Tag Archives: Presence

Lighting the Candle of Joy

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Third Sunday in Advent – Year A • December 14, 2025

Isaiah 35:1-10 • James 5:7-10• Matthew 11:2-11

Seasons of the church year have a luminous aspect. Easter is all light. There was a time in my life when I’d get up before dawn, preparing to lead a sunrise service. I know some people do sunrise services at a more convenient time, but I’ve never been an easy pastor; I always insisted on literally gathering before sunrise so it would happen during the service. Lent is dark: we start with ashes, we think about suffering culminating on Good Friday and the cross. Christmas is all lights: we put them on Christmas trees, and I’m old enough to remember the annual chore of climbing on ladders, helping my dad put up outdoor lights. 

But Advent, Advent is unique; Advent is both dark and light. It began as a little Lent; when I was first in ministry, we wore the same colors for Advent as for Lent. I was gone for a few years and when I came back, someone had decided we’d wear blue for Mary. But still, Advent has a darkness to it, balanced by the candles of Advent. So there is light as well. Christmas Eve is the best example: the next to the last thing we do on Christmas Eve is darken the worship area, just before we all light candles. I’m looking forward to sharing that moment with you in a couple of weeks. Advent light comes in stages, one candle at a time. A candle for hope, a candle for peace, and next week a candle for love. All these are blue; one candle alone is pink, the candle for joy. The reason for the tradition is that in the Latin mass, the word ‘Caudate’, which means ‘Rejoice’ began the service. So our challenge today is how can we light the candle of joy not only here but everywhere?

Today’s scripture readings have that light and dark in them. We started today with Isaiah’s prophecy that gushes out like a warm soda bottle someone shook up. He starts with all creation rejoicing. We often forget how central creation is to God. But there it is overflowing: desert blooming, “…it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and shouting.” [Isaiah 35:2b]. Wow: my English teacher would never have allowed “rejoice with joy”, it’s too much, it’s over the top. But it doesn’t stop with creation, it’s people too, and not just the healthy ones either.

Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”  [Isaiah 35:3f]

That really feels like I’m being personally addressed because honestly, my hands are not as strong as they were; I have trouble gripping the line on the boat these days, and my knees, well, my running days are over for sure. And the highway taking us home to God is so well-marked, so straight, so perfect that, according to Isaiah, “not even fools, shall go astray.” What Isaiah seems to have in mind is joy coming from heaven like a snowfall or a rain shower. You can’t escape it; it’s going to get on you even if you have bad knees, arthritic hands, even if you’re a fool. God’s light is going to shine so powerfully that every corner is lit up, every person is lifted up, and even creation itself is full of the joy of God’s coming.

Well, that’s the fun part of today’s Word: all God’s children parading together in joy. But there’s a darkness too. Before we get to carried away, we need to listen to the gospel. There, things are not joyful, there things are not light. There we are taken to a prison cell in a dark dungeon. King Herod Antipas was a famously bad actor and among his may sins was having his brother killed so he could marry his brother’s wife. John has been speaking about this and just like today, political violence from leaders was common. So John’s been thrown in prison. I’ve visited in prisons and they are not fun places. They’re noisy and drafty and there is an air of pervading violence. Even if nothing bad is happening right now, you feel like it could at any moment. The only light in that time is from candles or lamps of burning oil and those are expensive; no one’s going to waste them on a prisoner. I imagine John sitting in the dark, hearing the cries of these, wondering if it all is ending, if he was wrong. So he gets a couple of friends to contact Jesus and ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” [Matt. 11:3]

What would you say? How would you answer? Jesus doesn’t do theology, he doesn’t demand faith in him, he simply says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see” and then he points out the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.

…the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. [Matt. 11:5]

He’s quoting Isaiah 35:5-6 but surely he also has in mind what we read this morning. Where Jesus goes, the candles of joy are lit and the light of God shines. There’s no demand to come to Jesus; instead, there is this invitation to open your eyes and look around.

Isn’t this our challenge? How do we also light those candles. How do we say to our world, our city, our friends, “Look here if you want to see Jesus? This week I listened to an NPR show with a man who talked about how important his mother was to him. He said that she was 89 and had some medical challenges these days, and he admitted, in all honesty, taking care of her is sometimes a burden. He talked about how he has to wash her, help her use a bedpan, and that she isn’t always nice about the whole process. Then he said this amazing thing, “What I’ve learned, though, in caring for the one who brought me into the world, is that it is a kind of prayer.” He went on to say that too often we think of prayer as asking for something; for him prayer has become this act of service, this care for another. He’s found a new purpose and a new relationship not only with his mother but with God as well. Because he’s lighting a candle of joy in the process of doing something difficult for another.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a whole novel about a woman who was terribly burned as a child. Taken to a healer, they are only able to save her life, not fix the damage. What the healer says is powerful: “What cannot be healed must be transcended.” So our question is how to we take the dark parts of life, transcend them, make them into prayer, make them a candle of joy to light?

