Tag Archives: Grace

The Cross

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2026

Good Friday/A • April 3, 2026

Matthew 27:32-44

Jesus has been preaching, teaching, casting out demons and healing broken lives throughout the region of Galilee. It’s a place broken by many divisions. In Galilee there are rich people who enjoy fabulous luxury; there are poor people literally starving. In Galilee there are devout Jews but there are many Gentile settlers as well. There are farmers but also manufacturers, weavers and potters and metal smiths. In Galilee Roman and Palestinian and Jew and many others as well live side by side and not always peacefully. There are slaves, citizens, outcasts and many people just trying to get through the day, to put bread on the table, raise their children, take care of their parents, and wondering if there isn’t something they are missing. It is in Galilee that Jesus first turns to his disciples to ask, “Who do people say I am?” and then, “Who do you say I am?” It is there that Peter exclaims, “You are the Christ, the anointed one of God”. And it is in Galilee that Jesus first speaks of the cross to come.

What is the cross? What does it mean to pick up your cross? What does it mean to follow Jesus with your cross? It’s difficult to extract the cross from the overlay of lore and tradition which surround it. It’s difficult to separate it from the meanings we have thrust upon it. Like an old piece of furniture finished and refinished and painted over, it takes careful effort to strip off all the surface layers and see the cross for itself, for what it truly is, and not mistake it for the decorations we have applied. Today crosses come in all shapes and sizes; they come in all kinds of materials. For us the cross is principally jewelry. It’s an ear ring, a pendant, a lapel pin. Clergy wear pectoral crosses: big ones that sit on the chest, perhaps hoping people will assume the bigger the cross, the more faithful the minister. For us the cross is pretty and empty and we put it on or take it off like a name tag.   

But the first century knew the cross for what it was: an image of death, a symbol of execution. The Jewish historian Josephus who lived in that time tells of thousands of crucifixions in the area of Jerusalem. Two thousand were crucified by the general Varius about the time of Jesus’ birth and five hundred a day for weeks were crucified by Titus in 70 AD during the Jewish war. In June 1968, the skeleton of a crucified man from the period was found in northeastern Jerusalem. He had died with his arms tied to a crossbar, with a foot nailed on either side of the upright, with legs unbroken and he was found with an iron nail still impaled in his right heel. Death for a crucified person does not come from the trauma of the nails; it comes from asphyxiation. The unsupported position of the body strains the diaphragm and eventually the person is unable to breathe. It is a long, painful death designed to terrify all who see it. The public nature of crucifixion was its essence. Crosses were guarded by the Romans to make sure that the victim was not rescued by friends or family. For a Jew, death on a cross carried an additional stigma. Deuteronomy provided that a man who was hung on a tree was cursed.  So a crucified Jew was not only dead but cast out as well from the covenant of Abraham. It was a spiritual death as well as a physical death.

This is the meaning we must extract from the cross. The cross is about death and degradation. It is the stripping away of dignity, it is the denial of humanness as well as the extinguishing of life. This is the cross; this is what it means. This is why Peter and the others reacted so strongly when Jesus said he was going to a cross; they were scared to death. No one had to tell anyone in the first century about the meaning of the cross. Crucifixions were common; all they had to do was walk out in a public place to see them, to hear the gasps of the victims and feel an involuntary prayer forming: “Thank God it’s not me”!

The cross is terrifying. So terrifying that other generations couldn’t stand to think about it. In the centuries after Jesus, crosses became more and more elaborate and more and more beautiful. The high art of the Middle Ages found its expression in the production of crucifixes and the working and reworking of the cross in gold and silver and with inlaid jewels. By the 1600s when a longing to return to the deeper, simpler, purer meaning of Christian faith swept England and our fathers and mothers in the faith, the early Reformed Christians, rode to war against the Church of England, they made a thorough going attempt to destroy these pretty crosses. All over England they melted them down, broke them apart, and closed the chapels which had housed them. No pretty gold or silver or brass cross ever adorned a Reformed communion table. Today we are reluctant to speak of this period; we don’t like to remember there were religious wars or that people died to free themselves from the dead hands of kings and popes and bishops. But we shouldn’t forget it; we should remember what they did and celebrate it. Every cross they destroyed, every pretty, jeweled, precious cross shaped artifact they destroyed was one step closer to recovering the bright hard light of the cross experience.

