary assumes you already heard this story this year, sometimes last winter, just before Lent. To refresh, Jesus takes two disciples up a mountain with him and while they are there, they see Moses and Elijah appear and Jesus transfigured. What does ‘transfigure’ mean? Does it happen to you? It means here that he glows, and his clothing is suddenly bright white. Now this is a time before washing machines or bleach, so white clothes are startling. Jewish scripture is divided into three sections, Torah, Prophets, Writings; Elijah represents the prophets, Moses represents Torah. On the mountain, we read that “…a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ [Mark 9:7] Just as the signs of healing and exorcism point to Jesus as the Son of God, just as the blessing at his baptism did, once again, the disciples are being taught about the identity of Jesus. Peter’s answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say I am?”, that he is the Christ is being confirmed.

Now, I love a good story and I live with someone who loves them even more. I imagine if this happened today, there would be selfies and tweets and postings on Facebook. But when they come down from the mountain, Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone and amazingly they don’t. Instead, they encounter a crowd and get distracted. There’s a boy who is possessed; I’m guessing he is nine. Nine-year-old boys sometimes seem possessed; if you raised one, you know exactly what I mean. In any case, the surprising fact about this one is that the disciples have tried and failed to heal him. But Jesus takes him by the hand, heals him, and when the disciples ask later what they did wrong, simply says that the boy needed prayer.

That brings us up to the section we read today. Along the way, as they go through Galilee, Jesus again predicts his coming passion.

…he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.’ [Mark 9:31]

But just like the first time, the disciples don’t understand. It’s hard to know whether they don’t get it or they just don’t want to believe it. Mark says they were afraid to ask him. It’s uncomfortable; we don’t like talking about it either. Think how many more people show up for Easter than Good Friday services. 

But at the end of the day, it’s Jesus asking the questions. “What were you discussing?” It was customary for disciples to walk behind the master, so perhaps he’d heard them arguing and like a parent ignoring squalling kids, he ignored it; maybe he just didn’t know. They tell him they were arguing about which one of them was the Number One Disciple—who was the greatest. This is so wild, it’s funny. Jesus tells them he’s going to be killed; they argue about their rank. He’s pointing, for the second time, to the end; they are assuming things are going to go on and get better. Jesus is going to be King!—they want to be his ministers, his subordinates, and they want to figure out right now who is first, who is third, who is eleventh. 

So Jesus does what he often does: he tells them the truth, and then he illustrates it. 

He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Then he took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms he said to them. “”Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” [Mark 9:35ff]

Jesus is saying this in a social world that is very different from ours That culture had no middle class; it had rich, powerful people, slaves and people who were only a little better than slaves called peasants. Within the upper class, honor was very important and established by associating with other rich people, doing favors, and insulting those who were lower on the social status level. To say be a servant is to go against all of this: it overthrows every idea of the way to live they know. 

Then Jesus caps it by welcoming a child. Now as soon as I said ‘child’ I know you were thinking of little kids. Maybe you remember your own kids, maybe you’re thinking of grandkids. But child has a much bigger meaning in Jesus’ time. The word we translate ‘child’ is also used of slaves. And the people we call children are not beloved cute kids, they are seen as mostly worthless until they are old enough to work. Children aren’t respected, children are the least on the social scale. At another place where a child gets to Jesus, in fact, the disciples intervene because it’s not right for a child to be next to their leader. But Jesus embraces the child there as well as here.

In these two verses you have a capsule of the history of Christian churches. On the one hand, we are endlessly concerned about rank and priority. Some churches have different clergy ranks. I used to have a friend I teased because while my title is “Reverend”, his was “Most Reverend.” I asked him if there was an intermediate step of “More Reverend” I could get. We like hierarchies; we like to know our place among them. That’s what the disciples are doing. It’s Jesus, only Jesus, who is standing there saying, “Whoever wants to be first should be last.” It’s Jesus, only Jesus, who is saying no to all our hierarchies. 

Sometimes we listen to him. In the 1700s as England industrialized, some Christians were concerned about the children working in the new factories. They set up Sunday Schools where kids were taught reading and writing and also religion. The first one in England started in 1751. Richard Raikes was rich man who became a leader in the movement, and he helped bring it to America where it flourished. By 1785, 250,000 English children were attending Sunday Schools. As public schools took over the task of teaching basic skills, Sunday Schools became more focused on their religious mission. So sometimes we do what Jesus says; sometimes we do what we think best. How do we choose between the two? How do we stay on the way following Jesus? 

We stay on the way with Jesus when we listen to him. So I read this story of disciples who are scared by what Jesus has said; I read this story of disciples who don’t understand. And I know that I am one of them: I don’t understand either. I don’t understand suffering; I don’t understand a savior who goes to a cross. It’s too much; it makes no earthly sense. Of course, that is the point: it doesn’t make earthly sense. As Paul says, the wisdom of this world has been found wanting. He means me, he means my wisdom. Instead, I can only have faith in the wisdom of God. In that faith, when I look at this story, I see that Jesus has given us an action plan. He is going to Jerusalem to be handed over and killed—what should I do? What should we do? Simple: welcome children. 

That’s it: that’s his plan for us. That’s how we can know we are connecting to him because when we welcome children, we welcome him. When we welcome children, we are following him. Welcoming a child is welcoming the least among us. Young people, certainly, but also all those others who are seen as small. Finally, as we’ll see next week, children is what he calls us. And that is what we are: God’s beloved children. You are that child he is embracing. I am. All he asks is that we act like it: action this day! Action to embrace the least; action to make the love of God present in a concrete way. Action this day: action every day.

Amen.

Fear and Trembling

by

Listen to the Sermon Preached Here

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

16th Sunday After Pentecost • September 8, 2024

Isaiah 35:4-7a, Mark 7:24-37

Jesus is on vacation. Mark says he went up to Tyre, a big coastal town north of Israel, outside its borders. He enters a house and wants some privacy: “…[he] didn’t want anyone to know he was there.” [Mark 7:24b] You know how this works. You go to the shore, maybe Ocean City or Wildwood, rent an Airbnb, just want to be anonymous, kick back, rest up. After all, just before this he’s had a tough time. He got rejected in his hometown and couldn’t do anything there. His mentor and friend, John the Baptist, has been executed. He keeps having arguments with better educated clergy. Maybe his disciples have gotten annoying, the way family sometimes can. So off he goes.

