Tag Archives: death

Something God Alone Can See

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

22nd Sunday After Pentecost/C • November 9, 2025

Luke 20:27-38

Isn’t it good for us to gather here this morning? The Book of Job imagines all the angels of the Lord gathering one morning; I think it was just like this.

One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them.The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.” [Job 1:6f]

Well, none of you are Satanic but you’ve been out in the world. How was your week? What did you see that made you angry? What did you see that uplifted you? What was troubling? What made you smile? You’ve had to answer some questions: what’s for breakfast? What are we doing today? Why is that guy standing in the middle of North Third?

Here’s one you probably didn’t spend any time on this week: “How many angels can stand on the head of a pin?” What do you think? Supposedly, this was a big theological question in the Middle Ages. Actually, historians now find almost no evidence anyone worried about this until after the Reformation when people began to make fun of it. The answer depends on whether you think angels have substance. If they don’t, then an infinite number can stand on the pin; if they do, then just one. There: out of all the questions you’ll have to answer this week, that one is settled. You can go onto more interesting questions like what are we doing for dinner.

I bring all this up because today’s reading from Luke is about a question no one is really asking, just like the angels on the pin. Last week we left Jesus going to dinner at Zaccheus’ house; we’ve jumped ahead of the whole Palm Sunday story and Jesus is in Jerusalem where he encounters a group of Sadducees. It’s the first and only time we hear about the Sadducees in the Gospel of Luke. They’re a group centered at the temple who were generally more well to do than the Pharisees we’re used to hearing about. They’re actually  opponents of the Pharisees. You see, the Pharisees have accepted the prophets and some books lie Job called ‘the writings’ as God’s Word—holy scripture. The Sadducees, on the other hand, are purists; they only accept the first five books of our Bible, the Torah. 

“Why are we talking about obscure first century Jewish theology?”, I hear you wondering. Hang in there with me; we need to understand this question Jesus is being asked. Now, The prophets speak of God resurrecting the people of God. Ezekiel, for example, says

[God] asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign LORD, you alone know.”

Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!

This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. [Ezekiel 37:3-5] 

This ability of God to resurrect and make new is central in the prophets. So the Pharisees are preaching this. But as I said, the Sadducees don’t accept the prophets, so they don’t accept resurrection.

Jesus is preaching resurrection. He tells his friends that he is going to be killed in Jerusalem but God is going to raise him up again after three days. So, the Sadducees have come to confront him about this and that’s where we pick up the story in Luke. Do you ever ask a question without really caring about the answer? My dad did this: “What do you think you’re doing?” I’ve done it. “What’s all this mess?” That’s what the Sadducees are doing: they’re asking a question without really wanting an answer; the answer they want is Jesus saying, “Wow, I don’t know.”

So they’ve come up with a rule from Deuteronomy. This is the rule.

If brothers are living together and one of them dies without a son, his widow must not marry outside the family. Her husband’s brother shall take her and marry her and fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to her.

The first son she bears shall carry on the name of the dead brother so that his name will not be blotted out from Israel.

However, if a man does not want to marry his brother’s wife, she shall go to the elders at the town gate and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to carry on his brother’s name in Israel. He will not fulfill the duty of a brother-in-law to me.”

Then the elders of his town shall summon him and talk to him. If he persists in saying, “I do not want to marry her,” his brother’s widow shall go up to him in the presence of the elders, take off one of his sandals, spit in his face and say, “This is what is done to the man who will not build up his brother’s family line.”

That man’s line shall be known in Israel as The Family of the Unsandaled. [Deuteronomy 25:5-10]

Now, there are some things where our common sense can lead us astray when we put them back in the Bible. One of them is the whole concept of a widow. Throughout the Torah and the Prophets, God shows a particular care for widows. But who are these women? 

They are women in a patriarchal society. They couldn’t own property; they couldn’t function in regular economics But if they can’t own property and can’t earn money, how will they survive? Add to that is the fact that many women were widowed when young. When we say ‘widow’ we often think of an older woman who has lost her husband late in life. But Israel had to consider how to care for young women. So they did what many societies have done; they provided a way to marry them off. 

Israel also had a particular concern about biological descent. God’s blessing was understood to be carried on this way. So it’s important that each family be continued. This rule takes care of both problems. Who’s going to marry a widow? I’s not a matter of romantic attraction; there’s a rule. The rule is, your brother marries her, has children with her, and those are considered your children. Problem solved, right?

