Tag Archives: grief

Do Over, Do Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

23rd Sunday After Pentecost • November 16, 2025

Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 21:5-19

“I want a do-over.” I was standing in the cockpit of my boat, trying to back out of the slip. There were two things different about this time. First, we had an audience; some friends had come over to say goodbye. Second, it had gone totally wrong. Jacquelyn cast off the lines at the front perfectly. I put the boat in reverse, all 17,000 pounds started to move backward, and then it stuck and swung the wrong way. Everyone hurried to help, but the boat didn’t respond. Finally, I figured out that I had left one of the lines on the stern tying us to the dock connected; as soon as I untied it, we were fine. But I looked ridiculous and created a dangerous situation and all in front of our friends. I wanted a do-over.

“I want a do-over.” The first time I remember hearing the phrase was from my son. We were playing with a basketball; some game where we took turns throwing it at a basket, trying to get to a score. He would miss and say, “I want a do-over” and come up with some excuse, some reason: he was off balance, the ball had slipped: something. Later on, I came to the same feeling on my own, mostly as a parent. No one prepared me for the fact that parenting was so arbitrary, s make-it-up-as-you-go. There were so many times I wanted a do-over. Have you ever felt that way?

I wonder if that is how God feels about the world: “I want a do-over”. In English, we have “Behold I make a new creation” but the Hebrew really says, “Look at me, I’m making a new heaven and earth.” The truth is, we don’t want a new creation and a new earth; we don’t want things to change. We want everything the way it is and has been but better, cheaper, more. I’ve spent most of my life working with churches that said they wanted to grow and what I’ve learned is that we don’t want to grow; we don’t want to change. We don’t want a new heaven and a new earth and a new church; we want what we remember because it’s comforting. What if we did get a new heaven and a new earth? What if we got a new church? What if we became a new church?

We have to understand the setting to which Isaiah brought the word we heard this morning. God’s people had been disastrously defeated 80 years or so before, a defeat that shook their souls as well as destroying their nation. Thousands became refugees and many were taken into captivity in the foreign city of Babylon. Ever since, God’s people have listened to their grandparents tell them, “In Jerusalem, the gardens were better…in Jerusalem, the weather was better…in Jerusalem, the temple was better”. Now the Persian king has released the Jews and some have returned to Jerusalem. But they’ve gone home to something like Berlin in 1945 or Gaza today: a wiped out city with ruined buildings. That’s the present; what is the future?

God is offering a vision here of where we are going. I’m making new heavens and earth and this is what it’s like: you’re going to enjoy it, you’re going to build houses and live in them, have a vineyard and enjoy its wine. It takes a long time for vineyards to bear fruit, but you’ll still be there. I’m going to be there, and I’m going to anticipate your every want. The wolf and the lamb are going to lie down, there is going to be peace, even the natural world is going to be at peace. That’s where we’re going; that’s what the do-over is for: that’s our destination. Don’t worry about the trip: God knows where we are going.

 What is our ultimate destination? We have this Word from the Lord, and it’s about where we’re going. I’ve lived most of my life along the great parallel defined by I-90, a road that begins in Boston, runs through New York, loops south to take account of the Great Lakes, runs through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Indiana, Chicago, up through Wisconsin and Minnesota, then across South Dakota and Montana, where it rises into the mountains and snakes through the passes of Idaho before it flows out into the desert of Eastern Washington, jumps the Columbia River and ends in Seattle. I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve lived in Boston, and no matter which I was in, I never forgot the one at the other end. I knew the road had a destination; I knew where it was going. 

The same faith flows through what Jesus says in the reading from Luke. Jesus is a rural person and so are most of his followers. Think how they must have been dazzled by Jerusalem; think how the big buildings, the sights, the sounds, the smells must have impressed them. They must have felt this was a permanent place. Yet now Jesus tells them it’s all going to be destroyed, desolated: “the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” 

Just 35 years or so after Jesus said this, it came true. Luke was written about 20 years after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Like the shock of Pearl Harbor or the towers falling on September 11, they are living in a moment of shocked grief when it must have seemed, as the poet Yeats said,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

He goes on to warn them about the immediate aftermath: violent times, demagogues, false

preachers, persecution. All these things have happened in the life and experience of the Luke’s

audience. Yet at the end Jesus invites them to this one faith: that in the love of God, there is permanent place: “…not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.” 

