Tag Archives: Grace

Finders Keepers

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

All Saints Sunday • November 2, 2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4 • 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12 * Luke 19:1-10

This is how God starts: everything in order, light and darkness separated, land and sea, a fruitful creation, two people set in a garden. Then the people decide they want to be like God and it all falls apart. There’s violence and shame and sin and it’s a mess. It’s like when you go through one of those periods where you don’t clean, the dishes pile up, the bed’s a lump of twisted covers and sheets and you can’t face it all. 

So God starts over; washes it all away in the Flood, teaches boat building to Noah and Noah goes on a cruise, God promises not to do this again, the waters recede and everything is in order. Then people spread out, they decide to be god like, build a tower and God has to scatter them and invent languages, and it all falls apart.

So God starts over: whispers to Abram and Sarai a promise about a land where they will be God’s people and that they will have children and become the beginning of a blessing to the whole world. God makes a covenant with them, sends them on a long journey, gives them a child, and it all looks good. Then it falls apart. There’s violence, there’s division. The people of God go off to Egypt and become slaves.

So God starts over: gets Moses to go to Pharaoh to say, “Let my people go”, because on the whole, God hates slavery. It takes some doing to convince the Egyptians but eventually God’s people leave slavery, wander around, doubting God some, complaining some, but God gives them a set of rules, Ten Commandments, makes another covenant with them, promises the promised land. They get there and then it all falls apart. They don’t live by the covenant, they think other Gods look like more fun, and they think they can be Godlike themselves.

So God starts over: sends prophets, gives them a Word. One of them is Habakkuk. He lives in a time of deep division. The Chaldeans, a people from present day Iraq, have defeated God’s people but it’s before the final devastation of Jerusalem. He sets out the problem.

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?

1:3 Why do you make me see wrong-doing and look at trouble? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.

1:4 So the law becomes slack, and justice never prevails. The wicked surround the righteous; therefore judgment comes forth perverted.

But what’s the solution? Habakkuk says, “the righteous live by their faithfulness”.  But what about the rest? 

I’ve summarized the whole Hebrew Scriptures and perhaps you noticed the repeated, “So God starts over.” This is God: ever faithful, always trying to get back to that garden moment, like someone cleaning a house, making the bed, doing the dishes, putting things away. That’s what Jesus is doing: Jesus is God’s cleaner. And today we heard how he does it. Did you get it? Did you understand it?

It’s a simple story. Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem. Just a little before this, he’s told his friends for the third time that he’s going to go there and be crucified. No one wants to hear that but he keeps telling them anyway. Now, Jerusalem is up on a mountain. To the east is the Dead Sea and above that is the Jordan River. There’s a deep, deep valley, it’s actually so deep it’s below sea level. There’s a place at the river where you can ford and there’s been some kind of village there since about 9,000 BCE. There are fresh water springs and palm trees. Out to the east is the wilderness; off to the west is the winding road up the mountains. The city that’s grown up there is named Jericho and it’s one of the oldest cities in the whole world. To get to Jerusalem, you first have to go through Jericho.

That’s what Jesus is doing: he’s in the last stage of going to Jerusalem. It’s like taking the train here from Philadelphia; when you get to Elizabethtown, you know it’s time to get ready to arrive. When you drive up from Baltimore and hit the turnpike, you know it’s time to get over for the Harrisburg exit. He gets to the edge of Jericho and meets a blind man; Luke doesn’t name him, Mark says his name is Bar Timmaeus, which means more or less “Timothy’s son”. He cries out to Jesus; the crowd tells him to shut up but Jesus stops, has Tim brought to him, heals him because of his faith. 

It’s a sign: Jesus has been dealing with so many people whose eyes work just fine but who are blind to the way God’s love just falls on the world like rain. Jesus has been dealing with so many people who are blind to God’s hope for all of us to treat each other with that same love. Timothy’s eyes are now open and he can see fully what he had glimpsed in faith, that Jesus is the Son of God, come to show that love.

They move on into Jericho itself. I’m sure there’s a crowd, after all Luke says that at one point Jesus had sent out 70 people to share the good news about him with others. There are a group of women who have supported him all along. There are the 12 disciples. Just try to walk down Green St. with 12 guys following; you’ll end up stopping traffic. It’s the same thing here. 

If you’ve ever been to old cities, you know that the streets are narrow for the most part with the occasional open plaza area. That’s how I imagine this. There’s a small crowd, some running ahead, some behind Jesus, some trying to stay next to him. Surely news about him has gone ahead and there are people who stop what they’re doing to see. 

Now, I know you’ve all been to a parade and you know how it goes: there are always people in front of you. You always have to decide how hard you want to push and if you’re like me, it’s not that hard. That means going to a parade tends to be looking over people’s heads; not that fun. There’s a guy there in Jericho who has an additional problem: he’s short. He’s not going to look over anyone. This isn’t the first time he’s had this problem, so he does what I suspect he’s done since he was a kid, he climbs up in a tree. His name is Zaccheus, which means ‘Innocent’. But people there don’t see him as innocent;  they see him as a very bad man. He’s the chief tax collector there in Jericho which to most people means the chief cheat. He’s rich, and perhaps he’s not shy about showing it; drives a fancy chariot, has more than three sets of clothes, has enough food every single day. Being a tax collector means he’s ritually unclean; he’s not welcome at worship. 

