Tag Archives: Mission

Web of Wonder

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A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ 

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Second Sunday in Advent • December 7, 2025

Isaiah 11:1-10 * Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 * Romans 15:4-13 * Matthew 3:1-12

Sermon begins at 27 minutes

There is a story of a poor family at Christmas who had only enough to get a tree. There were no ornaments, no tinsel, nothing at all to hang on it. Still, they swept and dusted and scrubbed and prepared the house for Christmas just as if a great Christmas ball were to be held there. They moved the sofa; they cleaned behind the cabinets. Even the dog’s water bowl was washed and dried and put back clean. When all was done, they went to bed. But during the night a spider came crawling down from the attic where it had hidden during all the fuss. The house was so clean, there was no place to start a web. Then it saw the tree: branches lifting needles with lots of wonderful spots just waiting for a spider web. The spider began to spin and soon others joined it so that by morning the tree was decorated with a gossamer web. And when the family came downstairs and saw the web the spiders had fashioned, something mysterious happened. Maybe it was the morning light, maybe it was something more, but suddenly as the dawn came through the window, the web shone with silver and gold and the tree was decorated with a web of wonder.

It was Sunday, December 7, 1941,  and people were just leaving the performance of Handel’s Messiah at Duke University. Still full of the soaring inspiration of the music and these great words of hope from the prophet Isaiah, they left the chapel and found people clustered around radios, listening to the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, they were thrust from the comfort of Christmas to the wilderness of war. I wonder: did any of those people sit in the jungle wilderness of Guadalcanal a year later and remember that day? Did any of them remember three years later as they shivered in the snows of the Ardennes forest during the Battle of the Bulge? Did they listen in that wilderness for the voice of one crying, “Prepare the way of the Lord?” Those people who left that chapel and heard the news of Pearl Harbor had their world forever changed. 

We live our lives moment to moment as if we were fully in control, as if we were driving a road we’ve driven many times before. But great events can crash into us from nowhere—and we are changed. Some personal crisis, some accident of the spirit, and suddenly just as we thought we were making time, we are sitting by the road. One poet has written about the experience this way.

At the Art Reception

held in a Modern Bank

my daughter ran full speed

into a wall of glass

ricocheted five feet

and, for a second,

lay stunned.

till screams echoed throughà the lobby:

guests sipping wine,

turned with a chorus of eyes.

I picked my wounded butterfly off the floor

her screams turning to sobs

a red welt rising on her forehead

and together we examined that invisible wall

that comes out of nowhere

and knocks us flat

without any interest 

The invisible wall that knocks us flat leaves us reeling in the wilderness. 

That’s the place where Isaiah said we should listen for the voice of one who cries: “Prepare the way of the Lord.” The wilderness of Judea is dry and rocky and dangerous. The wilderness is a place of desolation. You can die of thirst or, if it rains, you can be killed in a sudden flood in a wadi. The real wilderness has snakes and lions and it’s kill or be killed. The real wilderness doesn’t care that you bought your tent at REI and your sleeping bag at L. L. Bean; the real wilderness simply doesn’t care, it has no interest. The real wilderness is full of invisible walls that leave you weeping with a red welt.

The wilderness is also a spiritual place. The wilderness is where Cain is sent to wander when he kills his brother and where Moses runs to hide from the law. The wilderness is where Israel goes after the Exodus and the wilderness is where Judah ends up when enemies break the gates and overcome the walls of Jerusalem. The wilderness is where you face temptation alone. Even Jesus faced temptation in the wilderness: it’s a place of hard choices. The wilderness is that place which becomes our address when we are knocked flat and left weeping alone. And it’s in the wilderness that John hears God’s call to proclaim the time for preparation. “Prepare the way of the Lord”.

John’s call forces us to choose what we will do about the wilderness. One solution is to call it home. When the Jews were in exile in Babylon, a psalmist asked, “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Many answered by saying we can’t. So they learned the songs of Babylon, they learned the dances and the customs of Babylon. The moral and spiritual wilderness that was Babylon was all they could see and they couldn’t believe in anything else. They made the wilderness home; there was a promised land God intended for them but they missed it because they settled for a home in the wilderness. Even when they returned to Judah, they brought that wilderness with them so that by Malachi’s time, many had stopped singing the Lord’s song even in the promised land.