For the cross is not an object but an experience. The cross you wear is not the true cross: the cross on the table here is not the true cross. The true cross is our fear; the true cross is our excuse. The cross is what holds us back from God, the ultimate barrier to living as a covenant partner in the kingdom of God. Jesus and his first followers certainly knew this even if we do not. To them crosses weren’t beautiful; they were frightening. The call to carry a cross was a call to faith in the midst of fear, a call to bring even fear to God faithfully. The text of Jesus’ first prediction of his death contains this experience. Peter is basking in getting the right answer when Jesus speaks of the cross and he tries to argue with Jesus. Peter is scared! But Jesus tells him to get behind him, that is, not to be a barrier. The call to the kingdom of God is not all comfort; it is a call to face the threat of death. It is the call to a faith in life and the life giving power of God so complete that death—and the cross—lose their power.

For the cross is life and death. Jesus knows this: Jesus speaks of it. He says, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it” There is the choice: to hang on to your own life with your own two hands as hard and tight as you can, grasping and scratching with all your might what you will lose in the end—or to let go and believe you can live in the hands of God. To come to the cross, to the real cross, is to to face our own death, our own suffering, our own fear and embrace them; to believe that even there, God is present, to believe it even when there is no feeling of presence. 

The cross was not beautiful to Jesus or his followers. It was not a symbol of life, it was a concrete reminder of death. But it reminded them as well that even there, on a cross, on that symbol of the greatest, most violent, ultimate worldly power of their time, God was alive: God was present. The cross was not powerful because of its beauty; it became beautiful because they remembered the power of God had overcome it. There, faithful even to death, Jesus embraced God. To follow Jesus is to let go of the charm bracelet cross, the ear ring cross, the pectoral cross, the brass table cross and pick up a real one. It is to frankly and faithfully face fear and failure, accept what you cannot change not in despair but in faith that God can work even there. It is to accept your death but even more to offer your life to the transforming energy of God’s love. 

This is the true cross. It exists in only one place: the hearts of faithful Christians. We see its shadow from time to time. I see it in hospital rooms the night before an operation. I see it in the lives of people living their faith. The true cross is not pretty and does not hang on ears or walls; it does not sit on shelves or tables; it burns in the hearts of men and women who are being transformed because they are faithfully seeking to live the gospel. It is not the triumphant signal of victory; it is the last exit before the Kingdom. And when we have passed it, tthen we know that we are home with God where we belong, for as Paul said, if we have died with Christ, we shall certainly live with him. 

Amen

Conversations Before the Cross 3: Samaritan Woman

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Third Sunday in Lent/A • March 8, 2026

John 4:5-42

I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too?

Those words were written in the nineteenth century by Emily Dickinson but I wonder if they might not stand for the thoughts of the Samaritan Woman as she trudged down the hot dirt path to Jacob’s Well and saw a strange man sitting there. One more man who would by his averted glance, his sitting aside, demonstrate his contempt for her and all she was. One more person who would demonstrate indeed that he believed she was nobody. She’s walking down the path at the middle of the day, the sixth hour. It’s an odd time to fetch water; water is usually fetched at the beginning and end of the day by young women who gather happily at the well. This woman has set herself aside and comes at the middle of the day for reasons about which we can only wonder. She is a minority in a culture of disdain. She is nameless even here in the Gospel. She is a woman in a patriarchal society, she is a casualty of relationships. All these things are like boundaries around her. 

The boundary of Samaria: as much a psychological boundary as a national one, one of those boundaries human beings create which seems to outsiders  artificial and yet to those who observe it is crucial to identity. How many years have we heard about the troubles in Ireland and yet which of us could distinguish between an Irish Catholic and an Irish Protestant? But the distinction is life and death there. Years ago the television program Star Trek had a show in which the crew of the Enterprise visited a world of enormous conflict between two races who were half starkly white and half deeply black. Captain Kirk, trying to make peace, arranges a meeting between the leaders of the two factions. He says, “I don’t understand, you’re both half white, half black.” But both combatants look at him in amazement. “But Captain!”, one replies,  “He’s white on the right and black on the left; I’m black on the right and white on the left!”. Jesus asks the woman for a drink and she’s amazed!  “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?”  There she is with all her boundaries and someone enters her space. What do you think she expected? What do you expect when you, as a woman, walk into a public place and there is a strange and threatening man? I asked this question in Bible Class and every woman there said the same thing: “I’d avoid him”. She expects to avoid him, she expects to endure his silent contempt, she expects to be nobody. But he asks for a drink. And before he’s done, she’s begging him for living water. There’s nothing more basic than a drink of water. Jesus asks for a drink and the woman asks for living water, the woman who was nobody, the woman who was nobody. The church is looking back and this is what they are remembering: once I was nobody. “I once was lost and now am found”, we sing. I once was nobody and I had living water poured on me and I became someone. One by one Jesus crosses the boundaries that have isolated this woman. He asks for water as if she were a friend; he offers living water as if she were family. He makes the well again a place to share for her, though she had been alone. Jew, Samaritan—we’re both thirsty, he seems to say. She wants to talk theology: a way to put the boundaries back. “What about where we worship”, she asks; “worship in spirit wherever”, he replies—that’s what God really wants.

