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Good Gifts

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Second Sunday After Epiphany/Year C • January 19, 2025

1 Corinthians 12:1-11 • John 2:1-11

This is a time of year when a lot of us plan to go somewhere else, usually somewhere warmer.   For the next couple of Sundays, I’d like to invite you to come with me to Corinth, in Greece, and listen to Paul as he writes to a new church there. I can’t promise the trip will do anything about the temperatures, but I believe he can help us understand more clearly what God hopes for us. What we call ‘First Corinthians’ is a letter written to a group of Christians in one of the very first churches. They’ve run into some problems; they are arguing and fighting, and their former pastor is writing to help them sort things out. He starts out thanking God for them and noting that they’ve been given every spiritual gift they need. Then he gets right to the problems: he’s heard there are divisions. The rest of the letter is guidance on dealing with division, and it’s worth listening to even when we aren’t divided; it’s like the signs on a hiking trail to help us stay on the path. Christians called Christ’s path “the way” and, thinking about Christian life as a journey rather than something we did once when we got confirmed is helpful.

One of the things dividing the Corinthians is spiritual gifts. We’re a pretty calm group when we’re here; the Corinthian church is a lot rowdier. In another place, he talks about their potlucks and notes that some people get drunk at them. We haven’t had one of the socials here in a while, but I don’t remember anyone getting drunk when we had them. One of their issues is that they’ve made spiritual gifts into a hierarchy and for them the top one is what we call speaking in tongues. Ecstatic speech happens in many religious traditions and in Corinth some seem to think it’s the most important gift of all and that it makes those who do this more important than others. And that’s the real problem: creating a hierarchy, valuing some more than others. 

To really understand this, we need to understand something about Corinth. Greece has two main parts, separated by an isthmus about four miles wide and that’s where Corinth is located. Sailing around the lower part of Greece was long and difficult, full of dangerous shoals. In fact, they built a sort of trolley system that allowed ships to be put on a little cart and moved by oxen and rigging across the land. So from very ancient times, Corinth was a crossroads of trade. This trade made Corinth rich. So rich that about 150 years before Christ, the Corinthians stood up to the Romans. But they were defeated, and the city was destroyed. It sat there desolate for many years, then about 40 years before Jesus, Julius Caesar had the city rebuilt as a place to settle retired soldiers. Once again, it became a center for shipping and a place where it was easy to get rich. It’s a place where riches are important for status as well as buying things. So you have people used to living within a hierarchy who are treating God’s gifts like worldly status.

But that’s not the reason for God giving spiritual gifts. Paul’s testimony is clear: “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” [12:7] He also tells us the most important gift of all, to say “Jesus is Lord”. This is the fundamental Christian statement of faith: that Jesus is Lord in our lives. Today, it’s conventional to say that. If you went around saying it at the grocery store, people would think you were just a little strange but no one would get mad. What do we get mad about? One thing today is politics. Go around a public place proclaiming your allegiance to one party or another, and you’re bound to make someone angry. Now in the first century, to say, “Jesus is Lord”, is a political statement as well as a religious one. The title “Lord” is applied only to the Roman Emperor. So you’re saying that you have switched your allegiance from the Emperor to this other person, this Jesus.  

Paul is saying here first, be clear who you are serving: Jesus is Lord. That’s the most important point. Now that who you serve is clear, consider the spiritual gifts not as reasons for boasting but as gifts as given for a reason. The reason is building up the community. In another letter, Paul describes the fruit of these spiritual gifts.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. [Galatians 5:22f]

Paul goes on to list some spiritual gifts: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, prophecy, what he calls “working power deeds”, and finally speaking in tongues. But as he lists these, he notes an equality in them: “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.” [1 Corinthians 12:11] Paul wants the Corinthians to see the equality in these gifts and since they are gifts, that there is no reason to boast about having one of them in your life.

Next week we’ll hear more about how Paul suggests we should see this working but for today, what I want to say is that it’s a good time to think about the gifts of the Spirit here. We aren’t divided like the Corinthian church but are we fully expressing the gifts of the Spirit here? What gifts do you have that could more fully be expressed here. We’re a small church, and it’s easy to assume we can’t do a lot. But what Paul is saying is that God has put everything we need here to do what God wants. We’re about to enter a new season of ministry here. A new pastor will be installed and take over the task of guiding this church. What are your hopes for that time? What could this church do to express “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity” in new ways here? What gifts has the Spirit given you, intending that they be shared in this community?

We need all of them. Whatever gift I have for preaching only goes so far; it won’t get the light bulbs changed. We’re lucky to have some great musicians, but they can’t oversee getting the chair lift put in. All the gifts the Spirit gives are needed; all of them are meant to work together to produce the fruit of the Spirit here, right here, right now.

You can see this working. One gift that’s broadly distributed here is appreciation. This church is better at appreciation than most. I love that every Sunday, the musicians are applauded. I’ve been gratified by the kind comments of so many of you. Psychologists tell us that appreciation and saying, “Thank you!” Is one of the hallmarks of great marriages and friendships. Now out in the wider world, we’re told that there is a widespread loneliness. People are desperate to find connection. How can we take that gift of appreciation that is so wonderfully expressed here out to the world with us?

I’ve put an inventory sheet at the front and back of the sanctuary, where you pick up bulletins. It’s designed to help you identify your gifts. Maybe you’re aware of these now; maybe it takes some prayer and reflection. I invite you to take the inventory and use it to help you think about your gifts this week. And then, to think about how you can nurture those gifts in this church, for this church and for its wider community.

Today, we also read about the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned a lot of water into wonderful wine. John says this is the first powerful work Jesus did, and that it’s a sign of God’s power in the world, working through him. What he does is to take people who believe they’ve run out of something essential and show them that in him there is an abundance that seems miraculous. It’s the same way here. We may feel like a small church, we may feel like the issues we confront are daunting, but in saying “Jesus is Lord” and living out that creed, we discover there is an abundance of the Spirit able to sustain us and accomplish God’s hope for us and for this church. 

There’s a children’s song we sang in one of my churches that makes this point in a simple way. It goes, “God gives us not just food, not just water, but everything we need, not just candy, not just broccoli, but everything we need…not just Jim, not just Linda but everything we need”… and so on. We used to invite people to make up new verses: one I remember was “not just pickles, not just olives” but everything we need. The chorus says, “So praise God, praise God, sing, praise for God is wonderful.” It’s the only song that ever made me give thanks for broccoli. And like most children’s songs, it is exactly right: thank god for not just pickles, not just olives, but everything we need, every spiritual gift, all of which are given here, all of which are given to share, all of which are meant to do the work of God here, in this place. 

Amen.

All Washed Up

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2025

Baptism of the Lord Sunday/C • January 12, 2025

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

“How have I ever deserved such love?” A woman asks this question near the end of a movie called The Danish Girl and I wonder if it is Jesus’ question at his baptism.

 I imagine it as a hot day; this is desert country after all. The stories about John tell us there were crowds but what’s a crowd? Twenty people? A couple hundred? Thousands? We don’t know. John is a striking figure, a charismatic man filled with the Spirit of God, who speaks a fierce message, calling people to repentance. He’s on the shore of the Jordan River. This is the river that had to be crossed centuries before by God’s people to enter the promised land. This is the water that had to be waded, this is the stream that stood between them and the fulfillment in history of God’s love and covenant. Is there a line to be baptized? Did Jesus stand behind others as one after another they came to John, talked to John, heard him pray and then felt him forcefully plunge them into the water, let the water cover them like someone drowning, and then lift them up, wet, wondering what comes next, clean, ready for the next chapter? Now Jesus comes; now he looks at John, now their eyes make a private space only they understand. Now John is taking Jesus in his arms, as he has with all the others, now Jesus is plunged into the water, there is perhaps that instant of fear so instinctive when we are underwater, now he is lifted up and heaven opens, Jesus hears what we all want to hear, “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” This is baptism.

Baptism is rare here and in church life, we’ve become fussy about the rituals that surround it. We have considerable evidence for baptism, both of children and adults, in the early church. The Didache, a collection of sayings and teachings probably written about the same time as the New Testament says this about baptism.

