Tag Archives: justice

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Trinity Sunday/A • Mary 31, 2026

Genesis 1:1-2:4a • Matthew 28:16-20

Climbing up the mountain children
I didn’t come here for to stay
If I never more see you again,
Gonna see you on the Judgement Day

You can listen to the song here

Do you know this song? It’s in the style of a spiritual. Spirituals used religious metaphors to signal slaves and call them to take the risks of seeking freedom. It’s striking how often mountains figure in our faith tradition. Ancient people looked up and believed they were looking toward God. So to get higher was to get closer to God, draw nearer divinity. Isn’t that our hope? Isn’t that why we come to worship?—to feel closer to God. Today, let’s listen to these two stories from scripture and let them help us climb the mountain toward God.

Take that long, long story that open Genesis, the book of beginnings. Did you follow it as we read it this morning? When you listen to a song, there are two parts: you listen to the lyrics and you also listen to the music. It’s the same way with this story. The words are the lyrics; the rhythm and balance is the music. It starts out with what our translation calls “the formless void”; in Hebrew, the “Tohu Bohu”, absence of anything and then—light. The light is divided—night and day. There’s a place: now it’s divided, above, below—sky and world. It’s divided: Earth and seas. On the earth, plants, in the sky lights—time and fruitfulness. In the sea, creatures of every kind, in the air, birds of every kind. On the land, animals and cattle, which is to say animals that live mutually with humanity. Finally: us—humankind, gendered and made in the image of God. What we hear if we listen more to the music than the lyrics is an amazing, ultimate ordering, a place for everything, everything in its place. 

Clean Up!

It reminds me of being a boy in the room I shared with my brother. We had closets, desks, and some storage areas. And we had an amazing mess of toys, dirty clothes, books, magazines, half-built plastic models and what I can only describe as “Interesting Stuff”—a special rock, some shell brought back from a beach. My mom would tell us to clean up and we would, in the way boys clean up, which is to say we’d dump stuff into the closets and push it under the bed. But every once in a while, often on a summer day, my mother, in the way of mothers who are never fooled and knew exactly what we’d done, would appear in our room and tell us that today we were going to really clean. We knew what really clean meant: everything came out from under the beds, everything came out from the closet and then, bit by bit, my mother would help us put it all away, dirty clothes to the laundry, beds made without lumps, toys and models on shelves, trash thrown out and Interesting Things examined and put into a box. She brought order and even though we whined about the process, at the end we loved it. She’d stand in the doorway, arms crossed and say, “Now that’s the way this room should be. Try to keep it this way, at least for a little while.”

That’s what this story in Genesis is about. People who want to argue about it as a scientific description of how things came to be are missing the song it means to sing. This isn’t about how things came to be, it’s about how things are meant to be, all in order: night, day, animals, cattle, human beings, ordered by a loving God, everything in its place, everything dancing together to the music of God’s order, just as a choir sings together to the music of the organ. Now there are various names for this order. When it comes to everything, we call it creation; when it comes to human beings, we call it justice. It’s where God is always trying to move us, and the pathway there is the mountain we are meant to climb.

We have to climb it because, just like my brother and I, on the whole we are messy children. We are meant to be caretakers of creation; we wander off and become consumers instead. We are meant to live in the equality of mutually, equally being made in the image of God, recognizing that image in each other. Instead, we create hierarchies, we compete to be better than others and, in our pride, we use our strength to create systems that oppress some and benefit others. Hierarchy always involves coercion and coercion is violence. Violence disorders the balance, the order, God created and like the pressure under a volcano, it gets stored up until finally the coerced erupt against it.

