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.