“Prepare the way of the Lord”,  John says. Just as some of the exiles lost their faith, others remembered God. Have you ever been so far from home you wondered if you’d ever see it again? Have you ever gone so far away you don’t think you can come back? I’m not talking only about geographical distances: I mean really far away, farther than anything measurable in miles. The wilderness is where we live away from others, believing we can’t find the way home. Some Jewish exiles Babylon looked homeward and hoped. They hoped for what Isaiah pictures, for God to come and make a way home. They hoped the mountains would be made low, so they could go home; they hoped the valleys would be filled up, so they could go home; they hoped the crooked roads would be made straight, so they could go home. 

“Prepare the way of the Lord”—there, in the wilderness, that’s what we are told. Get ready, because God is coming and there is no power that can stand in God’s way. There is no mountain high enough to stump God: there is no grief dark enough that God can’t let light in, no loneliness so profound that God cannot overcome it. Every mountain and hill shall be made low. There is no valley so low God cannot find you in that depth. Even in the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil because God is coming and every valley shall be filled. And all the crooked things of this world—all the crooked paths will be made straight. God is coming to straighten them and to tell the truth, the straight truth: like a refiner, showing what is true inside. God is coming, over and over again—God is coming. Remember that our home is with God and that God is making a way home for us.

Where are you living? You may be in the wilderness but you can choose to live in the Kingdom of God. Your address may be in the wilderness but you have a home with God. That is the gift of Jesus Christ: “..in my father’s house are many places,” he said—I go to prepare one for you. Advent calls us to remember we have a home and demonstrate what this life looks like 

That’s why churches exist. Loren Mead, lists among the ten characteristics of really great churches that they are places where mutual responsibility is shared and mutual aid is possible. That is, churches are places where we can embrace each other and discover that in the midst of the wilderness, we are at home in the Kingdom of God. They are where we practice peace. 

We begin to do that when we understand our lives as a mission. Some years ago I had the good fortune to be the pastor for Arvilla Cline. Arvilla was a slight woman in her 90’s who had been the much loved Latin teacher at a school for girls in Albany. She was a person of amazing intellect ,much loved by her former students. One night a woman appears at the door or our church. It was winter and she had no coat or boots; she made it clear she needed refuge although she spoke very little English. Jacquelyn and I took her home for the night; she stayed with us for a couple weeks and gradually we learned she had been purchased by a man from a refugee camp in Somalia. She herself was from Eritrea; her name was Letamariam. We didn’t have the space to let her permanently live with us so I put out a call in church. Imagine my surprise when Arvilla contacted me and said she’d be glad to take Letamariam. So we moved her there. Now, because Arvilla was a Latin teacher, she was used to overcoming language barriers. Bit by bit, she taught Letamariam English, helped her learn about American culture and think about a new life. Ultimately, we were able to connect Letamariam with some folks in Ohio. She moved there, went to college, married and has a couple of kids now. When all this was over, I sat with Arvilla, thanking her and this was what she said: “I wonder what my next mission will be.”

What is your next mission? We cannot avoid the wilderness no matter how carefully we walk, no matter how well we plan. But we need not live in it permanently, we need not allow it to become our home. We can live in the affirmation that God is coming; we can live in the community of God’s people.  If we will prepare for the coming of God, then we are promised a transforming presence that will come when we least expect it.

This is the promise of God: prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness…because God is coming and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. Prepare your life: God is coming to spin a web of wonder. Prepare the way of the Lord—so you can get on to your next mission. 