Concerning baptism, you should baptize this way: After first explaining all things, baptize in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, in flowing water. But if you have no running water, baptize in other water; and if you cannot do so in cold water, then in warm. If you have very little, pour water three times on the head in the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Before the baptism, both the baptizer and the candidate for baptism, plus any others who can, should fast. The candidate should fast for one or two days beforehand.

This is great news if you’re one of those people who think details aren’t important; bad news if you’re a ritual maker. What it says is that the form of applying the water, the part that most interests us, doesn’t really matter. Use running water—if you’ve got it. Use a few drops if that’s all you’ve got. 

But if the details don’t matter, what does? The clues are in the scripture we read this morning and they have nothing to do with measuring out water. Isaiah says, 

But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. [Isaiah 43:1-7]

This word is addressed to people who feel themselves lost. Every day the news shows us pictures of refugees from Gaza and other places. Israel had become refugees and this is God saying, “You’re not forgotten: you’re still mine.” There’s a reason every baptism begins with a question: “What name is given this child?” We name a person at baptism in a way that honors them uniquely but also connects them with a family, a heritage. Whose are you? You are God’s own child, regardless of your age. Baptism is a reminder we’re not on our own; we belong and we belong to someone, to God. In the visible church, here, we are meant to be the emblem of that belonging. Baptism is first, then belonging.

But it’s also a response to fear. Swimming is taught to children these days and we forget that for most of history and still today in many places, people fear water. Water is dangerous. Once my son was teasing me about not playing sports; he talked about having the courage to go out on the soccer field, knowing he might get bruised. I pointed out that I sailed and commented, “Every year, some sailors die when they drown.” It was a poor joke yet it had a truth: water is dangerous. Baptism began as a way of making sacred what we feared. In John Irving’s novel, The World According to Garp, a family retreats to a home on the ocean shore in New Hampshire. There’s a beach and the children are warned about an undertow that can suck them down. Misunderstanding, the way children do, they call it “the undertoad”. I know about the undertoad. Once, long ago, I was on a beach in New Jersey, swimming while my parents watched a few yards away. The undertow—the undertoad!—caught me, swirled me around and I’ve never forgotten the fear of that moment. “When you pass the waters,” God says, “I will be with you”. When the undertoad grabs you, you will still be God’s.

But it’s not all water; baptism is more than being washed up and set down fresh and fancy. Acts tells the story of an early church mission. Someone has gone up to Samaria and baptized some folks there. They didn’t ask the Consistory, they didn’t follow the ritual, they just went ahead and did it. But somehow, the baptism wasn’t effective and the disciples know this because there has been no evidence of the Holy Spirit among these folks. We don’t know what this means; we only have this little testimony. Yet clearly the early church knew that baptism wasn’t simply a human act of applying water; it had a deeper, transforming significance. Today, baptism has become about the water; God meant it to be about the Spirit, the breath, the wind that blows through life. In the beginning, Genesis says, the Spirit of God blew on the face of the waters and it’s from this ordering that creation follows. Baptism is meant to be a sign of a deeper spiritual blowing in us that causes us to live out the gentle, loving, forgiving way of Jesus. No amount of water can do that; it takes the Holy Spirit. Our task as baptized Christians is to nurture the presence and experience of that Spirit in those who come here, those God sends.

The final clue I want to call attention to this morning is simple and direct. At the end of the account of Jesus’ baptism, it says, “heaven opened”. We live in a world caught up in the details of earthly life: what to wear, eat, how to get through the day. What we miss if we forget our baptism is that heaven is open; God is calling. The question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?” has a simple answer: you don’t, you can’t. We don’t deserve love: it is pure gift, the gift of the God to whom we belong, whose children we are. If we believe we are indeed, God’s people, if God has given us the Spirit to bind us and energize us in living out love, if we know heaven is open to us, then indeed, we are loved in a way beyond deserving. You are my beloved, God says to Jesus: you are my beloved, God says to you.

The movie I mentioned earlier, The Danish Girl, is a fictionalized account of a real person, a man named Einar Wegener, married to Gerda, who discovered within himself a female identity he named Lili. It was a time and place with little understanding about such things the word ‘Transgender’ hadn’t even been invented and as Lili emerged and his life became living as Lili, as Einar receded and this woman became fully alive, he faced the conflict of being a woman living in a man’s body. At first treating this as a problem to be solved, Lili and Gerda struggled to find a way forward. Ultimately, Lili became the first person known to have undergone a series of operations to remake the body to match the identity as a woman. What’s clear from the real history, not as clear in the movie, is that there were years during which Lili faced the conflict of hiding her real self, living in shame, keeping the secret. Finally, near the end of the moveie, Lili sees how loved she is, asks the question with which I began, “How have I deserved such love?”, and answers it in the only way it can be answered. “Last night I had the most beautiful dream…I dreamed I was a baby in my mother’s arms…and she looked down at me…and called me Lili.”

The dream is being called by your true name: known in your true self. And loved. Like the mother in the dream, like our father in heaven, God is calling out to us, loving us, loving us beyond anything we can or ever will deserve. In the moment we see this, in the moment we know this, heaven does indeed open. And that is baptism. 

Amen.

The Unsung Carol

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

First Sunday in Christmas • December 29, 2024

John 1:1-14

Christmas continues today. We left here Christmas Eve in darkness lit by candles that symbolized celebration of God’s embrace by coming to us in the person of an infant. It was Christmas Eve, though; Christmas came later. But where did it begin? When did you hear the first Christmas carol this year? When did you see the first decorations? We decorated here right after Thanksgiving and entered the season of Advent, anticipating Christmas coming. 

Christmas Begins

Where does Christmas begin in the Bible? I suppose some would say when Mary and Joseph begin the journey to Bethlehem. Luke suggests it begins with Gabriel telling Zechariah he would have a son, who would become John the Baptist. But hundreds of years before this, Isaiah had said, 

For a child has been born for us,
   a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
   and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
   Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace [Isaiah 9:6]

Mary connects the beginning to Abraham and Sarah: “[God] has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever” [Luke 1:54f] Matthew seems to agree; he begins the story of Jesus by showing how he is connected to Abraham in a long genealogy.

But it’s the Gospel of John that has the longest view. He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” [John 1:1] and goes on with some of the most abstract language in all the gospels. Many years ago when I was in seminary, when I was a lot smarter or thought I was, I could quote this part of John in Greek from memory. But just being able to quote something doesn’t mean we know it. We have a little dog named Ellie. When she was a puppy, we put a push button bell by the door to the backyard. The theory was that when Ellie needed to potty, she would go step on the button that rings the bell, and we’d let her out. And she learned to ring the bell. She didn’t do it the way we intended to, however; she just rings it whenever she wants to go chase squirrels. But what’s kind of funny to see is that Ellie thinks the bell operates the door. So if she rings it, and we don’t let her out, she just rings it again—and again and again and again. Bible memories can be like that: we recite them over and over but if we don’t know the meaning, nothing happens.

In the Beginning

So let’s break this down a and see if we can figure out what it means. Let’s start with “the beginning”. What is that? What is your beginning? Perhaps you have a “first memory”, usually from when you’re about three or four. But that’s not your beginning. We might say your beginning was when you were born, or when you were conceived. Sometimes there are stories about these. My family legend is that I was born while my dad took his final exams in college. Of course, the Bible begins with creation: in the beginning God created, Genesis 1:1 says.  “What happened before that?” I remember asking a Sunday School teacher once; she told me not to ask such questions, but the truth is she didn’t know and neither do I. There is no before when there is no time and in Genesis the first thing God does is to create day and night, that is to say, time itself. So John is saying, that in the beginning—when there was no before—the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The Word: what is that? We know something about words. If you’re a parent, maybe you remember the first word your child spoke. Is there anymore eagerly awaited sound than that first “Mama” or “Dada”? Just like Ellie learned to ring the bell to get us to open the back door, babies learn to make a sound we call a word to summon us. That word defines relationships: “Mom” also means “Feed me! Change me! Cuddle me!” It’s the first step to controlling the world. Now, I have to do something I hate doing; I have to teach you something about Greek, the language in which the whole New Testament is written and the language in which many early Christians read the Old Testament too. In Greek, what we translate, “Word” is ‘Logos’. Logos means more than just words, it stands for the whole business of putting things in order.