Finally, something happens that saves this from being theoretical and that’s the moment when he asks about her husband; that’s the moment when it becomes concrete, there’s a moment when it becomes personal. There’s a story about a woman in an evangelical church who was very judgmental. One day she got the Deacons to invite a noted fire and brimstone preacher to visit. He said, “God is going to judge everyone! Everyone who has take the Lord’s name in vain, you’re going to have God’s judgment!” “Amen!”, the woman shouted. “Everyone who has looked with lust is going to have God’s judgment!” he shouted. “Amen! Preach it!”, she said, rocking in her pew with her enthusiasm. “Everyone who gambles and plays bingo is going to have God’s judgment!”, he yelled. And the woman stopped rocking and said to her neighbor, the one who had won $5 just last night with her at bingo, “Well, now he’s stopped preaching and gone to meddling.” It’s one thing to talk about theology; it’s another thing to talk about personal things, private things. “Call your husband”, Jesus says. That’s personal. “I don’t have a husband”, the woman replies. Whatever this woman’s history, and the church has imagined all kinds of histories for her, we know this: she has been dumped. We know it because the text says she has had five husbands and under the law of the time, she couldn’t divorce anyone, women couldn’t divorce their husbands, so five men husbands have left her. What does Jesus say to her? We don’t know; the text doesn’t t tell us but it is clear that whatever he says, she comes away from the encounter with a tremendous sense of acceptance, a deep feeling of having been heard and cared for, because her response is to ask, “Can this be the Christ?” He knows her: from his knowledge, she takes the courage to know him

It is the experience Paul talks about:

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

God didn’t wait for us to get right, God came when we were sinners, when we were a mess. God already knew us. That affirmation about God is at the core of what it means to be Christian. Christian life doesn’t start when we know God nor is it founded on what we say about God. Christian life begins when we know God already knows us and loves us.

The church has all too often forgotten that we come from God’s knowledge of us to our knowledge of God. We have fenced the communion table, we have created boundaries which kept people like this woman out. I want to say this one thing about the communion table: the invitation is for sinners. This table is a symbol that God is coming to us where we are, to give us the possibility of going to what God hopes for us. This table is a place to receive the food that can nurture us. And what is that food? Not just bread and grape juice. These are just symbols. They are symbols of God’s nurture, they are symbols of God’s call to move beyond the boundaries, beyond what we are, to what we can become. 

Just like Jesus with the Samaritan Woman, every day we encounter people who don’t expect much from us. They don’t know you are a Christian; they don’t know you at all. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility of someone being nurtured. In every one of those encounters, there is the possibility to share the well, to share the living water. God has for each one of us, for me, for you, this plan: that you will be a blessing. And everything you need to be a blessing is right there if you will look around and see it. That looking around begins with the woman’s question. When she leaves Jesus, she says, “Can this be the Christ?” What do you think? Can it? Can you believe this is a Christ who can care for you despite all the boundaries?

What this finally means is: can you believe in hope? It’s frightening to believe in hope sometimes; it’s scary to believe in a hope beyond reason. The movie Shakespeare in Love is the story of the young Will Shakespeare writing a new play he calls Romeo and Ethel, which you may know more familiarly as Romeo and Juliet. The movie has a romantic subplot and several conspiracies which all gather momentum near the end, as the play is put on stage. There are all kinds of obstacles and as they occur people keep rushing up to the stage manager and wringing their hands. To each in turn he replies, “It will all work out”. “How”, they ask. “I don’t know” he says. It will all work out—How?—I don’t know: over and over again. That’s the hope Paul talks about; not a hope founded on reason, a hope founded on the faith that there is a God whose love is so powerful it can break the boundaries, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call out of nothing creation, there is a God whose love is so powerful it called Jesus Christ from death back to live, there is a God whose love is so powerful it can call you to the same life. Share it, live it, offer it, as living water, as you share the well this week. 