But there he is, up in the tree, can you imagine him? He wants to see Jesus. Isn’t that like you? Isn’t that like me? I used to preach from a pulpit that had a little brass quotation on it I saw every time I was there, it said “Sir, we would see Jesus”. So, Jesus is coming down the street, with this whole crowd, some just want to be around him, some want him to solve all their problems, some want to touch him. Maybe the tree is in a little square, and the crowd flows in. There are sycamore trees, a kind of fig tree, and there are palm trees, maybe there’s a pool of water, and there’s Zaccheus up in a tree and this is just the reverse of what Zaccheus had in mind. It isn’t a story about Zaccheus seeing Jesus: it’s about Jesus seeing Zaccheus.

Zaccheus is rich but he isn’t popular. He’s rich but he isn’t liked; no one invites him to coffee, no one comes by his office just to hang out. People avoid him. But Jesus sees him and calls out to him, “Come down, I’m going to your house for dinner.” Wow! Imagine Jesus inviting himself to your home. Imagine Jesus seeing you and calling you out by name. “Salvation has come to your house,” Jesus says. But it’s not a popular saying; Luke says that everyone grumbled. Everyone in that crowd feels they are better than Zaccheus; he’s an unclean, unpopular, unrighteous guy. Why is Jesus making a big deal over him? Why is Jesus actually going to his house, planning to eat with him?

It isn’t some great act of repentance by Zacccheus; he isn’t going to change his life on the spot. He’s already pretty much doing good, he says he gives half his income to the poor, he goes beyond what’s required when he wrongs someone. But that all comes after Jesus has announced he’s coming to Zaccheus’ house. It’s not the reason for it, it’s Zaccheus reacting to the grumbling. No, there’s something else at work here and it’s this line near the end: “he, too, is a son of Abraham.” He’s part of the promise, he’s a child of God. It doesn’t matter that he’s rich; it doesn’t matter what he does for a living. He’s a child of God. A lot of those children have gotten lost and Jesus is all about finding them, guiding them back to the family, reminding them of who they are. He wants to remind us as well.

Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “I’m nobody; who are you? Are you nobody too?” So many live as nobody. Jesus comes to remind us of who we are. He sees Zaccheus and he sees what the grumblers have missed: that whatever else he is, whatever he has done, he is a child of Abraham, he is God’s child, a child of blessing and promise. Now today is ‘All Saints Day’ The word ‘saint’ has come to mean someone recognized as extraordinarily good but originally and always in the New Testamet, it means any follower of Christ. Paul says in Christ we have been adopted into Abraham’s family. So what Jesus says about Zaccheus he could say about you or me: this person is a child of Abraham. This person is a child or promise. This person is a saint. This person is a child of God.

Jesus mission is to find the children of God and keep them home with God. Surely that is the real meaning of All Saints. We look back to friends and family we have known and loved; we remember them. Behind them is an even longer line of those who came before. All these are God’s children. All these Jesus came because he finds God’s children and just as the prophets said, intends to restore them to God. 

But All Saints is not just the past; it is the present as well and the future. This is a wonderful congregation. What is said in Second Thessalonians about those Christians so many years before us could certainly be said here.

We must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly and the love of everyone of you for one another is increasing. [2 Thessalonians 1:3]

That same spirit of the saints is here. It’s here and Jesus is looking at us, as he looked at Zaccheus, saying the same thing about us, that we are children of God, hoping we will recognize each other in that way, act in that way.

So when we hear him talking to Zaccheus, we should hear him talking to us as well, saying the same thing. “This too is a child of God…and today salvation has come to your house.” May that blessing live in your hearts this week and always. 

Amen.

Turn

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Reformation Sunday • October 26, 2025

Luke 18:9-14

When I was little, maybe five or six, I hated making my bed. I didn’t care about my messy room with dirty clothes and toys scattered about. My mother did care and we fought about it endlessly. Finally, one day, she sat me down, and showed me a list. “This is your Do It list,” she said. There was a line for my making my bed, picking up clothes, and some other things. “If you can check off everything each week, you will get a prize. Well, I didn’t care about making the bed, but I did care about prizes. So I started doing the things on the list and I did get some prizes. This little interaction is exactly how religion worked for many centuries. There was a sense that God had a To-Do List and if you faithfully checked it all off, you’d get a prize. The prize might be a good crop, it might be a peaceful life, it might be a good life after death. Whatever the prize, you were buying it by doing your list.

That’s what’s going on at the beginning of the parable Jesus tells. It’s another “two guys” parable; we had one recently about Lazarus and a rich man, we’ve had others. In this one, we start out with a good guy. He tells us he’s a good guy right from the start. “The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” The tax collector is the other guy; we’ll come back to him in a bit. “I’m better than all these, God!”—that’s the beginning of his prayer. Then he goes on to tell God he’s done his To-Do list: “ fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.” This is actually beyond what he’s required to do. He’s proud of his religious accomplishment. He’s completed the list, he’s ready for his prize. Let’s set him there on the shelf for a few minutes while we think about this system of relating to God by completing a to-do list.

It’s an ancient system. Hundreds of years before Jesus, we hear the prophets talking about how some people speculating on how much it will cost, what they will have to do, to get God’s favor. The first Christians were close to the message of Jesus but within a few hundred years, they were overtaken by Roman culture which included this idea of how you got to God. They also took over the Roman system of hierarchy: someone at the top, a few just below, more below that, and so on down to regular people. They called the ones at the top Archbishops, the ones lower bishops, and they had other titles down to priests. All these over time came to be more interested in power and wealth than the pure light of God’s love.