A Woman Comes to Jesus

But when he gets there, it turns out he’s too well known to hide out. Some Canaanite woman, a Gentile, throws herself at his feet when he’s out looking for breakfast. Honestly, I’ve never had a woman throw herself at my feet, so I’m not sure quite what that’s like, but I have certainly been accosted when I’m getting away. It’s a little professional secret that clergy mostly learn early on never, ever, to admit they are clergy when traveling. Years ago when I was young and on a long flight and a woman next to me asked what I did. I proudly said I’m a minister. She spent the rest of the flight telling me why she didn’t go to church and how she didn’t believe in God. I really just wanted to nap, not talk theology. So I’m guessing that’s how Jesus felt. He’s off duty; maybe healing people is exhausting. He’s on a mission, after all, to reclaim Israel for God, to bring all Jews back to a purer, more passionate faith but these people aren’t his problem, they’re Gentiles.

Still, there’s this woman at his feet; no way around her. She’s begging for his attention, his compassion. Her daughter is possessed; she’s desperate. All parents know this feeling, that special, relentless, desperation when your child is sick and no one seems able to help. Jesus might be on vacation, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter. She looks ridiculous, lying there in the street, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter. He’s a man; she’s a woman, he’s a Jew, she’s a Gentile, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter. She lives in a culture that tells women to be quiet in public, never to talk to a strange man, but she doesn’t care, she only cares about helping her daughter.

Dogs!

I think Jesus must have tried to get around her but couldn’t, so he says something conventional, tries to get out of the situation. “He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’” [Mark 7:27] Now we think of dogs as fun and cute, and we love them. But dogs in this time and place are dirty, mangy, they live outside in villages, they eat garbage and smell like it. ‘Dog’ is an insult; it’s like one of the many ethnic slurs we all know, no need for me to quote them.‘Dogs’ is what Jews call Gentiles and they typically ignore them. Jesus grew up as a Jew; Jesus is steeped in the culture, he’s human and like all humans, his culture has captured him. So he replies like a Jewish man to this Gentile woman. I’m sure he thought that would be the end of it. A little brusque language, a little insult, done, she’ll go away and leave him alone.

But she doesn’t; she only cares about her daughter, she doesn’t care about the insult. She turns it around: “Even the little dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs,” she says. There’s a little play on words there: she’s turned his insult from an image of the mangy alley dogs to a puppy playing in the home. It’s a good argument and it works. “For saying that, you may go,” he says, and assures her that her daughter is healed. She gets up , goes home and wow! Her daughter is fine, her daughter is back.

This isn’t a very nice picture of Jesus, is it? It isn’t gentle Jesus meek and mild; it isn’t the good shepherd, carrying the lost sheep home on his shoulder. It isn’t the love your neighbor guy we all expect. There are endless articles and commentary and sermons explains this away, trying to give us back the nice Jesus we think we know. Even the Gospel of Matthew, about 20 years after Mark, cleans the story up and makes it about her faith, not the argument. But I want the real Jesus, not the pretty picture someone else painted; I want to know the real Jesus, so I want to know what’s going on here. And what seems to be going on is that Jesus changed his mind. 

Is Jesus Changing?

“Wait, Jesus changed his mind? Isn’t he perfect?” I imagine someone wondering this. We believe Jesus is fully human and isn’t being fully human sometimes being wrong? Jesus thought of his mission as being for the Jews, for God’s people. I think Mark is giving us a peek into the moment when Jesus changes his mind and realizes God’s plan is bigger, more wonderful, than he had realized. We’re getting a look at a moment when Jesus realizes everyone is welcome at his table, everyone is included, everyone is a child of God. Everyone includes a Gentile woman with a sick daughter. She isn’t a dog, she isn’t just a woman, she isn’t just a Gentile, she’s a child of God, just like him, and God loves her, just like him. 

It isn’t easy to admit you’re wrong and change. May and I like to argue, Jacquelyn likes everything peaceful. So when we became a family, Jacquelyn introduced a rule that we call the dance. It works like this: if you argue a point, and you are proven wrong, you have to turn around to the left three times and say, “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong”, and then to the right three times and say, “You were right, you were right, you were right.” By the end everyone is laughing; peace is restored. We remember that how much we love each other is more important than being right. 

What I love about Jesus in this passage is that he was wrong and could change. Mark makes it clear; it’s what the woman says that changes his mind. The passage asks us too: can we change? Can we listen to our history and our values and change our minds, change our hearts? I think this is something all too rare today. We all moan about the dark divisiveness of our politics, but isn’t it precisely because we don’t listen that we are divided? I wish we could make our politicians abide by the dance rule. I’d love to see some of those guys, instead of defending the indefensible, simply turn and turn and turn and say I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong. 

Acting on the New Reality

The rest of this passage makes it clear Jesus is acting on this new understanding. It says he goes by way of Sidon to the Deacpolis. This makes no sense; it’s like saying I went from Harrisburg to York by way of Philadelphia. But geography is theology in the Bible. What Mark seems to want us to know is that Jesus works among Gentiles as well as Jews. The Decapolis is a largely Jewish area. When Jesus arrives, we’re told that some friends brought a man who was deaf and stammered for healing. He takes the man aside and heals him in an astonishingly intimate way, touching his ears, telling them to be opened, wetting his finger on his own tongue, touching the man’s tongue. “Be opened!”, is the command: Ephphatha!

We’re starting a new year of programs and worship here, in a new time. Don’t we need to hear Jesus saying Ephphatha to us? There are some great things here that come from our values. One thing I’ve learned in the last few months is that this church is really great at appreciating. I love that we applaud the music; I love the positive energy of how people seem to appreciate each other here. How can we carry that forward? And what do we need to leave behind? 

Fear and Trembling to Joy

When Paul writes to a new Christian church in northern Greece, in the letter to the Philippians, he tells them to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. I think what he means is for them to discover that everything they think needs to be tested, evaluated, considered. I think he means they need to listen to Jesus, not just their own common sense. I think he knows that isn’t easy because it’s scary to change. I think he means to assure them that God is with them in the process. 