Amen

Conversations Before the Cross 1:

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Satan Speaks

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2026

First Sunday in Lent/A • February 22, 2006

Matthew 4:1-11

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

All of this is a prelude, it turns out, because no one gets to live in the best day of their life forever ,and for Jesus, the next day is terrible. It’s like living here, having it hit 50 degrees one day and then a couple of days later barely making 16. Ouch: things sure can turn around. In the life of Jesus, the turnaround is to go from heaven opening to being driven into the wilderness and going hungry for 40 days. No cake; no food at all. Just the dangerous, daunting, desert wilderness where all you can hear is your empty stomach begging to be filled. This is the site of temptation: this is where temptation always occurs, when we are empty. How can I get what I need? Isn’t that the question that leads to temptation? 

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

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

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

“If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.” This is the first test.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we want to find the adventure, we have to walk through the temptation and answer the question of who we are serving. 

This year, this season, this Lent, I hope to walk with you, listen to God’s Word, listen to the characters in the story, listen to their questions. Here is the first and most important and the tempter is asking it every single day: who are you serving? Rainer Rilke, a German poet, said in a letter to a young friend, 

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

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

Amen.

All Washed Up

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2026

Baptism of the Lord Sunday/A • January 11, 2026

Matthew 3:13-17

“How have I ever deserved such love?” A woman asks this question near the end of a movie called The Danish Girl and I wonder if it is Jesus’ question at his baptism.

 I imagine it as a hot day; this is desert country after all. The stories about John tell us there were crowds but what’s a crowd? Twenty people? A couple hundred? Thousands? We don’t know. John is a striking figure, a charismatic man filled with the Spirit of God, who speaks a fierce message, calling people to repentance. He’s on the shore of the Jordan River. This is the river that had to be crossed centuries before by God’s people to enter the promised land. This is the water that had to be waded, this is the stream that stood between them and the fulfillment in history of God’s love and covenant. Is there a line to be baptized? Did Jesus stand behind others as one after another they came to John, talked to John, heard him pray and then felt him forcefully plunge them into the water, let the water cover them like someone drowning, and then lift them up, wet, wondering what comes next, clean, ready for the next chapter? Now Jesus comes; now he looks at John, now their eyes make a private space only they understand. Now John is taking Jesus in his arms, as he has with all the others, now Jesus is plunged into the water, there is perhaps that instant of fear so instinctive when we are underwater, now he is lifted up and heaven opens, Jesus hears what we all want to hear, “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is baptism.

Baptism is rare here and in church life, we’ve become fussy about the rituals that surround it. We have considerable evidence for baptism, both of children and adults, in the early church. The Didache, a collection of sayings and teachings probably written about the same time as the New Testament says this about baptism.

Concerning baptism, you should baptize this way: After first explaining all things, baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in flowing water. But if you have no running water, baptize in other water; and if you cannot do so in cold water, then in warm. If you have very little, pour water three times on the head in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Before the baptism, both the baptizer and the candidate for baptism, plus any others who can, should fast. The candidate should fast for one or two days beforehand. [Didache, 7:1-4, found at http://www.paracletepress.com/didache.html]

This is great news if you’re one of those people who think details aren’t important; bad news if you’re a ritual maker. What it says is that the form of applying the water, the part that most interests us, doesn’t really matter. Use running water—if you’ve got it. Use a few drops if that’s all you’ve got. 

But if the details don’t matter, what does? The clues are in scripture. Isaiah says, 

But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.

This word is addressed to people who feel themselves lost. Every day the news shows us pictures of refugees from Gaza and other places. Israel had become refugees and this is God saying, “You’re not forgotten: you’re still mine.” There’s a reason every baptism begins with a question: “What name is given this child?” We name a person at baptism in a way that honors them uniquely but also connects them with a family, a heritage. Whose are you? You are God’s own child, regardless of your age. Baptism is a reminder we’re not on our own; we belong and we belong to someone, to God. In the visible church, here, we are meant to be the emblem of that belonging. We baptize because we recognize the person being baptized belongs to God. Belonging, then baptism.