A thousand years later, this produced some beautiful cathedrals, an elaborate ritual for worship and a deep spiritual emptiness. Some people began to look for another way. They thought the Bible should be in a language everyone could understand. John Hus in Bohemia said this and inspired followers who fought for this new way. John Wycliffe in England translated the Bible into English. Both were killed as heretics but their ideas lived on. A hundred years later, Martin Luther criticized the system of To-Do lists and the corruption of the church around him. This time, some of the princes backed him. When Papal delegates came to Prague to negotiate, they were thrown out a window you can still visit.

But Luther wanted to keep the structure of the church with all its hierarchy. It took others to see that hierarchy is not God’s plan. John Calvin suggested a kind of church governed not by princely bishops but by the people themselves, electing a consistory of leaders who, along with the church’s pastors, would govern the church. His ideas spread through parts of Germany and especially Holland. They were added to by a man named Ulrich Zwingli so that a set of ideas about how to worship began to come together and catch on.

Those ideas generally included four things. First, that a church was not just everyone who lived in an area but a group of people who were covenanted, promised to each other as followers of Christ. Send that being part of a church meant understanding you were saved by faith in Christ, not by completing a To-Do list. Third, that the way to know Christ was through the scripture. Finally, they created churches that were governed by the people in the church, usually through something like our consistory. These ideas…covenant, consistory, conviction, conversation with the Word, became the foundation of what was called the Reformed churches, and they spread through parts of Germany and Holland. In England, the same groups were called Presbyterians—‘Presbyter’  is the Greek word for Elder, the title given to the clergy of these new churches. In England, another group took the idea even farther and said that each Congregation was complete under Christ. They were called Congregationalists.

By the 1700s in Germany, life was tough. Wars had devastated the economy and people were forced to worship however their ruler wanted. That drove many to immigrate to the new colonies in America. William Penn offered these Reformed people land and freedom of worship. So, many Germans came to Pennsylvania and in 1725, just 300 years ago, sponsored by the Dutch Reformed Church, they met and held their first service of communion. I imagine it was cold that day; this is Pennsylvania after all and they were in the wilderness near Lancaster. But their hearts were warm. Gradually, this way of worship, with its emphasis on covenants, and a direct peace with God spread. Eventually some of them got together with some Lutherans and founded this very church.

I’ve been going through our family album, I hope you’ve stayed with me. This is who we are: we believe everyone should be able to read the Bible for themselves, everyone should be able to come to their own way with Christ without a To-Do list or a bill from the church. We believe our church should be governed by us and it is. Someone asked me a while back, knowing I had retired four years ago, how it was to be back running a church. I said, “I’m not running it, I just preach there, the consistory runs it.”

So now I want to take that guy we started with off the shelf, remember him? He’s busy telling God his To-Do list is complete and how great he is, how righteous. But there’s another guy in the story. That guy isn’t righteous. He’s a collaborator with the Romans; he’s a tax collector. And it’s worth hearing his prayer too: “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ [Luke 18:13] This is his prayer; this is his faith, that God’s grace can rain on him even though he isn’t a righteous man. These two are standing far from each other. The Pharisee is alone; the tax collector stands far off. Jesus says this parable is meant for those of us who trust their own righteousness, that is the righteousness that comes from completing your To-Do list. But Jesus says it is the tax collector who goes home justified. 

One writer said about this,

At the end of this story, the Pharisee will leave the Temple and return to his home righteous. This hasn’t changed; he was righteous when he came up and righteous as he goes back down. The tax collector, however, will leave the Temple and go back down to his home justified, that is, accounted righteous by the Holy One of Israel. How has this happened? The tax collector makes neither sacrifice nor restitution. On what basis, then, is he named as righteous? On the basis of God’s divine fiat and ordinance!

God’s grace is experienced in our faith, not in a To-Do list. We can’t make God love us; we can only believe God already does. That’s the message of the whole Reformation; that’s the message of the scripture. Turning towards each other, turning towards God is the way. 

Amen.

The Very Bad, Awful GuyWho Got It Right

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Luke 16:1-13

Jesus loved bad guys. Over and over in the gospels, we hear echoes of this; the good guys constantly grumble that he “eats with sinners”. Who are these sinners? Well they are people who have jobs that make them unacceptable: undertakers, tax collectors, and so on. They include guys who are just a little sketchy and guys that don’t always do what is conventionally the right thing. This is a story about a guy like that. He’s not a good guy; he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad guy who finally does the right thing.

To understand this story, it’s important to understand something about life in Jesus’ time. The whole country was ruled by a foreign power, Rome, and most of their economy is agriculture. Wine from Palestine was sent to Rome, so were figs and dates and olives. These are crops that take a lot of individual effort. Plant a potato, and it just sits there in the ground until it’s time to dig it up. Plant grapes, and you have to tend them all year long. You have to make sure they are up on stakes off the ground, you have to make sure they have the right amount of water. Olive trees take a generation to bear; you reap a crop your father or grandfather sowed. But most of the people doing all this work don’t own the land they farm. Just like rich people are buying up homes today and renting them out, Judah in Jesus’ time was full of landlords. Some of them were rich men from Rome; they bought up a vineyard or some acreage. They wanted the money from the crop but they weren’t about to go out and work for it. So they hired people or they had slaves. Somebody had to supervise all this of course, so they also hired managers. Managers could act with the force of the owner, we call that power of attorney today, it meant that they were in charge.

