{"id":1818,"date":"2025-07-18T10:35:34","date_gmt":"2025-07-18T14:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=1818"},"modified":"2025-07-18T10:46:39","modified_gmt":"2025-07-18T14:46:39","slug":"connection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2025\/07\/18\/connection\/","title":{"rendered":"Connection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Sermon for the Salem United Church of Christ of Harrisburg, PA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a92025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Fifth Sunday After Pentecost\/C \u2022 Boat\/Picnic Sunday \u2022 July 13, 2025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Luke 10:25-37<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Aren\u2019t we fortunate to live in this beautiful area, gather in this beautiful place by the river? Jacquelyn, May and I live close enough to the river to visit frequently, I hope you notice it as well as you go about your day. The water is constantly changing, sometimes in obvious ways, like when it freezes in the winter, or floods in the spring. Sometimes it\u2019s still and mirrored; other times it foams with energy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Water weaves through scripture as an important mark of God\u2019s power. At the beginning, we\u2019re told God\u2019s Spirit moves on the waters and creation results. Later, the signature act of salvation for God\u2019s people is the division of waters that allows them to escape the enslaving Egyptians and again, the waters are divided when they enter the promised land. Washing as a ritual was important in Judaism and still is. The first sign of the advent of the Kingdom is the baptism John offers at the River Jordan and Jesus\u2019 story really begins when he is baptized. At the same time, we know that water can be devastating. I imagine some of you have lived her long enough to remember the flooding in 1972, when Harrisburg was devastated, and we\u2019ve all felt some of the grief over the terrible flooding in Texas that killed so many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, we come to the river, seeking God, and God is here waiting for us to discover that presence. Think of the Susquehanna itself. It\u2019s over 300 million years old. It begins up in New York, near Cooperstown, at Otsego Lake. I live with baseball fans and Cooperstown is the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, so I\u2019ve been there, seen that pretty lake. From there, the river winds its way 444 miles along mountains, past farms, past cities, past forests. Just north of here, it flows past a replica of the Statue of Liberty and Fort Hunter before it flows to us, past us, past Harrisburg and our church, around this island on which we\u2019re met. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From here, it heads on in a windy, southwestern way, past Three Mile Island and its nuclear reactors, past marshes and towns and finally comes to a great dam at it\u2019s mouth near Havre De Grace in Maryland. There it feeds the Chesapeake; it\u2019s the reason the Chesapeake is not simply salty like the ocean. Its waters flow south, past the Patapsco River that leads to Baltimore, past Annapolis and then the Potomac until at Cape Charles its waters join the ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think for a moment about how this river, connects us to others. Perhaps others are picnicking along its banks somewhere; perhaps they also search the map of its flood plain when buying houses. It\u2019s not just contemporary people either, the Susquehanna has for centuries nurtured people along its banks, as it does us. How many fish have fed hungry mouths? How many beaver and muskrats have lived along its banks? I remember my first walk down to the river, watching the sun set over its winding water and suddenly seeing a little head pop up: a groundhog was watching me as intently as I watched the river. The river connects us to all these: the people who live along it, the animals, the communities it has nourished for so long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now if we think of connection, a good place to begin in scripture is the parable we read today, often called the parable of the Good Samaritan. Luke sets it with an introduction. An educated person is talking to Jesus, asking the deep question I suppose we all ask at some time: \u201cWhat must I do to inherit eternal life?\u201d as he often does, replies to the question with a question: \u201cHow do you read the law?\u201d The man replies with a quote from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” But then he asks another question: who is my neighbor? That\u2019s the tough one, isn\u2019t it? We know \u201clove God, love your neighbor\u201d but who exactly is my neighbor? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Jesus tells this story. A man is robbed and beaten and left bleeding along the way from Jerusalem to Jericho. Three men encounter him. Now, Amy-Jill Levine, an Orthodox Jew who teaches New Testament, says that the shape of Jewish stories suggests that once we\u2019ve been told that the first is a priest, the second a Levite, everyone expects the third to be an Israelite. It\u2019s how these stories go usually. But, of course, here the third person is not an Israelite, not even a Jew. It\u2019s a Samaritan. It\u2019s a definitively bad guy. The first two pass him by; only the Samaritan stops to help, and he helps in the most generous way. He bandages him, assuages his hurts with what serves as medicine in that place, takes him to an inn and promises to pay whatever it costs for him to recover. \u201cWhich one was his neighbor?\u201d It\u2019s not a hard question at the end, is it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first two guys who passed him weren\u2019t bad guys; they\u2019re just on their way somewhere. Maybe the first one is in nice clothes and doesn\u2019t want them messed up by a dirty, half dead man. Blood stains are hard to get out. Maybe one has an appointment in Jericho, and he thinks about stopping, but he just doesn\u2019t have time. So they do the obvious thing, they stay on the other side, they go on by. What\u2019s different about the Samaritan? What does the story tell us? \u201cHe was moved with compassion.\u201d It\u2019s that simple: compassion. He sees a man hurt, he doesn\u2019t worry about being late, he doesn\u2019t worry about dirt or whether the hurt guy is a friend or enemy; he\u2019s simply moved with compassion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That isn\u2019t always easy. I know I don\u2019t always do it. A few weeks ago, I think my first Sunday as the interim pastor here, it had rained and when I got here, there were two guys sleeping under the arches by the doors to the church. Neither one was bleeding, as far as I know, and I don\u2019t think either one had been beaten up. Clearly, they just wanted a place out of the rain, and they\u2019d found it. They\u2019d both brought big pieces of cardboard to sleep on. I\u2019d like to say I was moved with compassion, invited them in, cooked them breakfast, and connected them with a program to get them housed. But the truth is I didn\u2019t. I said to the one by the east door, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, you\u2019re going to have to wake up and move.\u201d He stirred, looked at me, silently got up and left; the movement alerted the other one, he left too. I picked up the cardboard and put it by the trash. Later, thinking about this, and especially preparing this sermon, reading this parable, I realized my mistake and prayed for forgiveness. Who is my neighbor? I didn\u2019t see him when he was lying right there in front of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank God I get another chance; thank God I live with an example of compassion. You see, every work day, Jacquelyn deals with hundreds of strangers. Some are great, excited to be going somewhere fun or visiting friends or family. Some are nervous; some are difficult. She has an amazing ability to deal with them even when they are being bad. She has a whole menu of things she does, but my favorite is her final, last straw. That\u2019s when all the smiling and being nice and trying to compromise fails, and she says, \u201cI see it\u2019s hard to be you.\u201d Just that: \u201cI see it\u2019s hard to be you.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long after this service is over, long after the hot dogs and hamburgers are gone and everything is cleaned up, sometime this week, you\u2019re going to encounter someone who has been beaten up. Maybe not by robbers, maybe just by life; maybe by some incident, maybe by a long cascade of incidents. The river reminds us that we are all connected; Jesus reminds us that our neighbor is the person to whom we show compassion. So perhaps you, too, will see that beaten up person and say, simply, \u201cI see it\u2019s hard to be you\u2026how can I help?\u201d And then indeed, you will have fulfilled the law Jesus preached, for you will have lit a candle of love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Susquehanna River reminds us of our connection to all just as Jesus does in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[101,39,371,3,2,32],"tags":[8,317],"class_list":["post-1818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-after-pentecost","category-exegesis","category-luke","category-sermon","category-worship","category-year-c","tag-connection","tag-love-in-action"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1819,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1818\/revisions\/1819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}