Tag Archives: parable

Are You Going to the Party?

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor ©2025

Fourth Sunday in Lent/C • March 30, 2025

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

Ohh! Woo! Wow!

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

by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor @ 2024

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

Mark 4:26-34

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woooo…wow. 

Amen.

What Are You Wearing?

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany NY

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

19th Sunday After Pentecost * October 11, 2020

Philippians 4:1–9 • Matthew 22:1–14

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

Wrong Shirt, Wrong Time

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

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

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

Are You Ready for the King?

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

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

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

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

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

The Urgent Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living from the Mind of Christ Now

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

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

Philippians 4:1–3

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

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

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

Now he offers a standard:

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

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

What Are You Wearing?

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

Amen.

Serious Laughter and the Evil Eye

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A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor

Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost/A • September 20, 2020

Matthew 20:1-17

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

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

It’s all so…heartbreaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Hidden Treasure

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Hidden Treasure

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

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

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

Matthew 22:1-14

Click below to hear the sermon preached

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen

18th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Tarnished Treasure

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Tarnished Treasure

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

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

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

Matthew 21:34-46

To Hear the sermon preached, click below

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

16th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Living Wage

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Living Wage

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

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

September 24, 2017 • 16th Sunday After Pentecost-A

Matthew 20:1-16

September always reminds me of the time three years ago when our family first arrived in Albany and I became your pastor. We were, all of us, out of breath. Like a sprinter completing a race, we came here from a rushed, hard-working summer of moving. We lived in a larger house in Michigan with lots of storage. So we accumulated things. Now we knew that meant getting rid of things. So day by day, we cleaned and packed up. As the time shortened, we became more and more frantic. We hired a man to help us and he filled his pickup truck over and over with stuff for the dump. We took so many loads to the Salvation Army that they asked us to stop coming, stop donating. Always looming was that day in August when the movers would arrive to load everything and bring it here.

I thought about that experience this week as I read the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Harvest is a frantic time. Grape picking is handwork and there’s far too much for this vineyard owner and his family. So the next morning, early, he gets up, hurries out of the house to where the day laborers gather. Every city then, every city now, has such a place. He looks around, he hires enough to get the job done, offering to pay them the daily rate, one denarius. I imagine some of the men smiling: a denarius is a living wage. No one gets rich on it but it’s enough to get you through to tomorrow and maybe the day after and who knows what will happen then? These men live day to day. So they hurry off to the field and begin picking grapes. But the owner can see it’s not going fast enough so he goes back, and hires more, telling them he will pay them what is right. In other words, he’ll be fair.

Even as the day begins to cool, as the workday begins to close, he is still hiring more workers, desperately trying to get the harvest in. By now, he recognizes some of those he passed over earlier. “Why are you waiting,” he asks, and of course they reply with the obvious: they haven’t been hired. Imagine the desperation of those men. All day long, they’ve watched as others left to work on farms; all day long they’ve been hungry; with no job, they have nothing to buy lunch. All day long, each time someone came to hire, they hoped to be chosen but they haven’t been. They face going home to tell their families there won’t be a wage today, perhaps there won’t be supper, or bread tomorrow. So to those left at the end of the day, his hiring must have been especially happy. They know they won’t make much; after all, the sun is already setting! Still, something is better than nothing and I think they must have been glad to go, glad to make even a few pennies, to make something for the day.

Finally, the sun is down; the workday ends. The hired men drift in to the area around the sheds, ready to be paid, already tasting the dinner they’ll buy. They’re hot and tired; so is the owner. So far, this whole story is so commonplace it’s boring. It happens hundreds of times. The people hearing Jesus know it, they live it, they must have wondered, “What’s the point?” Perhaps some of them are day laborers; all of them know how hard harvest is, how frantic, how everyone works and works to get it done. So perhaps they are beginning to drift off, their attention wandering. He’s telling them what they know and then suddenly he isn’t.

The owner breaks the workers into groups, starting with those hired last. Everyone knows they will receive less than a day’s wage; after all, they only worked a couple of hours. Fair is fair. So imagine how stunned they are when they are given a full day’s wage. Imagine the surprised looks, too tired to even celebrate. Group after group are paid, all the same: a full day’s wage, regardless of how long they worked. At first, the early hires, seeing what’s going on must have thought: oh, great, we’ll get a bonus but they don’t—they get the same as everyone else: a day’s wage. So, of course, they begin to grumble. It isn’t fair, is it?