That’s what Jesus is asking us to imagine: a manager. A guy who runs the farm. He hires people, he fires them; he makes sure they put in a full day’s work, he makes sure everything is done on time. Even today, most farms run on credit. You go to the bank in the winter and borrow the money to buy the things you need to put the crop in, seed, tools, whatever it’s going to take. Where does that money come from? Today it comes from a bank but in Jesus’ time it came from someone like the manager. Farm managers took a cut of this and we know from documents archaeologists have found that they charged huge interest rates, often 50% or more. This makes you a lot of money; it doesn’t make you popular. This lets you get ahead financially; it doesn’t make you many friends. 

Most of the people around Jesus are peasants; they know all about this system. They know all about managers who squeezed them for interest, they know all about being forced off the land when a crop didn’t come in and they couldn’t pay back a loan. I’m guessing they don’t much like managers; I’m guessing they see them as very bad, awful guys. I suspect some of them might have been cheering inside when the story starts out with the manager being fired; “Got what he deserved,” I hear them thinking. 

This is actually the second in a series of three parables about bad, awful guys. The first one is what we often call “The parable of the prodigal son”. Remember that one? A kid goes off and squanders part of his dad’s property but the really bad, awful guy is the older brother who refuses to welcome him home. Next week we’re going to hear about a really bad, awful guy in hell but I’ll save that for next Sunday. So here between those two stories is this one about this manager and I think he qualifies as a very bad, awful guy. 

For one thing, when the story starts, we’re told that he’s been fiddling the accounts. He’s been fired for embezzlement. That is to say: he was stealing from the company, from the man who owned the farm. That’s bad. Now he’s got a problem: he’s lost his job, and he lives with people he’s been cheating for years. He says, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.” In other words, he’s not about to go work like any common peasant. What else can he do? And then he has an idea: he’ll fiddle with the accounts again.

One by one, he calls the debtor farmers in. He asks them how much they owe. Now loans in this time were written differently than ours. If you owe say, $10,000 on a car, the loan says, “$10,000” and then it gives you an interest rate separately; your payment is some part of the loan and the interest. But in this time, the loan as quoted as the amount borrowed plus the interest. So a loan amounting to 50 jugs of oil is written down as 100 jugs; a hundred containers of wheat might be a loan of just 80 or so. What the very bad guy is doing is knocking off the interest. 

Imagine these people for a moment. They’re laboring under harsh, exorbitant loans. When they’re summoned, surely they’re scared: what if this man who controls their livelihood is going to make some new demand? What if he wants a bribe, what if he wants more interest? Imagine being summoned to the bank and told they’re going to cut your mortgage in half. Imagine getting a letter from a credit card company saying, “We’ve decided to cut what you owe us in half.” Joy hardly describes it, does it? This very bad, awful, guy, this manager who is losing his job, has a great plan in this crisis: he’s going to create joy right here, right now, and hopefully it will carry over to relationships that will sustain him. That’s his plan, after all: “…when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’

This is flagrantly dishonest. There’s no way around it: what he’s doing is wrong according to the standards of any society. So it’s a tough parable. In fact, all week long, listening to the podcasts that help me think about texts, I’ve been hearing pastors complain about having to preach this parable. This is a very bad, awful guy but at the end, his dishonesty works. “His master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly,” the parable ends. This is a joke; this is funny. We all know that no master is going to commend his kind of dishonesty.

You can see in what comes after how hard people struggled with this story. Generally, scholars tell us that parables end with the story and the applications were added on. We see this in various places but this is the only one where we have not one, not two but four different interpretive comments. Three of them contradict the plain sense of the story.

“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.

If, then, you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?

And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? [Luke 16: 10-12]

None of these really catch the story’s meaning which is revolutionary. All of them seem to be a way to restore the conventions of the time. So, why does Jesus tell this story? What does he have in mind? 

We have to go back to the beginning of the parable to see that. It  begins with the bad guy worried about relationships. He’s facing a crisis; his whole way of life is about to fall apart. He’s going to have to depend on people. In this crisis, he acts in a way that goes against the rules of his time and his job. In the same way, Jesus is asking people to understand the coming of the Kingdom in him is a crisis that calls for new relationships, for changing how they’ve been living. We’ve heard his parables about the ultimate value of finding the lost; we’ve seen him welcome the lost to his table. The point is back in the parable of the prodigal son, right at the end, when the father tells the older brother who is pouting about the welcome of his lost brother, “This brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” [Luke 15:32] Against the value of finding the lost, the value of good accounting is nothing. 

Recognizing the crisis of finding the lost is the point here. That’s how Christianity spread in its first years. We hear stories in Acts of mass conversions but the truth is, historians believe Christian faith spread little by little and largely because of the example of people of faith. About the middle of the 200s AD, for example, a massive plague spread through the Roman Empire. Scholars believe it might have been something like measles. People were dying everywhere; Rome itself, the city, was collapsing. We’ve all been through a horrible pandemic, we know what that’s like. The basic response of people in that time was to flee and they fled family, friends, communities. But Christians didn’t flee; they cared for the sick. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage said,

bring yourselves to the sick and poor, and help them. God said love thy neighbor as I have loved you [“Litany for a pandemic”.
America Magazine. 222 (10): 18–25.] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Cyprian#:~:text=%22Litany%20for%20a%20pandemic%22.%20America%20Magazine.%20222%20(10):%2018–25.

It was recognizing that relationships of care and love meant more than anything that spread Christianity. It still does.