Putting Things In Order

We know something about putting things in order. Jacquelyn and I share a big walk in closet. I’m messy, and the closet has gotten chaotic over the last month or so. Shoes all over the floor, summer and fall and winter clothes mixed, luggage out of place. So this week when she had some time off, Jacquelyn took on the job of organizing the closet and she succeeded brilliantly. Now you walk in there, the shoes are on racks, matched, my shirts are grouped by color and they all face the same way. I have to say, until Jacquelyn brought her sense of closet order to my life, I’d never thought about whether the shirts were grouped or faced the same way but there they are. Genesis describes creation the same way: God puts things away, night gets separated from day, land from water, plants, animals, everything right down to you and I. And the term for this in Greek is Logos, and it’s translation for us is Word. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” means putting things in order.

Now we all live with orders for things, places for them. Some of us do better than others but we do as well as we can. In our house, one cooks, another cleans up. The pots and pans go in one cabinet, the bowls go in another. There is a time for work, a time for sleep. There are other orders too. There is the way that atoms and molecules are bound and structured, the way that heavenly bodies and gravity keep the solar system spinning, the way that chemicals bond and become blood and move the oxygen and nutrients we all need around our bodies. I have no idea how this all works, honestly. I almost flunked chemistry. But I know there is an order to it all, and because of that order, we live and without that order our lives would be impossible. 

God is in the Order

So what John is saying is that right from the beginning, “in the beginning”, God was in the ordering of everything, that just like Jacquelyn matching up the shoes, God is in the order of the very tiniest and the greatest things. 

But what does this have to do with Christmas? Remember what he goes on to say: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.[John 1:14] Christmas is this order, this Word, becoming a child, a person, one of us, living among us. Think what Jesus does: he heals people, which is to say he sets them right, he casts our demons, he sets people back in order, he offers glimpses of how things should be in his teaching. How should we treat one another? “Love one another as I have loved you,” he says. He embodies the love of God which is the Word of God, the order of God and that is the glory John means when he says, “We have seen his glory.” Christmas is the Word becoming flesh.

The Real Christmas

This is the real Christmas carol and it’s often unsung. It’s easy to miss the real Christmas for the wrapping and bows. The real Christmas is God putting us right, ordering us, reminding us to live as children of God, seeing the image of God in others. It’s easy to go through life like Ellie, ringing a bell without knowing how the door really opens. Christmas means to teach us to open the door to love in our lives. It means living that love every day.

Christmas continues today—if that love lives in our hearts, if that light, shines in us. The most important question for our church isn’t “How can we keep going?”; it’s how can we shine the light of Christmas here? What do you think? What can we do together, to make sure it’s clear that Christmas continues with us? 

Amen.

Leaping Love

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Fourth Sunday in Advent/C • December 22, 2024

Micah 5:2-5a, Luke 1:39-55

Ever since Thanksgiving, and even before in some cases, in stores, in media, in daily life, we’ve been bombarded with Christmas. Our culture encourages a season of frenzied spending and parties, of decorations we buy and hang to show the Christmas Spirit. But where is that Spirit? Our Lectionary, the guide to scriptures we hear each Sunday, has taken a different tack. This whole Advent season, we’ve been asked to look not to Bethlehem, not to the stable but to other events. We began with the end: Jesus coming in power, and the heartfelt command to be alert, to watch and listen for Jesus appearance. The last two Sundays we heard about John the Baptist whose testimony is that one more powerful is coming. Finally, today, the last Sunday in Advent, we hear this story on the eve of Jesus’ birth.

A Strange Story

It’s a strange story, isn’t it? Luke doesn’t begin his gospel with Jesus; he begins with the parents of John, his father, Zechariah. Zechariah is a priest and during a service in the temple, the angel Gabriel appears and tells him that he and his wife Elizabeth are going to have a son. Zechariah doesn’t believe him because Elizabeth is too old. So Gabriel tells him he will be mute until his son is born. Never mess with an angel! So today we don’t hear from Zechariah; we hear from Elizabeth. She is, indeed, pregnant; she’s had her own inspiration, and now she’s about to bear a child who will be known later as John the Baptist. There’s no statue for Elizabeth in nativity scenes but let’s pretend there is and set her aside for a moment while we talk about the other person in this story: Mary. 

Now if you were Roman Catholic, you’d have heard all about Mary. But what you would have heard is about Mary characterized as the mother of Jesus, not this Mary, not this young unmarried woman. There are endless theological debates about Mary in which the word ‘virgin’ figures prominently. Most of those debates are in Greek and none of them tell us about the reality of someone we would call a girl. Most Biblical scholars suggest Mary would have been about 14. That’s very young in our culture; it was common in hers. What is shocking is that she is pregnant without being married. Girls who became pregnant out of wedlock were often shamed, sometimes stoned.

Mary’s Story

So we have this story that becomes stranger the more we listen to it. Mary has had her own angelic visitation; you’ll have to come back another time to hear that. Already engaged to Joseph, the angel tells her she will become pregnant with one who will become king, one who will reign in David’s line. She’s from Nazareth, up in the north; now she’s made the hundred-mile journey to Judah, to see someone who may be an aunt or a cousin, Elizabeth. These are two pregnant women who have no business being pregnant: one is too old, one is too young. There are no men in the conversation; this is women’s business. And at the moment they meet, something happens only a woman would understand: the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps.

This is the second time in the last few weeks when I feel totally unable to speak to a Biblical story. What does a man know about a baby in the womb moving? Nothing, not a thing. So I did what I did last time, I asked Jacquelyn about it. She said, “Well, May didn’t move around much; mostly she hiccuped.” I tried to imagine what that would be like, having someone hiccup inside you. It sounds awful. I mean, what do you do? You can’t feed them sugar, you can’t scare them, you can’t do anything but just wait, I guess. The one time she remembered May moving sharply was at a baseball game when some unthinking guy holding a beer, didn’t see her belly, tried to go past her and accidentally punched her belly. “May punched back,” she said. So, a word of caution; May isn’t here often, but if she is, don’t punch her, she punches back.

The reading goes on with two songs of praise, one from each woman. But I want to come back to this meeting. Luke—who, like me, is a guy, and therefore really doesn’t know anything about babies leaping in a womb—is the only place that tells this story. But we do have a story in Matthew about the same general time. Matthew tells us, 

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.
Matt. 1:18f

Joseph is usually described as a carpenter but the word translated ‘carpenter’ actually isn’t about someone who does what we think of as carpentry. It’s a person who makes tools out of wood: Joseph is a toolmaker.

Looking for Safety

So this is the story when we put it together. An angel visits a young girl, Mary, tells her she’s going to become pregnant. She’s already engaged; maybe she’s in love in that can’t stop thinking about him crushy way 14-year-old girls have. The Holy Spirit overwhelms her; she’s pregnant. Joseph knows the baby isn’t his. Honestly? Nazareth is a small place, if you know anything about small towns, you know they don’t keep secrets well. Joseph is planning to end the engagement; while he thinks about this, Mary leaves town, goes to visit her cousin or aunt Elizabeth. It’s a long way to go, a hundred miles, perhaps. Remember that the main way you get places in that time is you walk. What makes a young, pregnant girl walk a hundred miles? I can only think of one thing: she’s scared, and she’s looking for a safe place.

That’s what she finds with Elizabeth; that’s what that leaping baby in Elizabeth’s womb means. Maybe Mary still doesn’t quite believe the angel sent to her; maybe she’s already felt too many stares and heard too many questions. Maybe she’s figured out what’s going on with Joseph. But when she meets Elizabeth, when Elizabeth tells her own story, when Elizabeth’s baby leaps recognizing the special significance of Mary’s baby, she’s already safe. 

So we have these two stories of praise from two women who aren’t supposed to be having babies but are, who aren’t the sort of people we think of as especially blessed, but are. The rabbis who teach the history of God’s grace in Israel are all male but here it’s two women who say in the most profound way possible that God’s love is still active, still present, still making things happen in the world. 

Elizabeth speaks of the Mary’s baby as a fulfillment of the angelic message. Mary says, 

[God] has come to the aid his child Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever. [Luke 1:54f]

She also connects this aid to God’s special love for the poor, the weak, the powerless. Leaping love is for all, but it begins with loving those who need it most.

What about us?