A long time ago, when May was small, she had a problem and needed help. She seriously and carefully explained the problem and then came to what she wanted and said, “That’s where you come in.” Clearly, today we need someone to stand, like a mother at the doorway of a messy room, to clean things up. And that’s where you come in. Yes: we are meant to be part of the solution to putting things back in order. Just like my mother, God has a plan and the plan is in the other story we read this morning. It begins with God seeing the disorder of the world and coming to us, like my mother coming into the room. The signature act of God in Jesus is resurrection. Resurrection is God transcending violence. The cross is all the world’s violence, all the police on someone’s neck, all the politicians refusing to help the needy and helping friends get the benefits of God’s creation. The cross is domination; resurrection is the solution.

Trinity Sunday

The other story we read today pictures Jesus with his disciples on a mountain. “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.” [Matthew 28:16]. Jesus tells them to do three things: make disciples, baptize, teach his commandments. Today is Trinity Sunday and this is the one place in the Bible where the Trinity is explicitly mentioned. I have a history with the Trinity; the history is that when I was 12, I was in Confirmation Class, the old minister, probably not as old as I am now, tried to tell us about the Trinity and I said, “That doesn’t make sense!” Later he called my mother and asked her not to bring me back. Honestly? The Trinity is a way of trying to encapsulate that God comes to us in many ways. Jesus isn’t preaching theology here; he’s giving commands. Matthew says this interesting thing about the audience: “When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.” [Matt. 28:17] Believing all the theology doesn’t really matter, apparently; even the doubters are included. So if that’s you, welcome! 

What Jesus is teaching isn’t theology, it’s this: go make disciples. Sometimes we’ve misinterpreted this to mean “force people” but Jesus never forced anyone; he only invites. And what he invites them, what he invites us to do, is to obey what he commanded. It starts with the  power of forgiveness and what is forgiveness? It’s the intentional act of saying, “Let’s start new.” It’s the do-over after a missed opportunity, it’s the refusal to store up grievance and let it become resentment. Baptism is the symbol of this, the symbolic washing that gets rid of the dirt of the past. His ultimate command is love, loving the image of God where ever it’s found, whether in God or in God’s image, the person you meet, the person you haven’t met. To make disciples simply means to help someone else start to live this way, usually because they’ve been inspired by the example you set.

Living Now

This is a disordered moment. The regular rhythms of life are off. We are at war in a distant way that seems to cost mostly other people’s lives and our money. Our politics sounds more like a call to holy war than an invitation to solve problems. We can’t choose whether to live in this time; we can choose how we live. We can’t choose whether we live in a racist culture but we can choose how we live in it. We can use our politics, our money, our social media, our lives to say, to others, “I care about you—you’re a child of God, I’m going to treat you like one.” That’s being a disciple; that’s teaching Jesus way of love by example.

Somewhere, someone is rolling their eyes at this, I’m sure. Somewhere, someone is thinking it will never work. I imagine some days my mother stood in the doorway and thought, “How will they ever clean this up?” Jesus started with 12 disciples; here he is, just a short time later, and already he’s lost one—there are only 11 left to gather in Galilee. But it doesn’t stop him. He knows the truth that our politics always forgets, the one Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently voiced when he said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” 

In all the time since that moment in Galilee, there have been plenty of failures. Christians have busily built their own systems of domination and others have had to fight to restore justice. But God never stops trying, never stops coming to clean up. There’s another mountain song that reminds me of this. It’s meant to be a love song but I think of it as God’s love song for us and it begins, “A’int no mountain high enough, a’int no river wide enough, to keep me from you.” That’s the message of the resurrection: there is no power, no principality, nothing that can ultimately overcome God’s hope. When we live in justice, care for creation and each other, appreciate the image of God in creation and and all people, follow Jesus’ commands, then we are part of God’s plan. Isn’t it time to clean up today?

Amen. 

One Day

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A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor ©2026

Fourth Sunday After Epiphany/A • February 1, 2026

With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? 

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. 