Except for all the problems this raises. What if these two don’t like each other? When Jacquelyn and I were married, I had two brothers. My brother Allan was tall and handsome, much more handsome than me. My brother David is more charming than anyone I’ve ever known and he’s a rich lawyer. But you know, love isn’t always reasonable. This text comes up every three years and it came up about a year after we were married. After the service, Jacquelyn quietly said, “No matter what happens to you, I’m not marring either of your brothers.” The Sadducees think they’ve found another problem: “If, as you say, Jesus, there is resurrection, whose wife will she be after marrying seven brothers?” It’s a gotcha question!

I think of them gathered around, someone proposes the question, just as we heard: “Now there were seven brothers; the first married a woman and died childless;..” And so on. I think of them smiling in their arrogance, knowing they’ve got him. The crowd is quiet, listening, Jesus looks back at them for a moment, perhaps sad at their lack of imagination, their lack of faith in God creative power, and simply says, 

“Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. [Luke 20:34f]

Wow. That’s it: God’s able to create and recreated and resurrect is so far beyond our present experience, our present lives, that we can’t carry all the things we know into it. So there’s no problem; God’s love is so great, it’s beyond what we can imagine.

Jesus isn’t content to brush aside their gotcha question, though. He goes on to point something out from Exodus, from the very scripture the Sadducees claim to represent. 

the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.

This is what we should take away from this section: God is God of the living and all of us are all the time alive to God.

The closest we can come to this is the way parents are with children. Every parent, I think, has this experience: they are alive to us in their whole history, in all their ages. May is 35 but in my head, she’s also the little girl who was fabulous at her sister’s wedding when she was 10, she’s also the 15 year old who taught me to enjoy alternative music and rap, she’s the 20 year old college girl and so on. The same is true of my other kids. My daughter iAmy has grown kids now but to me she’s still the high school girl who outsmarted me. She used to go out on Saturday nights; she had a midnight curfew. I’d do that dad thing starting about 11:30; I’d start thinking she was going to be late and get mad. By 11:45 I’d be all worked up. By 11:55 I’d be ready to deliver a real dressing down to the late Amy. But Amy would sit outside in the car with her date until 11:58, then waft in just as the clock struck 12. I’d be obviously mad, ready to yell, but with no reason; she was on time. She’d look at me and say, “What?” And I’d have to stifle it. Maybe you know how awful it is to go to God full of unexpressed righteous anger. I could go on about Jason as well. What’s true is that all these are alive to me in all their ages, not just their present. 

That’s what Jesus is saying about how God is with us: we are all present to God  in all our ages, in all our lives. Our past is present to God. Our present is present to God. And our future is present too, beyond death. Death is one of the structures of this world, not God’s love. We don’t know how this works; we don’t know what this is like. So we imagine all kinds of things, most of them based on what happens here. That’s fine, as long as we realize that’s us. God’s love is beyond ours, beyond our imagination.

We’re going to sing a song in a few minutes that’s one of my favorites: “In the Bulb There Is a Flower”. Most of you know this song: in the bulb, there is a flower, in the seed, an apple tree. There’s nothing about a bulb that suggests a flower. There’s nothing about a seed that suggests an apple tree. Yet that’s their future. In the same way, Jesus is telling us, nothing about what we are now is big enough, full enough, to show God’s love for us. He invites us simply to believe in the love of God, beyond our imagination, beyond our experience. In that love, we are, we were, we always will be, embraced in the love of God. Who you truly are, who you truly will become, is indeed, as the song says, “Something God alone can see.”

Amen.

After Pentecost 2 B

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Seeming, Seeing, Saving

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
Second Sunday After Pentecost/B • June 3, 2018
2 Corinthian 4:5-12

So death is at work in us, but life in you. – 2 Cor 4:12

To hear the sermon preached, click below

Every preacher has some weaknesses. I know that one of mine is titles. Take today. I looked at this scripture reading and saw the part about being slaves, and I thought of when my older kids were eight and six. We lived in a flat in Milwaukee with no dishwasher. Every night after dinner, their job was to wash and dry the dishes and put them away. One night when they were pouting they said, “We’re slaves, we’re nothing but slaves.” Their mother and I looked at each other and said together, “You’re right, now get out there and finish up.” So I thought about calling this sermon “Nothing But Slaves”. It might be worth pointing out here that in Greek, the same word is used for children and slaves; I guess the Greeks needed dishwashers too. But I gave up on that title, it doesn’t really embrace Paul’s message.

