Tag Archives: parable

All Together Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

World Communion Sunday • October 5, 2025

Luke 17:5-10

One of my favorite musicals is The Music Man. Do you know this show? It concerns a con man in early 20th century Iowa named Harold Hill. His swindle is that he gets people to believe there is trouble in their town only he can solve and only by creating a boys’ band. He sells them instruments, he sells them uniforms, he sells them on the idea that he can teach them to play the instruments and march in the uniforms through what he calls “The Think Method”. This simply consists of thinking you can play. Now, I was a trumpet player when I was a boy and part of a band. I can tell you that thinking won’t make your trumpet sound sweet, that takes practice. I was part of a marching band for a while and it’s less about thinking than drilling on making each step exactly the same as the last so that you stay in line. So none of what he says is going to work. There is a wonderful moment in The Music Man when Professor Harold Hill is found out, arrested, brought in handcuffs to the school where the boys are assembled along with the town and told to prove the band can play. He takes up his baton, and with the most unbelieving expression possible, says, “Think, boys, think”. 

I wonder if that’s the same expression Jesus had when he said the things we read today. Jesus was no con man, but he’s been teaching and preaching for a while now. The part we read pictures him alone with his disciples. They’re on the way to Jerusalem, and he’s told them already that there he’s going to be crucified and said discipleship with him means a cross. Yet they just don’t seem to get it. Do we? Just before this section, he talks about forgiveness.

So watch yourselves. “If your brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them.

Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying ‘I repent,’ you must forgive them.” [Luke 17:3f]

Just after this section, Luke tells us that they are traveling along the border between Samaria and Galilee, on the way to Jerusalem. 

These two snippets tell us where Jesus is: he’s crossing borders. He’s calling his disciples to cross them with him. Cross the border from guilt to forgiveness; cross the border from one place to another. In those moments of crossing, the disciples ask, “Increase our faith.” It’s funny, but I’m not sure if we get the joke. These are disciples, followers, but here they are, ordering their Master like he’s a servant. So Jesus gently reminds them of their relationship to him—and ours. They all understand the relationship of servants and master, and he invokes it here: Will a servant be thanked for doing what he was done? Everyone knows the answer. Servants—and disciples—are meant to follow the Master, not have the Master wait on them.

Today, there are many voices wearing Christ’s cross but demanding that he follow them into division. So perhaps World Communion Sunday, this Sunday, is especially important. It began not far from here, in Pittsburgh, in 1933. That was a time when denominations were fiercely competitive, anti-Semitism was officially promoted and racism was rampant. The Shadyside Presbyterian Church began the service as a way of reaching across boundaries of faith. It was promoted by the National Council of Churches beginning in 1940, as the whole world sunk into the violence of a second World War. Today, it stands a reminder that Christ does not belong to us; we belong to Christ. Anyone who tells us that Christ is on one side or the other of political or ethnic conflicts is lying. The call of Christ is beyond the sides, bigger than any of them, a call from the God who loves all. 

Today, all over the world, Christians of every theology, every tradition, every background, every nation, unite to share communion. So we need to see at this table not just those of us here, but people of other colors, other traditions, other customs. It’s a reminder that we all follow Christ. And in that reminder is a miracle waiting to burst forth. 

When Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man, begins to conduct the boys’ band, something magical happens. The boys, it turns out, have actually practiced and can get some noise out of the instruments. But it’s not noise the parents hear: the parents hear the sweet melody of their children making music. The camera lets us see what they see. One man cries out, “That’s my Davey!” And somehow, the boys are transformed; they become the band they had imagined.

Christ’s call is for us to become the disciples he imagined: faithful, loving, forgiving. Like Prof. Hill, he raises his baton. Like Prof. Hill, he calls out, “All Together Now”. And waits to hear 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.

Making God Smile

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

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Interim Pastor • © 2025

14th Sunday After Pentecost/Year C • September 14, 2025

Luke 15:1-10 

One of the most astonishing things I’ve ever seen is a just born baby learning to make mom smile. Have you seen this? A few years ago, I went to visit a mom with a new baby, a friend and church member. I expected her to be glad to see me; I expected her to be proud to introduce me to her child. What I remember is standing by the bed, ignored, irrelevant, as her new daughter tried out expressions, clasped tiny fingers and stared endlessly into her mother’s eyes, eyes that never left her. The sounds were happy; mom’s smile was quick and constant. After a few moments, she looked up at me, just a little embarrassed, as if caught at something and said, “I’m sorry, I’m totally entranced.” Calmly, enthusiastically, that new baby learned to make each of us smile at her and we did. So when we read in this text: “…there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”, it’s not hard to imagine the experience: we are meant to learn to make God smile like a baby teaching mom, and Jesus is giving lessons.

That’s a nice, feel good message for a Sunday morning. But does it have anything to do with our real lives? How do we make God smile; do we have to smile ourselves? How often we’ve settled for a bland, smiling Christianity that never hears, never sees, the fear and trembling of those around. How often we’ve gone home, scripture read, songs sung, sermon preached, as if the word, the songs, the preaching existed only in a world of endless smiles, while we ourselves live in a frowny face place where things hurt, and we constantly fear the next wave of grief or disaster will overwhelm us. Can we hold on to the smile of God in such moments?

Perhaps we begin to understand how when we see that Jesus teaches God’s smile comes out of being lost, the experience that so terrifies us that we will do almost anything to avoid it. The Bible has two images of being lost. One is wandering in the wilderness, a place full of life-threatening danger, where the things we need—food, drink—are unavailable. God’s people are formed in the experience of wandering the wilderness and Jesus himself is forced there after his baptism. Lost in the wilderness, Jesus meets a tempter who offers easy answers; he hangs on to being lost, until God finds him—the story concludes, “Angels waited on him”. Another experience of being lost is grieving. Over and over again in the prophets, in the Psalms, we hear the anguished voice of God grieving for lost Israel, which has broken its covenant and left its Lord.

We heard that in the reading from Jeremiah this morning. Jeremiah lived in a time of incredible violence. His home, Judah, went to war with the much more powerful Babylonia and was defeated; Jerusalem itself was destroyed, its leaders and many others exiled to Babylon. 

I looked on the earth, and it was complete chaos, and to the heavens,
and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.

[Jeremiah 4:23-27]

Defeat meant feeling deserted by God. The people were lost.

When have you been lost? When has the darkness descended until you didn’t know if there was a path, much less how to find it? There are griefs, there are losses, that leave us lost, wandering, uncertain, unsure, unable to find our way on our own. These past few weeks have seen two murders for political purposes and children shot at their schools. I know every time I read about this, it makes me feel lost.  

When Jesus speaks about the lost, this is what he means. There is nothing more helpless than a lost lamb. A lost dog will wander around and often return home. A lost cat will find its way back. Pigeons home; even a child may ask the way. Lost horses frequently return. But a lost lamb will not come home, will not return, will not come back. It will simply lie down and bleat its fear and the very sound becomes an invitation to predators: easy kill. What should be done about the lamb? The sensible thing of course is simply to abandon it; it’s gone, and leaving the herd might endanger it. Yet here Jesus lifts up the lost lamb as the occasion that leads not only to a satisfied smile on the part of a shepherd but also: “…when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me…’” The joy of the shepherd overflows into a party that invites his friends and neighbors. 

