Tag Archives: Hope

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.

Pay Attention

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

16th Sunday After Pentecost/C • September 28, 2025

Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15 • 1 Timothy 6:6-19 • Luke 16:19-31

“Which side are you on? Which side are you on?” It’s a line from an old union organizing song; in my head I hear Pete Seeger singing it. But it’s also an ancient question it seems people have always asked. As far back as we know, our stories, our sagas, our poetry speak of sides. Homer’s Iliad, the great story of a war between Greeks and Trojans imagines sides, and the Bible is full of them: Hebrews and Egyptians, Israelites and Canaanites. Genesis traces our division all the way to the first brothers, Cain and Abel, with one being murdered. Which side are you on?

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus 

The story we read from Luke is the Jesus version of a much older parable. It was always obvious that life had immense inequities. Some are rich; some are poor; some live out on the couch of comfort while others huddle on cold cement. Like the parable we read last week, it begins, “There was a man…” Between that story and this one, we’ve skipped Jesus castigating the clergy there for their attachment to riches. Last week we heard about a dishonest manager who finally uses his dishonesty not to enrich himself but to make relationships; now we hear about another man, never named, who is already rich and doesn’t really understand that it’s relationships, not riches, God wants. 

The situation imagined in the parable is common. There is a rich man; there is a poor man. The rich man has good food, good friends, good everything. He feasts every day; he dresses like a king, for only kings could afford clothes made with the expensive purple dye. The poor man has nothing. He’s hungry and sick; he has the first-century version of no health insurance: he lies in the street with sores, unable to even fend off the dogs. His name is Lazarus, but he’s not the famous Lazarus resurrected by Jesus. He’s all the unhoused folks we see on street corners; he’s the person who lost their home and doesn’t even have a car to live in. 

But, we’re told, at death things reverse. Lazarus, the poor man, is carried to heaven by angels. The rich man? The text simply says: “He died”. In the afterlife, they find their fortunes reversed. The poor man cuddles in the lap of Father Abraham, the revered patriarch and companion of God; the rich man is in a place of torment. This is meant to be a metaphor, not an actual description of the after-life. Jesus has borrowed from the Greeks the concept of a two 

Long before Jesus, similar stories were told of a profound reversal of fortune. “Remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony,” Abraham says in response to the rich man’s complaint. The moral seems to be that God seeks a kind of even keel, a balance, and that the more unbalanced we are, the more we should look for reversal in the future. Be careful if your side is up: in the cycle of life, up comes just before down.

Beyond the Story

Other ancient Near Eastern versions of this story end here, with balance restored and the positions of the men reversed. What’s truly curious about this story is how Jesus has used the story to go on and make a profound point about our relationship with God. Consider the conversation in the afterlife. 

What’s clear almost immediately is that the rich man has learned nothing. He tells Abraham to send Lazarus to get him a drink, as if he still was in charge, as if even there, his comfort was the most important priority. When he is refused, he still doesn’t understand the new state of things; “…then send Lazarus to warn my brothers,” the rich man says. Even here, the rich man can’t see Lazarus as anything but a servant, a means of getting what he wants. Abraham replies that his brothers have Moses and the prophets, a way of saying, they have the scriptures. “But if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent,”

But will they? What will it take to get some attention, some attention for God, some attention for God’s purpose and rules? This story is being remembered and told in a church with amazing similarities to ours. The first century was a time of cultural ferment. All around the people for whom Luke’s gospel were written was a rich cultural buffet with many options. Philosophers and preachers held forth on street corners. It was a prosperous time and some were rich; many were poor. Rome made peace throughout the Mediterranean world and trade thrives in peace time. We know that in the time Luke’s gospel was first read, items from Spain were found in Palestine, Egyptian wheat was eaten in Rome, British goods traveled to Iran and the world was full of choices. But in a world of choices, a noisy world full of the clamor of the market, how is it possible to hear God’s voice and God’s word?

Pay Attention Please

Paul makes the same point in a letter to Timothy. Perhaps the most misquoted verse in the entire Bible is Paul’s statement that “…the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil…” [1 Timothy 6:10] Sometimes we say, “Money is the root of all evil,” but that’s not what Paul has in mind. He knows that money itself has no moral value, it’s just a way of keeping score. Money is an energy stored: so much work, so much sold, so much earned. It isn’t money that’s evil; the evil comes from fixing our focus on money. 

What Paul knows is that anything in this world that so occupies us, so consumes us, so captures us, takes our attention from God. That’s what he means to address and that’s what Jesus is lifting up as well. God wants our attention. The ministry of Jesus, the preaching of the prophets, all are a way of God saying to us, “Pay attention please!”