Wouldn’t you grumble? And then Jesus drops the conclusion on them. The owner says that it’s none of their business if he decides to pay everyone the same; they agreed to work for a day’s wage, they got their wage, the contract is fulfilled, the debt paid. I imagine these workers leaving, also, but with a different attitude, still grumbling, still saying, “Not fair”. Wouldn’t you?

Jesus is asking us to imagine acting out something he apparently said many times: the last will be first, the first last; the Kingdom’s arrival means a reversal. Well, we’re all in favor of that but we seldom ask what it really means. Now he’s imagining it: what if the last really are first; what if you—all of you, all of us—who are first get paid last and no more than everyone else? Ouch!

A key issue of this story is the notion of a living wage. The standard daily wage for a worker in Jesus’ time is a denarius. it’s enough to buy food for the day or two; in that sense, it’s a living wage. So if you fall below that, if you don’t make the days’ wage, you don’t have enough to eat, enough to get through the next day. Today, a swelling movement including the United Church of Christ is building support for raising the minimum wage so that it will be a true living wage. I imagine in many pulpits today, that’s what’s being preached and it’s a good and worthy cause.

But I don’t think it’s the point of this parable. Every parable invites us to experience something and this one invites us to experience the workers. It asks us to imagine their hope of being hired, their hope of being paid and their sense of fairness, of justice. “I’ll pay you what is right,” the owner says when he hires them and this seems to be an agreed daily wage, a living wage. When the owner pays those hired last the same as the others, the parable compares their grumbling with the owner’s generosity.

Where does that generosity originate? Perhaps it is in the compassion that comes from noticing the condition of the workers themselves. This is, after all, how some great movements have begun. The movement to abolish slavery began in this country in 1789 among the Society of Friends and soon spread to others. One of those was a free African American who had gone to Sunday School at the Second Congregational Church in Norwich, CT. David Ruggles moved to New York City where he helped lead abolitionist efforts. Others were also working to end slavery. Still, the movement grew slowly until the 1850’s when Harriet Beecher Stowe, another Congregationalist, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It’s a sentimental novel but it reached beyond the intellectual arguments of the abolitionists and made people feel the horror of slavery. President Lincoln, himself, is said to have believed the book was a major reason for the passions that ignited into the Civil War, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery.

Well, abolitionism is a big issue and we are mostly day to day people. Does this have anything to do with us? Erik Reitan in an article responding to an evangelical Christian condemnation of LBGTQ people said, “The first act of Christian love is compassionate, empathetic attention.” What Stowe did was to focus compassionate attention on slavery. What happens if we bring compassionate attention into our own lives and focus on someone we need to forgive? I’m often asked, “Ok, I know I should forgive, but how do I do it?” Last week I talked about taking the first step, which is to embrace our own forgiveness. The second step in forgiveness is compassionate attention to another.

In 1993, Mary Johnson’s son was murdered by another young man, Oshea Israel.

Israel was arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned for the crime. I’m sure Johnson didn’t think it was enough; I can only imagine the restless anger she must have felt. She talks about seeing Israel in court and wanting to hurt him. She continued to be obsessed with him and made repeated requests to meet him when he was in prison. Finally, he agreed. It had been 16 years since the murder. Israel, a 16-year-old boy when he committed the crime, had grown into a man in his early 30’s.
“I wanted to know if you were in the same mindset of what I remembered from court, where I wanted to go over and hurt you,” Johnson tells Israel. “But you were not that 16-year-old. You were a grown man. I shared with you about my son.”
“And he became human to me,” Israel says.
At the end of their meeting at the prison, Johnson was overcome by emotion.
“The initial thing to do was just try and hold you up as best I can,” Israel says, “just hug you like I would my own mother.”
Johnson says, “After you left the room, I began to say, ‘I just hugged the man that murdered my son.’
“And I instantly knew that all that anger and the animosity, all the stuff I had in my heart for 12 years for you — I knew it was over, that I had totally forgiven you.”