Then I thought about the text a bit more and I was really taken by the image of the earthen vessels. I put one on the communion table today, just to illustrate this. I’ve read a couple of sermons that focused there and especially on the pots as cracked pots. There are so many crackpots in our national life today that I thought I could talk for a long time about that. We might not all have the same idea about which crackpots are the worst or funniest but still, there do seem to be a lot of them. But I read some more and realized this isn’t really the point of the passage; it’s an illustration of a larger message. So sadly I gave up on that title; I know a lot of preachers, better preachers, are happy to do something light-hearted but I know you expect to hear God’s word, not just whatever I think is funny.
After a few days reflecting, I began to think of Paul’s message here in three parts and that’s where my title today, seeming, seeing, saving, came from. It’s not as fun as cracked pots but it makes more sense of Paul’s message here, at least it did for me; let’s see if it does for you.

The Corinthian Christians were a quarrelsome bunch. We have a letter we call First Corinthians that’s full of Paul’s advice on conflicts; it’s clear there that the church has some factions. Before this letter was written, Paul sent Timothy to try to solve the problems but he failed. Then, someone we’ll call Mr. X came along who was charismatic and apparently an excellent speaker and a bunch of the church rallied around him. But as often happens, the charismatic leader’s fall was just as sudden as his rise. Now the church is in conflict again over differences about this leader and Paul and Paul is trying to get them back on the path toward Christ.

He begins with a sermon that should be preached to every pastor in America today I think:

For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.

When I look back over my career, over 40 years of pastoral ministry, I see that one of the great changes has been the creation of what I call the entrepreneurial ministry. The model is something like this: go door to door, call on the phone, by some means get a little group together; tell them they are right. That’s right: no preacher ever started up a church confronting people about where they are wrong. Adopt their culture, wave their flags, support their politics, lift up their sports. That will make the little group a larger group; it will make them feel good about themselves. And it may work. Today all over the country there are super churches with super preachers who took and take this path. Every single one is led by some preacher who is lifted up as the voice of God.

But notice what Paul says: not ourselves but Jesus Christ. By ‘ourselves’ he means himself, Timothy, other church leaders. Here it means me, Joan, our Moderator, our other officers. We’re not the show; we’re not the heart. I’m not the heart. I’m not here to proclaim me, I’m here to preach Jesus Christ as Lord. I’ve been through a few transitions where I left a church after a long, fruitful time. Each time the same thing has happened; each time someone has come and said, “I’m leaving if you’re not going to be here.” I’ve always replied the same way: you didn’t join me, you joined a church; you didn’t follow me, you followed Jesus. So why would you leave? There’s more to do.

Paul wants us to see what an extraordinary treasure we have in God’s love. Just like many of us, he had his own particular experience of being called by Christ. In his case, it involved an intense light, so bright it blinded him. So naturally he remembers that God is the source of light, that God’s creation began with light. “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” He calls this a treasure, and so it is, for the greatest treasure of all is to see ourselves not as the world sees but in the light of God, in the mirror of God’s love. We may seem to be nothing to the world. We may seem to be weak in the world. But seen from God’s view, we contain a treasure: the image of God, which is our true self.

Paul knows about this difference between seeming and saying. He’s not being superficial or unrealistic. He goes on to admit that this treasure is held in an earthen vessel. In the ancient world, earthen vessels, pottery, were the everyday packaging. It’s what you put your olive oil in, it’s what your foods came in. It’s what held trade goods. Pottery was so widely spread that today archaeologists use different patterns and compositions of pottery to date cities; they dig them up in former trash mounds. Now pottery is made from clay; perhaps just as Paul is thinking of God’s creation of light, he’s also thinking of how we were created from the same clay that makes pottery. We are earthen vessels.

He’s completely realistic about our lives; they aren’t untroubled, in fact as he says, “We are hard pressed on every side,..perplexed…persecuted..struck down…We always carry in our body the death of Jesus.” Just like an earthen vessel that can be dropped at any moment and break into shards, we are terribly fragile. I think we all know this and fight the knowledge. We’re constantly defending that weakness. I was halfway through my career in ministry before I ever sat with a Board of Deacons, discussing a complaint, and simply said, “I made a mistake; I’m sorry.” I never wanted to be an earthen vessel: I wanted to be gold or silver or something shinier. It was terrible admitting I was just a clay pot. I wonder how many conflicts are caused by fear of our fragility. I wonder how many hierarchies, systems of oppression, come from the secret knowledge of the oppressor that he or she is fragile, an earthen vessel, subject to shattering.