Here is the issue, presented at the end of the parable: if someone comes back from the dead, will even that be enough to get our attention? This is a Christian scripture; this is a Christian question. We gather every Easter to say, “Christ is risen, he is risen indeed,” but is even that enough to get our attention? But then we look at our calendar, we look at our checkbook, we hear the voices of all those who want us to do something, and we begin to respond. Someone needs a ride; someone needs a job done. We make their approval or material things or some other worldly thing become our goal, and it draws us like the North Pole draws a compass. In the midst of it, the voice of God is often lost. Even our religious life can become a part of the noise. American religion increasingly is about what we do. In many churches, the whole emphasis is on getting saved, saying the right formula. Our prayers become to-do lists for God, delegated duties that are beyond our ability.

But what is God saying in the midst of all this noise? God is saying pay attention. And we will never hear the rest until we do pay attention. The first act of faith is not to memorize a catechism or believe something, it is to take God seriously enough to stop doing, stop saying, and start paying attention. The first act of faith is not to say your prayers; it is to stop and listen The first act of prayer is not to ask, it is to listen.

Jesus Listened

Jesus listened, and the amazing thing is that he heard both Lazarus and the rich man. He heard God erasing the sides, refusing the sides: he saw that to God they were one people, regarded with one love. He heard the suffering of the Lazaruses of this world, of course, and all the accounts of his ministry include healing. But he also heard the desperation of the rich ones too. He never stopped listening to the Pharisees, even when they opposed him. He tells them this story: they are the audience here. He invited them to stop choosing sides and follow God in choosing to share with each other, forgive each other, embrace each other.

Which side are you on? It’s second nature for us to choose sides. We do it in sports, we do it in music, clothing, style. When I bought a Nikon camera years ago, I discovered I hadn’t just bought a camera, I had become a part of the Nikon tribe; there were people who got angry at me because I had that brand of camera. We do it in our politics. The last Presidential election was particularly nasty. I see people losing friendships because of it. Now I love politics, I’ve been involved as a volunteer and sometimes a professional for years. But here it has no place; this is not a place for choosing sides, this is a place for paying attention to God.

Following Jesus 

I want to follow Jesus. Following Jesus means first, paying attention to God. When I pay attention to God, what I see is that God is beyond the sides. God is beyond the divisions. Our God is the God of all: rich and poor, alike. So the more we can do to live as binders together, stepping over the division of sides, the more we will find ourselves following in the footsteps of Jesus. That’s why our church continuously offers a chance to do things that recognize people. We do it individually when we baptize someone. We do it when we act in mission together, as we’ve done with the Christian Churches United. We do it individually when we bring a coat or some food. All these are ways of paying attention to God’s call in Jesus Christ to mutual care.

Which side are you on? Only when we realize the sides are just human inventions will we finally find ourselves where God has been all the time: beyond the sides, caring for all, listening to all, loving all. And it is when we know how God has loved all that we also come to the most powerful realization of all: that God loves each of us.

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.

By Faith

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Tenth Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 17, 2025

Jeremiah 23:23-29  • Hebrews 11:29-12:2 • Luke 12:49-56

…since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us [Hebrews 12:1]

What witnesses surround you? We all live with them, we remember them in stories, we are guided by examples. Do you have a favorite recipe you got from your mom? Maybe a teacher helped you imagine your adult life. Sometimes those witnesses are very present; sometimes we’re not even conscious of how they influence us. Our church has a family story as well and Susan Nelson works so hard at gathering and maintaining the materials that tell that story; we all owe her a great debt. I often take a moment to look at the model of the log church, our original meeting house, and wonder about the people who worshiped there. I wonder if one day another pastor of this church will look back at this time and wonder about it as he or she hears stories about Pastor Sue and how she was such a blessing here after a long search. It’s good for us to share stories and that’s just what the writer of Hebrews is doing in today’s reading.

This section actually started back with what we read last week. Even before that, the writer begins, “Now, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” [Heb 11:1] Then the writer begins all the way back with Abel, moves through Noah and Abraham, includes Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, Moses and the Exodus, and then through all those mentioned in today’s reading. Hebrews is part of the earliest church and most of the Christians for whom this was written are Jews; this is their family story. Not all the names and stories are as familiar to us: do you remember Rahab? She helped Joshua spy out Jericho. Gideon defeated the Midianites and tore down altars to Baal. Samuel was the judge in Israel who first anointed a king and David is the great emblem of a godly King. These are the family stories; these are the witnesses, the ones who stand behind these Christians who are hearing this just as we heard it read today. “This is who you are,” the writer is saying—to them, and to us.

Who is hearing this sermon? We think that Hebrews was written about 60 AD, so it’s about 30 years after Jesus has ascended. There may have been about 6,000 Christians, mostly in Jerusalem and the eastern Mediterranean. There are churches in Greece, probably in Rome. They’re having a tough time. Most are Jews; some are converts from the worship of other gods. Now Roman gods weren’t simply religious; they were part of the civic life of places. Each city had a patron god and, they were worshiped at festivals. We see the same thing today in many places where the label is Christian, but the real theology is politics. So Christians were seen as unpatriotic. 