Johnson set down the burden of anger. She forgave this man who had so terribly injured her. She went on to help other mothers of murdered children as well.

Now what Johnson did isn’t fair, is it? I know some are thinking, “I could never do that”; I know it because it’s what I thought when I first read it. Yet that’s the destination Jesus is leading us toward: a place where, as he says, burdens are light because he takes them up; where forgiveness is the rule.
This is what the Kingdom of Heaven is like: it’s not fair because we could never survive fair.

No, the Kingdom is where the principle isn’t fair, the principle isn’t what we earn, the principle isn’t what we deserve: it’s what we need. This is how God works: giving what we need, hoping we will accept it, use it, share it. That is indeed a living wage, it is what we need to live in the light of the love of God, it is meant to be shared.

Amen.

15th Sunday After Pentecost/A – The Forgiveness Dance

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The Forgiveness Dance

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2017

15th Sunday After Pentecost/A • September 17, 2017

Matthew 18:21-35

Click below to hear the sermon preached

“I’ve told you a million times…” Have you ever said this? It’s what gets said about those little things someone does out of habit that annoy us until it boils over. “I’ve told you a million times…” I’ll let you fill in the detail.

Once I was talking to a couple planning their wedding. They’d both been married before and we talked about those relationships and what had made them end. She was quiet at first, reticent, but as she talked about her marriage, she said, “It was little things. His socks: he never picked up his socks. It sounds silly but it became a big issue.” We were talking about their wedding vows, at least I thought we were, and as we moved back to that topic she brought up the socks again. So it was that on their wedding day, as part of the ceremony, her groom stood before a whole congregation and said solemnly along with promises to love and cherish her that he would always pick up his socks.

“I’ve told you a million times..” Of course, no one says something a million times. We exaggerate and this scripture begins with Jesus doing the same thing.

Forgiveness: How Much?

Last week we began to talk about forgiveness as the path to Jesus. Now Matthew imagines Peter stewing about this and trying to get a fix on just how much forgiveness is required. That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s not forgiving the one big hurt that hangs us up; it’s the million times bump, the thing that happens over and over again. “Do I have to forgive as many as seven times?” he asks. Jesus replies with something hard to translate; sometimes it comes across as 77 times, sometimes 70 times seven. The meaning, though, is clear: there is no limit to this forgiveness.

Does that make any sense? At some point, don’t you have to just say, “Look, this person is never going to do the right thing,”? I imagine Peter and the others looking with that disbelieving, “I can’t believe you said that” look people get about Jesus. So he tells them a story, a parable, about forgiveness.

The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant

Imagine a rich, Gentile King. Maybe it’s the Persian King; maybe it’s the Roman emperor. We know it’s not a Jewish king because the things that happen in the story are not according to Jewish law. Imagine the Emperor, the King, having one of his key administrators arrested, brought before him, because the taxes he was supposed to pay aren’t paid.

We don’t know what happened. Did he embezzle them, was it a bad year, is it simple theft? No details. We just know he is brought before the King. This isn’t the oval office; this would be a palace full of people, guards in armor with sharp swords. Surely this man, this servant knows some these people, was friends with some of them. Now they look away, now no one reaches out to help when he stumbles as the guards roughly bring him in.

A richly dressed guy stands by the king with a document recording the debt: 10,000 talents. Do you know what 10,000 talents is? It’s all the money in the world. Literally: a talent is the largest unit of money Jesus and his world knows. Ten thousand is the largest number they use. So it’s the largest number of the largest amount of money. It’s huge.

No one could ever pay it off; no one could ever work it off. You could work your whole life and not make a dent in it. So the King orders a punishment that takes his whole life: selling his wife and children, something so awful, so terrible, Jewish law forbade it. But Gentiles did it, Kings did it. Now the debtor stands there quaking, fearing, losing everything. What would you do?

What he does is the only thing he can do. Flinging himself on the floor the way they do in Eastern courts, he begs for mercy. He makes a promise everyone knows is ridiculous that he will eventually pay it off. There must have been a moment of silence. Think of the embarrassment of his former friends; think of the tension in the room, the fear of the debtor. As he lies there, something comes into the King, some impulse. He pities the man; he knows he’ll never get his money. Suddenly he does something no one would have expected. He tells the man to get up, to get out and he forgives the debt.