So: we know where we are going—what about now? What do we do now? Because we know it’s not like that now. The wolves and lambs are not lying down together now. What we are doing is living between the past and that vision. These readings have two ideas about what to do now. The first is to work here and now toward that vision. Someone said the Puritans were so effective because they believed everything depended on God but they acted like everything depended on them. They believed God’s faithfulness; they lived faithfully to God. 

Our future is in God’s hands. Our mission remains the same: to sustain here a community of care, where God’s love is evident in the embrace of people who have been embraced by Christ. The Rabbis say: if the Messiah comes, still finish your Torah study for the day. Work is the creative activity by which we are carrying out God’s will in the world. So we are called to work now, we are called to work here, for justice, for the embodiment of peace. We have been hearing this fall about the world changing effect of forgiveness. We have been hearing this fall about the world changing effect of finding the lost. We change the world when we do this now.

The second thing to do is witness. Luke is writing about 15 years after everything he says in this section has already happened. The temple is already destroyed; people are already being arrested for being Christian. What Luke understands to be our job in the present is to witness. Don’t worry about how you do it either, Luke says. This part always makes me smile at books on how to witness. How do you witness? Live your life: that’s your witness. Live your life in a way that allows Christ to make a difference. A number of social researchers have looked at Christians and others in terms of their behavior; what they find is being Christian often makes little  difference. Your witness is to let Christ make a difference in your life now.

Because Christ can make a difference, in good times, in bad times. In 1945, just before his execution by the Nazis for resistance, a German soldier wrote these words to his mother.

Dear Mother: Today, together with Jorgen, Nils and Ludwig, I was arraigned before a Military tribunal. We were condemned to death. I know that you are a courageous woman, and that you will bear this, but, hear me, it is not enough to bear it, you must also understand it. I am an insignificant thing, and my person will soon be forgotten, but the thought, the life, the inspiration that filled me will live on. You will meet them everywhere— in the trees at springtime, in people who cross your path, in a loving little smile. You will encounter that something which perhaps had value in me, you will cherish it and you will not forget me. And so I shall have a chance to grow, to become large and mature.

God’s work in the world through people who endure in faith is amazing.

The people that went into exile in Babylon did return and rebuild Jerusalem but they did something far more significant. While they were in exile, the stories, the teachings, the books we know as the Hebrew Scriptures were brought together and given their final form. The kings and armies and politics of that time are just obscure footnotes read by historians today. The scriptures they brought together have inspired three great faiths and people ever since. 

The little group, not as many as are here today, who heard Jesus and endured in their faith in him and his teaching and his vision of God’s reign saw the temple fall, experienced persecution, but they endured. They kept his memory; they became his body. Through all our stumbling history, that faith continues today and we are their inheritors. In our lives, in our witness, it has, as the resistance leader said, “…a chance to grow, to become large and mature.”

Where we are is not where we are going. Where we are going is in the hands of a God, beyond our vision of greatness or defeat. When we grieve, we should not do it as people without hope, as Paul says, but as people who have put their hope in the God who doesn’t fail. The creative God who when all seems dark still can say: “I’ll have a do-over: behold, a new creation.” Let us give thanks to God as we work, as we witness, as we wait for God to make the new creation.

Amen

The First Resurrection

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Mark 1:29-39

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Fifth Sunday in Epiphany/B • February 7, 2021

© 2021 All Rights Reserved 

Lost and Found

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures…

1Corinthians 15:3f

Not long after I moved to Albany, Jacquelyn and I got lost. We’d gotten the parsonage transformed from a house to a home and it was time to explore, so we went to Thatcher Park, out near the mountains, where you can see for miles and miles. It was a great trip and as we came down the mountain we were excited about our new home, talking, and taking what turned out to be the wrong turn.

Of course, we didn’t know it was the wrong turn, so we kept going. We had a GPS on the cell phone, after all. But soon it became clear we weren’t where we thought and the phone lost its signal and we had no idea how to get home. We finally did the most important thing to do when you’re lost: stop. When you’re lost, the most important thing you can do is stop getting more lost and figure out where you’ve been so you can get back to where you are going.

I thought of that recently as we moved again, this time to a new home in Harrisburg. One of the good things about moving is that you pull out all the old pictures you packed away and look at them before you put them away again. It reminds you of where you’ve been. So we’ve been seeing snapshots of the past, our past. There’s Paris, where we got engaged, our wedding, endless pictures of May when she was a cute little girl and more as she became a wonderful young woman. There’s Amy graduating from college and holding Maggie, her first chid, my first grandchild. There’s Jason as a boy, long before he had boys of his own. This is a time when so many of us feel lost; it’s good to stop and remember where we’ve been and it reminds me this is a moment that will not last, that we have somewhere still to go.