Being unpatriotic means you could get in trouble with the Roman authorities. Christians were persecuted in some times and places; we have legends of martyrs from the period, beginning with Stephen who was stoned to death. This is part of the family story too: Hebrews says, 

Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented— [Heb 12:35b-37]

This is the family story: it goes way back to Abraham and Sarah, it comes forward to friends in prison, friends stoned, friends who have died for their faith. They know that faith in Christ is not easy; they know it can mean division. 

These are the people for whom this was written; these are also the people for whom Luke is offering the sayings from Jesus we heard this morning. It’s a strange passage, isn’t it? Luke in particular goes out of his way to call Jesus, “the prince of peace”. Yet there’s nothing peaceful here. “I have come to cast fire upon the earth,” he says. Wow! Umm… no, thanks? What we’d really like is just to live out our lives peacefully? Fire is scary. 

Yet there’s a great truth here. Fire can be violent and deadly, but in the ancient world especially, it’s thought of as a way of purifying. We still do this; if something happens with the drinking water in the pipes, we’re told, “Boil water” and the way we do that is by lighting some kind of fire or heat. Jesus talks about division as well, and that can scare us. The Roman world was patriarchal; families were ruled by the eldest male. I can’t imagine he was pleased when some family members became Christians. I remember the early 1960s when boys grew their hair out to look like the Beatles. Just long hair was enough to set off my dad and most other dads.

So here is the little group of Christians, some divided from families, some afraid to go to family dinners like Thanksgiving because they are divided from the family. The writer of Hebrews is reminding them that there is a long family story of faith of which they are a part. They are not alone; they are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. 

Now that’s a lesson for us as well. We are living in a time of great division. Churches have divided over issues like marriage for all, over politics, over whether to have a praise band and so many other things. In the midst of the arguing, Hebrews wants to remind us: we are not alone, we have a cloud of witnesses, watching, sustaining us. And they hope we will simply look to Jesus, Hebrews calls him the pioneer and perfecter of faith. It doesn’t matter that we don’t agree about the length of hair, or the type of music; it doesn’t matter that we vote for different people; it doesn’t matter that we don’t agree about other things. What matters is one thing: are we following Jesus? 

In a few moments, we will share communion. I hope you see the others here sharing this symbolic meal. I don’t mean just the people in this room but the others as well who are sitting with us. The few who came here so many years ago and began this church; the ones before them, who inspired them, taught them. The one who will come after us. I hope you see the cloud of witnesses.

…since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us [Hebrews 12:1]

So indeed: let us run that race, following Jesus, knowing we are part of the cloud of witnesses to the love of God in this place.

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

The Covenant

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The Covenant

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Second Sunday in Lent/C • March 16, 2025

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

“After these things…” That’s how our reading from Genesis began this morning. It flew by, so I want to lift it up to make sure we don’t miss it. “After these things…” In a sense, all these readings occur “after these things”. Paul’s letter to the Philippians comes after he’s been their pastor and friend; now he’s under arrest in another city, sitting in jail. The gospel reading comes after Jesus has been teaching and healing and most of it occurs after some Pharisees warn him the Herod wants to have him killed; it’s startling when you get a death threat. The story we read in Genesis occurs after a war. Abram’s nephew, Lot, had been captured; Abram successfully led his version of Seal Team 6 to rescue him. It’s also long after Abram has felt God’s call, left his home, spent some time in Egypt and now is prospering as a leader of a tribe of herders. It’s also after Abram has felt God failed him.

“After these things…” describes our gathering as well. We’ve all lived years and years before we got here, and we’ve all had a week of doing whatever we did. Yet here we are gathered again. What did you hope when you came today? What I hope every Sunday when we gather is that we will encounter God here; that God’s Spirit will move in your hearts and mine, so that after these things, we are ready for another week, another month, another time. So today, come with me as we listen to the story of the covenant God made with Abram, the foundation of all God’s promises.

“After these things…” let’s go back and remember some of these things. Genesis starts out in what scholars call mythic time. Myth doesn’t mean it isn’t true; it means that our regular world rules don’t apply. So we have stories of creation, we have stories of how everything began, people live incredibly long lives, there’s a flood that wipes out everything except Noah and his family and God promises never to wipe out the world again. After all these things, God begins to work in history and the person God begins with is Abram. Abram is called, just like we are called, and Abram’s call is to go forth. When he does, God says, he will have unlimited generation and land and God’s presence. 

So Abram does go forth, along with his wife, Sarai, and his family. They start out in Ur, a real city, once located on the Euphrates river, in what is now southern Iraq. They end up in Egypt and later leave. Now they’re in the Kidron valley, near where Jerusalem sits today. He’s fought a battle and won; the king of the area has come offering peace. It’s been years since that original call and Abram has done well, but there is no child, no baby representing God’s fulfillment of the original promise. “After these things” is where we pick up the story.