I know that in my life, one of the most difficult things was when Jacquelyn started working as a flight attendant. I don’t have that reflexive fear of flying many have but I do know that thins happen on airplanes. Somewhere in the background of my mind are the flight attendants on 9/11 and in 2009, not long after she started, an airplane landed in the Hudson River. Planes do crash and even when they don’t, sometimes Flight Attendants get hurt on the plane. Jacquelyn has gotten hurt. So when she started going off to fly every week, it was hard, it was very hard. I didn’t sleep at night; I worried. Every time I said goodbye it felt like it might be the last time I’d see her.

But we’ve been doing this a long time, now. I still have problems some nights when she’s gone, but I’ve learned this important thing: my original thought was right, when she goes off to fly, I might never see her again. But she’s here now. She’s with me now. So it’s up to me to use this time to make a good life with her, and we work at that together. That’s become my prayer: thank god she’s here now.

My friend Jefferson gave me a book of Maya Angelou’s poems last Sunday. One that spoke powerfully to me says,

Thank you, Lord.

I want to thank You, Lord,

For life and all that’s in it

Thank you for the day

And for the hour and for the minute

I know many are gone,

I’m still living on

I want to thank You.

I went to sleep last night

And I arose with the dawn

I know that there are others

Who’re Still sleeping on

They’ve one away.

You’ve let me stay.

I want to thank You.

We don’t know why we’re here, always. Yesterday, I know you heard about the terrible shooting at Brown University in Providence, RI. I can’t imagine what that’s like: to be calmly preparing to take an exam and have violence suddenly burst in. One of them said this,

Spencer Yang, 18, who was shot in the leg in his Brown classroom on Saturday afternoon, described helping a fellow student who was seriously injured as they hid behind seats.

“To keep him conscious, I just started talking to him, so he didn’t close his eyes and fall asleep,” Mr. Yang said in an interview from the hospital, where he was being treated for a wound in his leg. “I handed him my water,” he said. “He wasn’t able to respond that well. He was just there nodding and making noise.” “He’s stable now, thankfully,” Mr. Yang added.

When Mr. Yang got up that morning, he didn’t expect to help save a life. When he went to that classroom, he didn’t expect to lie on the floor. But thank God he was there.

That’s it really: I don’t know if I will be here tomorrow, I don’t know if Jacquelyn will be here tomorrow, but she’s here now, I’m here now. When we realize what a wonderful, miraculous thing that is, it can become in our lives, a kind of prayer. Thank you, Lord. I’m still here: help me let my life light a candle of joy because you give me this life. 

Amen.

Second Sunday in Easter

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A New Song

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – ©2017

Second Sunday in Easter/A • April 23, 2017

John 20:19-31

Click Below to Hear the Sermon Preached

What Do You Know?

“I know what I know if you know what I mean.” It’s a line in a song by Neil Diamond, recorded some years ago by Edie Brickell that has rattled around in my mind ever since. How do I know what I know? What do you know? How do you know it? 

I asked the ushers to hand out objects today so you’d have something to touch while we thought about this. After all, a basic way we know things is through our senses. So take a moment: touch what you have, feel it, is it sharp, smooth, what does it feel like? What does it smell like? I won’t ask you to taste it but if you’ve ever cared for a small child you know that we start out with no inhibitions about putting things in our mouths; is there any parent who hasn’t had to run at least once yelling, “Take that out of your mouth”? 

So we know what we know because we touch it or taste it or smell it. We connect those things with memories. If I walk into the house on a day Jacquelyn is home and smell garlic, I know we are having something Italian for dinner and I smile: not only because of the future food but because I remember how nice it is to have dinner with the family. Just the scent of the garlic is enough to bring on a whole raft of memories: I know what this time will be like in some way. 
Pictures can do the same thing sometimes.

The last few years have seen an explosion of photographs. There was a time when a standard 35 mm camera shot a roll of film with 36 exposures. So if you were out taking pictures you had to think: is this scene worth one of those frames? Now it’s common to shoot 36 exposures of the same scene just to make sure you got the shot. Why are pictures so important? Because they remind us of what we know. This past week, I went to see Taxi Driver, an old 1970’s movie about a lost soul in New York City in 1973. Sitting there in the dark, with the pictures of bell bottoms and vaguely Indian hippy clothes and the tawdry culture of pre-Giuliani New York, I felt as well my own memories, I remembered experiences of those times. I think that’s why our ancestors drew pictures of hunting on cave walls: it was their photography.  What do you know? How do you know it?