But it’s also a response to fear. Swimming is taught to children these days and we forget that for most of history and still today in many places, people fear water. Water is dangerous. Once my son was teasing me about not playing sports; he talked about having the courage to go out on the soccer field, knowing he might get bruised. I pointed out that I sailed and commented, “Every year, some sailors die when they drown.” It was a poor joke yet it had a truth: water is dangerous. Baptism began as a way of making sacred what we feared. In John Irving’s novel, The World According to Garp, a family retreats to a home on the ocean shore in New Hampshire. There’s a beach and the children are warned about an undertow that can suck them down. Misunderstanding, the way children do, they call it “the undertoad”. I know about the undertoad. Once, long ago, I was on a beach in New Jersey, swimming while my parents watched a few yards away. The undertow—the undertoad!—caught me, swirled me around and I’ve never forgotten the fear of that moment. “When you pass the waters,” God says, “I will be with you”. When the undertoad grabs you, you will still be God’s.

But it’s not all water; baptism is more than being washed up and set down fresh and fancy. Acts tells the story of an early church mission. Someone has gone up to Samaria and baptized some folks there. They didn’t ask the Consistory, they didn’t follow the ritual, they just went ahead and did it. But somehow, the baptism wasn’t effective, and the disciples know this because there has been no evidence of the Holy Spirit among these folks. We don’t know what this means; we only have this little testimony. Yet clearly the early church knew that baptism wasn’t simply a human act of applying water; it had a deeper, transforming significance. Today, baptism has become about the water; God meant it to be about the Spirit, the breath, the wind that blows through life. In the beginning, Genesis says, the Spirit of God blew on the face of the waters and it’s from this ordering that creation follows. Baptism is meant to be a sign of a deeper spiritual blowing in us that causes us to live out the gentle, loving, forgiving way of Jesus. No amount of water can do that; it takes the Holy Spirit. Our task as baptized Christians is to nurture the presence and experience of that Spirit in those who come here, those God sends.

The final clue I want to call attention to this morning is simple and direct. At the end of the account of Jesus’ baptism, it says, “suddenly the heavens were opened”. We live in a world caught up in the details of earthly life: what to wear, eat, how to get through the day. What we miss if we forget our baptism is that heaven is open; God is calling. The question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?” has a simple answer: you don’t, you can’t. We don’t deserve love: it is pure gift, the gift of the God to whom we belong, whose children we are. If we believe we are indeed, God’s people, if God has given us the Spirit to bind us and energize us in living out love, if we know heaven is open to us, then indeed, we are loved in a way beyond deserving. You are my beloved, God says to Jesus: you are my beloved, God says to you.

The movie I mentioned earlier, The Danish Girl, is a fictionalized account of a real person, a man named Einar Wegener, married to Gerda, who discovered within himself a female identity he named Lili. It was a time and place with little understanding about such things the word ‘Transgender’ hadn’t even been invented and as Lili emerged and his life became living as Lili, as Einar receded and this woman became fully alive, he faced the conflict of being a woman living in a man’s body. At first treating this as a problem to be solved, Lili and Gerda struggled to find a way forward. Ultimately, Lili became the first person known to have undergone a series of operations to remake the body to match the identity as a woman. What’s clear from the real history, not as clear in the movie, is that there were years during which Lili faced the conflict of hiding her real self, living in shame, keeping the secret. Finally, near the end of the moveie, Lili sees how loved she is, asks the question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?”, and answers it in the only way it can be answered. “Last night I had the most beautiful dream…I dreamed I was a baby in my mother’s arms…and she looked down at me…and called me Lili.” The dream is being called by your true name: known in your true self. And loved. Like the mother in the dream, like our father in heaven, God is calling out to us, loving us, loving us beyond anything we can or ever will deserve. In the moment we see this, in the moment we know this, heaven does indeed open. And that is baptism. 

Amen.

Finders Keepers

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

All Saints Sunday • November 2, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Turn

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Reformation Sunday • October 26, 2025

Luke 18:9-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One writer said about this,

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

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

Amen.