The same is true in the other image Jesus shares. A woman’s dowry was often worn around her neck in his time; to lose a piece was to lose the chance at marriage. Have you done what this woman does? Lost a wedding ring, an engagement ring, a special paper: searched and searched, moved papers, cleaned the whole house, cleaned out a drain, searching until it was found? Again: her joy overflows and creates a community of joy around her. Her joy, his joy, makes God smile.

We live in a whole nation of the lost today. So many are afraid of losing homes; so many have lost jobs. Sons and daughters have been lost in wars. And there are so many voices of fear, angry voices, little Satans really—for Satan just means ‘tempter’ and what they tempt us to give in to the idea that we can fix ourselves by abandoning others, that we can fix ourselves by hurting others. That’s why we have such a plague of violence. Three hundred fifty years ago, Congregationalists, English reformed church folks just like us were scared too, and they let themselves get whipped up into literal witch hunts because someone said that would fix everything. They took their fear out on the least of their communities. This happens today: same thing in a different day and it has nothing to do with the life of Christ or the mission of Jesus. 

What Jesus does is just the opposite: he welcomes people, sinners, the lost, everyone to his table, to this table right here. The mystery Jesus offers is that the solution to being lost is to find someone; the joy of finding will overflow and create a whole community of joy. So he gathers the lost, sometimes called sinners, and he eats with them. He invites them to his table. Who belongs at this table? Everyone who has ever felt lost. Everyone who has ever wandered—everyone! Gay people and straight people belong at this table; young moms and widows and the unemployed and the rich and middle-aged guys who are wondering why just working harder doesn’t make them happier and women who are trying to figure out what to do after the kids are grown, single people and working people and retired people and people who have never been inside a church in their lives. When we gather them at the table of Jesus, when we find the lost and bring them in, we’re helping Jesus and God smiles: there is joy in heaven.

We know this instinctively and sometimes we practice it. One of the great things we do here is the clothing closet. It’s a simple process: we all have clothing we don’t wear, don’t need. So do others. So we gather it up, size it, make it ready, and give it away. It’s just like what Jesus does with Gods’ grace: gives it away, free to anyone in need. We do other things as well. Christian Churches United helps us work with other churches helping people who are lost get found. It’s the fulfillment of our prayer to walk in Christ’s way.

Timothy states the purpose of Jesus bluntly, clearly: “Jesus came into the world to save sinners”  If we are followers of Jesus, doesn’t it make sense that we would be on the same mission? This is the beginning of a new year of programs here. It’s a time to think about vision. We need to ask: what is Jesus doing? What can we do to help? And when we ask, we’ll hear this call from the deep heart of God’s Word, Jesus came into the world to save sinners. When we ask, we’ll remember what Jesus said: finding someone who needs God and didn’t know it, helping someone who needed us and didn’t know it, is a reason to rejoice, a thing that makes God smile. That’s it, that’s my vision: make God smile. Let God’s smile shine, until we can see where we’re going, until we know we aren’t lost, we’re on the way God had in mind all the time.

Amen.

Freedom Now

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Ninth Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 10, 2025

Luke 12:32-40  

Years ago, I was a high school track parent. My older daughter Amy was a lithe, fast girl. She ran sprints and she ran relay races. Now the thing about being a track parent is that the meets take hours and your kid, the one you want to see, be seen cheering, runs for maybe five or ten minutes. We lived in a small town, so I knew lots of people, many in my congregation, so a track meet was a chance to mingle, check-in with people, maybe talk to one of the Trustees. The problem was that it was so easy to get involved in doing the business of being a pastor that it was easy to miss Amy’s races. 100 yard dashes take place fast. They line up, bend over in the runner crouch, someone calls ready, set go, shoots of a phony gun and BAM! Ten or 15 seconds later the whole thing is over. It’s easy to miss; it’s easy to let every day things distract you. 

This is just what Jesus is talking about in the section we read today. Honestly?—I’m not sure why this set of verses was put together for reading; they don’t go together. So let’s take them apart and see how they can each feed us. The section begins with the startling statement, “”Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This verse really goes with what we read last week. Remember the parable of the rich fool who thought he could store up enough stuff to maintain his life? Instead of storing stuff, Jesus says God is giving us the whole kingdom. No bill: no payment, free gift, free grace. This verse and others like it led theologians like John Calvin, the originator of Reformed Churches, to talk about ‘violent grace’, by which they meant that God gives the grace of including us in the kingdom without our doing anything to earn it, whether we want it or not. This is freedom: freedom now, freedom to live in God’s kingdom.

If the kingdom is given as grace, what do we do then? We don’t have to work at earning it; we don’t need barns to store up grace. So Jesus tells this parable. Palestinian houses weren’t like ours, they were little fortresses. Frequently several families lived in one house. Think of those old U shaped motels our parents took us to when we were kids: a bunch of rooms, surrounding a central courtyard. The houses were walled because robbers were a constant threat. So at night, the main gate into the courtyard was shut up.

Now imagine the head of the house coming home late at night; Jesus says, coming from a wedding banquet. Wedding banquets could and did run for days at a time, so there’s no way of knowing when the head of the house will return. What’s the job of the servants? Their whole job is to be ready, whenever that return happens. “Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit”, the parable says. Don’t be asleep, don’t be busy with something else, or you’ll miss it. 

What happens when you are ready and open the door to the Lord? “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” Wow! It’s a total reversal of things. Masters never serve slaves; what Jesus pictures is a total reversal of what we would expect that comes from being ready to serve. From the prophets to Jesus, the image of a banquet at which all are welcome is a fundamental picture of God’s kingdom. Here, the kingdom is recognized by being ready to serve, so the moment isn’t missed. 

What does this look like in practice? It might mean something small, like passing by the school supplies aisle and remembering we’re collecting such things this month. It might be saving someone’s life. The village of La Chambon in southeastern France is just a small place. Most of the people worship in the same Reformed tradition we do here. Instead of German Reformed, they are French Reformed, called Huguenots. Hundreds of years ago, they were persecuted by Roman Catholics and the Kings of France, and they haven’t forgotten. In 1940, when the Nazis defeated France, La Chambon was left in the unoccupied zone. But even there Jews were persecuted. Pastor André Trocmé and his congregation offered shelter to these refugees. Many were not French; no one cared. They put them up in private homes, in schools, in their church. They forged identity cards and ration cards for them; some of them were guided across the Swiss border to safety. From 1940 to 1944, they sheltered 5,000 people; 3,500 of them were Jews. A majority of them were children.

There was a cost. On February 13, 1943, Pastor Trocmé and his assistant were arrested and interned. They were eventually released but had to go into hiding. His cousin, Daniel Trocmé was arrested in 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, whether he was murdered. Others who helped were shot by the Gestapo. In recent years, they have been recognized by France and by Israel, where they were honored by being included in a list of rescuers called the “Righteous of the Nations.” After talking with many residents, a filmmaker was so impressed with how they saw what they did as ordinary, that he said, 

“These days we seem to think that good people are those who agonize. They ” sleep on it” and maybe in the morning their conscience gets them to do the right thing. No- this idea is wrong. People who agonize don’t act. And people who act don’t agonize.” [LeChambon]

What’s needed is simply a moral readiness that doesn’t count political party or our own opinions, that only counts what is right, what path Jesus points out. 