Amen

Touched

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Sixth Sunday After Pentecost/B • June 30, 2024

Mark 5:21-43

We’ve just heard two stories about healings, and it’s tempting to just say, “Oh, that’s great, everything worked out.” But to really understand these stories, we’ve got to dig a little deeper and understand something about what’s called ritual purity in Jesus’ time. Let me explain it with a a story I heard this week about growing up in Appalachia on a farm. Sunday mornings, the storyteller and his four brothers all had a bath before church. Now keeping four boys clean while you wash the fifth had to be a chore, and his mother’s solution was to have all have them one by one as they got clean go sit on the couch. Ritual purity rules had to do with getting and staying clean in a way that made physical things an emblem of spiritual ones. These stories we read from Mark have a background we may not be aware of but would’ve been immediately obvious to any of the early Christians, all of whom were Jews. These aren’t just stories about healing—they’re also pictures of how Jesus dealt with those ritual purity rules. Those rules excluded many, many people. So let’s see how Jesus deals with these rules and these people and see what we can learn about how our lives as well.

Last week talked about Jesus crossing over to the gentile side of the Lake Galilee and this week we find him back on the Jewish side. For whatever reason, the lectionary has left out the story this year about what happened over there, but what happened is that he was casting out demons. 

Now he’s back and as he comes into town, there’s a crowd of people. Someone comes up, falls on their knees and begs Jesus to come to Jairus’ house, a leader in the synagogue. His daughter is ill, and Jesus is a well-known healer. So, Jesus and his disciples are pushing through the crowd when suddenly he stops. Have you ever done this, stopped in a crowd that’s moving? There must’ve been a bunch of them bumping into him. He turns to Peter and John and James and Andrew and says someone touched me. I think they must have rolled their eyes: they say, 5″You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?'”

But this wasn’t just someone bumping into him. A woman who has had a hemorrhage, we’re told, for 12 years has touched his clothing. Can you imagine her? Can you feel her desperation.? Surely she had been to healers; surely she had tried everything. If it was today, she would have gone on the web, searched for a cure. There’s another underlying piece here, too. In this time, her hemorrhage made her ritually unsure. Anyone who touched her, especially a man, would become impure as well. Perhaps that’s why she doesn’t just ask Jesus. Can you see her in the crowd? I think of her as an older woman, determined, brave. Now she’s moving through the crowd, now she’s closer to this Jesus, now she reaches out her hand and touches his cloak. And the story says she is healed. Imagine her shock; imagine her surprise. 

Then Jesus wheels around. “Someone touched me.” Was she afraid? Would he take it back, could he take it back? You know, in my family, when someone said that someone had done something, especially if it was my mom or dad, my brothers and I always had one response: “It wasn’t me!” The crowd seems to be doing that: they pull back, leaving her alone, on her knees. What do you think? The story says she was fell down before him in fear and trembling. But he doesn’t take it back; he tells her to go be healed. Perhaps you heard this and thought, “What? I thought she was already healed!” The healing he means is actually like a hospital discharge; it’s a certification that she’s now pure again, it’s the gateway back to her friends and family. There’s detail here you might have mixed. So far in this story, the woman is nameless; she’s just a woman with a disease. But when Jesus talks to her, he calls her daughter. Instead of her making him impure, he’s made her pure again, part of the family. This is what Jesus does. This is what Jesus’ touch does. It heals and brings us into the family. 

Touch is a switchy thing, isn’t it? My dad was a snuggler when I was little. Those were the days of one TV in the house. He’d lie on the floor in front of it, my brother and I on either side. But when I grew up, we had a hard time touching. I didn’t see him often and when I did, we didn’t know what to do. Shaking hands didn’t seem to be enough; hugging was not in our playbook. My mother used to laugh at us, she said we were like two bears, trying not to get too close. Of course, we’ve all been through the COVID pandemic when touch was dangerous. We didn’t worry before that. In most of my pastorates, I went to the back after the benediction and everyone shook my hand. Suddenly, we couldn’t do that. Suddenly, I couldn’t touch someone in a hospital bed. We learned the fist bump. Our family says grace before dinner; we used to hold hands, but now we don’t quite know what to do: some nights it’s holding on, some nights it’s bumps.

