Tag Archives: Jeremiah

Promises, Promises

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

19th Sunday After Pentecost/C • October 19, 2025

Jeremiah 31:27-34 • Psalm 119:97-104 * 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 * Luke 18:1-8

As many of you know, in December I’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of my ordination. I hope you’ll all celebrate with me on December 7th. It’s been a long run, God has been good, and perhaps because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about some of my experiences. One I miss is youth ministry. That’s a work for younger people but when I was younger, it’s one I loved. I particularly remember my first group as a youth minister. They were a great group of teens, and I remember them that way, although today they would probably be retired. One of the things I most loved was retreats. We were in Massachusetts, near Boston, and one of our members would lend us a ski chalet occasionally. 

The first couple of times we went off to Vermont, I planned the whole weekend, meals—it’s never good to let a youth group get hungry!—activities like sledding and some worship time, ending with a communion service around a fireplace. By the third time, I turned the planning over to the kids. They came up with a great schedule, but they left off the communion service. I didn’t want to take away their sense of authority, so I left the schedule as they planned it. 

The final night that year, we were all gathered in blankets, some of them quietly smooching in the back, and someone said, “Hey Rev, what about communion?” I pointed out that they hadn’t planned this. And then someone, who I am sure has since sat on a Consistory or a Church Board afterward said, “But Rev, we ALWAYS have communion!” Quickly they all agreed: I had failed to do what we always do!  We didn’t have any grape juice or bread, but we did have root beer and hot dog buns so we made do, and honestly, it was one of the most deeply moving services of communion I’ve ever shared. Maybe it was the root beer.

So much of church life is like that: we do what we’ve always done. We assume that’s the right way to do things. Jacquelyn and I spent last week in Prague in the Czech Republic, and we visited several cathedrals because they are so beautiful. Every one has the same form: there’s an altar at the front, a high pulpit on the side, pews,, side chapels with statues everywhere and they always have enormous amounts of gold and stained-glass windows. Honestly? I can’t imagine actually worshiping there; it’s not what we do, it’s not how we do things. Yet I know that people have worshiped there centuries longer than they have here. I know that they would find what we do strange and different. We do what we’ve always done but what about when things change? Can we change what we do and learn new ways?

Today we heard two oracles from the prophet Jeremiah. He lived in a very difficult time in what is now Israel and was then the kingdom of Judah. If you listen closely, you may have noticed that each of these pieces began the same way: “The days are surely coming…” Scholars call this eschatological, a big word that simply means look up from the present stuff and see the goal that’s always there. No matter where the Steelers are on football field, the goal is always there. No matter how the Phillies are doing in any baseball game, home base is always there. When someone begins to cook, they always have in mind the meal that will be shared. “Surely the days are coming!”—God has the goal in mind, Jeremiah wants us to see as God sees, toward that goal, toward the final feast.

His message is twofold: first, the immediate future is disaster; second, the ultimate goal is there and everything will be fine. He’s living like the people of Ukraine are now, under assault. The leaders of his day were so confident God would be on their side, they took on the greatest military power around. In that day, it was Babylonia, an empire based in what’s now Iraq. What’s happened here is that God’s people have lost the war. Jerusalem is destroyed; think of those old pictures of bombed out cities in Germany or France in World War Two or the recent pictures from Gaza with miles and miles of rubble. Jerusalem is rubble; the Temple, the focus of all their worship, is rubble. The leaders of the community are being led to exile; Jeremiah himself becomes an exile. Many are dead, all are suffering. 

Jeremiah’s message before this passage is that this is God’s doing. Because the people of God have not lived out God’s justice, have not followed God’s covenant, God has destroyed them. But that’s not the goal; that’s not God’s ultimate plan. Instead, Jeremiah brings this word.

And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. [Jeremiah 31:28]

The goal is out there: we just have to get there. The path may lead through defeat, but it shouldn’t include despair. The path may lead through foreboding and fear but it’s going to the  fulfillment of God’s plan. The path may lead through the valley of the shadows but it leads ultimately to the glory of the mountain top.

Now we live in a difficult time as well. Our city hasn’t been destroyed, but we are assaulted every day by news of gun violence. We hear about almost unthinkable things going on in other cities where the government is deploying our military to assault our own people. We are being asked to turn against people who aren’t citizens and the rules of our civic life, our constitution, are being changed in ways we never imagined possible. 

Last week, one of the most moving moments was walking through an ancient synagogue, now a museum, where the names of 80,000 Jews who were murdered by the Nazis are inscribed on wall after wall. What’s important to know is that Shoah, the holocaust, began with a long campaign of lies that Jews were somehow different, alien, and it’s humbling and scary that it took the cooperation of people just like us to accomplish.          