What about us? What does this kind of love that leaps when Jesus is near mean in our lives? There is a big temptation here for me as a preacher. I want to suggest some specific thing to do.
I want to endorse some mission. I want to tell a story of some other church, some other time, some other people who leapt at a chance to express God’s love and helped someone or some people feel safer, fed them so they were less hungry, cared for them in a way that transformed their lives. 

But those are other people, other times, other places. So I’m going to simply leave the story here with you. Mary went to Elizabeth, seeking safety, and found it. When did you feel safe? How did that feel? When have you helped someone feel safe? When can you do it again? How can we do it together as a church? We have this sign: “A small church with a big message”. Isn’t that the message?—that here, you are safe in the arms of love, God’s love. In Reformed Churches, we don’t use the word ‘sanctuary’ much. But perhaps we should. Because that’s what this place is meant to be: a sanctuary of safety, where all are reminded we are children of God together. If you want to feel that leaping love, you don’t have to be pregnant with a child: we are all pregnant with possibility. May we turn that possibility into the reality of helping people find safety here.

Amen.

A Particular Joy

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

Third Sunday in Advent • December 15, 2024

Luke 3:7-18 

This week winter came roaring into our area and whatever fantastic, private hopes we had that the weather would stay mild vanished with a blast of arctic wind. Isn’t it often the same in life? We roll along through the pleasant seasons until we are surprised by the onset of a winter of bleakness. The world goes cold; everything is difficult. When the cold is a matter of weather, we get out hats and gloves and heavy coat; when the cold is inside, when souls turn gray, we look for something to light the fire again. Last week we heard the story of John the Baptist’s message of repentance. Today we hear the specifics and this strange final note: “…he proclaimed the good news to the people.” [Luke 3:18]. Is John’s message good news? Is it joyful news? 

Luke is writing about people 80 years before, when Jesus was born, but he is writing for people near the end of the first century, people shivering in a spiritual winter, wondering how to find the way forward, perplexed about their purpose. The great shining promise that animated the very first Christians, that Jesus would return before they died, any day, any hour, had worn off in time passed and in the passing of the first generation. How to live in the meantime?—that is the great question they face. How to live in the meantime?—how to put into practice every day the teachings of Jesus? They live in a time of change, a time when many are being persecuted for their faith, many are in conflict with family members. Old institutions are collapsing; new ones are strange. In that sense, it is not so different from now.

John the Baptist: See Him

So Luke has reached into the great tradition of stories in the church and lifted up this story about John the Baptist and the beginning of Jesus ministry. There is John, Luke tells us: see him?–a wild, strange figure on the banks of the Jordan, the river Israel had to cross to come into the promised land. He looks and smells like the desert: camel hair garments, wild honey and roast locusts for food. He preaches repentance as the right response to the time: spiritual change that leads to behavioral change, doing new things as a way to experience a new spirit. 

It’s not a general message. He gets specific in a way preachers are always reluctant to do. Details always get you in trouble. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none.” Wow. Ouch. The thing is, I have more than two coats, I have coats for different purposes. I have blue blazers, the uniform of small town business and professional guys; I have a black leather jacket that lets me look cool and stay warm in the spring and fall. I have a blue down winter coat and a heavier beige one. Three suit coats, a couple of jackets. It’s no wonder a lot of preachers stick to pointing their fingers at people who do things they don’t; here I am having to deal not with your sins but with me. Ouch. “Whoever has food must do likewise.” Well, there, that’s a little easier, we give to food pantries. I can manage that one, I think. Could we just slide by the coats? Tax collectors in the period were famous for extracting outrageous interest; soldiers often demanded protection money. “What should we do?”, they ask. John tells them not to collect exorbitant fees and tells the soldiers not to demand protection money. That must have hurt, they depend on that money. I’d much rather talk about how they should behave better than about the coats. I don’t take bribes like the tax collectors; I certainly don’t get protection money. Thank God he didn’t mention wedding fees. What John seems to have in mind is devoting the details of life to God, letting God use the details to change us.

The Story of a Coat

So let me tell you the story of one of my coats. Jacquelyn and I were pretty newly married, and she was starting the long, long process of making me more presentable. I had a faded red jacket I loved; it had an under coat that made it warm, and it had endless pockets. I don’t know how women live without pockets; I can’t get enough of them. So Jacquelyn got me a new coat. It was blue and gold, had a down lining, came down to mid-thigh, and it had some pockets though not as many as the red coat. Plus, there was a problem. You see, where I come from in Michigan, there are two tribes: the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. MSU is where I went to college and our colors are green and white. No one from MSU would ever wear blue and gold because those are the University of Michigan colors. But here was this new wife and this new coat, and even if it was blue and gold, what could I do? I wore it. 

I never quite got over the embarrassment of the colors, but I liked being warm. And that coat just lasted and lasted. Eventually the zipper pull broke off and I had to use a paper clip. Every spring it would go away; every winter it would come out. One day, a slim woman showed up at our church with nothing but a suitcase. It was snowing outside and freezing, and she had no coat. We ended up taking her home; turned out she was a refugee from Eritrea who had been bought as a wife and escaped her husband. Jacquelyn gave her a coat and some other things, and it dawned on her that there were others who were shivering. So she put a basket in the church basement and asked people to give coats for those who didn’t have any. By then the blue and gold coat had been around long enough to be a candidate for this, but I really didn’t want to give it up. This new mission hadn’t gone through the Deacons, so there was some grumbling about it; I felt like I should set an example. So one day I made a more permanent fix to the zipper and put it in the basket. Others added their coats; we took them to a place that helped refugees. There weren’t many the first year, but the next year there were more. The year we left that church, the coats had become a tradition; over a hundred were donated that year. I’ve been gone from there four years and they’re still collecting coats. People are still getting warm because of what those people do. Sometimes I smile and think somewhere, someone is still keeping warm in that blue and gold coat. I’ve had lots of coats; that’s the only one we ever talk about. That one turned out to be a real joy.

Will giving a coat away or passing out food save the world? Of course not. But then, John says, we’re not expected to save the world. The people who heard him wondered about world saving too: “…all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah…” That’s not my job, John replies; God is sending someone much more powerful to do that, and so he did, and so he does, and so he will. What’s the point of all this food and coat distribution then? It is to give us a path, a way to change ourselves so that we look more like Christ. 

The True Appearance of Christ

For the true appearance of Christ isn’t that long haired, blue-eyed picture hung on the walls of so many Sunday Schools; the true appearance of Christ is the joyful gift giver, hope giver, peace bringer who will shortly appear right there at the Jordan among these people who are busy changing their direction. Just as we reshape our bodies by going to the gym, we reshape our spirits when we change our lives this way. And when we do, we discover the fierce joy of walking God’s path.

Walking God’s path isn’t abiding by some general rules, really. It’s always particular. It’s always some act in some moment. The Roman Catholic Church has a saint who was a Mohawk Native American and converted to Christianity. Her name was Kateri. She had smallpox as a child and it left her blind so she got renamed Takewitha: person who bumps into things. So she called Saint Kateri Takewitha. I love that image because it’s just how we run into God: we bump into God without intending to. John said, “Repent”, but the repentance was particular, individual. This week, sometime, somewhere, you’re going to bump into something where you can choose to act out your part as the body of Christ. It may to be comfortable, it may not be what you normally do, but there it will be: you’re chance in some particular moment, to be kinder, to give more, to live out your faith. When you do, if you do, there will be a little more light in the world, a Christmas light, a joyful light.

Christmas Joy

There is joy waiting for Christmas; there is joy shining in the Christmas lights. It is the joy of making God’s purpose our own; of living from God’s giving nature, on the way with Jesus. When we make our direction God’s way, when we determine to turn our eyes from the advertising to the star, we will see for ourselves God’s joy. When we follow that star, we’ll feel that joy.

Amen.

The music on the audio track is “Christmas Is Coming”, Licensed as CC BY 4.0 Deed Attribution 4.0 International


Get Ready!