Last Tuesday, I was in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel in heavy traffic. There are two lanes into the city and both were jammed; we were creeping along at 15 miles an hour, frequently stopping. Suddenly, far behind me, I saw flashing red lights, and then I heard a siren. An ambulance was trying to get through, and my first thought was, “No way it’s getting through.” Then I noticed something strange for city traffic: people were stopping, letting the left-hand lane drivers in ahead of them, clearing the lane. It all happened fast and suddenly the ambulance, with all its signs of emergency, was flashing past me. The kingdom comes like that. This is what Jesus is teaching, that the kingdom comes as a sudden, urgent, immediate moment and our job is to cooperate with it, move with it, help it to come. Like the servants in the parable, we are told: be ready, live ready, because kingdom moments come when we least expect them. 

In a few moments, we’ll release a group of butterflies, signs of hope, signs of fluttering beauty. But before they were butterflies, they were in a chrysalis, an enclosure. Then at some moment, each one pressed against the chrysalis, bursting it, freeing its wings, expanding them, ready to fly. That’s God’s invitation to us: “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” The kingdom is coming; you don’t know when. Get ready; live ready, every day.  Amen.

Are You Going to the Party?

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Fourth Sunday in Lent/C • March 30, 2025

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

“A man had two sons…” I know you are all Biblically literate so I know that just this simple phrase has already set your teeth on edge. I’m sure you are already bracing for the rest of the story. Because we know what happens in the Bible with stories that begin this way. Adam had two sons: Abel and Cain, and Cain killed his brother. Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, and the rivalry between them is used to explain the millennia long conflict that in our time is represented by Israelis and Palestinians. Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob and Jacob stole his brother’s birthright. King David had two sons who were rivals, Amnon and Absalom, and the result was a civil war that almost destroyed the kingdom. 

“A man had two sons.” Think how Jesus’ listeners, who knew all these stories, for whom these were family stories, must have heard these words. Think how they must have cringed. “A man had two sons.” I know you’ve heard this story before; today I want to ask you to set aside everything you know about it, everything you’ve heard, and try, like someone who has just cleaned their glasses, to see it in a new light.

“A man had two sons.” The older one is a lot like his father, must have learned from his father, as farm kids do, all the skills and patience of sowing, caring, reaping, up at dawn to feed the animals, working by lamp light when the harvest has to be gotten in. He’s grown into a sold man by the time of this story, I’m sure his father is proud, I’m sure he’s beginning to take his place in the community. He never disobeyed his father, he never asked for anything, he just worked like a slave on the farm day in and day out.

“A man had two sons.” The younger one; what shall we say about him? He isn’t any of those things I just mentioned. I think of him never quite getting farm work, never wanting to do it, avoiding it whenever he can, growing up with the farm asi a burden threatened to press the life out of him. I think of him always wanting to go to the city, eagerly listening to stories from travelers, imagining a day when he himself would see the sights.

You know what happened. As soon as he was old enough, he went to his father and asked for his share of the inheritance. You may have heard that this was treating his father like he was dead but the father doesn’t object; he sells some property and gives his son the money and the younger son takes off for the city, where he squanders all of it in dissolute living. I’m going to pause just a moment for you to imagine that. Ok, that’s enough, a little dissolute living goes a long way. Once the money’s gone, of course, he has to find work and he works for a Gentile on a pig farm. Have you ever been to a pig farm? Have you ever driven by a pig farm? A pig farm can make your eyes water. Of course, pigs are forbidden to Jews, but there’s no suggestion he’s eating pork, just helping raise it, and he’s so poor and so hungry that he wishes he could eat the feed he’s giving to the pigs. Ironically, he’s back doing farm work, and he’s doing the worst kind. Now it doesn’t take much thinking in this situation to realize that if he’s going to do farm work, he’d be better off back home.

This is all prelude, isn’t it? This is the set up for what comes. This isn’t the only son who’s ever taken part of the family fortune and squandered it. Families are full of guys like this. You probably know a family that’s dealt with something similar. What if it was your family? What if it was your kid? We all want our kids to find their way but this one has already spent his father’s trust and money. How would you handle him?

What happens is a party. Amazingly, his father goes to his son, rushes out to the son, before he even gets all the way home, greets him, gives him a festal coat, puts a ring on his finger and tells the servants to cook up some barbecue. They have a huge party, with brisket and I’m sure beer and wine and every good thing. You’d think this kid had just graduated and gotten a plum job; you’d never know he was a refugee from his own reckless, selfish squandering. 

It’s the father’s joy in finding him alive and home that demands celebrating. The family can never be complete without him. At the end of the story, the father says, “We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” Wow: it’s hard to resist singing Amazing Grace, isn’t it? Well, it’s a good song and this is a good story and it might just as well end there but—it doesn’t, does it? No, this isn’t just a man and his son: remember where we started? “A man had two sons.”

The noise of the party is wafting out over the hills, the music, the loud voices, everyone is there except: the other son, the older son. Where is he?—out in the fields, working away, getting jobs done just like he’s always done. Something is growing there and it isn’t just the crop, it’s his resentment, his anger. He’s pouting. Surely he knows about the party, surely someone has told him that his brother’s back, his brother who forced his dad to sell that lovely olive grove, his brother he never really shared the work, even when they were kids, his brother who always got away with everything. Now his brother’s back and he’s not about to pretend he’s happy about it. 

So he stays in the field, works away, until finally his father finds him. His father finds him because it’s dawned on the father that he has two lost sons: one has just returned, one needs to be called back. One is at the party; one is pouting in the field, using work to express anger, his absence from the party speaking his disapproval. Absence doesn’t always make the hart grow fonder; sometimes, it just makes everyone sad.

The father goes out to find him. Because the older brother is so often treated as an after thought, we miss this detail. If you just read the beginning of the story, it seems the action is controlled by the younger brother: he leaves, he squanders, he returns. But it’s the father who is the main agent. He gives the two sons a home, he gives the younger brother what he asks, he goes out to find him when he is on the way home, he makes a party, he goes out to the field to find the other lost son. It’s the father who moves this story forward at every stage and now he does it by talking to his older son. The older son has a grievance and its foundation is the disruption of the family.

For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!’ [Luke 15:31f]

The younger son came back because in his heart he re-discovered a relationship. Remember his inner dialogue? 

I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” [Luke 15:17-19]

He expects to be treated like a worker at the farm; the older son speaks of working like a slave. The father always has one relationship in mind: they are his sons, they are family. When the younger son realizes this,  it is the invocation of ‘father’ that causes his return. The older son has also lost his relationship.“I worked like a slave,” he says—not like a son. He’s lost the right relationship with his brother, too; he calls him, “This son of yours.”

The father’s response is simple. When the family is complete, when everyone is together, he feels joy and the party is the result. It’s the restoration of relationships that makes the joy. In each encounter, he addresses them as “son” and the party is unstoppable because it comes from the joy of completing the family. “We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” Notice the imperative: “We had to celebrate”.

This story is often told as an allegory of forgiveness but that’s a mistake. He says he’s sinned against his father and heaven but it’s not his confession that causes the joy; his father has already run out to find him He is not embraced because he is forgiven but because his his father’s child, because of the father’s joy at his return. He was lost; now he’s found. That’s all that matters to the father. It’s all that matters with both sons: that they be found, that they know they are beloved children. The older brother doesn’t say he’s sorry about pouting, about his resentment. The father embraces him where he is, out there in the field, as he is, for who he is, because he, too, is a son. He embraced the younger one before he even got all the way home; he embraces the older one to bring him home.