Personally, I can’t escape the feeling that at the beginning of this section, God is gloating: “Don’t be afraid, Abram, I’m your shield…”, God says. Maybe Abram is still recovering from the shock of battle, the surprise and relief of victory. But he’s sharp enough to ask difficult questions. So he asks God, “What about the promise of a child?” He points out that God promised this and Sarai isn’t getting younger; if there’s no child, someone in his household is going to inherit everything. God’s answer is: “Come outside!—Look at creation, look at the stars!—that’s how many descendants you’ll have!” Psalm 19 says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” [Psalm 19:1f] Abram’s been given a glimpse of the glory of God.

Abram believes God. “The Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”, the text says. It’s such a short, simple sentence. Righteousness means right relationship, having the right heart in the moment, having the right relationship. Abram doesn’t do anything: it’s all free gift, all God’s initiative. There’s no transaction here, no pay for service. Abram doesn’t give God anything; he simply believes God. All of our reformed theology is built on this moment, this example. We believe that our relationship with God depends not on what we do, but on whom we believe. Abram believes God—God calls him righteous. What’s true for Abram is true for us, as well.  God doesn’t 

Abram also questions God about the promise of land and that’s where we learn about the covenant. Covenants are intentional promises. It’s confusing in the text: all this stuff about animals cut in half is foreign to us. When we make contracts, we often go to a lawyer’s office or a conference room, someone sits and hands us a bunch of papers to sign. But when kings in the ancient world were making treaties or promises, the question in the background was always, “Who’s going to enforce it?” So we know that ceremonies similar to this one were held at times. The point is to call down on the person making the covenant a curse if it’s not performed. What we see is that Abram prepares the covenant and guards it, but at the moment, he’s asleep. God freely makes a covenant, sealing the promise given years before. 

This is the beginning of God’s work with people that leads to us. It’s a foundation for everything that comes later. Later, Abram’s descendants will multiply. They will go into slavery in Egypt, but God will hear their cries and save them, send them on an exodus out of there and into the land promised here. Later, Abram’s descendants will demand a king and the king will do what kings do: oppress them and involve them in wars. Later, prophets will come reminding them of this covenant and still later Jesus will come. And when he’s told Herod wants to kill him, he will smile because he knows this covenant; he knows that he’s acting after these things. And he will weep over Jerusalem instead, and its history of violence and refusal to listen to God. Why is he weeping? Because of the failure to fulfill the third part of God’s promise to Abram, the part not mentioned here: to make Abram a means of spreading blessing through the whole world. What did God want? Jesus says, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” [Luke 13:34b]

This covenant is what is renewed in Jesus Christ. Every time we share communion, we remember his words, how he took a cup, gave thanks, and said, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” The covenant includes us and invites us. It is God’s promos of presence and care throughout all times, throughout our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. But a covenant is two-sided: God is one, we are the other. Every day asks whether we are living from this covenant or from the world’s seductive promise that we can be enough in ourselves, that we can earn righteousness and safety. Every day asks which road we will choose, whether to believe God’s care for all or to choose to divide people into categories and see some as less and ourselves as more. 

There is a famous Native American story that depicts this choice. This is the story.

An old Cherokee Indian chief was teaching his grandson about life.

He said, “A fight is going on inside me,” he told the young boy, “a fight between two wolves.

The Dark one is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The Light Wolf is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you grandson…and inside of every other person on the face of this earth.”

The grandson ponders this for a moment and then asked, “Grandfather, which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee smiled and simply said, “The one you feed”.
[https://www.michelleweimer.com/blog/two-wolves]

Every day asks: which wolf are you feeding? Every day asks: are you living in God’s covenant? Every day, every one of us, answers. 

The story of the covenant began, “After these things…” Isn’t that where we all live?—after many, many things. But we also live before things and these ask: what will you choose? Which wolf will you feed? What road will you walk? This season of Lent is meant to remind us of our call and our covenant so that wherever we have been, wherever we go, we may walk the way of Christ, following him, believing God, seeking God’s reign in our lives and our world.

Amen

The Facts of Life

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Sixth Sunday After Epiphany/C • February 16, 2025

Jeremiah 17:5-10 * Luke 6:17-26

We shall not, We shall not be moved,
We shall not, We shall not be moved.
Just like a tree that’s planted by the water,
we shall not be moved.

This song is so resonant for me. Mavis Staples is a gospel and R&B singer who sings a version of this song and tells a story with it. When she was young, she was one of those brave young people who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Birmingham. She talks about going with a group to a café in the still segregated city, sitting down, hungry, waiting for the server. The server told them to leave and called the police. Can you imagine being a black kid in Birmingham, hearing police sirens, knowing the long history of violence against black people there by police? Can you imagine how scared they were? What do you do when you’re scared? What these people did was to sing this song: “We shall not, we shall not, we shall not be moved. Just like a tree, that’s planted by the water, we shall not be moved.” What they did was simple: they turned at that moment of fear to faith in God. They trusted God and their faith and the faith of others moved an entire nation that summer. The song was a prayer, and they ran to God in that prayer. Where do you run when you’re afraid? 