The Very Bad, Awful GuyWho Got It Right

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Luke 16:1-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Making God Smile

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

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

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

Luke 15:1-10 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jeremiah 4:23-27]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Freedom Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Ninth Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 10, 2025

Luke 12:32-40  

Years ago, I was a high school track parent. My older daughter Amy was a lithe, fast girl. She ran sprints and she ran relay races. Now the thing about being a track parent is that the meets take hours and your kid, the one you want to see, be seen cheering, runs for maybe five or ten minutes. We lived in a small town, so I knew lots of people, many in my congregation, so a track meet was a chance to mingle, check-in with people, maybe talk to one of the Trustees. The problem was that it was so easy to get involved in doing the business of being a pastor that it was easy to miss Amy’s races. 100 yard dashes take place fast. They line up, bend over in the runner crouch, someone calls ready, set go, shoots of a phony gun and BAM! Ten or 15 seconds later the whole thing is over. It’s easy to miss; it’s easy to let every day things distract you. 

This is just what Jesus is talking about in the section we read today. Honestly?—I’m not sure why this set of verses was put together for reading; they don’t go together. So let’s take them apart and see how they can each feed us. The section begins with the startling statement, “”Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This verse really goes with what we read last week. Remember the parable of the rich fool who thought he could store up enough stuff to maintain his life? Instead of storing stuff, Jesus says God is giving us the whole kingdom. No bill: no payment, free gift, free grace. This verse and others like it led theologians like John Calvin, the originator of Reformed Churches, to talk about ‘violent grace’, by which they meant that God gives the grace of including us in the kingdom without our doing anything to earn it, whether we want it or not. This is freedom: freedom now, freedom to live in God’s kingdom.

If the kingdom is given as grace, what do we do then? We don’t have to work at earning it; we don’t need barns to store up grace. So Jesus tells this parable. Palestinian houses weren’t like ours, they were little fortresses. Frequently several families lived in one house. Think of those old U shaped motels our parents took us to when we were kids: a bunch of rooms, surrounding a central courtyard. The houses were walled because robbers were a constant threat. So at night, the main gate into the courtyard was shut up.

Now imagine the head of the house coming home late at night; Jesus says, coming from a wedding banquet. Wedding banquets could and did run for days at a time, so there’s no way of knowing when the head of the house will return. What’s the job of the servants? Their whole job is to be ready, whenever that return happens. “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit”, the parable says. Don’t be asleep, don’t be busy with something else, or you’ll miss it. 

What happens when you are ready and open the door to the Lord? “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” Wow! It’s a total reversal of things. Masters never serve slaves; what Jesus pictures is a total reversal of what we would expect that comes from being ready to serve. From the prophets to Jesus, the image of a banquet at which all are welcome is a fundamental picture of God’s kingdom. Here, the kingdom is recognized by being ready to serve, so the moment isn’t missed. 

What does this look like in practice? It might mean something small, like passing by the school supplies aisle and remembering we’re collecting such things this month. It might be saving someone’s life. The village of La Chambon in southeastern France is just a small place. Most of the people worship in the same Reformed tradition we do here. Instead of German Reformed, they are French Reformed, called Huguenots. Hundreds of years ago, they were persecuted by Roman Catholics and the Kings of France, and they haven’t forgotten. In 1940, when the Nazis defeated France, La Chambon was left in the unoccupied zone. But even there Jews were persecuted. Pastor André Trocmé and his congregation offered shelter to these refugees. Many were not French; no one cared. They put them up in private homes, in schools, in their church. They forged identity cards and ration cards for them; some of them were guided across the Swiss border to safety. From 1940 to 1944, they sheltered 5,000 people; 3,500 of them were Jews. A majority of them were children.

There was a cost. On February 13, 1943, Pastor Trocmé and his assistant were arrested and interned. They were eventually released but had to go into hiding. His cousin, Daniel Trocmé was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, whether he was murdered. Others who helped were shot by the Gestapo. In recent years, they have been recognized by France and by Israel, where they were honored by being included in a list of rescuers called the “Righteous of the Nations.” After talking with many residents, a filmmaker was so impressed with how they saw what they did as ordinary, that he said, 

“These days we seem to think that good people are those who agonize. They ” sleep on it” and maybe in the morning their conscience gets them to do the right thing. No- this idea is wrong. People who agonize don’t act. And people who act don’t agonize.” [LeChambon]

What’s needed is simply a moral readiness that doesn’t count political party or our own opinions, that only counts what is right, what path Jesus points out. 