This isn’t forgiveness, it’s grace. It isn’t about how we get to where God can love us—it’s knowing that this is what God is like. It’s part of a set in Luke. We don’t have time to explore them all this morning but here is the short version. A man has a hundred sheep, one gets lost and he goes and finds it and when he does, he’s so happy he throws a party to celebrate. A woman has a necklace with ten silver coins; one gets lost and she sweeps the whole house looking for it and when she finds it, she throws a party to celebrate. Are you seeing the pattern?

A man has two sons. One gets lost squandering his life; when he is found, his father is so happy, he throws a party. It’s imperative: he says, “We had to celebrate.” Another son is lost too, lost in resentment and rules. What happens when he is found? The surrounding context of these parables is a group of people who are just like the older brother, angry that Jesus eats with sinners, unhappy about the company he keeps. Those new people don’t know the rules, they don’t know how to behave. So they miss the party God is giving.

Are you going to the party? Paul says, “In Christ there is a new creation.” And he goes on to say that we are God making an appeal through us. This is what God is like, this is what Jesus is teaching. God is like this father who wants to embrace us. Are you going to the party?  We live in a world of boundaries and expectations, rules for what’s polite, what’s right.  All those rules keep us safe; all those walls are made because of our fears. The tough thing, the annoying thing, about Jesus is that he won’t have anything to do with our walls and he wants us to live from faith in God’s joyful embrace instead of our fearful wall building. Jesus lives in a society that is divided up, you heard it at the beginning: there’s Pharisees, teachers of the law, sinners, all these different kinds of people. And he just makes a party for all of them. 

Are you going to the party? This is an enormously loving and wonderful congregation. This is an enormously welcoming and appreciative congregation. That is what God wants and God blesses that. Maybe one more thing: realize that out there in the surrounding community there are people who don’t know that’s what God’s like and lots of people who assume that if they came here, they would be treated like people who lived dissolutely; like the older brother wants his younger brother treated instead of as beloved children. So, Paul says, “We are God making the appeal, ambassadors…” It’s up to us, each of us. If you want to see the love of God flourish here, go be an ambassador. Make this place a party where the love of God is celebrated. Are you going to that party? It’s not easy. Sometimes they play different music, sometimes they hang different banners. God just loves them all. He wants us to live like we are beloved children and his whole life is an example of what that looks like. 

I hear this story, I hear the sound of that party and I want to go. Are you going? Are you coming to the party? I want to get there; I want us all to get there. But more than what I want—God wants us, God wants you, God wants me, God wants all of us. Two Sundays ago we heard Isaiah say for God,

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.[Isaiah 55:1ff]

That’s God’s hope: that we will all, every single one, come to the party. 

Are you coming to the party? Can you let go of everything and just come celebrate? Sing different songs some Sundays, tear up the bulletin and make it confetti, throw it, celebrate, make it the party of the reconciliation of God. When we do, the angels sing and the joy of God overflows like a wine glass poured too full. Jesus is the wine: “poured out for many,” he says. Among them are you; among them are me. Are you coming to the party?

Amen.

Ohh! Woo! Wow!

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor @ 2024

Fourth Sunday After Pentecost/Year B • June 9, 2024

Mark 4:26-34

“A man went out to sow.” It’s simple, isn’t it? Up in Galilee, where Jesus is speaking, most of the people are farmers. I imagine, just like us, they all have their morning ritual. What’s yours? Three mornings a week my version of going to sow is to get up early, take my daughter to a coffee place called Lil Amps. I buy her a latte, or whatever she wants; I get black coffee. We sit and talk for five minute and then announces, “Well, it’s time.” I wish her a good day, remind her I love her, and she walks off to her office in downtown Harrisburg. I take my coffee and go home, read the news, read my email and look at the scripture for the week. Jesus asks us to imagine a farmer, a regular guy, starting out his day: “A man goes out to sow.” Nothing special, nothing momentous, nothing out of the ordinary. But remember what he says first: this is an image, a parable, of the most momentous thing of all, the kingdom of God. Want to see God present? Look here, watch: a man goes out to sow.

My dad grew up on a farm, so we always had a garden. Each person grew their own crop. My job was sweet corn, and he taught me to make a little mound of dirt, put some fertilizer in the middle, then poke five holes around the edges; each one got a kernel of corn. Maybe you have a garden, and you have your own way of sowing, so let’s be clear what happens when a man in Galilee goes out to sow. He doesn’t carefully put down each seed; he doesn’t plow first and sow in the furrows. Grain was sown by walking through the field with a bag on your hip, reaching in, taking a handful and scattering it over the field In another parable, Jesus describes this. It’s what we should imagine here. A man goes out to sow, scattering the precious grain this way and that. Maybe he’s a poor man, and he’s calculated just how much he can afford to take away from the family as seed; maybe he’s worried about the harvest, maybe he’s hopeful it will be a good year. This is the kingdom, and it begins with seeds that hold a secret.

Not knowing is hard for us, I think. I had a class in biology in high school. One of the projects was to grow beans. Beans are usually pretty easy to grow but in my case, I was assigned to grow them in what was a new way, called hydroponics. Hydroponics is growing in water with nutrients dissolved. So I set it all up in a long half-tube, seeds and water and nutrients. And I waited. I waited about two days. Then I got impatient; the people who had been given little cups of dirt were seeing tiny sprouts, but I wasn’t. So I pulled the seeds up just to check. No sprouts. A couple of days later, I did the same thing. I kept pulling them out and I never saw a single sprout. At the end of the project, everyone else had little bean plants; I had seeds that had gotten stinky and molded. The teacher asked if I had any idea what happened. I told him how I’d pulled them up every day and I still remember how his eyes got wide, and he said, “Jim, you can’t force it, you have to wait.” I flunked. That’s one reason I’m here today instead of doing biology.

A man goes out to sow, and then he does—nothing. This is the part that always gets me in trouble with gardeners. “What? What about weeding? What about fertilizing? What about all the hard work?” Sorry, I don’t know. I just know what Jesus said: he sleeps and rises, night and day; he waits. He just waits. He doesn’t pull up the plants like I did; he waits. And Jesus points this out: “The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.” There is a process, there is a creative, God given process and the best the sower can do is wait. Waiting is hard, isn’t it? I’ve been to hundreds of church conferences over the years, times when clergy gather along with active lay people and talk about their year in the church. There are stories of successful stewardship campaigns, programs that turned out great, and things to try. I have never been to a single conference in almost 50 years when someone said, “Oh, we slept and rose, slept and rose; we waited.” 

Mark’s gospel is the closest of all the gospels to Jesus, and it alternates between two times. One is “Immediately!” When Jesus is baptized, immediately, the spirit drives him into the wilderness. When he calls his disciples, immediately they respond. When he heals, immediately the person is whole. ‘Immediately’ occurs 28 times in this short gospel, more than in Matthew and Luke put together. The other time that happens over and over again is that Jesus tells his disciples not to talk about the amazing things they see, the healings, the time on the mountain when he shines with a heavenly glow. It isn’t time to tell these things. Just like the man who went out to sow, they have to wait; they have to sleep and rise and let the unseen work of the Spirit go on, trust that God is working. 

Of course, the parable tells us, eventually the harvest comes. No sleeping then! I’ve lived in a couple of rural communities, and harvest is a time when nothing else matters. You rush and work as late as there’s light because once the crop is ripe, you only have so much time to get it in. Then, like Jesus in Mark’s gospel, everything is “Immediately!” What does the man who went out to sow do when it’s harvest time? He puts in the sickle, in other words, he uses everything he has to harvest the crop that was sown. 