So we live in a difficult time as well. What does God’s Word say about living in such times?First, that this moment is not God’s ultimate goal; God’s goal is the joyful, abundant community of God’s people, living in justice, reflecting God’s love thankfully and endlessly. “The days are surely coming…”, Jeremiah says, when God will make a new covenant. The new covenant is that we will want to do God’s will. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”, God says. Now in ancient Jewish thought, the heart was not a romantic center; it was the center of a person’s will. This is a prophecy about a time when we all want to do what God intends.

How do we get there? That’s the question we ask every day. Everything is going to be fine eventually, “Surely the days are coming…”, but what about now? How do we live now? For that, we turn to the other readings. Paul wrote to Timothy in a difficult moment as well. The first thing he commends is simply to persist

…continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. [2 Timothy 3:14f]

The same thought comes through the parable we heard in Luke. Judges in Jesus’ time had enormous power; there was no system of appeals. Their word was final on all kinds of cases. But what about when they are wrong?

Jesus asks us to imagine a woman who just won’t give up. It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? We can imagine this woman. Maybe it’s a small town, maybe she just keeps bugging the guy. “Give me justice!” Over and over again; he sees her in the market, she comes to his home, she’s there when he sits in judgment. The story tells us that he “neither feared God nor had respect for people”, a way of saying the guy just makes it up as he goes. You’d expect him to blow her off, wouldn’t you? But Jesus points out that actually what happens is she wears him down with her persistence. She never stops, she never goes away, and eventually she gets her way. The point isn’t that God is like the judge, it’s that persistence pays off.

We are all carrying around a bunch of ideas from our past about how things should be. But we live in a changing time, and it’s going to call for some new ideas, some new ways. It’s time for a new covenant. So God is asking: can we change? Can we let go of the old, persist in our faith in God and not in the forms of what we do?

Two years ago a horrific moment of violence occurred when gunmen took over 200 hostages, one of whom was an infant,  from a musical festival in Israel. An enormous amount of hate and division has come from that act powered in part by grief over those hostages. A synagogue in Detroit remembered the hostages by putting 240 chairs and a crib out on their lawn. This past week, the last living hostages were returned as the beginning of the promise of peace deal in Gaza. The synagogue marked the moment by removing most of the chairs; a few remembering hostages who have died but whose remains haven’t been returned were left. The ceremony also marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Jews of that synagogue and the large Islamic population in Detroit. They are trying to persist in their faith but also recognize this is a new time that calls for new efforts to embody God’s love. 

“The days are surely coming…”, God says. In the meantime, it’s up to us to listen to God’s Word, persist in faith that God’s ultimate goal will be accomplished and embody not what we’ve always done but what God is doing. What God is doing is always the same: a justice that sees all people as God’s children and a love that embraces every single one. This is God’s promise; these promises are the foundation, the only foundation, for building our lives together.

Amen.

Lent 5 B – The Rainbow Path 5

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Clean Up

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor ©2018

Fifth Sunday in Lent/B • March 18, 2018

Jeremiah 31:31-34 • Psalm 51:1-12 • John 12:20-22

Click below to hear the sermon preached

One of the great gifts I received when I was called as the pastor of a church in Michigan was the opportunity to be present right after my youngest grand-daughter Bridget was born. There is a picture of Bridget and I, taken when she was about 30 hours old, I value beyond all the wonderful photographs hanging on all the museum walls in the world. I had just been handed her and I remember exactly what I was thinking when Jacquelyn took the shot: “She’s perfect, completely perfect.”

Of course, now I know Bridget a lot better and it turns out she isn’t perfect after all. She’s messy, for one thing; a piece of advice I’d offer is don’t stand too close when Bridget is eating chocolate cake. She has a stubborn sense of order that can drive you crazy. When she was small, one of her favorite games was to take the furniture out of the dollhouse and get me to put it back. The game goes like this: I put a piece of furniture in the dollhouse; Bridget lifts it up, says, “No, Grampa Jim, not there,” and puts it where she believes it should be. Perfect is hard to find, harder to sustain. Are you perfect?

God is perfect and working with this imperfect world. What is God doing? We’re nearing the end of Lent and it’s time to step back and ask how it all fits together. Sometimes we can miss the Word God is speaking because we get so focused on the words. A few weeks ago we read the story of Noah and God’s rainbow covenant, a promise never again to start over, wiping everything out. We read the story of how God started with Abraham and Sarah the whole long, painful promise of reclaiming the world from darkness, restoring it to a place of praise, a community of joy, a shining story of justice. We’ve read God’s attempt in the Exodus and the Ten Commandments and we know how profoundly this failed, how the community of faith God hoped went astray.

Today we read how God began again in the words of Jeremiah.

…this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. [Jeremiah 31:33-34]

In Hebrew thought, the heart was the seat of the will. The verb “know” means to experience intimately, fully. To say God’s covenant will be written on their hearts is to say they will naturally want to fulfill it; to say they will know God is to say they will have a direct, immediate connection with God. No temple, no clergy, no king, nothing else needed.