Now we live in a time of crisis, also. We’ve been through a plague caused by a virus, we’re in the midst of a plague of gun violence. We’re a small church and of ourselves we may not be able to solve these problems. But we can live our faith every day; we can remember that even the very bad, awful guy, finally got it; the question is, will we. Jesus started with a group about half the size of the people who worship here most Sundays; 300 years later, his way was the official religion of the whole empire.

It’s hard to know how seeds will grow. Jacquelyn and I drive over the I-83 bridge almost every week, headed to her work. She drives, so I get to look around. The other day, I looked at the river, at the still standing pillars from the bridge that collapsed and I noticed something amazing. On the top of one of them, a tree is growing. Some time in the past, a seed landed there, I guess. There was enough dirt to let it germinate, start growing and so far the winds and the rain and the storms haven’t been able to push it aside. It’s right there, it looks to be about three feet tall. It’s small: a sapling. But it’s there, it’s doing what trees do, taking in some nutrients, taking in water, taking in sunlight, making oxygen, growing taller. 

What about us? We’re small but we’re here and every Sunday we come together to strengthen each other, pray, remember the way of Jesus. I hope, like that little tree, we’re growing up in Christ too. God hopes this. What do you hope? What will you do about it?

Amen.

Making God Smile

by

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

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

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

Luke 15:1-10 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Jeremiah 4:23-27]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Freedom Now

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Ninth Sunday After Pentecost/C • August 10, 2025

Luke 12:32-40  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still I Rise

by

A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor • © 2025

Easter Sunday Year C • April 20, 2025

Luke 24:1-12

Christmas begins with lights. On Christmas Eve, we gather here to look for the Lord, to celebrate his coming. The last thing we do is to light the candles. It’s a wonderful moment: celebrating the one who came as the light of the world, we pass the light, candle to handle, one to another until the whole room sparkles and we sing. But Easter begins in darkness. The last thing we do on Maundy Thursday is to extinguish the candles, remembering the darkness to come on Good Friday. So we come to Easter from the darkness.

Like a stage cleared in the final act of a play, John tells us the crowds have cleared out, first shouting, “Hosanna” for Jesus come as king, later demanding, “Crucify him!” when the Romans and the city authorities arrest him and put him on trial as a terrorist. Peter denies him in the courtyard of the jail. Killed on a cross in the gathering shadows of sunset that marks the beginning of the sabbath, his followers fade away. Finally, it’s left to a sympathetic rich man to provide for his burial and the body is stashed in a cave tomb, too late for preparation before shabbat, which starts as darkness begins and night takes over. Only now, in the darkness of the dawn, does anyone, a few women, venture to the tomb. They buy spices to prepare the body, to make the final arrangements and give some dignity to the dead. They are going to the grave and they’re worried that the stone closing it off will be too much to roll away; they’re worried they won’t be able to get in to where Jesus lies dead in the darkness. It’s early: John says, “while it was still dark” [John 20:1b]

The burial caves of Jerusalem are on a cliff wall. Imagine walking along the a cliff, as the darkness turns into dawn, slowly, carefully negotiating the turns in the path, watching just the steps ahead, not the whole path, unable to see around the next turn. Carefully, quietly, the women walk the path, stumbling here or there, clutching each other to keep from falling, arms full of the precious spices. They know a large stone blocks the entrance to the tomb and they are already trying to think of a way to move it. You see how like us they are? They have a problem: they’ve brought the things they will need to do their job and they are discussing how to deal with the biggest obstacle of all. Isn’t that what we do?

Now they come around the last curve. Are they still talking about the stone or has the nearness of the grave silenced them? Now they look toward the grave, discovering the problem they worried so much about isn’t there: the stone is moved. Who moved it? How did they do it? The women don’t know or seem to care. The grave is open; they walk slowly toward it, silent now I’m sure, they come to the entrance and, they enter the cave and suddenly the darkness lightens and in the light there is a person sitting, dressed in white, shining with it. They’re afraid: who wouldn’t be, they came to deal with a dead man, not a live angel. 

He says what angels always say: “Don’t be afraid.” He shows them where Jesus had lain, they see the grave clothes they had intended to anoint with their spices which won’t be needed after all. And he tells them what to do. The women run. Of course they run: wouldn’t you? “They went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”, one account says. What about you? What about me? What are we to make of this story? 

Most importantly, that Easter is not only for Easter Sunday. The gospel of Mark starts, “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” All that follows, all the stories of Jesus’ ministry and teaching, the story of the cross, this story of Easter is prelude, just a beginning. The good news is that it’s not the end. In the failure of the worldly events, there is a space made by faith. In the vulnerability of the cross and the tomb, there is an empty place and God works in that wilderness, God is present in that wilderness, raising Jesus. The Pharisees cannot understand him, the Romans cannot kill him, his own followers cannot follow him but God’s grace is so powerful it can overcome all of them. Go home, the angel says: go back to Galilee. He’s not gone, he’s still here: “there you will see him.” Easter is a summons to see.

Maya Angelou is a poet who has seen in the long history of oppression of black people a reason for hope, an image of resurrection. She says, in part, 

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise. [Maya Angelou, Still I Rise]

There he is: rising in the sweep of history, bending history to the love of God, the justice of God a little bit every day. See him there: see his power there. See his resurrection there. To the violence of the Empire, of all empires, he says: “Still I rise.” 

But it’s not only in the big things that Jesus can be seen. Terry Marquardt wrote about grieving for her grandmother and remembered,

My aunt was with my grandmother during the last nights of her life, when the pain in her spine was so horrible that she hadn’t slept for two days, and the medication had stopped working, and she was beginning to lose hope. It was too much to lay down, so the two of them were sitting in the living room at 2:00 in the morning when my aunt had an idea.