Last Tuesday, I was in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel in heavy traffic. There are two lanes into the city and both were jammed; we were creeping along at 15 miles an hour, frequently stopping. Suddenly, far behind me, I saw flashing red lights, and then I heard a siren. An ambulance was trying to get through, and my first thought was, “No way it’s getting through.” Then I noticed something strange for city traffic: people were stopping, letting the left-hand lane drivers in ahead of them, clearing the lane. It all happened fast and suddenly the ambulance, with all its signs of emergency, was flashing past me. The kingdom comes like that. This is what Jesus is teaching, that the kingdom comes as a sudden, urgent, immediate moment and our job is to cooperate with it, move with it, help it to come. Like the servants in the parable, we are told: be ready, live ready, because kingdom moments come when we least expect them. 

In a few moments, we’ll release a group of butterflies, signs of hope, signs of fluttering beauty. But before they were butterflies, they were in a chrysalis, an enclosure. Then at some moment, each one pressed against the chrysalis, bursting it, freeing its wings, expanding them, ready to fly. That’s God’s invitation to us: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” The kingdom is coming; you don’t know when. Get ready; live ready, every day.  Amen.

Still I Rise

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A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor • © 2025

Easter Sunday Year C • April 20, 2025

Luke 24:1-12

Christmas begins with lights. On Christmas Eve, we gather here to look for the Lord, to celebrate his coming. The last thing we do is to light the candles. It’s a wonderful moment: celebrating the one who came as the light of the world, we pass the light, candle to handle, one to another until the whole room sparkles and we sing. But Easter begins in darkness. The last thing we do on Maundy Thursday is to extinguish the candles, remembering the darkness to come on Good Friday. So we come to Easter from the darkness.

Like a stage cleared in the final act of a play, John tells us the crowds have cleared out, first shouting, “Hosanna” for Jesus come as king, later demanding, “Crucify him!” when the Romans and the city authorities arrest him and put him on trial as a terrorist. Peter denies him in the courtyard of the jail. Killed on a cross in the gathering shadows of sunset that marks the beginning of the sabbath, his followers fade away. Finally, it’s left to a sympathetic rich man to provide for his burial and the body is stashed in a cave tomb, too late for preparation before shabbat, which starts as darkness begins and night takes over. Only now, in the darkness of the dawn, does anyone, a few women, venture to the tomb. They buy spices to prepare the body, to make the final arrangements and give some dignity to the dead. They are going to the grave and they’re worried that the stone closing it off will be too much to roll away; they’re worried they won’t be able to get in to where Jesus lies dead in the darkness. It’s early: John says, “while it was still dark” [John 20:1b]

The burial caves of Jerusalem are on a cliff wall. Imagine walking along the a cliff, as the darkness turns into dawn, slowly, carefully negotiating the turns in the path, watching just the steps ahead, not the whole path, unable to see around the next turn. Carefully, quietly, the women walk the path, stumbling here or there, clutching each other to keep from falling, arms full of the precious spices. They know a large stone blocks the entrance to the tomb and they are already trying to think of a way to move it. You see how like us they are? They have a problem: they’ve brought the things they will need to do their job and they are discussing how to deal with the biggest obstacle of all. Isn’t that what we do?

Now they come around the last curve. Are they still talking about the stone or has the nearness of the grave silenced them? Now they look toward the grave, discovering the problem they worried so much about isn’t there: the stone is moved. Who moved it? How did they do it? The women don’t know or seem to care. The grave is open; they walk slowly toward it, silent now I’m sure, they come to the entrance and, they enter the cave and suddenly the darkness lightens and in the light there is a person sitting, dressed in white, shining with it. They’re afraid: who wouldn’t be, they came to deal with a dead man, not a live angel. 

He says what angels always say: “Don’t be afraid.” He shows them where Jesus had lain, they see the grave clothes they had intended to anoint with their spices which won’t be needed after all. And he tells them what to do. The women run. Of course they run: wouldn’t you? “They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”, one account says. What about you? What about me? What are we to make of this story? 

Most importantly, that Easter is not only for Easter Sunday. The gospel of Mark starts, “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” All that follows, all the stories of Jesus’ ministry and teaching, the story of the cross, this story of Easter is prelude, just a beginning. The good news is that it’s not the end. In the failure of the worldly events, there is a space made by faith. In the vulnerability of the cross and the tomb, there is an empty place and God works in that wilderness, God is present in that wilderness, raising Jesus. The Pharisees cannot understand him, the Romans cannot kill him, his own followers cannot follow him but God’s grace is so powerful it can overcome all of them. Go home, the angel says: go back to Galilee. He’s not gone, he’s still here: “there you will see him.” Easter is a summons to see.