Jeremiah was a prophet in a troubled time. God’s people were being led by kings who ignored God’s way. They believed God would always rescue them from powerful foreign armies. Jeremiah said no: that their faithlessness would lead to disaster. Just like the kids in Birmingham, he goes to a familiar form to make his point. In his time, a kind of preaching called Wisdom was well known. Wisdom preaching often sets out two different ways, one is faithless, one is faithful. That’s what Jeremiah is doing in the portion we read this morning. Those who trust in mortals, he says, are trusting the wrong thing. He compares them to a familiar scene: shrubs in the desert who get blown away because they aren’t rooted deeply. It must have been a common sight; it is today out west in Montana, in some parts of Texas and New Mexico. Whole bushes can be seen tumbling.

But those who put their faith in God, Jeremiah says, are like tough trees who put down deep roots. Anyone who’s ever tried to remove a tree knows what he means. Cut down the trunk, and you’re not even halfway done. You’re left with a stump and under it perhaps a dozen big, thick taproots that lead to hundreds of smaller roots. Some of them go deep; some go horizontally. Removing them is a long, tough job. Trees planted by water are sustained by underground streams and stand up even in drought. They are sure, they are certain. They are something to cling to when the wind blows, when fear comes. Jeremiah announces this choice not as a set of options, not as possibilities but simply as facts, the facts of spiritual life. Put your faith in human things, and you’ll become like a tumbleweed; put your faith in God and you have something sure to hold on to even in tough times. It’s the meaning in the song: “We shall not be moved, just like a tree that’s planted by the water.”

Jesus is also announcing facts of spiritual life. Matthew also has a version of this story; some scholars believe this version in Luke is the oldest, the closest to Jesus’ original words. He’s in a level place and Luke tells us that people from all over have come to him. Tyre and Sidon are up north, outside the country; it’s like saying, “People from Toronto”. People from all over Judea are there; those are locals. And there are the urban folks from Jerusalem. They press close and try to touch him. Today, they’d be trying to get selfies with him. But here in this place what they want is healing and exorcism. This is the three-fold ministry we read about over and over in Jesus’ life: teaching, healing, freeing people from demons. Just before this reading, he has named a group of 12 disciples; now he gathers them close, and he teaches them the facts of spiritual life. 

I imagine they were surprised, don’t you? Blessing isn’t something anyone thinks of for the poor, the hungry, those weeping in grief. Blessing isn’t something anyone thinks of for those who are ostracized, who are excluded, who are hated. Matthew took this teaching and softens it by adding “in spirit” to poor; He makes the hunger about righteousness. But I wonder if the scholars aren’t right; nothing is soft in the teaching of Jesus. That’s why people get mad. So let’s take him on his own terms, how is it possible to see blessing in these conditions?

Annie Dillard is a writer who has a wonderful thought about what she calls, “a healthy poverty”. She says,

When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason, I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions.

After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny?

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. [https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=2312]

Just like Jesus, we live in a culture that has put enormous stress on wealth and connected it to power. But where does faith in wealth lead? We’ve seen so many times from the Great Depression in the 1930s to the Housing Bust of the 2000s to know that faith in wealth makes us tumbleweeds. A healthy poverty is to focus on what we need, not what we want; on what is enough, not always more.

There is a blessing sometimes found in hunger, too. When I was young and in seminary, I managed for the one and only time in my life to buy a new car, a Ford Pinto in that weird, fluorescent blue. I had the car two days and then, pulling away from a curb, someone plowed into it and crushed the driver side. The car operated, but the door didn’t, so I had to crawl into the driver seat from the right. I had insurance, but I didn’t have the money for the deductible. So I stopped having lunch for a summer to save that up. It was hard, but eventually I got there and fixed the car. Some years later, my dad and I were talking about hard times; he was a depression kid who had lots of stories. I told him my story. Now, my dad had a rule he had announced for years when I was young: once you get married, and you’re on your own, don’t come back looking for help. I’d taken him at his word. When I told the story, he was upset. “I would never have had you go hungry,” he said; “Why didn’t you tell me?” I reminded him about his rule and I saw something I recognize now, as a father myself, and mumbled, “I never meant you to go hungry.” That moment changed our relationship. My father was one of those guys whose first adult experience was as a soldier in World War II; he was focused on work, he frequently told us the family was like the army, mom was the sergeant, he was the officer. But after that moment, he began to be more interested in my life, less directive; less about rules, more about caring. That summer of hunger turned out to be a blessing because it drew us together.