This story goes on to Jairus’ house. People tell Jesus not to bother; the girl is too far gone, but when he gets there, he touches her and tells her to get up. This is important: touching a corpse will definitely make you impure under the rules. But Jesus never hesitates; he says that she’s sleeping and goes right on. 

Think of what that home must have been like: people weeping, people trying to hold it together, people at the end of their rope. The text says there was a commotion. There would have been food; someone always brings food. No one wants to eat, but the food is there. Jesus goes to the girl, never hesitates, touches her, and says, “Talitha cumi.” That’s an Aramaic phrase; Aramaic was the common spoken language of the time. It’s often translated, “Little girl, get up”, but that doesn’t really convey the meaning. ‘Talitha’ is a term of endearment; ‘cumi’ means get up or come on. So it’s more like saying, “Come on, sweetie”. And she does; he says, “Give her something to eat,” which might have been to show she wasn’t a ghost. Personally? I think he just thought she needed a snack. It’s also a way of saying, “You’re back to being part of the family.”

This is what Jesus does: he touches people and brings them back to life in their community. He never seems to worry about ritual purity; he never seems to pay attention to the rules of ritual purity. What seems to happen is that instead of the impurity flowing to Jesus, his purity, his love, makes people pure and heals them. The gospels have at least nine stories of healing and several summary statements where he heals everyone brought to him. All have in common Jesus touching someone and healing them. Most of the time, he sends them back to families, to communities, to their lives. It isn’t just about physical touch, either; there are people he touches by casting out their demons, people he touches with parables, people he touches by feeding them.

Now, this is a time for this church to think about its mission in the next chapter. Where do we want to go? What do we want to see happen? Every church I’ve ever served generally said, “We want to grow” but that’s not what Jesus does. Over and over in Mark, the big crowd is in the way; sometimes it’s hostile. The crowd is not the goal. What Jesus does is touch people and give them back heir lives. So if we’re going to walk with Jesus, if we’re going to live as disciples of Jesus, we’re going to have to figure out how to touch people like Jesus did, with the love of God, the love that heals souls.

I took a class on being an Interim Pastor a while back. One of the things the teacher said is that pastors are supposed to provide answers, but interim pastors are supposed to ask questions. So today, I want to leave you with some questions. How can this church touch people with the love and grace of Jesus Christ? How can we make sure our traditions aren’t barriers for others? How can we, like Jesus, leave people sure they are spotless before God, ready to share their God given gifts in loving ways?

Amen.

Mission Accomplished?

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor • © 2021 All Rights Reserved

Epiphany Sunday • January 3, 2021

Matthew 2:1-12

Today is a unique and special day. It is for me the conclusion of a long career as a pastor and minister of churches from Boston to Seattle, in six different states, sometimes in cities, sometimes in small towns. It is as well my last day here with you as a pastor. For though it may be that I will come back some time, see you some time, it will not be the same, it will not be as your pastor or the minister of this church. Something is being put away, something I have savored and enjoyed and for which I have knelt here in this same room so many times and thanked God. So there is a temptation to simply bathe in the warm waters of memories, share them, shape them into a message. But it is also the day we celebrate the final story of Christmas, the visit of the Magi to the stable, and join together in communion. For over 45 years, I have focused my life, my mind, my talents on connecting the scripture to the life of a church, the life of people with whom I shared a church, as I do with you. So let me today, one last time, set aside the backward pull of memories and look with you once again at the strange and wonderful story of the Wise Ones who came so far and see how it calls us forward to follow the star ourselves.

The first problem with the gospel story is that we’ve already heard it. We have little statues of the Wise ones, we have a song, We Three Kings, there is a kings cake,  and a whole festival day dedicated to  them, Epiphany, January 6. In many countries, that’s the day you give and receive presents and eat special foods—did I mention the cake? With a new story, we pay attention to the details, we figure out the plot, learn the characters. With an old story, we tune out. It’s like listening to your dad telling you how many miles he had to walk to school. So our problem is how to pay attention. We can do that by treating the story like a white board, erasing it, and starting with the same questions we’d have about any story. Who’s involved? What’s their mission? Are they successful? Why is this story here?