Why is God doing this? Jeremiah spoke these words to a people already defeated in their hearts, people who have already acknowledged they don’t deserve anything. They were an imperfect people and they knew it. You can hear it in the words of the Psalmist: “…I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” [Psalm 51:3] If even this people know they don’t deserve another chance, what’s going on here? Why is God trying so hard?

The answer seems to be the concluding line of the Psalm we read: “Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.” [Psalm 51:12] God is trying to bring about a joyful community which will naturally praise, naturally worship, naturally live out God’s justice. When we look at the whole sweep of the story, we discover God is bringing the perfect, heavenly life through a new covenant by working on the least perfect. Jesus is the method.

That is certainly what is happening in the Gospel reading. A group of Greeks are in the crowd around Jesus; they approach Philip and ask to see Jesus. What do you suppose they hope to see? What do they expect to find? Greeks worshipped through the images of a variety of Gods but the central theme of their spiritual life was the notion of the perfect. The Olympic games were a display in which the goal was to display perfect bodies doing athletic things perfectly. Greek philosophy suggests that everything in the world exists as a reflection of a perfect reality in a spiritual world. Even in their political life, it was important that a leader be beautiful; beautiful and perfect were equivalent.

Jewish spiritual life also focused on the perfect. There were hundreds of religious rules and spiritual life was built around trying to observe every one of them perfectly. But few people could or did live up to all the commandments. In Jesus’ preaching, the requirements become even more daunting; he tells them that the commandment against murder, for example, is violated when we get angry at someone. In one way or another, both understand God is perfect and both believe the answer to getting nearer to God is to be perfect also.

What are Jews hoping about Jesus? That he will act in perfect accord with the law. What are the Greeks hoping to see? A perfect man, whose perfection mirror’s God.

This is why Jesus confuses and angers them: he offers a completely different path to God. Jewish leaders are already angry; we hear over and over again about Jesus, “This man eats with sinners.” Perfect people only ate with other perfect people; it’s scandalous that Jesus will have lunch with anyone at all. He embraces God’s joyful provision and his disciples gather food on the Sabbath; he heals on the Sabbath and tells the leaders that Sabbath is a gift, not a burden. Now he turns to the Greeks and tells them something that must have left them gasping. He tells them he’s going to die.

Jesus answered them,

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. [John 12:23-25]

We are so familiar with the story of Jesus’ death that it fails to shock us. But perfect people didn’t get crucified; perfect Sons of God didn’t die. When Jesus embraces his life and speaks of dying, they must have been stunned. When they hear this is how he is going to represent God, they must have been confused. But Jesus knows the truth. He says that this is the new covenant in his blood: by his death, he shows what covenant faithfulness looks like. This is the picture: a life freed from death through trust in a loving, forgiving creator God.

Jesus offers in place of perfections what the Psalmist calls “God’s steadfast love.” In his teaching about community, Jesus stresses something we talk about but have a hard time practicing: the role of forgiveness. The Greeks measure spirit by perfection; Jesus measures it by love. Here is how things work in the joyful community of Jesus: we’re equally brothers and sisters, we recognize in each other the image of a child of God, and when that child does something wrong, stumbles falls, even falls way down, we respond by encouraging repentance and offering forgiveness.

Jesus says that what we ought to do is stop trying to be perfect and start learning to forgive each other. How many times, his disciples ask? “Seventy times seven”, he responds, a way of saying: endlessly. The rhythm of life in Jesus is a constant sea of love where the waves peak and we are carried closer to God and the waves recede and we forgive and are forgiven.

This is what church life is supposed to look like. Of course, it often doesn’t, because we’ve often copied the world around. In this world, we increasingly hold out an image of perfection and then savagely attack those who seemed to embody it but fall short. We see it in politics, we see it in sports, we see it in the cult of celebrity. We see it in the screaming commentators on TV; we see it in the constant “gotcha” ping-pong of news. We have become Greeks and we use Jesus to help us look more perfect.

But what God hopes is that instead, we will let Jesus use us not to make the world more perfect but to teach it how to love, and how to forgive. God hopes we will teach the world the fundamental reality Jesus preaches here: that we can’t bear fruit except through an unfolding process, a process in which our imperfect seeds sprout and change and produce. That’s how God is working out this great purpose; that’s how God is perfecting the world, by teaching us that instead of being perfect, we can be loved as we are. Like a parent laughing at a child who has gotten dirty and summoning them to a bath, God knows we can always be cleaned up; God remembers who we really are underneath.

I’ve led a couple of churches with preschools and floating through the walls of my study, every day there would be a song signaling the end of the day:

Clean up, clean up, everybody do your share,

Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere.

Things get messy; people get dirty. I don’t honestly know that everyone does do their part; I do know I love the song. In Jesus Christ, God is singing this same song, summoning all God’s children to clean up, clean up, asking all God’s children to do their part. If Bridget isn’t perfect, she is perfectly lovable and perfectly loved. So are you: so am I. In Jesus Christ, God is offering us forgiveness, cleaning us up, and getting us ready to sing the songs of glory in our heavenly home.

Amen.