No one seeks poverty, no one seeks hunger, no one seeks grief, yet there are moments that can come from these occasions that do bless our lives. A penny isn’t much. It’s so little that they are going away, but as Annie Dillard says, if finding a penny will make your day, you are in for a lot of good days because the world is strewn with pennies. There’s a depression era song, “Pennies from heaven”. The song says,

Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven
Don’t you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven?
You’ll find your fortune’s fallin’ all over the town
Be sure that your umbrella is upside down

The facts of spiritual life are that God has sprinkled life with blessings—if we are looking for them. Looking for them means trusting God, not human institutions and persons. Looking for blessings means being alive to God in every occasion. If we live this way, the light of God’s presence becomes clearer and clearer. And we become indeed, like trees planted by the water, strong and secure, growing in God’s way. Amen.

Here I Am

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Fifth Sunday After Epiphany/Year C • February 9, 2025

Isaiah 6:1-8 * 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 * Luke 5:1-11

My favorite place in Spain is a little fishing village named Cambrils. Now, all fishing villages have a common layout, so imagine this scene being like that. There are the houses and churches and plazas to gather and then closer to the water various shops and cafés. In a working village, there would be the smell of seaweed and rotting fish from the bits and pieces that fall off. You know what the shore smells like. Then there is a road, an open area, just in from the sea itself. Then there are the docks and the boats. There are gulls wheeling in the air over it the road and the docks, diving occasionally to find some speck of food. And then, of course, endlessly moving, always changing, there is the water. Jesus has gone to a fishing village to teach and heal and exorcize demons. Just like the story we read last week, people gather to hear him and marvel at his teaching. What they don’t know is that something incredible is about to happen. Did you see it? 

Today we’ve read three stories of how people just like us came to be called by God. There’s Isaiah, one of the greatest prophets of Israel. We think he was a priest in the temple, and he tells this fearful story of monstrous looking seraphim and a brazier from which a coal is plucked to touch his lips and purify his speaking. Wow: at my ordination a bunch of ministers, some of them so old they could barely get up after they knelt, laid their hands on me while a prayer was offered—I’m glad I didn’t have Isaiah’s initiation. Yet there is the same interplay, the same Lord asking, “Who will go?” And one person, Isaiah in this story, me at that ordination, saying “Here am I, send me.”

The portion of First Corinthians is also a call story, although it may not seem so at first glance. Paul has been dealing with the divisions in that congregation, divisions caused in part by others coming and perhaps teaching them something different from what they’d heard from Paul. So he quotes to them the bedrock of Christian faith. Scholars tell us that this looks like something already familiar, like the lords’ prayer. If that’s true, clearly it settled down early, because this letter was probably written about 20 years after Jesus. 

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 and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. [1 Corinthians 15:3-8]

The striking thing about this is that it mixes things we hear other places, like the appearance of the resurrected Christ to Cephas, another name for Peter and then to the twelve. But it also mentions 500 brothers and sisters and James; we don’t hear about those appearances anywhere else. At the same time, he doesn’t seem to know about the appearance to Mary Magdalene that John mentions. He says at the end, “Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.” [1 Cor 15:11] So he’s reminding them of their call in Christ.

That brings us back to Luke and the fishing village. Can you see it? Can you smell it? There’s a crowd and frankly? Not all of them showered this morning. There are fishing guys working on nets. Most of a fisherman’s time is actually spent cleaning and mending nets, not fishing. In Spain, that work was often done by women but here it seems to be Peter and Andrew and James and John and presumably others doing it. And there’s Jesus. He’s not new in town. The gospels tell this story a bit differently but in Luke’s version, he’s been there long enough to have gone to Peter’s house, where he miraculously heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Her response to this miracle is to get up and serve dinner. It’s an interesting side note that the Greek word used for this—diakonis—gives us the word ‘Deacon’. Peter’s mother-in-law was the first Deacon. The crowd is doing what crowds do, pressing in to hear and get closer. There’s no sound system, just voice, and the thing about a fishing village is that it has an edge: step back too far, and you’re in the water. I imagine Peter’s boat being side tied to the dock, and Jesus asks to use that as a pulpit; Peter shrugs and says sure, so they get in, Jesus sits down, which is the position rabbi’s used for teaching, and he talks to the crowd. None of the gospels tell us what he said.

Then there is this remarkable moment. He turns to Peter and says, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Peter replies the way churches always reply when Jesus tells us to do something: “We already tried that, and it didn’t work.” It makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, Peter and the others have been fishing these waters for a long time and most recently all night. I bet Peter grew up fishing; some people just take to it when they are small. My son did. And this is corporate fishing, it’s not a rod and reel and a worm; you have to get ready, load bait, arrange the nets, get set. Peter and his crew are exhausted, they’re ready to finish fixing the nets and go home and get some sleep. But here’s this guy who may know a lot about the Torah but knows nothing about fishing calmly telling them to go fish. They know better; there just aren’t any fish right there, right then. 