But if we are fragile, if we are earthen vessels, we also have an amazing capacity to carry the extraordinary spirit of God. Paul sees the fragility, sees the injuries, the hurts, the times that shatter us but he also wants us to see that in Jesus Christ we have another possibility.

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; 
perplexed, but not driven to despair; 
persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; 
always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, 
so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. 

This last is what saves us, saves our world: that the life of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, is made visible in us. Yes, we are earthen vessels; but those vessels contain a treasure. Yes, we are fragile; but we have an eternal life in the heart of God. Yes, we are carrying death in our bodies, just like Jesus, but just like Jesus, we have the capacity to shine with the light of the Spirit of God.

When we understand we are earthen vessels containing a treasure there are two consequences. One is that we understand our own value before God. So we are set free from the world’s value systems. We can stop trying to be gold vessels or silver vessels, because the treasure is what we contain. And the second consequence is that we recognize a fundamental equality with all God’s other children. We are all earthen vessels; we are all carriers of treasure. Paul saw this himself. In Galatians 3:28 he writes, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” So our mission becomes working for justice for all, for justice simply means treating equally people who are equal.

We live in a world that seems to be one way but Christ calls us to see beyond the world to the hope and love of God. We live in a world where we get bruised, cry out, feel ourselves cast down, but if we look, we can see that even in the moment of suffering, we are invited to the arms of Jesus Christ who also suffered, who knows about suffering. This is how God is saving this world. In our moments of celebration, in our times of suffering, we are earthen vessels meant to carry the treasure of God’s glory, God’s image, God’s presence. This is the spirit that is saving the world. Whatever things seem, may we see it and share it.

Amen.

Lent 2 B – No Turning Back – The Rainbow Path of Covenant 2

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No Turning Back

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor © 2018

Second Sunday in Lent/B • February 25, 2018

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 • Mark 8:31-38

Click below to hear the sermon preached

Chopped is one of my favorite television shows. It works like this: four cooks are given a basket of various ingredients and compete to make a dish out of them. The problem is that the ingredients are sometimes strange: liverwurst and jelly beans have appeared in baskets along with things I’ve never heard about before.

I wonder if God feels like that sometimes: making something out of ingredients that don’t always work together. Think about the stories of Genesis. God makes a person, notes that the person is lonely and makes a partner. But faced with a choice about their own desires and God’s command, they choose themselves. So they lose their special place in God’s garden; God stitches them up some winter clothes and send them out. Pretty soon things degenerate into violence when one of their sons kills the other. The violence spreads until God has to start over.

There is the flood; God chooses Noah and his family, as we read last week, and makes a covenant with creation, a promise, to sustain it forever. But human beings soon go their own way again; pretty soon we read about people trying to be god-like again and God scatters them. So God starts over, not with a flood but with a family: Abram and Sarai. This is the story of how God started saving us; this is the story of God starting over with a covenant.

What is a covenant? It started as a mutual promise. One guy was bigger and tougher than another but at the same time big tough guys can’t constantly look over their shoulder. So as cities and kingdoms developed, agreements began to be made. All kingdoms, after all, are a kind of protection racket. Covenants began as promises between stronger and weaker kings where the weaker one promised to faithfully serve the stronger and the stronger promised to protect the weaker one.

Now, Torah imagines God doing something similar. Look, the story says—imagine the unimaginable powerful God starting over again, but this time with a particular family, this time not with mythic strides and swirling water, but with history itself. God reaches into history and chooses a particular person, a particular family a particular people. You: Abram! Sarai—you and your family, because no one then or now is alone—I choose you, and here’s the choice: I make a covenant with you.

What does it feel like to be chosen? It’s a mix, isn’t it? I’ve mentioned before I think what a bad baseball player I was growing up when the New York Yankees shone like the heavenly court over the lives of little boys in New Jersey. Still, I did get chosen, usually last. And I remember walking out to the inevitable outfield position worrying, hoping I wouldn’t mess up again.

Later on, as a minister, I’ve gone through the process several times of having a church choose me. That, after all, is how I came to be here, this morning: you chose me to be the pastor of this church. For better or worse, you said, “Come here and preach, come here and care for us, come here and lead our church.” And we covenanted together, pastor and people, church and minister.
Look at the covenant God makes with Abram and Sarai.

You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.
I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you.
I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.
[Genesis 17:5-7]

It’s all about the future. Here is the problem of human life: what’s coming next? What’s tomorrow and the day after and the week and month and year after that? Covenants are a way to look into the future and tame it. Here is God saying, “This is your future: you’re going to have descendants and they’re going to be communities, nations; you’re going to have a future that will include kings.” And most important of all, I’m going to be your God and their God forever.