What is the kingdom like? It’s a harvest, but it’s also these other times: sowing and waiting as well.  And one of the most important questions to ask in a church is: what time is it? It’s a question our consistory ought to be asking, it’s a question for the search committee, it’s a question for all of us: what time is it here? Is it time for sowing? Is it time for waiting? Is it time for harvest? Because if we wait when it’s time for sowing, we’ll never get anywhere; if we try to harvest when it’s time for waiting, we just end up with moldy beans.

Perhaps this is what Paul is trying to teach the Corinthian Christians. He says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” That sounds like someone who understands the Spirit’s work is not always visible, like the sower who sleeps and rises while the earth produces of itself. And finally, he comes to the harvest moment.

5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
[ 2 Corinthians 5:16-17]

Wow! God isn’t just improving things, God is making a whole new creation!

Jesus doesn’t want us to miss that wow. So we have this other parable about a mustard seed. I used to think of this as a story about gradual growth, from little to big, but I’ve become convinced that it’s not about growth at all. It’s about wow. You know the wow moment? In a couple of weeks we’re going to celebrate the fourth of July and most places will have fireworks. We have a boat in a slip in Baltimore that’s just across a little water from Fort McHenry, where the “rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air” actually happened almost 210 years ago. Every year there’s the same conversation. A colored rocket shoots up giving off sparks and someone says “oooh!!!” And then another, sometimes bigger and there’s a “woooo” and finally at the end when all the rockets shoot off, someone will always say “wow!” 

Christ invites us to the same “oooh! Wooo! Wow!” With the story of the mustard seed. All over Galilee, mustard was a plant that grew wild in the ditches and along roads. Left alone, it spreads and grows up in the summer to big bushes. But this growth isn’t the point: the point is that looking at tiny mustard seeds, you’d never expect a big shrub. Look at Jesus: you’d never expect a resurrection. Look at us: you’d never expect a new creation. But there he is; here we are. The last part about the birds making nests isn’t just artistic license; it’s actually a reference to a story in the book of Daniel. The nesting birds are a symbol of God’s New Creation. They’re meant to make us go, “Wow!”

What does the kingdom of God look like? It looks like someone sowing, someone waiting, someone harvesting, each at the right time. What time is it here? 

What does the kingdom of God feel like? It feels like the unbelievable surprise of something tiny becoming the means of a whole new creation. Something small: like you, like me. 

Woooo…wow. 

Amen.

What Are You Wearing?

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany NY

By Rev. James Eaton, Pastor * © 2020 All Rights Reserved

19th Sunday After Pentecost * October 11, 2020

Philippians 4:1–9 • Matthew 22:1–14

“Saturday I have to take Lucy for her rabbi shot.” It was a simple text from Jacquelyn; most of you know Lucy is our little seven pound endlessly barking dog. What you may not know is that our best friends in Albany beyond the church are our neighbors who are Orthodox Jews. So we hear a bit about rabbis and we’re very conscious about Saturday being their sabbath. But why would Lucy need a shot to protect against a rabbi? I looked at the text again and then it hit me: the demonic spell checker had hit again and converted ‘rabies’ to ‘rabbi’. I laughed, I laughed and laughed again. The spell checker failed but in failing made me laugh. We are a society frantic to succeed; what if going forward means failing? 

Wrong Shirt, Wrong Time

Today’s gospel reading contains two parables. One is about a great banquet; that occurs in a slightly different form in the Gospel of Luke as well. The other is this strange, last part about the a guest at a wedding who gets thrown out, all the way out, into the outer darkness, because they wore the wrong thing. I guess we all wear the wrong thing sometimes. One day, I put on a nice shirt with pink stripes only to have Jacquelyn take one look, make the face, the one that says,  “Oh no!” and inform me that it was a spring shirt. I didn’t know shirts had seasons. So I had to find one what went with fall for reasons I didn’t understand and put that on.

This unfortunate guest has made the same mistake: he’s mistaken the time. Clothing rules are really about showing respect, a way of acting by wearing. When my daughter Amy was married, I did what ministers do: I wore a suit. Jacquelyn had many things to navigate: what was the mother of the bride wearing? what were the bridesmaids wearing? Would it be hot or cold? Did it call for heels? Coming up with the right outfit wasn’t as much about style as about showing respect to her new stepdaughter and the rest of the family.

The issue here isn’t style, it’s whether we are responding to God’s call in Christ. Clothing is a symbol for who you are and who you are following. Paul knows this. In a culture where the symbol of power was the armored Roman soldier, he says to Christians, “…be strong in the Lord and in God’s mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. [Ephesians 2:10f]” The guest with the wrong garment failed to grasp the moment; he failed to honor the king. The punishment is to be left out of the kingdom, for the kingdom is the place of light; the outer darkness mentioned is its opposite. 

Are You Ready for the King?

So the critical issue here is this: are you ready for the king? The best way to understand this story is to look at the context. If we look a little farther back, we find that Jesus tells a series of three parables about people who miss out on the kingdom. We read one two weeks ago: a man tells two sons to go work in the vineyard; one replies, “I go!” but doesn’t, one replies, “I will not,” but goes. “Which did the will of the father?,” Jesus asks. 

The second is also about a vineyard. A householder plants a vineyard and then lets it out to tenants. At harvest, the tenants beat his servants and kill one. He sends more servants; same result. Finally, he sends his son; they cast him out of the vineyard and kill him. What will the owner do when he comes? The answer is obvious and the disaster that befalls the tenants comes from their failure to remember the vineyard doesn’t belong to them. 

Finally, we have the parable of the great supper, in this version is a marriage feast. Once again, this is a story where someone loses out because they don’t grasp the moment. That’s a common thread in these stories. The son who doesn’t go into the vineyard, the vineyard workers who kill the owner’s son, the guests who don’t come to the feast are images of people who should have known better and didn’t. They are images about Israel’s spiritual life; the vineyard is an ancient image for God’s people. The stories take place in a setting of conflict with religious leaders and just before the parable of the great supper, we read that the Pharisees and Chief Priests knew he was speaking about them and are plotting to arrest Jesus.

The structure of this parable is simple. A king invites several subjects to a wedding feast; each refuses, giving as a reason some concern of his own. In response, the king wipes out the things they thought were important and, left with an empty banquet hall, invites strangers instead. The feast goes on but those first invited aren’t present. They weren’t ready for the king and their failure destroys them. 

Two stories of failure; two stories of rejection: that’s a lot for a Sunday morning! What is Jesus saying? What can we learn about following him from these failures? Perhaps the most important thing is the urgency of now.

The Urgent Now

A wedding is a unique moment. That’s what the invited guests miss. “…they made light of it and went off, one to his farm, another to his business,” [Matthew 22:5] They missed this most important part of the invitation: “Everything is ready.” 

From the beginning, Jesus has been saying the same thing. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus begins to work when John is arrested and he begins to preach with this simple message: “Repent, for the kingdom of God heaven is at hand.” [Matthew 4:17] He lifts up the tradition of God’s people; he talks about the future of God’s people. But he begins with the urgent now: “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”—right here, right now.

“Now is the time,” was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorite phrase. The gospels’s give us two patterns of calls to discipleship. The first is the call of Peter and Andrew. In their case, the signature is the immediate response: “He said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. Immediately they left their nets and followed him.’” The same pattern is repeated with John and James. They’re mending nets, working with their father when Jesus comes to them and Matthew tells us, “Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.” [Matthew 4:20–22] But later, when a scribe offers to follow him, he’s discouraged when Jesus tells him that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” Another follower who wants to wait to begin following him while he buries his father is told to leave the dead to bury their own dead.