“Mom, let’s have a party.”

“How could I possibly do that,” my grandmother said, motioning to her stiff body, kept awake by the sensation that it was being ground into dust.

“Let’s try,” my aunt said.

And she started to sing.

My aunt sang the Mennonite hymns my grandmother had taught her, songs from my grandmother’s childhood in a Mennonite farming community in northeastern Canada, songs that were sung in the fields, at their dinner tables, to greet the dawn, to end their day, on the way to church. My aunt and my grandmother sang all night long, until there was no pain, until my grandmother’s nurse woke up and tiptoed into the room. “I’ve never heard such beautiful music,” she cried.

View at Medium.com

In that moment, in those songs, her grandmother was rising, and they were rising with her.

We thought the problem was how to give Jesus a decent burial, how to roll the stone away. But it turns out that the stone we worried about is already rolled away; Jesus is gone ahead. The empty tomb is God’s message to the Emperor, to the soldiers, to the world, to the followers who have scattered that in the midst of death, still I rise. This is God saying, in the midst of betrayal, whether Judas and his double crossing kiss or Peter in his fearful denial, still I rise. This is God saying to the torturers and the prison guards and the judges and the crucifiers just following orders, still I rise. This is God saying that even when I feel abandoned on a cross and cry out asking why I’m forsaken, still I rise. This is God saying, even from a tomb closed up tight, still I rise.

This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. It starts with fearful followers running away. In the days that followed, every one of them had to decide what to do about the news that he had risen; every one had to decide how to live when the tomb was empty and despite the plain sense of his death, there was this amazing experience where it was clear that he was saying, “Still I rise”.  Every one of them had to decide whether to keep running or to rise with him, to look for him, follow him, to Galilee.

Where is Galilee? It’s where they came from, where they started. Jesus is going back to the beginning and starting over: that’s where they will see him. Their lives are about to start over because these lives are lived beyond the fear of death. The great question about the Christian movement of the first century is what powered it, what allowed it to change history. The answer is the people Jesus changed; the answer is the people who saw him rise and took his resurrection as the pattern for their own lives. Jesus was risen and they said with him, still I rise.

It’s the same with us. We are prepared to go to the grave; we are good at raising the money to buy spices, we can discuss how to move the stone. But are we ready to leave the grave and go to Galilee? Can we take Easter home, can we take it wherever we go? Still I rise, he says: despite what we thought, he calls us, invites us, forgives us, commands us. Come see me: come follow me. 

He’s gone ahead and when we see that, we’re ready to take the next step, to let go of our fears, accept his forgiveness and follow him. Easter isn’t a day, it’s an invitation: come see me. The gospels tell us how he appeared over and over to people, and his message is always the same: love one another, see me, follow me, because still, I rise: even when you don’t believe it, even when you don’t understand it, still I rise. Peter denied him but it’s Peter he calls back to tend his sheep. Mary ran in fear but it’s Mary who first meets him on the way. Thomas won’t believe him but it’s Thomas who feels his wounds. To the powerful who prey on the poor, his presence says: still I rise. To the hopeless who cannot find the way out of darkness, he says, “I am the light of the world”—still I rise. To us, to all of us, who come here, wondering, he says: still I rise. Come follow me. Come: because on your way, on your journey, you will see me: for still I rise. 

Amen

Are You Going to the Party?

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Fourth Sunday in Lent/C • March 30, 2025

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

The Covenant

by

The Covenant

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Second Sunday in Lent/C • March 16, 2025

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

“After these things…” That’s how our reading from Genesis began this morning. It flew by, so I want to lift it up to make sure we don’t miss it. “After these things…” In a sense, all these readings occur “after these things”. Paul’s letter to the Philippians comes after he’s been their pastor and friend; now he’s under arrest in another city, sitting in jail. The gospel reading comes after Jesus has been teaching and healing and most of it occurs after some Pharisees warn him the Herod wants to have him killed; it’s startling when you get a death threat. The story we read in Genesis occurs after a war. Abram’s nephew, Lot, had been captured; Abram successfully led his version of Seal Team 6 to rescue him. It’s also long after Abram has felt God’s call, left his home, spent some time in Egypt and now is prospering as a leader of a tribe of herders. It’s also after Abram has felt God failed him.

“After these things…” describes our gathering as well. We’ve all lived years and years before we got here, and we’ve all had a week of doing whatever we did. Yet here we are gathered again. What did you hope when you came today? What I hope every Sunday when we gather is that we will encounter God here; that God’s Spirit will move in your hearts and mine, so that after these things, we are ready for another week, another month, another time. So today, come with me as we listen to the story of the covenant God made with Abram, the foundation of all God’s promises.

“After these things…” let’s go back and remember some of these things. Genesis starts out in what scholars call mythic time. Myth doesn’t mean it isn’t true; it means that our regular world rules don’t apply. So we have stories of creation, we have stories of how everything began, people live incredibly long lives, there’s a flood that wipes out everything except Noah and his family and God promises never to wipe out the world again. After all these things, God begins to work in history and the person God begins with is Abram. Abram is called, just like we are called, and Abram’s call is to go forth. When he does, God says, he will have unlimited generation and land and God’s presence. 