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Second Sunday in Advent/C • December 8, 2024

Luke 3:1-6

Mise en place. Unless like me, you’re fascinated by French cooking videos on YouTube, Mise en place may not be a familiar phrase. It’s a French that translates roughly, ‘Preparation’. It means before you set out to make something, getting all the ingredients ready and at hand. For example, I make Hollandaise sauce at home. It’s a fussy sauce, prone to falling apart if you don’t attend to it. So before I start, I separate two eggs and put them in a little bowl. I slice a butter quarter into bits and put the bits on two separate little plates. I zest two lemons and then squeeze the juice into a cup. Only when all the preparation is complete do I start actually cooking. It makes a lot of dishes—but when the ingredients are combined and heated and the critical moment occurs and the sauce thickens, I’m not looking for something I forgot. Mise en place: preparation. Today’s reading calls us to a spiritual mise en place, spiritual preparation, and advent is the time to get ready.

One of the most important steps in preparation is clearing the space. This past week at our house, before the Christmas decorations were brought up, before Jacquelyn did the amazing transformation she oversees each year, we had to put things away. The light on the table behind the sofa by the window: gone! The lamps that sit against the wall: moved. The sofa had to be moved to make space for the Christmas tree. We don’t have a lot of electrical plugs, so things had to be unplugged to make space. All this is mise en place, all this is preparation. All this is before the decorations appear. And there is a moment, just a moment, when the space is bare, almost back to the emptiness of when we first arrived.

Luke wants to summon us to just such a moment with Jesus. Mark starts with John the Baptist and Matthew hurries past a genealogy and the story about the wise ones. But Luke has already told us about the special birth of John. The long call to worship we read this morning is John’s father’s song about his son coming into the world; we’ve already heard this when we get to hearing about his ministry. Luke is preparing us; Luke is getting ready, getting there slowly but surely, and we’re invited along.

Luke starts with the particulars. Folk tales start, “Once upon a time…”. Luke is using the dating conventions of his time. We talk about, “AD, BC”; scholars now use “CE” for Common Era to mark the same thing. People in Luke’s time used the reign of rulers to set dates. We do the same, don’t we? In our house, we have “before we were married,” “When we lived in Norwich”, “the year we got that huge snow storm in Owosso”. Luke is using events but honestly, Luke’s dates don’t quite match up. They roughly put us in what we would call about 27 AD. Tiberius is emperor; Herod Antipas is governing Judah. Pontius Pilate is the Roman procurator, something like governor, of Palestine. 

There is a lesson behind Luke’s careful dating. He wants us to see the particularity of God. God always acts in a particular place, a particular time, a particular person or people. “Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?,” the Psalmist asks, and the answer is always someone’s name, some particular person who lives in a time, who lives in a place. Luke asks us to see John as a real person, as real as any of us. He’s inviting us to see that God is acting in all of history though this particular man in this particular time. What God does is to call him to preach a message of repentance. Next week we’ll hear more of what he preaches but for now, we’re offered two parts. One is that he’s calling people, including us, to prepare for God’s coming. The second is that he’s offering a baptism of repentance.

This is the portion from Isaiah.

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight”.

Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’” [Luke 3:4b-6]

Straight paths, valleys and mountains made level—this is the language of road building. Have you seen this? In 1971, I drove across the country to my first church, the Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church in Idaho. Interstate 90 wasn’t complete yet. Every so often, I’d have to detour off the highway, drive past the bulldozers and work crews building the next section. The most spectacular part was in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. There, they were taking the zigzagging rising road and straightening it, filling valleys, literally making crooked places straight.

Isaiah may not know about Interstate 90, but he does know about road building. He lived in the time of Babylon and every year Babylon had a big New Years festival. The climax of the festival was the king dressed up like the god Marduk being pulled on a huge parade float into the city. But before that could be done, thousands of slaves would be sent out beyond the city gates to make the road smooth, fill in low places that had washed out, cut down hills. Curves would have to be changed into straight sections. This is what Isaiah is imagining: making a way for God to come to us. 

Our culture emphasizes what we do, and we’ve let that leak over into our spiritual lives. So we hear a lot about “coming to Jesus”. But the testimony of scripture over and over again is that it is not we who come to God; it is God who comes to us. What we can do is to prepare the way for God to come, make the path straight and easy. 

We do that the way we prepare for anything. Mise en place: get things ready. Every Sunday, we all receive a bulletin here that Linda carefully, thoughtfully prepares. Take it home. You heard the scripture in a few minutes, but a great discipline is to take that bulletin, make it a devotional guide for the week. Read the scripture readings again, you will have my thoughts; consider your own. How does it make you feel? What questions does it ask? What does it ask you to do? Read a little before, a little after the reading. Scripture is particular: every reading is new. I’ve been a lectionary preacher over 40 years. The lectionary is a three-year cycle of readings, so I’ve been through the whole cycle more than a dozen times. Yet every week when I start to prepare to talk with you, I read the scripture for that week fresh, I find fresh things in it. Because the reading is not just words, it is the mix of the words with this particular moment.

Preparing takes some space. Perhaps the hardest spiritual discipline of all for me is just that, making space, doing nothing. I don’t know about you, but if I sit down for am minute with nothing going on my mind starts to fill up with all the things I should be up doing. I have to consciously push them aside for prayer time. Yet isn’t that precisely what John is asking? “Prepare the way of the Lord.” Make a moment; listen. Once again, our culture misleads us. We think of prayer as something we say. And God surely wants to hear what we want to say, God surely wants to hear our particular fears, our particular hopes, our concern for others. But real conversations aren’t just what we say, they are what we hear as well. What if we just listened?

The second thing we learn about John in this reading is that he’s preaching a baptism of repentance. Now repentance means changing your direction. When you’re lost, it’s easy to keep getting even more lost; it’s hard to stop and ask for help. But that’s what John is preaching. 

Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. Eighty-three years ago, people just like us sat here. I’m sure some worried about the war in Europe, some were anxious to get on to Christmas, they had all the daily hopes and fears we all have. I imagine the pastor preached a good sermon that day, they sang some great hymns, perhaps hymns we still sing. They left church, went home, and heard on the radio the terrible news of Pearl Harbor. Nothing had prepared them for that. In that moment, everyone’s life changed.

Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. We can, however, prepare for God to come to us and when God is with us, those events will not crush us or overwhelm us. “Mise en place”: prepare the way of the Lord, as carefully as we would prepare to make something wonderful on the stove. The gift of advent is time to get ready. The gift of advent is time to prepare. The gift of advent is to make straight God’s path to your heart.

Amen.

Give Thanks for the Appetizers

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

Thanksgiving Sunday • November 24, 2024

Joel 2:21-27, Matthew 6:25-33 

It was the year nothing went right. May was in college in Georgia; she decided to go to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving. So Jacquelyn and I were on our own. Then, a friend of ours named Tara was going through a difficult time, so we invited her to come visit. I volunteered to cook, so the women could visit. Now Tara and Jacquelyn both love Victorian home and our town was full of them, so on Thanksgiving Day itself I set about cooking the meal I’d planned while they took off for a walk around our town. 

The real challenge of a dinner like this is getting everything to come out on time. I’d researched the traditional dishes and put a turkey breast in to brine the night before. I patted it dry, rubbed it with oil and spices and put it in to roast, setting the timer according to the directions in Betty Crocker. I chopped and mixed and spiced the various side dishes and got them going. I had everything timed and thought I was doing fine. I was doing the “blast turkey with high heat then turn down” method, so after a half hour, I intended to turn the oven down; instead I turned it off; mistake number one. I didn’t realize what I’d done and thought we were on course. The kitchen mess was mounting when the women returned, talking about how hungry they were and that the house smelled great. They started to pick up bits to eat in the kitchen, I shooed them out, sternly ordering just like my grandmother used to do, “No snacking! You’ll spoil your dinner!” I checked the turkey; not done. They complained about being hungry; I snarled back, “No snacking!”  We waited; I checked the turkey again and it clearly wasn’t cooking. I finally figured out what had happened—along with the fact that we were a solid hour or more from being having dinner ready. Meanwhile, the rolls had burned beyond redemption. Mistake number two. 

It’s a scary thing to tell two hungry women dinner is delayed. I frantically looked around, saw a baguette, sliced it up, spread it with some garlic and tomato sauce and bits of onion, put it on a plate and took it to the women, announcing as if I had planned it all along, “This is the appetizers.” I was so frustrated, angry at myself for my mistakes, feeling like nothing was going right when I heard from the other room the song the choir sang last week: “Give Thanks with a grateful heart.” Except the words were different; instead of,  “Give thanks with a grateful heart”, they were singing, “Give thanks for the appetizers.” We all laughed. The turkey eventually finished. I dropped it on the floor taking it out of the oven, it didn’t matter; we were still laughing about the song. We still do. 