The same is true here. At the end of this story, Jesus is on his way home. Along the way, he heals a man who is deaf. Isn’t this all of us? Aren’t we sometimes deaf when God is practically shouting at us? It’s a fulfillment of what Isaiah said: 

Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. …then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.[ Isaiah 35:4-7a]

Jesus goes on from here with a new understanding. He knows change is difficult; he knows we we have fearful hearts. Yet he says, over and over, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear.” May we hear him; may we follow him, no matter how it changes us. May we learn the love of God so that our fear and trembling turns into songs of joy.

Amen

Leaping Love

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

15th Sunday After Pentecost/B • September 1, 2024 (Labor Day)

Song of Solomon 2:8-13, Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Listen to the sermon here

Happy Labor Day! You probably already have ways to celebrate this holiday but do you know its history? At the end of the 1800s, American labor conditions were grim and there was a rising tide of anger at the injustice. In 1894, that anger found expression in a march on September 5, 1882, by 10,000 workers through New York City who took the day off and marched to show their strength. Soon the custom spread and by 1894, Labor Day became a federal holiday. But that only affected federal workers; it took decades for the unions to win the right to the holiday in other industries. So today, along with barbecues and family gatherings, we ought also to remember that this holiday has its roots in the longing for justice of all people.

God Loves Holidays

Holidays have a special place in God’s plan. Literally in the beginning, at creation, God rests and that creates the sabbath, in Hebrew, Shabbat. In Exodus 23:9-12, God commands rest on the seventh day, not only for God’s people but also for undocumented people living among them, for slaves, even for animals. That theme of seven is extended in what is called the “Jubilee Year”, God’s command that debts be canceled every seven years. Also, it’s extended in the seven great festivals of God’s people: Passover, First Fruits, Pentecost, Day of Trumpets or Rosh Hashanah, Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur and Tabernacles. Every one of these festivals has a set of customs that make it special. At Passover, we are encouraged to remember God saving God’s people out of slavery in Egypt; at Tabernacles, God’s people are told to build a booth with a roof open to the sky and to spend time there, remembering the greatness of God in creation. Every one of these festivals is meant to bring us to a passionate appreciation of the presence of God.

We see that passion in the reading today from the Song of Solomon. The song is a love story and a lot of preachers over the years make it into an allegory of Israel and God. But I think it’s more of a metaphor, a way of saying “Look, this is what being with God is like: it’s like being in love.” The section we read today imagines a girl watching her boyfriend approach. He’s leaping over things to get to her; nothing is going to stand in his way. And when he gets there, he begs her to come away, because, he says, “…the time of singing has come…” The whole Song of Solomon is a duet, and in other parts we hear of his passionate love for her. Why is it like to love God? The Song tells us: “It’s like the first time you were in love.”

Turning Passion Into Routine

The trouble is we have an immense ability to turn this feeling into something routine and boring. In 1904, Virginia Cary Hudson wrote was 10 and wrote this view of church. 

Before I go into the house of the Lord with praise and thanksgiving, I lift up mine eyes unto the town clock…to see if I am late. It is not etiquette to be late.

Do not hop, skip, jump or slide in the church vestibule. Tip. Tip all the way to your seat. Be sure and do not sit in other people’s pews Jesus wouldn’t care but other people would. Paying money makes it yours to sit in…. Never punch people in church, or giggle or cross your legs. Crossing your legs is as bad as scratching or walking pin front of people or chewing gum…

[Hudson, O Ye Jigs and Tulips, p. 6f]

We have made worship something that proceeds in an orderly, careful manner and rarely offends people.

This is at the heart of what we read this morning from the Gospel of Mark. Jewish religion revolved at Jesus’ time revolved around a set of practices that governed the most basic bits of life like eating and drinking. The rules were meant to remind you that God was involved in every moment, the rules were meant to keep you looking up to God every day. There were rules for Shabbat, there were rules for food, there were rules for everything. The rules began as practices that helped people keep God’s covenant but over time, they became a burden for many.

In this chapter of Mark, the issue is handwashing. Now, we’ve all come through the pandemic, we all had those lessons, those endless lessons, on how important washing your hands is, how to do it, how long to do it. But this washing isn’t so much about germs and cleanliness as about being pure before God. Many Jewish rituals involved symbolic washing with water. We’ve taken one over, and we call it baptism. This handwashing is a kind of every day, every time you eat, baptism. It’s not even actually washing your hands; it’s enough to pour a little water over your fist.

A group of Pharisees have come to see Jesus. This isn’t the first time; you might remember earlier this summer a group of Pharisees argued with him because his disciples were eating on the sabbath. The Pharisees are often looked down on by Christians, but the truth is, they were trying to bring people back to a daily faithful observance of God’s covenant. But here are these followers of Jesus, eating without doing the ritual handwashing. They should be setting a good example, right? So Jesus: what about this? What about the “tradition of the elders” which is to say the customs of how God is worshiped.

Jesus’ response is pointed. He says they’re just paying lip service to God. They quote the tradition of the elders; he says that they are “…teaching human precepts as doctrines.” And then he goes on to list all kinds of bad things summed up by the phrase “evil intentions”. What he seems to be talking about is what Buddhists call desire. In our culture, we almost equate sin with sexual immorality so it’s interesting that in Jesus’ list of theft, murder, avarice, envy, slander and pride all occupy equal places. What keeps us from God isn’t whether we perform some ritual or another, it’s that we do it for ourselves rather than as a way to watch for God.

The Meaning of Worship

For that’s what worship is really meant to be: watching for God, hoping God will appear, hoping we will feel God’s presence. It’s not guaranteed, and it doesn’t always happen. We’ve all sat through boring church services; I know I’ve conducted my share. Part of the problem is that we want to be comfortable. And we’re most comfortable when we know what’s going on, when we know what to do. Like Virginia said, there is etiquette and every church has its set of customs. 

We’re in transition here. We know where we’ve been. I love the story of the day people of this congregation left the little wood church just a few yards from here, carrying books, and I’m sure other things, marching into this building, ready to carry on. They were making a transition and have been hard for some. The pews were different, the walls were different, the place was different. What if they had said, “No, we’re not going.”? We have a great history as a church and that march symbolizes it all, that carrying things forward to a new place and a new time. Hebrews calls those in our past, “the cloud of witnesses” and we should honor those witnesses. Our congregation is not just those here today, it’s that cloud of witnesses whose gift to us is this church. 