Jesus On the Way

Today’s Gospel reading is about Jesus on the way, Jesus just beginning his journey. He’s been baptized by John, he’s spent time in the wilderness. He’s started his mission, proclaiming, 

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. 

Mark 1:15

He’s begun to gather disciples in the port town of Capernaum. He preached his first sermon there and cast out a demon. Now Jesus and his friends have gone to Peter and Andrew’s home. But there’s trouble there; Peter’s mother-in-law is sick. I’ve always been fascinated with this brief narrative because it raises all kinds of questions. Think about it: your son-in-law, his brother, some friends and a new preacher all come to your house and you’re in bed with a fever. 

In the last few months, many of us have learned to be efficient at quarantines and distancing.  Last March, Jacquelyn was very sick for three weeks. We never knew if she had Covid-19 but we were careful. She stayed in the bedroom; I slept in a guest room. I brought her meals and left them outside the door; she texted to warn me if she was going to use the bathroom to shower. We know how this goes and along with the aches and pains of the fever, I know she must have had the crushing loneliness of a sickness that confines you. 

So it’s strange to find Jesus going to this woman’s bed side. When we add on the barriers of gender, it becomes even stranger. Men in Jesus’ culture simply don’t have anything to do with women they don’t know. We see this gender conflict several times in the story of Jesus, from his encounter at a well with a Samaritan woman to the story of a woman washing his feet with perfume. But Jesus banishes barriers: between sick and well, men and women, clean and unclean, righteous and sinner.

He goes to her and Mark says he took her by the hand and raised her up. It’s important to pay attention to the language here, to every single word. Because the word we read in English as “raised her up” is the same verb used for Jesus’ resurrection. Here he is, fresh off his first sermon, not long after making his first disciple, and now: the first resurrection. 

Resurrection has become a term we only use about Easter, about Jesus himself, but that’s not the way the New Testament uses it. Resurrection is a reality meant for all to share, according to Paul. He says about his own life, 

The First Resurrection

I want to know Christ* and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, 11if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal;  but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.

Philippians 3:10ff

Peter’s mother-in-law is the first resurrection and an invitation to all of us to live in a resurrection reality. The gateway is knowing that Jesus has taken your hand and taking his, recognizing in his resurrection the possibility of your own.

Finding Jesus

But how do you find Jesus? He says that in the final reckoning, we will be called together.

“Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

Matthew 25:39-40

There’s a story floating around Facebook that illustrates this. A man went out riding a nice bike one day. He’s practiced at this: it’s an expensive bike, he’s wearing the proper pants for riding and he puts his earphones in and has some great music playing while he rides. But something on the path punctured a tire; a piece of glass, a sharp stone, something, and he left his patch kit home. So instead of enjoying a swift, exhilarating ride, he’s forced to walk the bike, limping along, grumbling in his head. Along the way, the path goes under a bridge and there he encounters a guy who’s dirty and perhaps homeless. The guy says something but the bike rider doesn’t hear him, he just wants to get by. But he can’t, so finally he takes the earphones out and brusquely says, “What is it you want?

At that point, the homeless guy says, “I was trying to tell you I have a patch and some glue for your tire if you want to fix your bike.” They fix the bike; the rider goes on his way. But he can’t get over the encounter. He gets some food and clothing together and goes back to the bridge and gives the things to the man. Perhaps they talk; \you can imagine the rest. The bike rider experienced a resurrection that day. But he didn’t get it until he started listening. 

Paying Attention

We’ve come through a hard time and it’s not over yet. There’s sickness and grief and the threat of more. We’ve been passing through a wilderness. Even our life as a community has become sick. This past week, we saw the spectacle of a member of Congress having to be told that yes, children were really murdered in a school in Connecticut and yes, 9/11 really happened. We are hearing more and more about a conspiracy that sought to overturn an election through violence and lies. It’s a difficult time, a wilderness time. 

There are some lessons here for us. One is: Jesus raises up, Jesus intends resurrection. Over the last fifty years, we’ve seen an amazing decline in many churches. One reason is our fascination with guilt. It’s a paradox: Jesus preaches forgiveness but many churches encourage guilt. But guilt beats us down. Jesus intends to raise us up. 