“Now is the time.” The great irony in the story is the violence. Those invited were concerned about their farms and businesses; the king destroys them both. What they thought was so important is gone. What now? What will they do now? 

This is a parable for this moment. How often were we told that we lived in the most advanced country in the world? When the pandemic first began, it was easy for many to believe the promises of leaders that we had nothing to worry about. After all, we had resources, we had the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, why worry, why wear a mask or close a business or stay home? We missed the urgency of the moment and just as in this story, disaster has resulted.

“Now is the time.” Jesus preaches the urgency of now: the kingdom is at hand. It’s not tomorrow, it’s not yesterday, it’s right now, right here. What are we going to do? 

Living from the Mind of Christ Now

That’s the question each day: what are we going to do now? what are we going to do today? It’s certainly the question Paul presses on the church in Philippi. In the part we read this morning, he gets personal. 

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life

Philippians 4:1–3

The church is divided; these two women lead factions. You know how strong feelings must be running for it to threaten the life of the church. It’s easy to love your enemy as long as your enemy is abstract; when it’s that annoying Syntyche, when it’s that awful Euodia, it’s harder, isn’t it? I’ve always thought there was great insight in Jesus’ command to love your neighbor. The world is easy to love; a neighbor, someone close by is harder.

So we’re back to what we talked about two weeks ago, also from this letter to the Philippians: have this mind among yourselves that was the mind of Christ. Except now it’s focused, now it’s harder because now it’s now. Now is the time: now is the time we’re called to live from the mind of Christ. We’ve talked about how humility can lead us to this; Paul says, 

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. 4Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.”

Now he offers a standard:

“Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”

It’s hard to fight a church fight when you are thinking about things that are honorable, just, pure, commendable. It’s hard to rant in your head about someone and think about what is pleasing, worth of praise and so on. Everyone who hikes learns to watch for trail markers; everyone who drives watches the signs. These are signs of the mind of Christ and if they aren’t part of your journey, it’s time to stop now, and do exactly what Jesus said: repent—for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom is right here, right now, and if you aren’t living from the mind of Christ, you’re wearing the wrong outfit. 

What Are You Wearing?

This is finally the message of these parables: following Christ is a series of moments, not a one time commitment that needs no follow up. Now is the time—each day, each moment, each interaction. Now is the time to put on Christ; now is the moment to live from the mind of Christ. Today is the day we’re invited to the kingdom. What are you wearing?

Amen.

Serious Laughter and the Evil Eye

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost/A • September 20, 2020

Matthew 20:1-17

I want to begin this morning with something I read that expresses where I am, where I think so many of us are today.

I watch the news some nights, and I listen to reports about COVID…I also watch our beautiful western states burn. I watch Black lives and blue lives being taken unjustly. I watch fear-mongering and listen to … brazen lies.

It’s all so…heartbreaking.

Cameron Trible, ‘Piloting Faith”, email on September 16, 2020

Here’s my question: in these days of heartbreak, how do we find joy? How do we respond to whatever the day brings? Every day is a basket of occasions; every day has threats and opportunities and invitations to praise. Jesus’ parable of the vineyard workers is about a day when some grumbled, and some laughed. Can we join the laughter?

Let’s start with the end and work back to the beginning. Imagine these workers going home; what do you think the conversations were like? Think of the last first. All day long these sat around the dusty corner where day laborers gather. They talked, hoped, gradually gave up. They saw friends get work but they never did. Then, at the last moment, at the moment when they were hopeless and just avoiding home where there wouldn’t be anything to eat, this amazing chance. Five o’clock!—and a guy comes looking for help picking grapes. Who cares what he was offering to pay? Something is better than nothing, anything is better than nothing. So off they went to the vineyard, hoping for just a little, maybe some gleaned grapes. Imagine their surprise, imagine their “it can’t be true” joy when they walk to the pay table and the manager hands them a whole drachma, a day’s wage. I wonder if their eyes widened, I wonder if one by one they slunk away, thinking the guy must have made a mistake, wanting to get away before he figured it out. Think of them grinning as they walk in the door at home and someone looks up, eyes questioning. Think of the grin as they hold out a whole drachma, enough to pay for dinner and breakfast tomorrow both. Imagine the hug and the laughter, the serious laughter.

Now think of the first hired. Tired, hot, dirty after a long day in the fields. Farm work started then as it does not at dawn. They were smart to get down to the corner early, and their smarts was rewarded. A full day’s work but more importantly a full day’s pay, just as agreed. I wonder if they felt a little smug, seeing others who didn’t get to work until noon or later, knowing they wouldn’t get full pay. So imagine their anger, their grumbling, when—impossible!—the manger starts handing out drachmas to everyone. “How was your day?”, their families ask, and the answer is grumbling about the unfairness of the vineyard owner and the pay tossed on the table. Which home do you want to live in? Can we choose?

Go back to the beginning. It’s September; well, I know it’s September here but in this story it’s September too: that’s the grape harvest. You know what September is like? One bright, warm sunny day immediately followed by thrashing rains and cold temperatures. Harvest is a crisis because grapes all get ripe at once, the vineyard is ready now, and if you wait, even a day or two can mean you missed the moment. So this vineyard owners goes out at daybreak to hire some day laborers. Every farming community has a corner where these guys hang out. He finds a group, he contracts to hire them for a day’s wage, a denarius, paid as a drachma, a standard coin. So they go to work. Imagine the owner working with them, correcting some of them, helping and realizing it’s not going to be enough, there aren’t enough of them. So at noon he goes and hires more. The same thing happens. He’s getting more frantic so he goes at mid-afternoon, hires more and as the evening starts still more. These others don’t have a contract, he just tells them to trust him, he’ll pay what’s fair. They know they aren’t working a whole day, they’re glad to at least get a few hours.

At the end of the day, the owner’s tired but he’s happy; the grapes are picked, the vineyard is harvested and he makes a decision. He tells his manager to pay everyone, and to start with the last hired first. This is really the central point of this parable and it’s why Matthew, the only one to tell this story, has it here. It’s connected to the spiritual facts Jesus preaches, that God doesn’t play by our rules and that the last are going to be first. So the laborers line up, just as ordered. And the manager starts paying them: one drachma for you, one drachma for you, one drachma for you.

It doesn’t take long for them to figure out what’s going on. I wonder what the guys at the end of the line, the ones hired first, who worked all day, thought as they saw these others get paid. Day laborers lived day to day and a day’s pay meant just that, they got through the day, they had enough to eat for the day. One day for you, one day for you, one day for you, on and on the pay goes until the first hired, the ones who had a contract finally get to the head of the line. Did they assume they would get more? Wouldn’t that be fair? What do you think? They worked all day, they bore the heat of the day; on the other hand, they agreed to work for—one drachma, one day’s pay. And that is exactly what they get.

19th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Hidden Treasure

by

Hidden Treasure

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2017

19th Sunday After Pentecost/A • October 15, 2017

Matthew 22:1-14

Click below to hear the sermon preached

[Jesus said} The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son.
— Matthew 22:1 (NIV, used by permission)

When I was eight or so, I went to a church where the greatest value was silence. “Sit still,” my mother would say, and on the few occasions when children were allowed into the sanctuary, the very air seemed full of quiet. My friends and I were restless little boys and knew we didn’t belong in there.