I’ve seen this play out in churches. Some new member is all excited about their new faith and new church, they get on a board and start suggesting things. The long time members quietly tell them, “We tried that ten years ago, and it was a failure” or “We can’t afford that” or “That’s not how we do it here.” Thank God that this time, Peter and the others shrug and decide to go along with the new preacher. So they set out, let down the nets and there’s a miracle: the nets fill up. Can you imagine what that would look like? Silvery, slippery fish jumping all over, the nets bulging, weighing down the boat. These are open boats, pull the side down far enough and they’ll sink. The first time we took our sailboat out on our own, I forgot to detach something from the engine shaft. The result was that when I went below as we were starting back, there was water already up over the floor boards. I’ve been sailing since I was 12 and in my whole life, that was one of the scariest moments. So I get what they are feeling. “This is too much!” No wonder Peter says, “Go away from me Lord!” I wanted a big catch, but this is too big; I didn’t want a miracle, I just wanted to get by.

They make it back to shore, apparently. We never hear what happened to all the fish; hopefully someone took care of them cleaned them sold them. Jesus just laughs; he tells them not to worry about it all because they’re going to become fishers of men. Now if you grew up with that line like I did, you probably think this is where this turns into a sermon telling you to out and evangelize, get people to come to church with you. That would be a fine thing to do, but I don’t think that’s the message here. “Fishers of men” has a particular meaning in the Bible. In Jeremiah (16:16) it’s a description of God sending people to find evildoers and idolaters; in Amos 4:2, it’s connected to being conquered and exiled because of the sins of the people and Ezekiel has a similar message. Becoming fishers of men isn’t evangelism; it’s confronting injustice. It’s proclaiming the year of favor for the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to captives. 

Peter hears this call and responds first with repentance, then with obedience. He’s already called Jesus Lord; now he puts that word into action. He’s gotten a glimpse of the miraculous abundance Jesus reveals. We call it eternal life sometimes; in the gospels it’s a miraculous catch of fish, it’s feeding thousands of people from a few donations. What is it here?

The musical Rent is about a group of Bohemian young people in New York in the plague years of AIDS. It begins with a song about abundance: “525, 600 minutes”, the minutes in a year. Stunning, isn’t it? Isn’t that a miraculous catch, to have 525, 600 minutes laid out this year waiting for us to fill them? Each of these stories offers us a perspective on God’s call to someone, each is a question: who will go? Isaiah says “here am I”; Paul says, remember that Christ is risen. Peter says, go away from me Lord, but he follows Jesus, leaves the boat and the fish and his mother-in-law and presumably his wife and family behind. There are still 482,400 minutes left in this year. How will you fill them with your call? Oh, there’s one other line from Rent I want to share: it’s a refrain at the end: no day but today. When is God calling you? No day but today.

Amen. 

Leaping Love

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Fourth Sunday in Advent/C • December 22, 2024

Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-55

Ever since Thanksgiving, and even before in some cases, in stores, in media, in daily life, we’ve been bombarded with Christmas. Our culture encourages a season of frenzied spending and parties, of decorations we buy and hang to show the Christmas Spirit. But where is that Spirit? Our Lectionary, the guide to scriptures we hear each Sunday, has taken a different tack. This whole Advent season, we’ve been asked to look not to Bethlehem, not to the stable but to other events. We began with the end: Jesus coming in power, and the heartfelt command to be alert, to watch and listen for Jesus appearance. The last two Sundays we heard about John the Baptist whose testimony is that one more powerful is coming. Finally, today, the last Sunday in Advent, we hear this story on the eve of Jesus’ birth.

A Strange Story

It’s a strange story, isn’t it? Luke doesn’t begin his gospel with Jesus; he begins with the parents of John, his father, Zechariah. Zechariah is a priest and during a service in the temple, the angel Gabriel appears and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to have a son. Zechariah doesn’t believe him because Elizabeth is too old. So Gabriel tells him he will be mute until his son is born. Never mess with an angel! So today we don’t hear from Zechariah; we hear from Elizabeth. She is, indeed, pregnant; she’s had her own inspiration, and now she’s about to bear a child who will be known later as John the Baptist. There’s no statue for Elizabeth in nativity scenes but let’s pretend there is and set her aside for a moment while we talk about the other person in this story: Mary. 

Now if you were Roman Catholic, you’d have heard all about Mary. But what you would have heard is about Mary characterized as the mother of Jesus, not this Mary, not this young unmarried woman. There are endless theological debates about Mary in which the word ‘virgin’ figures prominently. Most of those debates are in Greek and none of them tell us about the reality of someone we would call a girl. Most Biblical scholars suggest Mary would have been about 14. That’s very young in our culture; it was common in hers. What is shocking is that she is pregnant without being married. Girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were often shamed, sometimes stoned.