But there’s another crowd we should honor and remember too and that’s all those who aren’t here yet: the future congregation of this church. What will they look like? Who will they be? What will they need? We are a church in transition but in reality, all churches are in transition and always have been. Forty years or so after the days Mark is writing about, the church faced its first great conflict precisely over rituals that had to do with eating and whether all Christians would keep kosher. Surely this story is here in Mark because it helped them see how to go forward. 

I started with Labor Day for a reason. Labor Day honors workers: all those who produce everything we need, everything we use. What is our work as followers of Jesus? What is our work as God’s people? What is our work as members of this church? Surely it is to share the love of God; surely it is to refuse to let our desire for comfort get in the way of sharing the joy of God’s presence. So today, close with a quote from Anne Sexton’s poem, “Welcome, Morning”.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.” ― Anne Sexton

Amen

And Also Many Cattle

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

14th Sunday After Pentecost/Year B • August 25, 2024

Jonah 4

Imagine something with me. It’s morning, a still, cool day like today, on the edge of fall. It’s quiet, no breeze, no sound. The sun is shining and you’re out for a walk through a little woods. You come to a pond and sit on a big rock that was there before this was Pennsylvania. On an impulse, you reach down and pick up a little stone, throw it out as far as you can into the pond, where it makes a splash and a little wave. The circle of the wave moves out, slowly, the only disturbance on the pond. Outward and outward, as far as you can see.

Now come back and let’s talk about Jonah and this funny last chapter. Last Sunday, we left things in a fine state. Jonah heard God’s call, repented, went to Ninevah preached the greatest one sentence sermon of all time judging from the reaction. Everyone in Ninevah repented—changed!—stopped doing evil. God repented too: decided not to destroy them. It seems like that’s a place to ring down the curtain, doesn’t it? Time to celebrate. But we have this last little bit and it may be the most important part of all. 

Jonah’s Story

Jonah knows God has repented and it makes him mad. Isn’t it annoying when you tell someone they’re going to be in trouble and then they somehow wiggle out? Jonah has had a hard time getting to this point, he had three days in the belly of the fish, he had the whole business of finding out after that he still had to go to Ninevah, he had the trip to Ninevah. He had looked forward to seeing the whole city destroyed. It’s what they deserved. Now, that’s gone; God has repented. Jonah knows God and suspected this might happen; he thought God just might change his mind and make the whole trip useless. So he’s pouting. Do you know what I mean by pouting?  He’s mad, but instead of letting it out, he gets dramatic. “…now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” [Jonah 4:3] It’s a hot day, that dry heat that is just unrelenting and God is trying to coax Jonah back like a mother pacifying a child. So God makes a tree grow up just to give him some shade and Jonah sits under it in a little shack he’s built.

Jonah Pouts

But the next day, right at dawn, a worm starts to chew on the tree; God sent it, like God sent the fish and the tree. There’s a scorching east wind that gets under the shelter. “The sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint.” [Jonah 4:7f] Once again, Jonah is angry and once again he pouts: “It would be better for me to die than to live”, he says. Do you know this feeling—the desperate sense that you just can’t take anymore? We speak of “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”, a proverb that picks up the experience we all have when just one small thing is too much to bear. When my son Jason was 12 or so and couldn’t have something he wanted, he would say, “I’m having a bad life.” This line was always delivered after great sighs; usually it was spoken in response to one of those parental inquiries, “What’s wrong Jason?”—“I’m having a bad life.” Jonah is having a bad life.

We have a bad life too, at times, so it’s important to see how God responds. First, God asks whether Jonah’s anger is appropriate: “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?”, God asks, and Jonah of course says, “I do…I’m angry enough to die.” This is God’s response: you didn’t grow this vine, you didn’t tend it, you didn’t do anything for it; the vine grew up overnight and now it’s gone. But here you are angry because I decided to save Ninevah’s 120,000 people. I love God’s description of these people: they can’t tell their right hand from their left. And many cattle too, God says. Now the word that we translate ‘cattle’ really means all the animals there. Stunning isn’t it? For a month we’ve been reading and thinking about this city, about its destruction and salvation, did you ever think about the cattle? Here’s Almighty God, not fooled at all by the repentance of the city, knowing there is trouble ahead—they don’t know their right from their left, they’re children morally!—and God still has time to care about the cattle. God cares about the dogs, the goats, the little creatures e don’t even see most days. God’s circle of care is bigger than we ever thought.

Whom do you care about? Who does God care about? Is your list looking more like God’s? That seems to be the heart of the story of Jonah. Remember what we said at the beginning? This story uses an ancient time as its setting, but it was written down for God’s people when they were feeling smug and distinct. They’d come back from exile and pushed out all the foreigners. What a scandalous story in that context: a good religious man does all the bad things and the bad Gentiles do all the good things. And God cares for them all, teaches them all, saves them all. It’s scandalous: it will never work. But it does. God is there, in the process of each day, stretching people, teaching, growing the circle of care.

Growing Our Circle of Care

I’ve had to grow my circle. Almost 30 years ago, when my kids, Jason and Amy were almost grown, I moved far from them. It was hard and I started making a daily practice of sitting in the church’s sanctuary and praying for both of them. I’d take a few minutes to picture them, think about what they were going through, and ask God to work in their day. After a while, Jacquelyn and I were married and I became a parent to May, so the prayer time had to grow to include them. Amy got married to Nick: now I had six to pray for each day. Jason married Jenelle, Amy and Nick had Maggie, the list kept getting longer. By then I’d added onto it whoever was sick in the church. Then I went to a conference and someone suggested praying for all the members of your church daily: reading their names from a list. Amy and Nick had Andrew and later Bridget. Jason and Jenelle had Jude and Jonah. The list just kept getting longer. I added parents: my mother, Jacquelyn’s mother and father. There’s no end and that’s what God let me discover: I can’t draw a little line and say, “These are it, the rest don’t belong.” The list was like the circle in the pond: it just kept growing and now it’s grown to include all of you.  