So Abram does go forth, along with his wife, Sarai, and his family. They start out in Ur, a real city, once located on the Euphrates river, in what is now southern Iraq. They end up in Egypt and later leave. Now they’re in the Kidron valley, near where Jerusalem sits today. He’s fought a battle and won; the king of the area has come offering peace. It’s been years since that original call and Abram has done well, but there is no child, no baby representing God’s fulfillment of the original promise. “After these things” is where we pick up the story.

Personally, I can’t escape the feeling that at the beginning of this section, God is gloating: “Don’t be afraid, Abram, I’m your shield…”, God says. Maybe Abram is still recovering from the shock of battle, the surprise and relief of victory. But he’s sharp enough to ask difficult questions. So he asks God, “What about the promise of a child?” He points out that God promised this and Sarai isn’t getting younger; if there’s no child, someone in his household is going to inherit everything. God’s answer is: “Come outside!—Look at creation, look at the stars!—that’s how many descendants you’ll have!” Psalm 19 says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” [Psalm 19:1f] Abram’s been given a glimpse of the glory of God.

Abram believes God. “The Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”, the text says. It’s such a short, simple sentence. Righteousness means right relationship, having the right heart in the moment, having the right relationship. Abram doesn’t do anything: it’s all free gift, all God’s initiative. There’s no transaction here, no pay for service. Abram doesn’t give God anything; he simply believes God. All of our reformed theology is built on this moment, this example. We believe that our relationship with God depends not on what we do, but on whom we believe. Abram believes God—God calls him righteous. What’s true for Abram is true for us, as well.  God doesn’t 

Abram also questions God about the promise of land and that’s where we learn about the covenant. Covenants are intentional promises. It’s confusing in the text: all this stuff about animals cut in half is foreign to us. When we make contracts, we often go to a lawyer’s office or a conference room, someone sits and hands us a bunch of papers to sign. But when kings in the ancient world were making treaties or promises, the question in the background was always, “Who’s going to enforce it?” So we know that ceremonies similar to this one were held at times. The point is to call down on the person making the covenant a curse if it’s not performed. What we see is that Abram prepares the covenant and guards it, but at the moment, he’s asleep. God freely makes a covenant, sealing the promise given years before. 

This is the beginning of God’s work with people that leads to us. It’s a foundation for everything that comes later. Later, Abram’s descendants will multiply. They will go into slavery in Egypt, but God will hear their cries and save them, send them on an exodus out of there and into the land promised here. Later, Abram’s descendants will demand a king and the king will do what kings do: oppress them and involve them in wars. Later, prophets will come reminding them of this covenant and still later Jesus will come. And when he’s told Herod wants to kill him, he will smile because he knows this covenant; he knows that he’s acting after these things. And he will weep over Jerusalem instead, and its history of violence and refusal to listen to God. Why is he weeping? Because of the failure to fulfill the third part of God’s promise to Abram, the part not mentioned here: to make Abram a means of spreading blessing through the whole world. What did God want? Jesus says, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” [Luke 13:34b]

This covenant is what is renewed in Jesus Christ. Every time we share communion, we remember his words, how he took a cup, gave thanks, and said, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” The covenant includes us and invites us. It is God’s promos of presence and care throughout all times, throughout our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. But a covenant is two-sided: God is one, we are the other. Every day asks whether we are living from this covenant or from the world’s seductive promise that we can be enough in ourselves, that we can earn righteousness and safety. Every day asks which road we will choose, whether to believe God’s care for all or to choose to divide people into categories and see some as less and ourselves as more. 

There is a famous Native American story that depicts this choice. This is the story.

An old Cherokee Indian chief was teaching his grandson about life.

He said, “A fight is going on inside me,” he told the young boy, “a fight between two wolves.

The Dark one is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The Light Wolf is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you grandson…and inside of every other person on the face of this earth.”

The grandson ponders this for a moment and then asked, “Grandfather, which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee smiled and simply said, “The one you feed”.
[https://www.michelleweimer.com/blog/two-wolves]

Every day asks: which wolf are you feeding? Every day asks: are you living in God’s covenant? Every day, every one of us, answers. 

The story of the covenant began, “After these things…” Isn’t that where we all live?—after many, many things. But we also live before things and these ask: what will you choose? Which wolf will you feed? What road will you walk? This season of Lent is meant to remind us of our call and our covenant so that wherever we have been, wherever we go, we may walk the way of Christ, following him, believing God, seeking God’s reign in our lives and our world.

Amen

All Washed Up

by

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.

There Is Love

by

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor © 2024

World Communion Sunday • 20th Sunday After Pentecost • October 6, 2024

Genesis 2:18-24 • Mark 10:2-16

I’d just moved to Boston to go to seminary, and I was excited and nervous. This was long before Starbucks and coffee house culture; we just had diners. So I went in one and asked for a coffee. The man said, “You want dat regulah?” Not wanting to look like I didn’t know what I was doing, I said, “Sure.” He gave me a cup of coffee with cream in it. I always drink my coffee black; so I said, “Oh I didn’t want cream,” and asked him to replace it with a black coffee. He said, “You asked foh regulah.” What I learned is that while black coffee is how it comes regularly in Michigan, in Boston, “regular coffee” is coffee with cream in it. Since then, I’ve had to deal with lots of similar misunderstandings. In Spain once, I thought I ordered olives—“olivdes”—but ended up with snails. England is especially hard because they use the same words for different things. We all know what a biscuit is, right? Except that in England it’s a cookie. Never order biscuits and gravy in England. I mention these differences because this morning in our gospel reading you heard the word ‘divorce’. Some of us are divorced; others have walked with friends or family through divorces. So when you heard that word, you probably thought you knew what it meant. But just like biscuits, just like olivdes, just like regular coffee, we need to be careful and not apply our own ideas to what Jesus is saying. Instead, let’s look at what this means for his time and his way so that we can hear what he’s really saying.