Maya Angelou is a poet who has seen in the long history of oppression of black people a reason for hope, an image of resurrection. She says, in part, 

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise. [Maya Angelou, Still I Rise]

There he is: rising in the sweep of history, bending history to the love of God, the justice of God a little bit every day. See him there: see his power there. See his resurrection there. To the violence of the Empire, of all empires, he says: “Still I rise.” 

But it’s not only in the big things that Jesus can be seen. Terry Marquardt wrote about grieving for her grandmother and remembered,

My aunt was with my grandmother during the last nights of her life, when the pain in her spine was so horrible that she hadn’t slept for two days, and the medication had stopped working, and she was beginning to lose hope. It was too much to lay down, so the two of them were sitting in the living room at 2:00 in the morning when my aunt had an idea.

“Mom, let’s have a party.”

“How could I possibly do that,” my grandmother said, motioning to her stiff body, kept awake by the sensation that it was being ground into dust.

“Let’s try,” my aunt said.

And she started to sing.

My aunt sang the Mennonite hymns my grandmother had taught her, songs from my grandmother’s childhood in a Mennonite farming community in northeastern Canada, songs that were sung in the fields, at their dinner tables, to greet the dawn, to end their day, on the way to church. My aunt and my grandmother sang all night long, until there was no pain, until my grandmother’s nurse woke up and tiptoed into the room. “I’ve never heard such beautiful music,” she cried.

View at Medium.com

In that moment, in those songs, her grandmother was rising, and they were rising with her.

We thought the problem was how to give Jesus a decent burial, how to roll the stone away. But it turns out that the stone we worried about is already rolled away; Jesus is gone ahead. The empty tomb is God’s message to the Emperor, to the soldiers, to the world, to the followers who have scattered that in the midst of death, still I rise. This is God saying, in the midst of betrayal, whether Judas and his double crossing kiss or Peter in his fearful denial, still I rise. This is God saying to the torturers and the prison guards and the judges and the crucifiers just following orders, still I rise. This is God saying that even when I feel abandoned on a cross and cry out asking why I’m forsaken, still I rise. This is God saying, even from a tomb closed up tight, still I rise.

This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. It starts with fearful followers running away. In the days that followed, every one of them had to decide what to do about the news that he had risen; every one had to decide how to live when the tomb was empty and despite the plain sense of his death, there was this amazing experience where it was clear that he was saying, “Still I rise”.  Every one of them had to decide whether to keep running or to rise with him, to look for him, follow him, to Galilee.

Where is Galilee? It’s where they came from, where they started. Jesus is going back to the beginning and starting over: that’s where they will see him. Their lives are about to start over because these lives are lived beyond the fear of death. The great question about the Christian movement of the first century is what powered it, what allowed it to change history. The answer is the people Jesus changed; the answer is the people who saw him rise and took his resurrection as the pattern for their own lives. Jesus was risen and they said with him, still I rise.

It’s the same with us. We are prepared to go to the grave; we are good at raising the money to buy spices, we can discuss how to move the stone. But are we ready to leave the grave and go to Galilee? Can we take Easter home, can we take it wherever we go? Still I rise, he says: despite what we thought, he calls us, invites us, forgives us, commands us. Come see me: come follow me. 

He’s gone ahead and when we see that, we’re ready to take the next step, to let go of our fears, accept his forgiveness and follow him. Easter isn’t a day, it’s an invitation: come see me. The gospels tell us how he appeared over and over to people, and his message is always the same: love one another, see me, follow me, because still, I rise: even when you don’t believe it, even when you don’t understand it, still I rise. Peter denied him but it’s Peter he calls back to tend his sheep. Mary ran in fear but it’s Mary who first meets him on the way. Thomas won’t believe him but it’s Thomas who feels his wounds. To the powerful who prey on the poor, his presence says: still I rise. To the hopeless who cannot find the way out of darkness, he says, “I am the light of the world”—still I rise. To us, to all of us, who come here, wondering, he says: still I rise. Come follow me. Come: because on your way, on your journey, you will see me: for still I rise. 

Amen