It’s not easy to grow your circle. It means thinking of what people want and need who aren’t like you. Sometimes we fail. For a few years, I attended a Presbyterian church in Milwaukee. A group of Hmong people had settled nearby after being refugees and they wanted to be part of the church. They liked their new church so much that the Hmong women made a banner to hang on the pulpit. Hmong banners are beautiful, full of intricate tiny stitches that make vibrant patterns and the cloth is dyed with saffron, so they are bright orange. The pastor hung the banner one Sunday. But the session met soon after and declared that since orange isn’t a liturgical color, the banner would have to come down. 

The people on the session, their version of a the consistory, weren’t bad people. They were faithful Christians, they loved their church. They had been brought up seeing green, red, white, blue and purple banners, the liturgical colors. That saffron colored banner with its bright orange? They just couldn’t stretch enough to take it in. Maybe they repented eentually; I moved away shortly after the banner controversy. Honestly? I don’t think God cared about liturgical colors. I think God loved that banner. I think God likes a rainbow of colors, after all that’s the sign God chose for a covenant after the flood. I wonder what would have happened if they had stretched their circle, seen that the banner was a glorious fabric of devotion, woven those folks into the heart of that church. 

God Is Shaping Us

God is shaping us, shaping our history, expanding the circle. To be the people of God is to consciously choose to be a part of this process. It means to understand we are not here on our own and our choices are not ours alone to make. We have a purpose, the same purpose we had from the beginning. At our creation, Genesis says God placed us in a garden and told us to keep each other company and take care of the garden. That’s still our purpose and God wants to stretch us to fit it. Of course we don’t always succeed. But look at the story of Jonah:  the only one who succeeds there is God. Jonah runs away and ends up back where he started. It doesn’t matter that we don’t always succeed; God has given us repentance as a tool so we can come back, come home, remember our purpose and start over. Wouldn’t today be a good day to begin? It takes some stretching: remember, there are all those cattle, all those people, all of creation. God means to stretch us out until we finally know our right from our left, until we know the big love of God is big enough for all, big enough even for each one.

I started with a pond. Genesis says God stilled the waters at creation: God is everywhere in the pond. And God drops us in, and the effect of what we do spreads like the waves farther and farther, far beyond what we know. We may never know how much a kind word, a prayer for someone, an invitation matters. There are all those people God cares about and means us to Care for. And then of course: also many cattle.

Amen.

Go!

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

13th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 18, 2024

Jonah 3

Today’s reading from Jonah is every preacher’s fantasy. We’ve seen Jonah hear God’s call, run away, be hurled into the sea, rescued by God’s hand. He’s changed by the experience. He learns, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord,” and when he’s left on the shore, God again calls him in just the same way to go to Nineveh and announce its destruction. 

The text tells us Nineveh was a great city that would take three days to walk across. Imagine Jonah coming into Nineveh, tired, thirsty after a long trip. He’s determined to finally do what God called him to do. He walks a third of the way into the great city and says, “‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ It’s a one sentence sermon. It doesn’t have an engaging introduction doesn’t have three points, it, it doesn’t have a focus on what the preacher hopes will happen. Just: “…he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” What do you think he imagined would happen? 

Repent!

What actually happens according to the story is amazing. What happens is that everyone takes him seriously; everyone repents! The king makes repentance a legal duty. I’ve been preaching over 50 years, and I’ve never had a reaction like this. I’ve had people walk out, leave the church, get mad; I’ve had people tell me something I said inspired them or that it was a good sermon, I’ve even had people applaud. Never once in all that time did the whole place rise up and say, “Wow!! Jim is right! We need to change our ways right now!” What is going on here?

The key is the reaction to the sermon: repentance. Notice Jonah doesn’t preach repentance; he never says, “God’s going to destroy the city unless you repent.” He just says God’s going to knock it all down. But the response of the people is immediate. The outward signs of repentance are fasting and wearing plain clothes; the text calls it sack cloth. When the King hears about Jonah, he changes his clothes and fasts along with everyone else.

No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. [Jonah 3:7bf]

Look how complete this is: not just the king, not just the nobility, not just the peasants, even the animals are going to repent. This is funny, isn’t it? We have a little dog named Ellie. She’s a good dog but once in a while she gets something she shouldn’t have. She likes paper towels; when she gets one, she runs away and hides, she knows she’s being bad. When you get it back, she looks up and is sincerely repentant.

‘Repent’ isn’t a word we commonly use except in cartoons about silly street preachers. What does it mean? At its heart, repentance means two things. One is recognizing you’re wrong; the other is changing your direction. Most of us have had this experience. Maybe you’re driving somewhere you’ve never been; you have directions, but it just doesn’t feel right. Eventually, you admit you’re wrong and stop and ask for directions, you turn and go the right way. The last time this happened to me, I was on the way here. I stopped at the Starbucks over off Market Street shortly after I started here; I knew Locust Grove Road went all the way there. I was feeling good about finding my way in this new place, turned left off Market, right on Locust Grove Road to that place where it splits, and happily followed the yellow line off to the left. Iit took me a few minutes to figure out I’d made a wrong turn, stop, go back and get on the right road.

Three Repentances

This story is all about repentance; it’s all about change. Remember where we started?—with Jonah running away. God said, “Go to Nineveh”. But he didn’t; he went to Joppa and got on a ship for Spain, the opposite way. It takes a great, life-threatening crisis to get Jonah to turn around; it takes being in the belly of the fish for three days to get Jonah to repent.

Now we come to a second story of repentance by the community of Nineveh. The text imagines people hearing the threat of destruction and immediately repenting. Wow! Furthermore, the King gives us the reason: “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’ [Jonah 3:9] Just like Jonah, the impetus for change comes from a crisis that threatens their very lives. What’s going on here?

Jonah is pictured as a prophet from about the 700’s up in the north, in the kingdom of Israel. That was a time when Israel’s society had left the justice envisioned by God’s covenant and traded it for systems that produced a few rich people and many poor people. They had left faithful observance of God’s covenant and there are several prophets in the Bible who denounce this. They prophesy a coming judgement but unlike the Ninevites, no one does anything about it. Ultimately, Israel is conquered by people whose capital is Ninevah. What seems to be in the background here is a comedy with a serious thought: look, those awful Gentiles over in Ninevah repented but God’s own people did not.