We longed to be in the Good Room. The Good Room was the Kindergarten Sunday School room and it was full of big wooden toys. It had a wooden bus you could sit on and ride, blocks and puzzles and a rug. But then we were told we were too big for the Good Room.

Our room did not have a rug. Our room did not have toys. We had the Bad Room. Our room had a picture of Jesus with long hair. We all had crew cuts which on Sunday had a special wax applied to the front to make our hair stand straight up. Our room had confusing colored maps; these same maps are still sold by church supply stores today.

Mostly our room had little wooden chairs. The wooden chairs were usually pulled into a circle and a teacher would sit on one of them and hand out Sunday School papers. We were supposed to be quiet and read the papers. Then she would ask us questions and we were supposed to be quiet while good kids answered the questions quietly.

We were not good kids and on top of that, we itched. We itched from the moment our mothers made us put on the special Church Clothes until we got home and put on real clothes. It is impossible to sit in a wooden chair and itch quietly and we didn’t. Furthermore, we were endlessly fascinated by the possibilities of wooden chairs. They could be tipped back, for example, and we never tired of trying to discover just how far. A Ph.D. in Engineering would say we were trying to determine the limit case experimentally. We just knew it was incredibly funny when someone fell over. Our Sunday School was a constant battle between Quiet and Noise, which our teacher seemed to think translated into a battle between God and Satan. Satan was Noisy and so were we.

I mention all this because knowing that I grew up among people who believed silent children sitting in a circle of wooden chairs was the ultimate Goodness may help you understand how surprising it was when I discovered God loves a party. It’s true: read the scriptures and over and over again there are parties. Noisy parties. After creation, God gives the first people things that are good to eat and things that are beautiful; apparently, God cares about the decorations.

When God renews the promise of descendants to Abraham and Sarah, it’s at a dinner party. Later, when God tells the Hebrews they are going to get out of Egypt and go free, they’re told, “But before you go, have a party, a Passover seder,” gives directions for the food and makes sure everyone has enough and then God so enjoys the party that it becomes an annual festival. Later on, the ark of the covenant comes to Jerusalem and King David dances in the streets and embarrasses his wife. So it goes: on and on, party after party, down to Jesus, who explains the Kingdom of Heaven by saying it’s like the biggest, noisiest party his friends know about, a wedding celebration.

Jesus seems to like parties too. They’re all over the Gospels: John starts with a wedding at which Jesus supplies the wine; along the way to Jerusalem, he has time to stop for a dinner party at the home of a tax collector. One of the main complaints about him is that he eats with sinners: in other words, he has too good a time. Now he’s near the end, still trying to explain what life is like in lives that God governs and he tells this story about the biggest party anyone there can imagine, a royal wedding.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son”, Jesus says. Weddings were a bit different then. First, you sent out an invitation, letting your friends know you were planning the party. but the invitation didn’t include a date or time. When the party was ready, you sent servants to tell everyone to come right away. A King’s wedding banquet would be the ultimate version of the biggest party. Now imagine the King, party prepared, oxen and cattle being barbecued, beer and wine all cool, special cakes baked, everything ready to go sending word to his friendly nobles. “Come to the wedding banquet!” But the invited guests don’t show up. They’re busy, they’re involved. They treat the king’s servants shamefully.

It’s always a temptation with a parable to start pinning labels on the characters and often this story gets read as if the king equals God and so on. That’s a mistake that’s likely to lose the point so let’s try not to do that. A parable is about an experience: so what’s being experienced here? What’s being compared? First: there’s the king, of course. Have you ever had a party? Sent invitations, cleaned and cleaned, made the food, decorated the house and then—waited. There’s that long moment when you wonder: will anyone come? So I imagine the King has that moment. This is an important occasion; maybe you remember watching a royal wedding in Britain. But now the King waits and waits to see what will happen, the aroma of the barbecue and the clink of the glasses being set wafting through.

There there’s the experience of the invited guests. In those days, party invitations were a two-part process: you got the invitation without a date, then when it was time to go, someone came and told you. Now I imagine that when these people got the original invitation, they noted it, stuck it on the refrigerator, discussed it with spouses: “Hey, you want to go to this wedding?”—and then went on with their lives. Those lives got busy. In this version of the story, it’s a king doing the inviting and the people who decided not to come are nobles; in other versions, the inviter is just a rich guy and the people invited are his friends. They don’t mean to brush him off; they just got busy, too busy to go.

What do you do when you meant to have a party and no one comes? Well, generally you get embarrassed, you send the food to the food pantry, you put away the decorations, you get annoyed with the people who were too busy. But see what happens here: the king does none of these things. Instead, he pursues his purpose. He has other people, poor people, people who have never been to a party, invited in, people off the streets and street people.

I imagine that was some party, don’t you? We’re left to imagine their experience. What is it like when you are poor to be treated like you are rich? What is it like when the world turns upside down, when the last really do become first?

Jesus tells this story just before he’s arrested and I think he means us to understand that when God reigns in us, we will understand this amazing, wonderful thing: nothing can stop the purpose of God. Like water running downhill, if you try to contain it, it finds another way; if it runs into a boulder, it will wear that boulder down, nothing can stop it flowing to the sea. Nothing can stop the purposes of God.

We are the means by which God does that. We are God’s treasure, sometimes hidden, always loved. The original guests invited to the party are used to good things but imagine the reaction of those who are brought in from the streets. Think how loud, how joyful, the party becomes with their surprise at being there. It turns out they are a treasure, one that had been hidden. Now that treasure is revealed and the party goes on, just as the king had hoped.

Now the church is meant to show what it looks like when God reigns. What does it look like? It looks like a party. You can’t do a party all by yourself. Soon, we’re all going to get an invitation to estimate what we will give in the coming year to this church. It’s really an invitation to a party: our mission is to make the party of God’s kingdom available and evident and open here and now, in this place, in this time. In the parable of the party, many of those invited look at their calendars and decide they have other, more important things. Some are doing business deals; some have family commitments. They miss the importance of the invitation the king has offered. Now in the Matthew version of this story that we read there’s a great huff and puff of angry reaction. But isn’t the real problem with missing the invitation that you miss the party?
This is the same problem the man who is thrown out of the wedding banquet has: he isn’t wearing a wedding garment. This is a symbol for his failure to act appropriately, to make a full commitment. What Jesus seems to be saying is that even if you come to the banquet, you have to do something. It isn’t all invitation; it’s also response.

The Kingdom of God is a party and you are invited, we are invited, each one of us, every one of us—everyone welcome. But the invitation isn’t everything. It takes some response, it takes some decision, it takes changing the way you look and the way you live. You can’t come to the party wearing the same old armor you wear out in the world—you have to put on a wedding garment. You can’t live out your faith in the same old behavior of yesterday—you have to make a daily decision, “Yes, I’m going to live out of the love of God.”

Come to the party: that’s God’s invitation. Our God is a nearby God, a God who invites us to a celebration, a God who cries when we cry, who laughs when we laugh. But living with God is not automatic, it takes your decision to put on the wedding garment of love, it takes your faith that God will be present, providing, trustworthy. Your contribution of you. God invites you to the party: get dressed and go!