Our Thanksgiving celebration is like the Susquehanna, a river with many sources. Some are harvest festivals, which both the English and the Native Americans celebrated. Some of the streams are legends: no one called the people at Plymouth ‘Pilgrims” for almost 200 years. So there was never a “Pilgrim Thanksgiving”. And we have no record they ate turkey at all on that day; most of the meat was venison, much of the meal was fish and seafood. There is the long history of Thanksgiving celebration in the Biblical record, the New Testament commands to give thanks and most of all the deepest current, which is the power of giving thanks to transform us.

Where shall we dive in? Let’s start with the message we read earlier from the prophet Joel. We don’t know much about him or his time. One thing that’s clear: he preached his Word in the midst and aftermath of a time of fear and desperation. Hordes of locusts had eaten crops and people were afraid. It’s fear Joel addresses here, fear that robs hope, fear that paralyzes. To this fear he says, 

Do not fear, O soil; be glad and rejoice, for the LORD has done great things!

Do not fear, you animals of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness are green; the tree bears its fruit, the fig tree and vine give their full yield.

O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the LORD your God; for God has given the early rain for your vindication, God has poured down for you abundant rain, the early and the later rain, as before. [Joel 2:21-23]

He begins with the ground of faith, the history of God’s blessing, and follows the rhythm of creation from land to animals to the trees that bear fruit and the vines that give wine. Only then does he come to us: the children of Zion. God’s first and foremost blessing is creation itself; God’s creation is the ground of hope. “Do not fear…be glad and rejoice, for the Lord has done great things!” The answer to fear isn’t redoubled effort, it isn’t what we do at all; it is a Thanksgiving that remembers and appreciates what God has done and invites us to hope in what God will do. The final movement of this song is faith: “You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I, the LORD, am your God and there is no other.” [Joel 2:27]

Jesus is also addressing fear in the passage we read earlier because our fears make us worry. 

31Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” 32For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
[Matthew 6:31-33]

Matthew has wrapped this saying into a summary we call the Sermon on the Mount. We don’t know the exact setting but it’s not hard to guess. Jesus is on the road with his disciples. There must have been times they wondered where the next meal would come from, how they would raise the funds they needed for the ministry, for their own needs. Just like Joel, Jesus calls them to remember God’s creative blessing. He asks them to look around at the lilies, at the birds;
he invites them to put God at the center and give thanks. Thanksgiving is the real cure for fear. Thanksgiving is the doorway to hope.

We’re living in a fearful moment. The locusts of our fear of terrorism and different people are trying to eat up our hope. It’s a story that sells ads, so the media is urging them on; it’s a story that gets attention, so some people who want to lead are telling us the solution is to get rid of the locusts. Last week, I quoted Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming, and it’s line, 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

It is especially important that we remember and take to heart the lessons we heard today. Our hope is there; our worry can only be satisfied by the peace of remembering God’s providence and power.

In this moment, in this week, it’s good to remember the Thanksgiving story. It is so overlain with legend and lore that it’s hard to remember the real details. This is the Thanksgiving story. A group of refugees who wanted to worship in the Reformed way, like us, fled persecution in their native land. They went to Holland, where they formed a little cultural enclave. But they don’t really fit in; their religion is different, stricter, their values are different also. So they returned to England and contracted to found a colony in Virginia. Half of the people going weren’t part of the original religious group; they were called ‘strangers’. After a terrible yoyage, they go off course and end up in Cape Cod in November. A measles epidemic had decimated the native population; these new settlers survive by stealing corn from caches those vanished natives left behind. They settle in a protected bay and name it after their departure city: Plymouth. They have a hard time fitting in but some of the native people, the Wampanoag, in the area help them out, teach them how to get along, and they adjust, they adapt. Almost half of the original 102 settlers die the first winter. But eventually they learn to grow corn and other things, they learn to eat the local seafood, clams, lobster and so on. They learn to hunt. 

A year or so later, things are going well. They decide to take a few days off and plan a feast. They invite their neighbors who take one look at the food and decide to supplement it with local meats. Later, the whole experience is romanticized and becomes a kind of living legend. The refugees are now called the Pilgrims. They go on to found churches and communities; they create a culture of congregational democracy that trains people to live in hope, believing God is present and they have a purpose. We are meant to be that people. We are their children. Let us like them, like faithful people in every time, from Joel to Jesus to Plymouth to York, give thanks, the thanks that remembers the Lord our God is in our midst.

Sometimes things succeed; sometimes they fail. The Thanksgiving dinner where nothing went right? It’s remembered by all of us as a wonderful, special one. Somehow, the song—give thanks for the appetizers—the act of giving thanks even when hungry, the choice to see the gift and goodness rather than focus on the failure and fear it transformed the moment. It can transform any moment; it can transform us. Give thanks—this week, always. Give thanks for the appetizers; give thanks to the Lord above. Give thanks and see if it doesn’t grow into a harvest of grace.

Amen.

All Fall Down

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

26th Sunday After Pentecost/B • November 17,2024

Daniel 12:1-3, Mark 13:1-8

Ring around the Rosie, Pocket full of Posies

Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down

Did you sing this when you were a kid? It’s an old, old folk song. It makes me think of happy children dancing in a circle and giggling when they fall down. Some historians today believe it may have originated during the dark tide of the bubonic plague. The “rosie” are the marks of the  plague, the ashes are the thousands of corpses burned. Some estimates are that about half the people in Europe, 50 million, died in a period of seven years. Whole villages were depopulated and it took Europe over a hundred years to begin to recover. I know this is a dark way to start a sermon, but today our gospel reading asks us to look at what happens when things fall down.

The poet William Butler Yeats asked this question in a piece called “Second Coming”. The opening stanza reads, 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

What happens when things fall apart? Why does God let things fall apart?

Surely the place to begin is with our central prayer, which begins, “Our Father”. Hosea compares God’s love to a mother’s love. Now every parent knows there is a fundamental dilemma in raising a child: there is what’s right, what protects the child, yet there’s a need to give that child the freedom to grow and make mistakes and learn from them. I’ve seen this in my own parenting. When my older kids were young, we lived in a little village in northern Michigan. The kids could go off on their own and mostly did. I didn’t worry too much. Then there was the day I got a call: Jason is lying down in the middle of Route 22. Now our village had lots of tourists in the summer, so we all looked forward to the time in the fall when they left and things were quiet. My son and two of his friends decided to celebrate this moment by lying down in the middle of the main street through town. It was just one of those dumb boy things. Of course, there was a long discussion about why we never, ever lay down in the street, a discussion that began with, “What were you thinking? You could have been killed!”. As I recall, his response was essentially, “Well, we didn’t think of that.” As far as I know, he never did again. Should I have kept him home?

Throughout the story of God’s people, there are dumb, lying in the street moments. When Israel decides it wants a king, for example, we hear in 1 Samuel 8 about all the terrible things a king will do. Nevertheless, Israel insists on a king and God, sighing I imagine, gives them one. Much of the rest of the Hebrew scripture is devoted to the terrible things that result. By Jesus’ time, Palestine is a Roman protectorate, with a puppet king. Jerusalem is a big city up on its mountain. Over the previous century, the temple has been rebuilt into a huge structure. The rebuilding began in 20 BC and took about 40 years; it was still going on when Jesus and his disciples were there. Now these are guys from the rural north and I can imagine their reaction to seeing this temple. Mark says, “As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” [Mark 13:1} It makes me think of the first time my mom took me to New York City and I saw the Empire State Building. Maybe you’ve had the same experience: going to the big city, seeing the big buildings.

The temple was meant to be a lighthouse of God’s love and justice, but it had become instead a headquarters for the rich to oppress the poor. We see that weaving through the sayings of Jesus over and over again. So when the disciples are marveling at the towers and the stones, Jesus replies that it’s all going to fall down. In reply to their comment, he says, “13:2 Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” [Mark 13:2] He goes on to say there are going to be terrible wars and conflicts. Everything is going to fall apart. Then he goes on to say something else: all of this destruction is not the end—it’s birth pangs, it’s the beginning of something new.  