Why don’t people repent? Why don’t we change? Of course there are institutional reasons: some people benefit and they don’t want to give that benefit up. But I think also the familiar, the customary, gives us a sense of comfort. We like things as they are. Change can feel threatening. One of my churches wanted, so they said, to grow. They called me as their pastor for that precise purpose. Yet one Sunday after church when I was new, one of the ladies in the church took me aside and said, “We hope you will get new people in the church but we hope you will get our sort of people.” I knew what she meant: don’t change anything. 

There’s a third repentance, a third change in Jonah’s story, although we don’t always see it that way. Remember Jonah’s whole message was “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed”. But at the very end of this part of the story we have this amazing result: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it”. [Jonah 3:10] God changes God’s mind! Is this a little bait and switch? “I’ll threaten them but if they behave, it’s all good.” As someone who grew up hearing, “Wait ’til your father gets home” as the ultimate threat, this surprises me.

A Lesson from Dad

Yet, I also remember one of my dad’s most effective lessons. I was 16, it was winter, and I had the car and had been explicitly told to do whatever errand I was sent on and not to go anywhere else because it was snowing. But I had a girlfriend. I had the car. So stopped at her house. When I left, the wheels spun, the car shifted, and I hit a sign with the back. Not enough to hurt anyone; too much damage to go unnoticed. It was my first accident and it scared me. 

My mother was furious when I got home; my dad was out. I was shaken up, and I went to bed, but not to sleep. I knew I was in serious trouble. I heard the door when my dad came home, felt the time when I knew my mother was telling him, heard him come upstairs. I knew I was in for it. The door opened, and I laid there and in a moment, my father, this stern man who had always been the ultimate threat, quietly said, “Your mother told me about the car. Are you ok?” I blubbered and said yes. He nodded and then he said, “That’s all that matters. Get some sleep.”, and closed the door. That moment of grace and care did more to change me, make me a more careful driver, than any punishment could have done.

Jonah’s story climaxes with three stories of repentance, three stories of change. Jonah has changed his view of God. He knows now that his own judgement is not enough. He’s answered God’s call. The people of Nineveh, facing a crisis, find the courage to change. Even the king sits in sackcloth, hoping God will repent. And God, whose children these are, whose beloved children, is so pleased, the disaster is averted. God repents. The forty days come and go; the disaster never occurs. Perhaps when our fears don’t happen, there is a lesson to be learned as well.

Years after the comment about bringing in “our sort of people”, that church did begin to grow. It wasn’t easy and it took changes, changes that weren’t always comfortable. But I remember smiling one day, looking at the back of the church, where that same lady was happily chatting with one of the new members, a woman who came to us in desperate straits, whom the church embraced, who had become, like the lady, a deacon, a sister in Christ in the covenant of that church.

Following Jesus

Change is hard. Repentance is hard. But what does Jesus say? At the beginning of his ministry, the very start, Mark tells us, “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ Repentance—change—is the gateway to the gospel. And isn’t our call, all of us, to share that good news, that God’s love, embodied in Jesus Christ, has changed us? Amen

Meet Mr. Jonah

by

Exploring the Book of Jonah #1

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

By The Rev. James E. Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

11th Sunday After Pentecost/B • August 4, 2024

Scripture Jonah Chapter 1

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Superman! We all know who Superman is; we know at least part of his story, we know he has a cape, most of us know he passes the day working as mild-mannered Clark Kent. Whether we watch an old 1950s episode of Superman or the latest movie, all individual Superman stories have the same plot: something happens, Superman appears and saves the day, an evil genius arises and finds a way to weaken Superman who is temporarily out of action. During that time, the evil genius creates mayhem, but Superman eventually triumphs and saves the world. But we go; we watch.

From the days of our ancestors gathered around fires, stories have intrigued us and the best ones are always old. Think of the story of a special man with a single flaw: his pride, his anger. When he gets angry, he does something shameful that ultimately proves his undoing. You’ve seen this story a hundred times in various forms, but the amazing thing is that it was already old in Jesus’ time: it’s the plot line of Homer’s Iliad, which is actually titled, The Wrath of Achilles. We love stories and this summer we are going to try an experiment: we are going to spend this month exploring Jonah. Why Jonah? Because Jonah is a book with you and me in it: it is a story that invites us to share our own stories of God’s call in our lives.

Meet Mr. Jonah

I know as soon as I said Jonah, a lot of us raced ahead to the whale. Actually, there is no whale, it’s a big fish, and we’ll get to that along the way. Don’t be in such a rush! Even Superman movies start by introducing him before they get to all the gee whiz stuff and introducing Jonah is just what I have in mind today. Today, we’ll meet Mr. Jonah and make it clear how we can use his story to help us understand what God is doing right here, right now. In the next few weeks, we’ll see him struggle with God’s call, just as we often do. 

Was there a real, historical Jonah? The answer is: possibly—and the real one may have nothing to do with our story. How can that be? Think of our own stories. Do you remember Davy Crockett? Some I suspect are already humming the Davy Crockett theme song in their heads. Davy Crockett wrote a brief story about some of his adventures, but others expanded on them, and he became a legend in his own time. In our imagination, he’s a courageous warrior and a man of simple but true homespun wisdom he finally gave his life in a fight for freedom at the Alamo. The facts of his life are quite different. Crockett abandoned his family to go hunting and the fight at the Alamo was actually an insurrection. What interests us about Davy Crockett is not his biography but his legend and the story of a man making a way in the wilderness.

Even if we don’t know much about the historical Jonah, we do know enough to imagine him. Just like us, he has what I call the Daily Problem. He needs to eat every day, he needs something to drink every day. He has a to-do list. He gets annoyed with his neighbors sometimes. He has a father—remember, Jonah son of Amittai?— who probably gives advice he doesn’t want sometimes. He is associated with a little village up in the north of Israel with a name that translates something like “wine press place”, so I like to think of him living in wine country, just like we do. He’s described in 2 Kings as a prophet, so his job is preaching and healing there. I imagine he has the same set of aches and pains we all have at times. 