—Micah 6:6-8 (NIV – Used by permission

An old man is walking on a path with the sea off to his left and as the breeze blows on the water and his family trails quietly after him, we might think this is a group on the way to a picnic. But soon the concern on his face and the worry in the eyes of his family show and it’s clear a picnic is not their destination. We see a cemetery: row on row on row of white crosses and we’re told this is Normandy, this is the great American cemetery where thousands and thousands of American men are buried. Men who stormed ashore across those beaches in fear and fire to defeat an awful demonic evil. Men who gave their lives so others, so that you and I, would be safe. Here is a man who was part of that generation which grew up in depression and then was called to go off at the beginning of adulthood to kill or be killed. As the man stops in front of one particular cross, the tears stream down his face. He turns to his wife and says, “Am I a good person? Have I lived a good life?” 

The scripture reading pictures just such a moment. Am I a good person? Haven’t we all asked that question: The lesson imagines a man who comes to a priest or prophet, to someone he believes can speak for God, to ask just that question. Am I a good person? What can I do to be a good person? With what shall I come before the Lord? One by one he goes through the options the ancient world suggested. Should I bring a year old calf? Can I be justified for the price of a cow? Should I bring thousands of rams? Rams are male goats. I’ve never seen thousands of them but once I brought a baby goat home from school to keep at my house overnight. That one single goat made such an incredible mess of our basement and smelled so bad that I can’t imagine anyone having a thousand of those things in any kind of religious meeting house. Should I bring streams of oil? The oil they mean here is olive oil. It was used for cooking and perfumed and used instead of bathing: you would pour the oil over yourself and then scrape it off. Should I bring streams and streams of oil? 

You see what this man is doing? He’s bidding for the love of God. I asked the children in a church once, “What would it cost to hire your mother to do what she does for you?” I got lots of responses: $15, $20, even $100! What would it cost to be a good person before God? —a prize calf, a thousand rams, streams of oil, even a first born child. The religion of Israel didn’t practice child sacrifice but others around them did. One archaeologist has discovered at Carthage a place with over 15,000 baby skulls. That was the cost over the years of people feeling they were good persons before their God. This man is not exaggerating, he is asking what it will cost to be a good person before God and he’s wondering if it might not be very dear indeed. He wants to know the answer to a question we all ask: What does God want? What does God want from me?

The answer is simple: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God. Justice in the Bible comes with a special concern for the poor, the immigrant, the widow, the child, for anyone, in other words, who is vulnerable. Mercy is that unlimited love God models for us which asks not what is fair but what will help. Justice is about public policy , how we act as a community; mercy is what we do as individuals to fulfill our vocation to bless others. Humbly walking with God means simply thinking God might be more right than your own opinion. This may seem simple; it turns ought to be tough. Every church meeting for example begins with a prayer for guidance; most then go on as if What We Did Last Time is the true Torah. We say, “It seems to me…” and share our good common sense although clearly nothing in the scripture makes sense. There, an old woman named Sarah has a baby, a tree trimmer named Amos knows more about God’s Word than all the Ph.D. temple priests and fishermen become apostles.

What does God want? Do justice; love mercy. These things are hard so we often substitute social service programs. A number of years ago I worked in a church with a food pantry. The rule for getting food from the food pantry was simple: if you’re hungry, we’ll feed you. This rule never bothered the poor folks who got food; it always bothered the well to do folks who handed it out. We had long committee meetings about the rule and how to change it so that only people who deserved food would get it. Some of the farmers from the area churches didn’t like the pantry feeding migrant workers because they felt the workers didn’t hav]e as much motivation when they knew their families would get fed regardless of whether they worked. Some people didn’t like giving food to women on welfare who drove cars even if it was the only way their kids would be sure to get a decent meal. Finally after years of wrestling over the pantry rules, an old man said at a meeting, “I’m tired of arguing about this. The Bible says Jesus told his disciples, ‘You give them something to eat!’  He didn’t make any rules and neither should we”. There was a long silence and in that moment a miracle happened: a program with the rule mentality of the Department of Social Services turned into a place where Christians were doing justice. In the eight years I worked in that church the food pantry went from being a little four or five bag a day operation to a program costing $39,000 a year. But the  biggest change wasn’t in the food pantry, it was in the people who ran it as they came to understand what it meant to do justice even when it doesn’t make sense and doesn’t fit the rules.