A second lesson is that when Peter’s mother-in-law is raised, the text says that she served. Actually, the word used is the root of the word we use for Deacon, a common office in churches. Our own raising isn’t the end of the story, it’s the beginning. We are meant to go out, we are meant to go on, as Jesus sent his disciples, to raise others, heal others, give hope to others.

This is a wilderness time but we are not meant to live in the wilderness; we are meant to keep moving in hope, keep moving on the way toward God’s promise, keep following the star of Bethlehem with which the season of Epiphany began. 

Jesus says at several points, let those who have ears to hear, hear. That’s all the bike rider  had to do: listen. When you are lost, the first thing to do is to stop so you don’t get even more lost. The second thing is to remember you have ears to hear and listen for directions. We are not meant to live lost in the wilderness. Open your ears: hear the news of resurrection. Press on, press on to make it your own, Look for Jesus: he’s looking for you.

Amen

Easter 2B – The Owie Report

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The Owie Report

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor • © 2018

Second Sunday in Easter/B • April 8, 2018

Acts 4:32-35 • John 20:19-31

Click below to hear the sermon preached

My family was never close and I moved away when I went to college. So my two younger brothers and I never really knew each other as adults. When my dad died and we gathered, it was a strange experience. But what I remember most about that time is that we were all so wounded that it overcame our midwestern male refusal to admit we were in pain. In our grief, we had a night of sharing ourselves, connecting to each other.

Now when we listen to the stories of the disciples after the Easter, we hear how those around Jesus connected, were changed and began to share their lives in the way we now call the church. They connected in a new way to Jesus; they connected to each other. These stories are meant to teach us how to do it.

I want to skip the story about the first meeting encounter between the resurrected Lord and the disciples; we’ll come back to that in a few weeks, so here’s your chance to feel you’re a little ahead on things. I want to get to Thomas. It’s an odd story, isn’t it? Thomas is a twin; he’s often referred to this way, “Thomas the twin”. And this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of him. When the word comes to Jesus that his friend Lazarus is dying and Jesus tells his disciples he’s going back to see him, the disciples are scared; they just got out of there ahead of arrest. Thomas says, “Let’s go back and die with him.” It feels like an ironic comment. Next, when Jesus is speaking about his death and resurrection and he says, “You know where I’m going,” Thomas interrupts and says, “No, we don’t: we don’t know where you are going.” He is one of the few disciples quoted and his comments are a strange mix of irony and doubt.

Now we have this story near the end of the gospel. Sometimes we collapse the story of Easter into a day but the record of the early church is that instead, it was a progressive unfolding of revelation, understanding, and vision. We can see that in this story. John tells the story of the resurrection in three stages. First, Mary encounters Jesus in the garden. We’ll come back to that story next week. Next, Jesus appears to his disciples in a locked room and literally inspires them; we read that this morning and we’ll come back to it in a few weeks. Finally, a week later, the Lord appears again, seemingly specifically for Thomas, who was absent the first time.

Where was Thomas? We don’t know. I suppose we all miss meetings sometimes; we forget the date or something comes up. We get sick, we get late. Things happen. Surely the disciples are reeling in grief after the death of Jesus. The text says they met behind a locked door in fear. Their grief is overlaid with fear for their own lives. The Romans had a habit of sweeping up the followers of a movement and killing them all. Maybe Thomas was scared to be seen with this group. After all, Peter himself—we’ll get to him in a couple weeks—was so scared even while Jesus was on trial that he denied knowing him.

Still, Thomas has missed what might seem to be the most important meeting of his life. Think of how you would feel, a week later coming and finding out that at the meeting you missed, the risen Lord made an appearance. You were busy, you were hiding, you were grieving, you were crying, you were raging at the Romans and when the time for the meeting came, you just didn’t go, you stayed home, you hid out. Later, your friends tell you what happened; they’re positively glowing, transformed. It’s enough to make your whole day sour, isn’t it? That’s how I hear his first comment. His friends tell him how the Lord appeared; he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” [John 20:25]

Doesn’t Thomas stand for us? We read these stories of an empty tomb, a Risen Lord who wafts through locked doors and I wonder how we receive them? I wonder how we believe in this Risen Lord? Throughout the Easter stories, we hear hints of this problem. No one recognizes Jesus as the Risen Lord; no one makes the connection immediately. Mary of Magdala—we’ll talk about her next week—meets the Risen Lord in a garden near the empty tomb. Now if there is one part of the whole story about which the church seems to have been consistent, it is about Mary going to the tomb. Mark says so, as we read last week; Matthew also reports Mary discovering the empty tomb. Luke says, “…on the first day of the week, at early dawn, [the woman who had come with him from Galilee] came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.” That includes Mary.” John says, “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.”