Jonah’s Call

Jonah’s story was told among a group of people wrestling with what it meant to be chosen by God. That had always been Israel’s faith: God’s special care for them. But eventually, Israel was conquered, her people deported, and they had to ask how it could be that God would desert them. If you have ever felt deserted by God, if you have ever felt alone and afraid, you know just how they felt. Why were they defeated? Why had God abandoned them? Would God ever change and take them back? They asked these questions, and they began to tell this story of a man just like them who heard God’s call and how he acted.

Jonah’s story begins with God’s call.

Go to the great city of Ninevah and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. [Jonah 1:2] 

Have you ever been to Nineveh? I thought not. But maybe you have in a way. Nineveh is the place you fear, the place where you are a stranger and everyone is your enemy. To this day, Israel remembers how the Assyrians, whose capital was Nineveh, conquered the northern tribes 700 years before Christ and deported them. The whole ancient world knew Nineveh as an emblem of torture and cruelty and irresistible violence. It brought to mind the same darkness the word ‘Auschwitz’ does for us. 

But here is God saying, as if it were nothing, go to this foreign, fearsome, place and tell them to repent. Now that can only have two results. Either they will laugh at you—or believe you and take it out on you. Imagine God calling you to go to New York, the financial capital of a great worldwide empire, to announce its destruction. Maybe you would be laughed out of town; maybe you would be jailed as a threat. Neither choice is good. 

That’s what Jonah thought too. Maybe he thought God made a mistake; maybe he just didn’t like the odds. What he does about the call is run the other way. He goes to Joppa, a busy port, and buys passage to Tarshish, The writer assumes you know the geography but just in case you don’t, let me explain. Nineveh was a city in what’s now Iraq; the ruins are still there. It’s about 550 miles east of Israel. Tarshish, on the other hand, is about 2,500 miles west, somewhere in southern Spain. It was famous as a Phoenician city that exported tin and other metals.

Running Away from God’s Call

Jonah runs away. He thought Tarshish would be beyond the presence of the Lord. How far do you have to go to get away from God? Jonah thinks Spain but he’s mistaken. The Psalmist asks “Where can I go from your Spirit?” [Ps 139:7] God is everywhere. Jonah sails off west, but the sea can be ferocious. It’s an image the Bible frequently uses for chaos. Creation, according to Genesis 1, begins with a primordial dark tossing sea called in Hebrew, “Tohu Bohu”. God’s power is controlling the sea, and that theme is repeated over and over again. In the midst of the storm, the sailors want to lighten ship. They throw Jonah overboard, a sad necessity to them, perhaps to him the end of the voyage. 

The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. [Jonah 1;17]

But God isn’t finished with Jonah. He’s swallowed by a big fish.

See?—no whale. Sorry, I didn’t write the story, I just preach it.  

We Are God’s Tools

There’s a lot to think and pray about here. First is the whole idea of a call. What is your call? What is our call as a church? Most of us have tools of some sort. I don’t mean just the screwdrivers in the garage, I mean things we use to get things done: the broom, the vacuum, the flipper for your eggs. Every single one has a purpose and if we don’t use the right tool, we do a poor job. I have a hammer, just a regular old carpenter’s hammer. But it lives down in my basement, two flights of stairs away from where Jacquelyn is asking me to put a nail in the wall to hang a picture sometimes. And you know, I’m just lazy enough that often I look around for something to hit that nail with: maybe the flat side of a wrench or the handle of a screwdriver. It doesn’t work very well. Every task has an appropriate tool and caring in creation is the main task God has set humanity. We are the tools God uses and calling is simply being the right tool for a purpose of God’s. We look around and say, “Oh, that’s a Phillips head screw, I need the Phillips head screwdriver,” or “I need the big sauce pan that has a lid.” God looks around and finds one of us and knows we are the right tool for God’s purpose.

But a hammer doesn’t have a will of its own; we do. So we get to choose. Jonah chose to run away and in all honesty, so do we sometimes. But God’s purpose doesn’t change; it doesn’t in this story, it doesn’t in history. What changes is our willingness to say yes to God’s call, yes to God’s purpose, yes to living from God’s purpose. 

Your Call

What is your call? Maybe you know already; maybe you haven’t felt that movement of the heart. Hearing God’s call takes some listening. Often when we think of prayer, we think of what we say. But prayer can also be simply listening, being still. God’s call is there if we are quiet enough to see it, hear it, feel it. Moses was a middle-aged fugitive who’d made a new life in a foreign country. He worked as a herdsman, married the boss’s daughter. One day he was out with the flocks, and he noticed a bush burning without being consumed. Now the rabbis say hundreds of people had seen this and passed it by. But Moses turned aside. Moses went and listened and God called him to an incredible, amazing life leading his people out of slavery. What part of God’s purpose are you uniquely, wonderfully made to accomplish? And what is the call of this church? What purpose of God’s is it meant to serve, meant to accomplish?

I’m going to end with that question and I hope this week you’ll think about and pray about your call. I hope this week you’ll think about and pray about the call of this church. We’ll leave Mr. Jonah there in the belly of the fish for now and see what happens next week. What happens when you run away from God’s call? What happens when you embrace it?

Amen.

Leftovers

by

A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ

by Rev. James Eaton ©2024

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost/B • July 28, 2024

John 6:1-21

This text includes two stories: Jesus feeding more than 5,000 people and Jesus walking to his disciples across the water. Because of the constraints of time, I’ve chosen to deal only with the first story in this sermon.

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.
– The Jewish prayer over bread, also used by Muslims.

Give us today our daily bread.
– The Lord’s Prayer

Good food, good meat, good God, let’s eat
– Table grace at Michigan State Youth camp

Every culture has a way to say thank you at the beginning of a meal. In our home, May and I usually cook, but it’s Jacquelyn who offers the prayer: “Heavenly Father, thank you for this food and the person who prepared it.” We say grace because we know, deep down, we are not of ourselves enough: we need to be sustained, every day, by our daily bread.

Bread is interesting stuff. Sometime about 14,000 years ago, someone somewhere figured out that if you ground up grains, mixed them with water, and put them near a fire, the grains turned into something good to eat. Later, they discovered if you added something bubbly like beer, which we know is over 5,000 years old, the result was even better. Ever since, bread has been the common food of common people, and it weaves in and out of the whole Bible story. 

What to Do When 5,000 Show Up?