Let’s start with the characters in the story. Who do we meet? First of all: Herod, the Roman appointed king of the Jews, a man almost universally despised by contemporaries and historians. Behind him stands the emperor and the might of Rome. The second character we meet is the people of Jerusalem; they’re a walk on part, we’re just told they are sort of a chorus for King Herod, frightened as he is. I’m going to skip the wise ones for the moment and go to the end. There, we meet Mary and, “the child”—isn’t it interesting that the story doesn’t call Jesus by name?

In between are the wise ones, called “magioi” in the original text. That’s a Greek word, a plural, that usually refers to intellectual religious authorities from Persia. They might be priests, they are certainly astrologers. They are Gentiles. The text in our translation reads “Wise Men” but the actual text doesn’t call them wise men, it says nothing about gender, it says nothing about wisdom. It also doesn’t say there are three. That tradition probably came about because of the three gifts.

Now that we’ve met everyone, consider what happens. The wise ones come to Jerusalem, to King Herod, tell him they’ve seen a predicted star—which simply means a particular bright light in the sky—and that there is a prophecy that a new king of the Jews has been born. 

It’s interesting to contrast the missions of Herod and the Magi. Herod is all about power. He’s scared; all kings get scared when their successor is talked about. He helps the Magi by getting his experts to send them to Bethlehem but later we learn it’s so he can accomplish his own mission, getting rid of the new king. In the next story, in fact, he is so afraid of this new king that he orders all boys born during the period killed; Mary and Joseph have to take the baby and flee to Egypt for a time to avoid this murderous mission of power.

The Magi, on the other hand, are on a mission to pay homage to the new king. They also give three gifts, often thought to have symbolic significance. Gold, the traditional tribute for kings, myrrh, a very costly ointment used for embalming and frankincense, used as a symbolic upwelling of something good to God, a tangible symbol of prayer. Notice they didn’t give Herod gifts; they didn’t give Herod anything. After they give the gifts, they depart by another way. 

Why does Matthew want us to know this story? He’s the only one who tells it. The context  can help us understand. Matthew starts out with a long genealogy almost never read in churches that connects Joseph to Abraham and King David. Matthew wants us to know Jesus is part of the continuing story of God’s promise of presence to Abraham. Matthew wants us to know Jesus is born of a royal line, a king in waiting. But the only ones who are going to know this are Jews; no Gentile is going to see Jesus as royal because of David. The implication that the baby will be royal is made specific by the second story. There, an angel connects Joseph to Marry and goes on to say that Jesus is going to fulfill a scripture promise of God’s presence so that he will be called Emmanuel, meaning Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God with us.”

So before the story of the wise ones, Jews have been given a reason to believe Jesus is the Lord. But Matthew is seeing a larger vision. By his time, Christians had stopped being a Jewish sect and included Gentiles. Now he tells this story of the wise ones and the message seems to be that even the Gentiles recognize Jesus as king, and they do it even if the Jewish authorities like Herod don’t. Matthew wants us to know what Herod couldn’t understand: Jesus is Lord.

Jesus is king: Jesus is Lord, Jesus is God with us. That’s the message of this story and we have to ask: so what? What will we do about it? Matthew is telling us about the past: what difference does it make that Jesus is Lord to our future? The first time I preached here, I said that the problem of faith was whether you believed Jesus was here to stay. It’s still the greatest question. Because if he’s here, if he’s staying, if he’s Lord, shouldn’t we do what he says? And what he says is, “Go make disciples.”

What is a disciple? Is it someone who gives to the church, serves on a committee or Board, comes regularly?Look at the disciples in the gospels. There’s James and John, who snap and snark about who’s number one, Judas who betrays Jesus, Thomas who doesn’t believe in the resurrection and Peter who seems to get everything wrong all along but is the first disciples to understand the message of the Magi and call Jesus the Christ. So in a way, the bar is pretty low. But in another way, it’s very high. Because discipleship is giving your whole self, sharing your whole self, in the service and following Jesus Christ. To be a disciple is to know Jesus is Lord and act on it, live from it.