Mary’s Story

So we have this story that becomes stranger the more we listen to it. Mary has had her own angelic visitation; you’ll have to come back another time to hear that. Already engaged to Joseph, the angel tells her she will become pregnant with one who will become king, one who will reign in David’s line. She’s from Nazareth, up in the north; now she’s made the hundred-mile journey to Judah, to see someone who may be an aunt or a cousin, Elizabeth. These are two pregnant women who have no business being pregnant: one is too old, one is too young. There are no men in the conversation; this is women’s business. And at the moment they meet, something happens only a woman would understand: the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps.

This is the second time in the last few weeks when I feel totally unable to speak to a Biblical story. What does a man know about a baby in the womb moving? Nothing, not a thing. So I did what I did last time, I asked Jacquelyn about it. She said, “Well, May didn’t move around much; mostly she hiccuped.” I tried to imagine what that would be like, having someone hiccup inside you. It sounds awful. I mean, what do you do? You can’t feed them sugar, you can’t scare them, you can’t do anything but just wait, I guess. The one time she remembered May moving sharply was at a baseball game when some unthinking guy holding a beer, didn’t see her belly, tried to go past her and accidentally punched her belly. “May punched back,” she said. So, a word of caution; May isn’t here often, but if she is, don’t punch her, she punches back.

The reading goes on with two songs of praise, one from each woman. But I want to come back to this meeting. Luke—who, like me, is a guy, and therefore really doesn’t know anything about babies leaping in a womb—is the only place that tells this story. But we do have a story in Matthew about the same general time. Matthew tells us, 

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.
Matt. 1:18f

Joseph is usually described as a carpenter but the word translated ‘carpenter’ actually isn’t about someone who does what we think of as carpentry. It’s a person who makes tools out of wood: Joseph is a toolmaker.

Looking for Safety

So this is the story when we put it together. An angel visits a young girl, Mary, tells her she’s going to become pregnant. She’s already engaged; maybe she’s in love in that can’t stop thinking about him crushy way 14-year-old girls have. The Holy Spirit overwhelms her; she’s pregnant. Joseph knows the baby isn’t his. Honestly? Nazareth is a small place, if you know anything about small towns, you know they don’t keep secrets well. Joseph is planning to end the engagement; while he thinks about this, Mary leaves town, goes to visit her cousin or aunt Elizabeth. It’s a long way to go, a hundred miles, perhaps. Remember that the main way you get places in that time is you walk. What makes a young, pregnant girl walk a hundred miles? I can only think of one thing: she’s scared, and she’s looking for a safe place.

That’s what she finds with Elizabeth; that’s what that leaping baby in Elizabeth’s womb means. Maybe Mary still doesn’t quite believe the angel sent to her; maybe she’s already felt too many stares and heard too many questions. Maybe she’s figured out what’s going on with Joseph. But when she meets Elizabeth, when Elizabeth tells her own story, when Elizabeth’s baby leaps recognizing the special significance of Mary’s baby, she’s already safe. 

So we have these two stories of praise from two women who aren’t supposed to be having babies but are, who aren’t the sort of people we think of as especially blessed, but are. The rabbis who teach the history of God’s grace in Israel are all male but here it’s two women who say in the most profound way possible that God’s love is still active, still present, still making things happen in the world. 

Elizabeth speaks of the Mary’s baby as a fulfillment of the angelic message. Mary says, 

[God] has come to the aid his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever. [Luke 1:54f]

She also connects this aid to God’s special love for the poor, the weak, the powerless. Leaping love is for all, but it begins with loving those who need it most.

What about us?

What about us? What does this kind of love that leaps when Jesus is near mean in our lives? There is a big temptation here for me as a preacher. I want to suggest some specific thing to do.
I want to endorse some mission. I want to tell a story of some other church, some other time, some other people who leapt at a chance to express God’s love and helped someone or some people feel safer, fed them so they were less hungry, cared for them in a way that transformed their lives. 

But those are other people, other times, other places. So I’m going to simply leave the story here with you. Mary went to Elizabeth, seeking safety, and found it. When did you feel safe? How did that feel? When have you helped someone feel safe? When can you do it again? How can we do it together as a church? We have this sign: “A small church with a big message”. Isn’t that the message?—that here, you are safe in the arms of love, God’s love. In Reformed Churches, we don’t use the word ‘sanctuary’ much. But perhaps we should. Because that’s what this place is meant to be: a sanctuary of safety, where all are reminded we are children of God together. If you want to feel that leaping love, you don’t have to be pregnant with a child: we are all pregnant with possibility. May we turn that possibility into the reality of helping people find safety here.

Amen.

Give Thanks for the Appetizers

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Thanksgiving Sunday • November 24, 2024

Joel 2:21-27, Matthew 6:25-33 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

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

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

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

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

Amen.