But the stories of encounters with the Risen Lord are much less consistent. Mary meets him in a garden; the disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem, other stories speak of a meeting in Galilee. Paul says Jesus appeared first to Peter, then to the rest of the disciples, then to more than 500 others, finally to Paul himself. That last encounter with Paul would have been three or four years after the first Easter. The church remembers that they didn’t recognize or understand or believe Jesus as the Resurrected Lord immediately.

Now that may come as a stunning admission from a Christian pulpit: the first Christians didn’t immediately acclaim and believe Jesus was resurrected. Maybe you’ve had a hard time believing it as well; maybe you didn’t want to admit it. But right here in the Gospel of John Thomas admits it, Thomas proclaims it: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” [John 20:25] The church remembers there was this problem at the start, at the core: not everyone believed.

What changed Thomas? In the story, Jesus shows him his wounds. Think of that for a moment, imagine it. The Son of God could certainly produce a miracle, he could awe and inspire in a thousand ways. But he doesn’t. He could show Thomas heavenly beauty, he could appear in shining white as he did at the transfiguration, but instead, he shows him his wounds. He shows him the ugliest thing imaginable: the wounds of the cross, the holes in his hands and feet, the place where his side was pierced by a spear, the places where he was hurt, the wounds that made him cry out from the cross. Jesus tells him to touch these ugly, terrible wounds. He doesn’t; “My Lord and my God,” he proclaims. Seeing the wounds changes him; seeing the wounds makes him a follower.

We don’t often talk about wounds. I attended a Baptist church for a couple of years; it seemed like half the hymns there had the word “blood” somewhere in the lyrics. I grew up in a culture that said about our wounds, “Never complain, never explain.” Crying was a failure. I wasn’t prepared to talk about wounds and as a young pastor, I was often uncomfortable when others did. So often I wish I could go back to some of those folks and apologize; I know I didn’t offer them the solace of safely sharing their wounds.

For sharing our wounds does indeed transform us. The pattern Jesus offers works in our lives as well. Connection is what gives meaning to life and allows us to fully become the persons God hoped. Remember that in the story of our creation, right from the beginning, we were made to hold God’s hand with one hand and someone else with the other. But that kind of connection comes out of vulnerability. In a sense, we’re like a hamster on a wheel, caught in a circular problem: we need connection to make us feel safe to be vulnerable but connection comes from being vulnerable. One writer said,

The longing for connection to another soul is within us all already. It is waiting for our nurturing and our willingness to embrace vulnerability. It is through this knowledge that we can move closer towards our universal goal of love.


[Melissa Wilder Joyce, Huffington Post]

In this moment with Thomas, Jesus shows, the church remembers, how to transcend the problem of vulnerability and connection, how to get off the hamster wheel. It happens when he shares his wounds.

Many of you know that I’m a step-parent. The thing about being a step-parent is—you have to earn it. You aren’t automatically mom or dad; you’re Jim. You’re an awkward pause when someone asks the child with you who that man is. When I became the step-parent of my older kids, I had no idea how to earn them. So I tried various things; some worked some didn’t.

The one I remember most we called the owie report. My daughter Amy was a runner and a jumper and she constantly got scratches and little injuries. These were bandaged with great seriousness. And then every night, when I went to kiss her good night we would examine each one. We’d start with the oldest wounds. We’d discuss whether something was still an owie and then move on to more recent ones. Sometimes we’d replace old band-aids. All this was done with great solemnity. Each wound was offered; each was kissed. I did this for years. By the end, I was her parent. I still am.

Thomas saw Jesus’ wounds; he called out, “My God and my Lord.” It wasn’t a miracle that changed him, it wasn’t the fact of the resurrection, it was the wounds. His connection to Jesus was transformed and it transformed his life. He may have written down the sayings of Jesus that he remembered; he himself was remembered as a great apostle. When we trust God with our wounds, we discover a connection we cannot find any other way. For then we begin to understand indeed, as scripture says, that Jesus’ wounds are for us: he was wounded for us. And when we know this, when we believe it, we also understand him as our Lord.

Amen.