I’m asking this question today because it’s a core problem of the resurrection. Of all the things we know, one of the most basic is that dead is dead. Benjamin Franklin said in a letter to a friend once, “…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” The resurrection flies in the face of that certainty. What are we to do with it? What are we to do about it? What are we to believe?

The Disciples and the Resurrection

This isn’t a new problem. The gospels depict Jesus telling his disciples several times that he would be crucified, die and then rise again. John has him saying,

So the Jews answered and said to him, ‘What sign do you show to us, since you do these things?’ Jesus answered and said to them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ Then the Jews said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?’ But he was speaking of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he said this; and they believed the Scripture, and the word which Jesus had spoken (John 2:18-22)

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Matthew quotes this saying:

An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:39-40).

and then again,

From that time Jesus began to show to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day (Matthew 16:21).

One might have thought there would have been a crowd of witnesses at the tomb if his disciples had believed him. Evidently they didn’t since only the women go and they go to prepare a corpse, not acclaim a risen Lord. It’s only in the moment of finding the tomb empty and meeting Jesus again that the women believe in the resurrection and when they do, they tell the disciples, disciples who apparently don’t believe them. So if in your heart of hearts, you don’t believe the women, the Easter story, take heart: neither did the first people to hear it.

We Are Toddlers

The problem we have is the same as the one Thomas the Twin has. Remember him? In the reading today, he says,”Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Doesn’t that describe most of us? We want to see: we want to touch. Like a toddler with a toy, we only know what we can get our hands around, we only believe what we can get in our mouths. The resurrection flies in the face of everything we’ve ever been told or known or seen. “I know what I know,” we say to it, like Thomas. Want me to change? Show me something. I wonder if that isn’t the same problem many of us have with the resurrection. We are toddlers too: before we believe in something impossible, we want to see it, touch it.

Of course, no one saw the resurrection. Search the scriptures, there’s not a single eyewitness account, not one. Instead, what we have accounts, many accounts, of the experience of encountering the risen Lord. Paul says more than 500 people, both men and women, had such experiences. So the key to understanding what John is telling us may not be Thomas’ question but the earlier experience of the disciples. Remember that moment? They are locked in a room. Now there’s one reason we lock rooms: we’re afraid of something. The leader of this movement has been executed for a political crime; surely the authorities will be after his followers. They’re afraid, meeting secretly behind a locked door and suddenly there he is, the Lord, coming through the door. No grave can keep him down; no door can keep him out. “Peace be with you,” he says. And it is.

“I know what I know.” What these followers of Jesus know is simple: that when they get together, he’s still present with them. When they sit down to dinner, as they did with him, he’s still present with them. When they love each other, he’s still present with them. When they share his love with others, he’s still present with them. They feel it; they know it. Perhaps for Thomas it is seeing this acted out that matters. Perhaps for you it is and if that’s true, look around, look for him: he comes and goes wherever people live in love and remember him.

There is a game small children play at a particular moment: it’s called peek-a-boo. You’ve played it, we all have. You know how it works. You cover your eyes, say, “Where’s Maggie? Where’s Andy?” and then open your eyes or uncover them and there they are. The child does the same thing.

Peek a Boo

Peek-a-boo, it turns out, is a very important game. We don’t come believing the world is permanent; we don’t come believing things stay here when we are asleep or close our eyes. That’s one reason children cry so inconsolably at bedtime. Wouldn’t you cry if you thought the whole world would end when you closed your eyes? So we teach them. Look: it’s still here, I’m still here. Peek-a-boo. Close your eyes: it’s safe. Open them: still here. Over and over again, until they know it, believe it, until we don’t remember not knowing it.

It’s like learning a new song. One of the first times I went to my church youth group, Harry Clark, our minister sang a cool song called, “Dem Bones”. It has endless verses and no one ever wrote them down. It has a chorus: “Dem Bones gonna rise again: I knotted it, knowed it, knowed it, Dem bones gonna rise again!” I didn’t know that song but gradually, over years of listening to Harry, I began to learn it. I learned the verses and even though I’m not much of a singer, I learned to lead it. I knew I had it one day when I was a newly minted youth minister and I had to lead a song at a retreat and I started it up. “Dem bones gonna rise again”.

Learning resurrection life isn’t about pretending to believe some event hundreds of years ago. It is about learning to move to a new rhythm, sing a new song. It is like being a child who has discovered that just as the world doesn’t go away when you shut your eyes, God’s love doesn’t go away when you die. Peek-a-boo: still there, always there, permanently there.

Amen.