What does Jesus finally say we should do when these things happen, when things fall apart? Keep awake. Stay alert. That message comes through parables, that message is explicit in this story. The verses we read this morning are part of a larger section which includes predictions of persecutions and concludes with a parable about the need for watchfulness. The final word: “Keep awake” [Mark 13:37b]

What this means is first, staying alert, watching for new ways to share God’s Word, looking for ways to invite others into Christ’s church. . I don’t know what your experience here was when the COVID 19 Pandemic forced closing of churches. I know that where I was, we didn’t handle it well. We hadn’t kept up with the technology to share our services with over the internet, we didn’t have active social media accounts, we didn’t have the capability to stream anything. The technology was there; others used it for various purposes, but we were a very traditional church. It reminds me of an incident in a Massachusetts church in the late 1700s. Then, the new technology was Franklin stoves: heat right there during worship. I remember reading the minutes of Annual Meetings at a church in Chelmsford, MA, where year after year this was brought up, year after year voted down until finally it passed, at which point a Deacon who had opposed it said that he was sure God would find a warm place in hell for people who needed heat in church.

In Albany, we were much the same about steaming and online ministry for a long time. We missed the boat. We weren’t alert to the possibilities; I think we often still aren’t. We miss the chance to invite others, share with others. Some of you know that I post my sermons online weekly. What you may not know is that every week on average those sermons are viewed about 30 times. That’s close to double the people who hear them here in this lovely place. What would it mean if we made a larger commitment to a digital ministry, to reaching out? We don’t know.

Keeping awake means keeping hope alive. Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Invention of Wings, tells two parallel stories. One is a biography of the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Abigail. Raised in the early 19th century in the slave supported culture of Charleston, South Carolina, they became leading advocates of the abolition of slavery and later of full equality for women. The other story is fictional but just as important; it’s the story of Handful, an enslaved girl given to Sarah Grimké at an early age, who grows up with a mother determined to seek freedom. For more than 20 years, she and her mother pursue various strategies until finally she escapes north, to Pensylvania and freedom. Along the way, she and her mother are beaten, worked, defiled but they never give up hope. We honor our history here in many ways yet how often do we talk about our hope? Shouldn’t we be as focused on where we are going as where we’ve been? No one would walk a path facing backwards; we know enough not to do that. But do we know enough to turn around and look forward to where God wants us to go as a church?

Keeping awake means keeping connection. We often miss how encouraging our presence here is to each other. I’ve been here just about six months; already I can look around and see when someone is missing. I’m sure you can do it much better. Over the years, I’ve heard more excuses for why someone doesn’t go to church than I can count. They mostly come down to, “I didn’t want to go.” We seldom think: maybe I should go because someone else needs me there. One of the best things about this church is the way we honor connections. I never visit someone in the hospital or a nursing home that they don’t have cards sent from other members. I never visit without hearing how important those cards and our prayers are to them. I know in my own experience how much it lightened me when I was sick and received those cards.

 Keeping alert, keeping focused on the future, keeping connection, these are all ways of keeping awake. They are the way Jesus tells us to respond when things fall apart. He says these are birth pangs. Now, I think it’s a bit dicey for a man to talk about birthing. There are some things I’m totally clueless about: why someone gets up one day and decides to change her hair color, how to put on eyeliner, how to clean so it satisfies Jacquelyn. Birthing is one of those things. So this week, I’ve been asking friends who’ve had babies about their experience. I got some truly answers, but the best of all was close to home. When I asked Jacquelyn, she told me about birthing May, how there was a young woman in the next room screaming, how it was busy in the ward. I asked her if it hurt and she said, well, yes of course but you don’t remember the hurt, you remember the delight.

I think that says what Jesus hopes. Yes, things do fall apart; yes, things are going to fall apart. Don’t get attached to what looks impressive and big in this world. It’s going to fall because only God endure forever. Yet when things do fall apart, remember: it’s not the end, it’s birth pangs. Keep awake—alert, connected, focused on the future—and know that beyond what’s ending, beyond the birth pangs, there is the delight of God’s presence waiting.

Amen.

Sing Along

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Listen to the sermon preached here

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor

25th Sunday After Pentecost/B • November 10, 2024

1 Kings 17:8-16, Psalm 16, Mark 12:38-44

We often envy what the others have, don’t we? I always wished I was taller and had a cool preacher voice. But most of all, I envy people who can sing and do it on key. I love hearing the choir; I love my daughter May’s voice, she sings on key, something I have never consistently managed. It’s not my gift. I used to record sermons on cassette tapes and play them later, to critique and improve. But I frequently forgot to turn off my microphone during hymns. So there would be my voice, and just my voice, tunelessly singing some hymn everyone else can sing just fine. It always made my family laugh.

Since I can’t sing well, I sing along. You know what I mean? I just kind of sing the words quietly, under everyone else who’s singing so beautifully. I add a little volume and enthusiasm. But I like to sing along. When I sing along, even though my voice isn’t as sweet or tuned or wonderful as others, I’m part of the group, I’m part of the praise. That’s what I believe today’s scripture reading is about. Now when we read the gospel lesson for today, commonly called the widow’s mite, I’m guessing that it may not have been new to you. It’s a common text for Stewardship Sundays and appeals to give to the church. Well, I hope you do give generously to this church. But I don’t think this text has much to do with that. I think it has to do with singing along. 

If we pull back from the specific story of the widow, we find Jesus has been going to the temple and arguing with representatives of various powerful groups. The temple isn’t much like our church buildings; it’s more like a farmers’ market with a chapel at one end. People are there buying and selling animals for sacrifices, they’re changing money because you can’t use Roman currency for temple offerings. It’s a noisy place and if you’ve ever been to a farm with animals, you can imagine what it smells like. It’s also a place where people meet. Some of them are doing business deals, some are meeting friends. In one area, there’s a place to put in temple offerings, just like we have offering plates at both ends of the worship area here. We walk past those plates and quietly put offerings in, but the temple treasury is a public place and the offerings aren’t little envelopes they are coins or sacks of coins and animals. The nice thing about this arrangement is that everyone can see how generous you’re being, how much you love God, calibrated by how much you put in the offering 

Jesus is watching, and he points out what everyone knows. Many of the people bringing offerings are well-to-do, he says dressed in long robes, the equivalent today would be expensive suits. They’re mostly scribes, what we would call lawyers and accountants. They’re rich people working to get ahead and they envy each other, try to make a big impression, try to get one more step up the ladder of respect and honor. And some of them do it by what he calls “devouring widow’s houses.” In this place and time, women have no property rights. When a husband dies, his widow doesn’t get his house. Scribes often help the man’s brother or sons take it over, usually getting a piece of the value for themselves, leaving the widow impoverished and homeless. Why do the scribes do it? Because they live their lives out of envy, always trying to get richer, get more honors, get more important in their world. Somewhere along the way, they have become like the lady in the Led Zeppelin song who is buying a stairway to heaven. Their offerings have become a transaction: see, God, I’ve bought my ticket to righteousness.

Their envy makes them devour widow’s houses and God hates this. God has a particular fondness for widows. There are over 100 places in scripture where God mentions widows for special concern. In Deuteronomy, justice for widows is central to God.

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, 18who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, [Deuteronomy 10:17]

So it’s not an accident that Jesus is lifting up a woman who is a widow. In his words, in this moment, for this moment, he is demonstrating what he has said, that the last shall be first. Because Jesus sees to the heart of what’s going on here. This woman is going all out. Here she is in all her vulnerability, yet she’s giving everything, thanking God every day. This isn’t about stewardship, this isn’t about giving to the church or the temple at all really. It’s about how we come to God: buying God’s love, or just letting it flow over us? Because we can never deserve that love; we can only accept it and share it.

This text makes me uncomfortable. I’d like to be on the side of the widow but honestly, I look more like the scribes. I know there is a part of me that likes having a title, there is a part that likes sitting at the head table, there is a part that wants to look successful in my career. I know that part of me likes the whole winners and losers game and when I play, I want to win. But God keeps throwing pitches at me even though I don’t always catch them. This is one. It asks whether I’m buying a stairway to heaven or just thankful to be here, thanking God that I know what love is, that God loves me.