Amen

18th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Tarnished Treasure

by

Tarnished Treasure

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by The Rev. James E. Eaton, Pastor • Copyright 2017

18th Sunday After Pentecost/A • October 8, 2017

Matthew 21:34-46

To Hear the sermon preached, click below

Have you ever found a treasure? Maybe your grandparents had a house with an attic or a basement where you went and pored through things you sometimes could hardly understand. Maybe your mother draped you with costume jewelry or your father handed you a baseball and gruffly said, “Look at the signature on that, now that was a ballplayer.” Every church meeting house contains a treasure along with its congregation. Look around: many of us here think of the stained glass windows of this house as a treasure and people come to see what we see every Sunday. One congregation I served had a building that had stood since ten years before the Civil War and like a house where things accumulate, it was full of closets that held treasures.

But of all the closet treasures, the greatest was the Victorian silver. It was rarely mentioned; only once in a while someone would allude to “the valuables.” One day when I was avoiding working on the sermon and investigating closets, I found it. A full double size, floor to ceiling closet, overflowing with little soft bags which, when I opened them, contained a treasure trove of silver. There were cream pitchers and sugar bowls, large bowls for food and serving utensils. There were things I didn’t even know how to name: one I later learned was designed to hold and dispense salad dressing.

Like a child on Christmas, I shuttled back and forth, unwrapping and taking out each piece until the next door kitchen counter was full of old silver. That presented a problem, of course; it’s always more fun to take things out then to put them back. Somehow I knew that like Peter Rabbit, I had slipped into a forbidden garden and that if the farmer came along, I’d be in trouble. So I carefully wrapped each piece, put it back, closed the closet and determined to leave it alone.

I couldn’t, of course. Not long after, at a church council meeting, I mentioned as casually as I could that I happened to have found the church silver and that I thought at our next celebration we should get it out; it was too pretty to stay in a closet. Of course, I pursued the matter and when I did, I learned this: the silver was, in fact, a treasure, very valuable, very beautiful—everyone agreed—but it could not be used because it was tarnished.

For those who don’t know much about silver, as I didn’t, let me simply say that when silver sits, it acquires a dull layer of oxide, some places it turns black, and that’s called tarnished. More importantly, those in charge of the silver had pronounced it tarnished and didn’t understand why I was so dumb, so obtuse, not to realize that tarnished silver could not be shown, could not be used, could not be anything but in the closet. It was over; it was tarnished, unfit, worthless for use.

Now you and I are God’s treasure, creatures meant to reflect God’s glory. But often, just as the bright silver stops reflecting when it’s tarnished, we get tarnished and think our days of reflecting God are over. We’re not up to it; we’re not worthy to do it. Sometimes it’s something we’ve done, sometimes it’s something we’ve been; sometimes it’s something we’ve lost or added. We may be treasure but we are tarnished treasure and like the silver, we assume off in a dark closet is the appropriate place.

So Jesus tells this story, this shocking story, that we read this morning. He lived in a restless, violent world where unscrupulous bankers took advantage of people and many people worked for large farms that didn’t offer health insurance, pensions or anything else but a bare minimum wage. Restless, hungry poor people sometimes get violent and there were many instances of small peasant revolts. He tells this story. Some tenant farmers work in a vineyard and the owner lives far away; when he sends a slave to collect the profits, the tenants beat him up, in fact, they beat up several servants. Ultimately, the owner sends his son and heir, thinking this will make the tenants take the demand seriously. Instead, they beat the son up and murder him. I imagine Jesus telling this story, and brows knitting, frowns forming in the ring of listeners as he comes to his final question: “what will the owner do?”

We all know the answer, don’t we? We know what we’d do. The listeners know what the owner will do, he’ll do what owners always do: get the police, in this case, the Romans, come and get those murdering tenants and string them up. A life for a life, the judge will say, and justice will be done. “What will the owner do?”—why even ask? We all know how this ends.

The world’s answer to problems is violence. The tenants feel the injustice of sharecropping and see no way out except to kill the owner’s son. Surely the owner will reply with the authorized violence of the police forces. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Last week I watched a documentary on the Vietnam War. One of the most moving moments was watching a former North Vietnamese soldier say that in war there is only death and destruction, right and wrong don’t matter.
We’ve all seen this deadly dance. We can imagine the people hearing Jesus tell this story. Some are tenant farmers, surely, or come from that world: they know, perhaps they remember when an owner came and killed everyone after a revolt. Others are authorities, owners, and their agents. They’re already mad; Matthew sets this story in the Temple precinct, where not long before Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers.“What will the owner do?” We all know, don’t we?

Except—except Jesus is about to demonstrate the most stunning, amazing answer to his own question. In the crowd around him, there are people already plotting his death. This story is told in the days just before the crucifixion. His friends will remember the story precisely because only a few days later, just like the son in the story, the owner of the vineyard-—for hundreds of years, Israel has been described as “a vineyard of the Lord’s”-—the owner of this vineyard is God. What God does is astonishing: God does not punish the killers, God saves them.

Here is the great mystery of God’s love—that when we are tarnished treasure, even when the most tarnished among us, God yet is trying, seeking, looking for a way to love us back into acting like the treasures God made us. Maybe you don’t feel worthwhile; maybe you feel tarnished. God doesn’t care what you feel—God cares for you.

Because God cares, we are called to care. This church is a community of care. Two nights this week I was here when the whole building was full with people healing in some groups, sharing in others. I know that this week all of us have been held rapt by the violence in Las Vegas. There is no way to disconnect this violence from the violent culture in which we live and the river of guns that flows through it. To the question of violence, God offers this answer: God’s love. And the expression of that love through the way we use our lives and our treasure to extend that love.

The tarnished treasure at that church did eventually come out of its bags and back to a dinner table. A couple of years after I found it, I got tired of arguing about it. We were planning to mark Maundy Thursday communion, with a full dinner, a seder, the traditional Passover celebration. Passover remembers when God saved a people who had become slaves, a reminder of the first communion, in all its passion, darkness, hope and grace. Part of the seder tradition is that you set the table with your best stuff, best china, best cups, best silver.

We pulled the tarnished treasure out of its closet. We didn’t have the time or people to polish the silver but we set it out nevertheless, on white table clothes, with the best church china we owned. We sat down to dinner, to a dinner at the Lord’s Table, someone turned the lights down, and then the candles were lit. Suddenly, the treasure shined, reflecting the light of that moment, reflecting the love shared by a small congregation as we joined together to remember how God had first loved us. The tarnish didn’t matter; only the treasure did. In the light of the candles, in the gathering of people around the Lord’s Table, only the reflected light of God’s love mattered. It just took seeing the silver in the right light to appreciate its beauty.

That’s how it is with us. We are tarnished; God uses us anyway. We are God’s treasure. What matters isn’t our perfection but our persistence, our persistent willingness to choose love over hate, to see others as brothers and sisters, to seek to live as God’s blessing. Maybe you are tarnished; God still sees you as a treasure.

The choir is going to sing a song in a few minutes about a simple blessing. That’s us: that’s how we are meant to live, understanding that we are stewards of God’s gifts, not their owners, giving thanks for the simple blessings which sustain our lives. In turn, we have the possibility to become a simple blessing to others, to give our gifts as well. The kingdom of heaven is not fulfilled by any act of violence or domination. It is fulfilled in this exchange of blessing, bearing the fruit of the spirit.

What will the owner of the vineyard do? The ultimate answer is Easter; the answer is the resurrection. When the vineyard owner is God, the owner will look to the original purpose of the vineyard: to grow grapes and make wine. And the owner will do whatever it takes to make sure the grapes are harvested, the wine is made, the cup of the covenant is filled until it overflows, even if it takes forgiving and reusing the tarnished tenants.

Amen.