Let that word just echo in you for a moment: forever. It’s scary, isn’t it? I think there is some moment in the lives of most of us when it dawns on us that we have some time but we don’t have forever. Maybe it’s when you read about the guy from high school you didn’t know too well but was always in your homeroom who suddenly died. Maybe it’s when you start paying attention to all the ads about aging. Maybe it’s something physical or spiritual or emotional. I call it the obituary moment. When we’re young, none of us read the obituaries; when we are seniors, we all read them, sometimes first.

Forever: it’s the question mark that hangs over us and we have lots of ways of dealing with it. I suppose the most common is to pile up a lot of stuff, whether we call it money or property or something else. Our church building is full of memorials: most of the pews have brass plaques and they are scattered all over. We name rooms: Palmer Hall, Hampton Lounge. But honestly? I suspect most of this is useless. We move on. Most of the newer members in this church have no idea who Ray Palmer was.

But here’s God offering another answer: forever is assured because of this covenant, not because of anything any of these people can do or will do. In fact, Abram and Sarai are not particularly exemplary people; Abram’s already had some shady dealings with the Pharaoh in Egypt and there’s the whole business of Hagar and his son Ishmael. But the covenant doesn’t depend on Abram; it depends on God. And God’s covenant is so overwhelming, so important that it changes anything, even his name, even Sarai’s name. From now on, they will be Abraham and Sarah.

Simone Weil, a writer who began life as a Jew and converted to Christianity, said,

If there is a God, it not an insignificant fact, but something that requires radical rethinking of every little thing. Your knowledge of God can’t be considered as one fact among many. You have to bring all the other facts into line with the fact of God.

Now I want you to notice another thing about this covenant: there are no particular guarantees. God doesn’t say, “I’m going to make you rich, or help the arthritis in your hands, or prevent you from being hurt or humbled.” God simply says: I”m always going to be your God—forever.

This covenant, this guarantee of the future, is behind Jesus’ life. Just before the section we read today, he explains to his disciples for the first time what it means to be the Christ: not the acclaim and world power of a prince but the cross of a man suffering as an outcast. Now he invites his followers to the same life: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” This is the new covenant he offers, and he offers it in the most profound way possible, with his very life itself. Later he will say, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” He walks a way that sheds everything, even the claim of connection to God—on the cross, he will cry out, feeling forsaken even by God. But God is faithful to the covenant and raises him on Easter.

This is what Jesus is trying to tell people. “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Years after Jesus’ earthly ministry, the church is looking back and imagining him saying this, years later when people have turned back, when people have turned away, when people have refused to listen. 
But the answer he offers to the ultimate problem of life itself and its limitation is still there Our lives are meant to be lived with God at the center, God’s covenant firmly in mind, faith in God’s presence and providence as constant as our breath.

The covenant God makes with Abraham and Sarah changes their lives. It sets them in motion. Whether in the right direction or wrong, whether doing the right thing or wrong, they are never the same. There is no turning back for them. To walk in the rainbow path of covenant is the same for us: there is no turning back, there is no reason to fear the future. We can’t assure the future with our stuff, we can’t assure the future with our accomplishments, we can’t assure the future with our fame. Only God’s everlasting covenant can assure future and we can only walk in that assurance when it becomes the guiding faith of our lives.

Martin Luther King, Jr., grew up as a young prince of the church in Atlanta. His father was a renowned preacher, seldom remembered today. He went to seminary in Pennsylvania and got his doctorate at the Boston University School of Theology. Almost by accident, he became a leader in the Civil Rights Movement but that movement became not only the greatest moral lens of the last century but his own legacy. Today we often forget that the movement and the man had their ups and downs. In April 1968, King was in Memphis, Tennesee, leading a struggle for justice for sanitation workers. He said at the conclusion of his speech one night,

…we’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end…I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.

The next day he was murdered. And yet who wouldn’t say that his life has gone on, who does justice today and doesn’t feel his spirit? He knew who controlled his future: his faith was in that God who is everlasting. So for him, there was no turning back.

This is the call of Christ: knowing God as the ultimate foundation of our future, no turning back. Knowing God as the ultimate light of love, no turning back. Knowing God as the ultimate faithful one, no turning back. Covenanted in Christ, forward in faith, no turning back.

Amen.

The title of this sermon was inspired by the song I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.