Let’s begin by remembering where we are in Mark’s story of Jesus. At his baptism, he heard a voice from heaven say, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Just before this, he’s taken two disciples up a mountain and again, a heavenly voice has said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Twice already he has told his disciples that he’s going to be handed over to the authorities, killed, and will rise again after three days. They are now on the way to Jerusalem, where this will be fulfilled. Along the way, there are a series of confrontations where he’s asked to debate tricky questions of religious law. That’s what’s happening here. This is a political question: the most famous divorce there was when King Herod divorced his wife to marry his sister-in-law. It was preaching against this that got John the Baptist executed.

When we think of marriage and divorce, we think of two people dating, falling in love, having a ceremony that celebrates their unique commitment to a relationship of intimacy with each other. We know this hope doesn’t always blossom. Sometimes there are choices, sometimes there is abuse, sometimes it becomes clear to one or both that this relationship cannot continue. So we provide for either person to ask for a divorce, and we have a whole legal framework that tries to equitably divide up property and responsibilities for children. But Jewish custom was different in Jesus time. Marriage was less about intimacy than about a contract, called a ketubah. The ketubah specified a bride price and provided a property settlement. After the ketubah was signed, there was often a period of being engaged, up to seven years. Then a formal marriage ceremony would be held. Women could not ask for a divorce; only a man could initiate a divorce by filing what is called a get. Women and children were often abandoned after a divorce. There was no requirement for child support or property division. This is what’s being discussed here.

The Pharisees in the passage set out the law of Moses regarding divorce; it’s what I’ve just described. A man files a get, the divorce is finalized. All is according to the law of Moses. Perhaps Moses realized not all marriages work and provided an out. But that bit of grace has become a law. Jesus goes to the core of the matter. He wants to go behind Moses’ law and back to the original intention of God. He says that Moses wrote this law because of the hardness of hearts of people and reminds them of God’s hope at creation. 

We miss some of the significance of the story of creation in Genesis because of translation issues. What happens there is that God takes some mud from a creek, forms a human shaped doll, just as Jewish children did. These dolls were called adamanh; we translate this as a name, Adam, and use gendered language to make Adam male. But this isn’t a male, isn’t Adam, it’s an adamah.Then God breathes life into the adamah. In both Hebrew and Greek, the word for Spirit and breath is the same. So the adamah becomes a living being by God sharing spirit/breath. 

God says it isn’t good for the adamah to be alone and tries out all kinds of creatures as partners, but it’s only when God takes some of the substance of the adamah and makes another being that the adamah recognizes a true partner. The word is ‘aged’, which means helper but has the sense of equal. Sometimes God is described as our aged, our helper. It’s only when the two are together that they are described as man and woman, actually as husband and wife. The story concludes, “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” This part always make middle school confirmation classes giggle, but it’s really a sign of intimacy.

Sometimes this happens and it’s amazing and wonderful. We also know sometimes it doesn’t. This is true of much of life. God hopes we will live in covenants that express justice and loving kindness, that we will provide for everyone to live out the fulfillment of their gifts as children of God. We know that doesn’t happen as well. When we think of marriages breaking down, we often think of adultery, but it’s just as common for marriages to break down because the couple are not helpers to each other, not partners. So we provide in our common life, legal ways to say, “Look, I need out of this marriage. I need a divorce.” We provide a legal process for this. But what about the spiritual process?

Jesus has an answer for that as well. First, he refuses to endorse the abandonment of the vulnerable, of wives and children. Second, he picks up a child. We’ve seen him lift a child before; here he touches them, often a sign of healing. He says, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” What he seems to be signaling is that when adults have wandered off God’s path, the solution is to go back to being a child. He speaks in other places about being born from above; he invites us to become a new person. This is the key to moving beyond divorce: to reflect and repent, to see that if you have not lived up to God’s intention, you need to change and start again, like a child. The solution isn’t law: the solution is grace.. 

This text has been turned into law in a way that often hurts people. Jesus heals; Jesus hopes. He lifts up God’s hope that we will live in equal, intimate partnerships, in just covenants, and when we don’t, he summons us to repent and become like children. This is a hope meant for all people. Today is the tenth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that finally recognized the right of LBGTQ people to publicly celebrate marriages partnerships. We should be proud the United Church of Christ has been and continues to be a leader in accepting and affirming this hope for all people. 

I come to this text as a person who has been divorced and remarried. I know what it means to take a hard look at yourself, to realize you need to change. There is a song that says, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.” Sometimes what we should sing is, “It’s me, it’s me, it’s me O Lord, standing in the need of change, standing in the need of forgiveness, standing in the need of grace.

Jesus preaches this; Jesus is the embodiment of God’s love among us. And God’s hope is that just as we received the spirit at our creation, we will share it. We will heal and hope and in those partnerships, in our communities, there will be love.

In a few moments, we’re going to share together communion, the great memorial of grace. When we say, “This is his body, broken for you,” it reminds us that we are also broken. When we say, “This cup is the new covenant in his blood,” it reminds us that Jesus offers not law, but love. Peter, Paul and Mary sing a song about marriage and love. One of the verses says,

Oh the marriage of you here has caused him to remain
For whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name
There is love. there is love.

Amen.