The other story we read today asks the same question but it takes us right into the heart of the decision. Elijah is a prophet in Israel at a time when the king has become faithless. He wants to be like other kings, he wants to become more powerful. To do that takes powerful, rich friends and he has to make it pay off for them, so justice has become a thing of the past there. When justice dries up, so does the land, the Bible says. There is a drought; people are starving. Elijah has announced this but he’s hungry too. So he shows up at this widow’s door, dirty, hungry, probably a little stinky. Here’s the amazing thing: she’s a Gentile. She isn’t even Jewish. Geography is theology in the Bible so it’s important to pay attention to the fact that he’s in Zarepheth, outside Israel. A woman is gathering sticks to make a fire and he asks for some bread; she tells him she was just going to make one last meal with all she has for her and her son before they starve. He says what angels say: “Don’t be afraid”, and then he tells her the flour and oil will be enough. 

Now she has a decision, doesn’t she? What would you do? Would you share your last bit with a hungry stranger? Well, let me tell you a story about a Christmas party, the best Christmas party I’ve ever been to. A number of years ago, we had a play at the church where I was the pastor.. It was a big success, people were feeling good, and afterward a man chatted with me for a while. He carefully explained he didn’t go to church; I think he was stunned when I said that was fine. He stayed for a long time, and when he got ready to go, he said, “Preacher, I want to do something good here but you’ll know better than me what to do,” and handed me a $100 bill. I guess I could have put it in the offering, I could have given it to the benevolences but what I did was to give it to a single mom in our church who was struggling. I told her  to use it however she wanted, maybe get some presents for her kids.

A few weeks later, she begged me to come over to her house after the Christmas Eve service. Now after Christmas Eve, I’m always exhausted, I’m anxious to get home to my own family. But I couldn’t say no, so off I went. She lived in a little apartment in a part of town where you made sure to lock your car. I don’t know what I expected, but when I got up the stairs to her place, I was amazed. It was full of people, there were bowls of chili and chips and food and kids, and presents and wrapping paper and happy people. She’d been homeless until recently; now she had a place and she’d taken the $100 and invited a bunch of people who lived in their cars and so on to come over for a feast.What I remember most is sitting on the couch, with her little girl on my lap, endlessly stroking my tie, and asking me why I wore it; she wasn’t used to men in ties. It wasn’t what I would have done with the money; it’s what God would do. It’s what God does.

A widow who gives out of her poverty, who believes her poverty is an abundance because it gives her the means to thank God. A widow who takes a chance on the word of a prophet from another country that God will somehow provide for her and her son and him as well. These are the pictures God’s Word is giving us of what God wants; these are the people God sets up as examples. 

Those guys fussing about their status and giving big sums to the temple, buying influence with the king? They’re going to lose it all. About 30 years after this moment, the temple is going to be pulled down during a war with Rome. Jerusalem is going to be destroyed. All that’s left of it is a bit of a wall today. The Psalm we read in the Call to Worship has it exactly right: 

Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.

When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God,

who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever; [Psalm 16:4-6]

If we focus just on today, we miss this. Only God’s way endures and it endures forever.

It’s easy to follow the way of the world in our spiritual life and church life. So thank God we have these examples: women who believed enough to live in thankful faithfulness. The headlines in the news are for today; tomorrow they’ll be something else. God’s love is forever. Which one will we live from? Which one will we demonstrate? 

Believing in God’s blessing, God’s abundance, God’s goodness is like a song. Remember how the Psalm started? “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul! I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God all my life long.” That’s the song these widows are singing and we’re invited to sing along. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a great singer like the people in our choir or a little tuneless like me. Sing along. It doesn’t matter whether you feel like you’re winning or losing today; sing along because ultimately God always wins. It doesn’t matter whether you’re feeling full or worried like the Gentile widow; sing along because the song itself is a blessing meant to be shared. 

Amen.

Saints Without Haloes

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

All Saints’ Day • November 3, 2024

Isaiah 25:6-9, Matthew 25:31-40

For 11 years, I was the pastor of the United Congregational church, whose meeting house is one of those big, ornate buildings, with stained-glass windows and dark woodwork everywhere. One year, we held a special Good Friday service with the Roman Catholic diocese. We walked behind a cross and the Catholic Bishop preached in our pulpit. So we had a lot of Catholics there for the first time. One comment I heard afterward always stuck with me “It’s a pretty church and the people are nice but oh my God! They don’t have any statues at all! I don’t know how you have a church without any saints!” For Reformed people like us, it’s a pretty fancy place, but for this woman, brought up in the lush environment of Italian Catholic churches, it was plain and soul-less and more importantly, saintless. I imagine she’d say the same about this meeting house. Personally, I love its simple lines, the way the light floods in from the windows, how it sits embraced by the trees. But there are no statues of saints.

Of course, there are reasons we don’t have statues. The practice of venerating saints was a cash cow for the Medieval Catholic Church, and it had gotten out of hand; buying and selling religious relics including bits and pieces of the bodies of saints was a big business in 1500 AD. When the Reformers, including our own fathers and mothers in the faith, were cleaning out the closet of church practices, they wrinkled their nose over the whole business and tossed it in the trash box. So does it even make sense to have All Saints’ Day in a Reformed Church?

Maybe it helps if we understand just what the word saint means. It comes from the same root that gives us all the words like elect and election; just like we choose a candidate for office and give them a job. We elect them; we choose them. Saint is the English translation of the Greek word for ‘elect’. The original idea was that God chooses people here, right here, in this world, in this community, for a purpose;  They are elected, chosen, and the word for ‘elect’ is translated as ‘saint’. Everyone chosen by God is a saint. 

We’ve just come through Halloween, celebrated in our country by putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else. One year, one of my churches held a memorable Halloween party. Our hall was full, there were a hundred kids and their parents, most of them working hard at looking like someone they aren’t. We had a half dozen Spidermen, at least two Wizard of Oz Dorothies; we had Megatron and Bumble Bee, we had a nice selection of princesses, Barbie, and enough witches for a coven. Superman and Supergirl both attended. We had zombies and clowns; we had costumes whose identity wasn’t entirely clear but seemed assembled just to be different. It’s fun to pretend to be someone else for a while; it’s fun to get out of yourself and into a costume.

What wasn’t obvious is that we also had a lot of saints present. They were saints without halos, of course, but saints nevertheless. It took pretty much everyone from our church to host the party, and we were all tired at the end. But we were there doing God’s work. You see, the Halloween party wasn’t just a good time; it was also a day when we demonstrated  free grace, showing off how we believe God cares without price, without purchase. One of the parents said to me, “I think we’re supposed to pay for all of this somewhere, but I didn’t see where.” I said, “No, it’s free; just a good time.” I was taking pictures and printing them. He asked how much the picture would cost; I said, “Nothing, it’s free”—and when he asked how much for another one of the whole family I said again, “It’s free.” It puzzled him, it really puzzled him; God grace always does, free grace always stuns us when we encounter a little of it; we’re used to paying our own way. 

We have lots of visions of life with God but many of them look like the one we heard from Isaiah this morning. 

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.  …Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces

Life with God looks like a party, in other words: a great, wonderful time of praise and joy and good things we all enjoy that God gives for free.The woman who said we didn’t have saints in our churches was wrong; we do have saints, but they are saints without halos. What is a saint? A saint is someone fulfilling God’s purpose. It isn’t hard to understand that purpose. When Jesus was asked what God wanted, he replied with the ancient teaching from Deuteronomy, “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength” and added, “love your neighbor as yourself.” This is our purpose; this is our mission. It’s a good thing for us to remember it, it’s a good thing for us to celebrate it. For the purpose of a church is to help us dress up in the costume of a saint, in the life of a saint. What I mean is, to learn to live like this, to live like this every day. When you do this, when I do, then we are saints. That’s right: Saint Linda, Saint Diane, Saint Sigmund, Saint fill in your own name.

We don’t have statues; we do have memories. In a few moments, we celebrate the memory of our friends who passed on this year, completing their mission. But celebrating all saints includes all the saints who are here. And it also includes some people we don’t always think about: al the ones who aren’t here yet. So today, right now, I thank God for all those saints who have gone home to God, for all of you saints who are here and for the ones I haven’t met yet. May God’s blessing flow

Amen.