At the beginning of the story we read in John, Jesus has gone off to a mountain to meet with his disciples in private. Remember that geography is theology in the Bible: “The mountain” is frequently where God encounters prophets, from Moses at Mt. Sinai to Jesus later when he is transfigured. Mark says withdrew to let his disciples rest. John just says they went off by themselves and Jesus sat down. Sitting down is the position from which a rabbi teaches, so perhaps that’s what Jesus had in mind. Clearly, it’s a private party. But five thousand men show up – and their wives, significant others and children. What to do?

What amazes me about this story every time I go back to it is that it is so like us. I’ve been sitting with church committees for almost 50 years and every time a crisis occurs, the first thing that happens is someone talks about the cost. Philip does it here: “Two hundred denarii wouldn’t be enough.” Two hundred denarii is about eight months wages for most people. It’s an astounding sum. What’s the next thing we do, once we figure out we don’t have the money for the project? Don’t we look around to see what we do have? Andrew: here is a boy with five loaves and two dried fish. I’ve always wondered about this boy: it doesn’t say he offered his lunch, it doesn’t say he volunteered to share. These aren’t big loaves; the average lunch for a peasant is three barley loaves. Barley loaves are coarse and not as tasty as wheat bread; it’s what poor people eat. 

It’s easy to rush over the details that come next, but we shouldn’t. Jesus tells everyone to sit down; the Greek word here actually means “to recline”. That’s significant because poor people in this time ate standing up but rich people at feasts recline at table. He’s asking them to eat like they’re at a rich, wonderful banquet. Then Jesus gives thanks. “Blessed art thou O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” He starts distributing the bread and the fish, and it turns out there is more than enough for everyone.  If you grew up in a church where they’re comfortable with the supernatural, this is miraculous. If you grew up where preachers like to make things more natural, maybe you’ve heard that everyone just shared the lunches they’d brought—as if that wouldn’t be a miracle as well. It doesn’t matter which road you take, they both get to this place: there is this miraculous abundance in God’s care. 

What God Does

This is what God does. At creation, God makes a world with everything we need and then says to people, “Take care of it.” Eat whatever you want, God tells them, except from the tree of the experience of good and evil. In the wilderness, when God’s people are hungry and whining, they discover manna, a bread like substance that occurs naturally. God feeds people twice at the request of Elisha, once with leftovers. No wonder every religion, every culture, has a way of saying thanks: at it’s foundation, what we need to survive is all gift.

We say grace, but what if we really gave thanks? What if we gave thanks for each part of the meal – main dish, potatoes, vegetables—hopefully dessert! Someone raised that chicken, someone plucked it, packed it, put it out for us to buy. Someone grew the vegetables which needed rain and sun and earth. What if we gave thanks for those as well. It would take a long time to say that much thanks. Even just the bread would take a while if we thought of all the ingredients – water, yeast, oil, flour. The wheat alone contains miraculous abundance. Annie Dillard writes,

So far as I know, only one real experiment as ever been performed, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little strands placed end-to-end just about wouldn’t quit. In a single cubic inch of soil, the length of the root hairs totaled 6,000 miles. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, pp. 166-67)

Jesus gives thanks—and there is miraculous abundance. My favorite part of this story is that there are leftovers. Remember where we started? We can’t afford it, there isn’t enough, we just have a little bit—now the disciples are scurrying about with baskets taking up the leftovers.

Some people want to seize Jesus—don’t let him get away, they cry. They wanted to make him King by force. Isn’t this like us too? We want to own Jesus, we want to make him our king, we want him to heal us, feed us, just us, not the others. But he slips away; he always does when we try to take charge of him. The only way to stay with Jesus is to stop making him ours and let ourselves belong to him. At the end of this story, he’s back where he started, up on a mountain.

Leftovers

The disciples have a new problem: taking up the leftovers. The text calls them “fragments”, the same word used by early Christians for the bread used in communion. What did they do with all those leftovers? Did they make bread pudding? Did they hand them out the next day? John doesn’t tell us, he moves on to Jesus using the image of bread for himself: “I am the bread of life”, he later says. 

And the boy, how did the boy react? Someone packed him a nice lunch: five loaves is a lot for a peasant boy and a couple of sardines to go along. I bet he looked forward to that lunch; boys get hungry and here he had everything he needed to be full, possibly something that didn’t happen every day. Going hungry isn’t something you forget. My dad grew up on a farm in Michigan and remembered going hungry. We always had enough to eat in the home where I grew up, but dad insisted that every dinner had to include a plate of bread, even though we seldom ate it. Did the boy give up his lunch voluntarily? Was he disappointed? John doesn’t say. But John does say everyone had as much as they wanted. So we know that at the end, the boy was full: he had enough.

This is what God wants: for us to feel the fullness and thanksgiving is both the method and the appropriate response. Fullness is not an amount but an attitude, a spiritual state Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna in 1942 when he was sent with his family to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Two years later he was sent to Auschwitz, where his family was murdered. Even there, he said thanks. He says in one place,

The most ghastly moment of the twenty-four hours of camp life was the awakening…We then began the tussle with our wet shoes, into Which we could scarcely force our feet, which were sore and swollen… One morning I heard someone, whom I knew to be brave and dignified, cry like a child because he finally had to go to the snowy marching grounds in his bare feet, as his shoes were too shrunken for him to wear. In those ghastly minutes, I found a little bit of comfort: a small piece of bread which I drew out of my pocket and munched with absorbed delight

Even in the heart of darkness, even in the midst of evil, God intends our fullness. The writer of Ephesians prays, “…that you may be  filled to the full measure of all the fullness of God

How Wonderful to Be Full

This story is one of the few told in all four gospels. I think it’s told because it helps us understand who we are. We are the people who pick up the leftovers of God’s grace and give them out so that need everyone will have what they need. We are the people who pick up the leftovers of God’s grace and share them out as fragments that can fill someone with the full measure of God. It’s what we do every time we open the clothing closet; it’s what we do through Neighbors in Need and countless other missions. It’s what we do every time we welcome someone; it’s what we do every time we share communion. We take up the leftovers of the bread of life, share them out, so that all can indeed, like the boy, like the disciples, like the crowd, have what they need. We share them out as God’s blessing. 

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, hamotzi lechem min ha’aretz. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has brought forth bread from the earth.

How wonderful to be full. May you be full today.

Amen.