 What does God want? Do justice, love mercy, show them both in your daily walk so that walk becomes more about following God than getting where you think you should go. Now we are at the beginning of a new decade. We have a choice: we can make this moment like one of those opening prayers at a committee meeting that’s forgotten by the time the minutes are read or we can ask, “What does God want?” If we ask, it will soon be clear that God does not want a calf, God does not want a bunch of goats, God does not want streams of oil. What God wants is simple: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Isn’t that when we are at our best? 

A few years ago some Congregationalists, Reformed churches just like this one, got together with just these purposes in mind. A slave ship named Amistad had landed in New London and they did what we do best: held a meeting. The meetings expanded and soon the step that’s natural for Congregationalists was taken: they organized a committee. That committee worked for years until finally those slaves were set free and even the United States Supreme Court had to admit that slaves were people. Just about every old Congregational Church in New England has some part of this story to tell. One congregation I served founded the first school for the children of escaped slaves during this time. Why did these people do this? Because they heard what God said: Let my people go; because they asked what God wanted and heard God wanted justice and mercy and humility. That moment, when Congregationalists set out to do justice, is one of the best chapters in our story. And if we want to write a chapter just as good, it will take more than raising enough money to buy a calf and some goats and olive oil, it will mean spending more time on how we can do justice and love mercy better instead of just refining our knowledge of Roberts Rules of Order.

It’s hard to know how to do these things. But I know what it looks like when it happens. One summer I was in Boston with Jacquelyn. We have a continuing argument her about giving money to pan handlers. I keep quoting a theologian, William Sloane Coffin, to the effect that charity is not justice; she keeps saying, they need the money. We were crossing a street and there was a man in a wheel chair who had been pan handling without much success. He was about to go try his luck elsewhere. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her get her dollar out. But he didn’t see it, so he went on about his business, which was finding a better corner to pan handle, so he started to cross the street. She got to the other side and he wasn’t there anymore, he was out in the street, halfway across, and she went running after him, out into the street, to give him that dollar. When she caught up with him, he looked at her like she was a crazy woman, I don’t think he has a lot of people running after him to give him a dollar. And I knew I’d lost the argument. I thought, that’s it, that’s what we should be doing, running into the street because we love mercy so much we just can’t bearÏ to miss a chance to show some. We should be doing what that old man did at the meeting: reminding each other of just what God has to say about justice and asking how we can do some. We ought to ask of every program in this church, we ought to ask of everything that is said in this church, how is this going to help us do justice, how is it going to let us express mercy, how is it a part of our walk with God?

The image with which I began is the beginning of the movie Saving Private Ryan. The man in the cemetery is Ryan, now grown old, but most of the film is a flashback to a time after the invasion of Normandy when a patrol was sent to find and bring back Private Ryan. The flashback ends with a battle on a bridge and there is a moment when Private Ryan confronts the commander of the unit which had been sent to save him. It’s a moment full of the sound of explosion, the smoke of gunfire and the confusion and fear of everyone. As the captain lies dying, bleeding from wounds he received saving Private Ryan, he grips Ryan’s arms, looks into his eyes and says, “Earn this…earn this.” God has given into our hands all of creation and the time to enjoy it, to live in it, to appreciate it. But creation is not just a fact; it is an occasion, it is an occasion for us to live out the great potential we have to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God. Each day asks: what is to be done; each day invites us to do what God wants. One day we will; will this be that day?

Amen

This sermon has been revised. It was originally written for the United Congregational church of Norwich, CT, won the Connecticut Fellowship Sermon Award in 1999 and was preached at the communion service of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches in 1999

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.