Long ago, the prophet Isaiah said, 

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…

Isaiah 61:1-2

When Jesus first began his mission in Galilee, he began with this same text: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.. [Luke 4:18f] Anointing is what you do with kings: it signals someone who leads. Matthew’s message is the same: here is the king, here is the Lord. 

Now when I was ordained to the ministry at the Seattle Congregational church, when a group of Deacons of that church and clergy laid hands on me, this same text was read. It’ a mission statement and the mission is to show God’s presence in the world by bringing God’s light to darkness, to show God’s presence in the world by bringing God’s love to the unloved, to follow where Jesus leads as his disciple and invite others to come along. 

Today is my last Sunday as a pastor, though not the end of my ordination. It’s fair to ask: did you accomplish the mission? I’ve started two preschools, nurtured another, helped four churches grow their membership, baptized a lot of people, including Jacquelyn and all five of my grandchildren. I helped start a food pantry in one place, a coat ministry here. But the mission isn’t a list of what you’ve done: it’s a challenge about whether you’ve made disciples and that’s harder to know.

When I came here, it was clear this would be a different kind of ministry, one exclusively about preaching and praying. At times it’s been hard for me to give up trying to program things; I think I wanted to build things here. But like Peter stumbling along, you have wonderfully let me learn. Sometimes we’ve prayed in hospital rooms, sometimes here. I learned the answer to conflict wasn’t to win but to go pray for those who disagreed. I learned to do something ancient: to walk humbly with God, inviting others along. Has that made disciples? 

The first time I preached here, almost seven years ago, I said the church was intended to be a school for discipleship. So the same question applies to all of us: have we accomplished the mission? We’ve done some amazing things in the last few years. We helped a young woman get free of bondage, we have brightened Christmas for many, many children through the mitten tree, we’ve gladdened the heart of homeless folks through the Capital Latinos, we’ve praised God, worshipped God, listened to God’s word together for six and a half years. But have we made disciples?

It’s a hard question. So much of what we do in churches is just like home: maintenance. There we is always a tendency to polish old furniture rather than finding new missions. There is always a pull to measure attendance instead of discipleship. But people who come here, visit here, are looking for a new vision, not a photograph of the past.

I’m about to do something rare in my life: find a new church where I’ll worship in the pews. And my hope is that I can find a church making disciples. This is what I look at when I visit a church: how many pictures on the wall are people praising the Lord recently, how many announcements in the bulletin are about helping others rather than committee meetings, how many voices are heard in worship. So it ’s not a question just for me, it’s a question for all of us in churches: are we accomplishing our mission, making disciples by sharing the light of God’s love?

The Magi came to signal that the new King of the Jews, the Lord, was also here for the whole world. Great churches are built by being a community open to all, where all take responsibility for the worship and mission of the church. We must constantly fight the tendency to let a church be run by one person or family or an inner circle. We must constantly fight our human tendency to listen to our own wisdom instead of the wisdom of God, which is the Cross of Christ. We must constantly ask: mission accomplished?

So I leave you with that question. I ask it of myself. When two boats meet on a voyage, perhaps both in a strange harbor, the crews will talk, share stories, give advice about the next harbor or a hazard or opportunity ahead. But then there’s a moment when they both untie the lines, leave the dock, depart and watch each other as their courses diverge, finally out of sight. This is the day we untie the lines. But even out of sight, we will remember, we will share a hope and a mutual concern.

I remember laying on a dock in northern Michigan when I first felt the stirring of the Spirit, when I learned to listen to the gospel. I remember all the ways, all the years, I’ve tried to tell what I heard there. I remember the first time I stood in this pulpit, called here by God, chosen by you, to share the call of Christ to discipleship, to ask again and again, “Are we accomplishing our mission?” It’s still my question, it’s answer is still the star that can guide us on our separate ways. May your journey lead you to the Lord;.

Amen