Wow. Can you imagine that moment? Can you imagine that man, lying there on the floor, on the cold stone floor, afraid for his life, afraid for his family, barely able to believe what he’s just heard. “Get up and get out, I forgive you and your debt.” It’s more than he asked. The best he hoped was to stay out of jail; instead, he’s just been given a whole new life, like someone born again. “The Lord released him and forgave the debt.”

Imagine having your biggest problem something you’ve worried about, something that kept you up nights, suddenly solved. Imagine having all your debts paid off; imagine having whatever scares you solved. Imagine being given a whole new life. Don’t you think that’s what this guy must have felt? How incredible would that feel? How new? How different?

So there is this stunned, amazing moment and then he must have gotten up. The King and his advisors are already going on to the next thing. Before the King can change his mind, I imagine the man walking out, still afraid of the guards that only a moment before had been a threat, now ignoring him. Perhaps slowly at first, not wanting to attract attention, he begins to back up, to move out of the crowd, and then faster. Smiling now, feeling the joy of it, the release of it. Everything paid off; everything taken care of, solved. He moves back through the crowd, mind whirling and then settling down, wanting to tell his wife, his family everything is ok, everything will be ok. He moves out of the crowd, down the corridor, outside into the market. What would you do? Where would you go? How would you feel?

Leaving the Moment

There he is, coming down the steps, there he is, jostling in the crowd, and just as he walks through the last people in the palace crowd, he bumps into someone he knows, someone who owes him a little money: a hundred denarii, that is to say about three months salary. It’s nothing, compared to what he’s just been forgiven. It’s pocket change.

Yet in that moment, all the new life, all the possibility of his forgiveness seems to fall away. He grabs the guy by the throat, calls for a guard, demands immediate payment.
Now this man makes exactly the same plea the first man had made to the king, word for word the same plea. Did you get that when I read it?

Just like the first man before the king, he’s caught short of funds; just like that man, he’s about to go to jail. Just like the first man before the king, he begs for time to pay. That first man has just been forgiven all the money in the world and now he’s being asked to forgive a trifling amount but he hasn’t learned anything. Instead of passing on the forgiveness, he refuses and has him thrown into prison. Stunning, isn’t it? He was forgiven everything; he forgives nothing.

What happens next is a cascading disaster. People from the court see this performance and tell the King. The King is offended, angered, and he has the first man arrested, brought back. The new life is over before it began. He’s sent off to be imprisoned, tortured, the point is clear: “I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ [Matt 18:32] I imagine the disciples leaning in, listening, trying to follow this story, trying to follow Jesus, just as we are doing and suddenly he looks up at them, his eyes searching, and says quietly, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Wow: ouch! How did we get from more forgiveness than Peter could imagine to such a disaster?

What is Jesus teaching?

To see what Jesus teaches, we have to let go of trying to reduce it to a set of lessons and let ourselves experience what he asks us to imagine. If we take seriously the experience of this parable, what we find is that the unmerciful servant was confronted by the possibility of new life. That’s what it really means to take our own forgiveness seriously. It’s what Peter missed when he asked his question. Peter was still focused on how much forgiveness he has to dole out: seven times? Seventy-seven times?

Jesus wants him to realize the issue isn’t how much forgiveness he does, it’s how much he has received. Forgiveness isn’t first about what we do: it’s first about what we receive. It’s suddenly understanding that despite all our flaws and failures, the one Jesus calls our father in heaven has forgiven us and still loves us. It’s realizing we are, each one of us, just like that debtor before the King: failed at times, yet loved beyond failure.

Feeling Our Forgiveness

That’s the experience he wants them to have. And to see also: that our forgiveness invites us to be transformed. Until we know ourselves forgiven, we will never be able to fully forgive, we will always be grabbing someone else, demanding payment.

The final note about torture isn’t a moral, it’s a fact. If we don’t learn to accept our forgiveness, we don’t learn to forgive others. The burdens that pile up from that torture us, imprison us, like the old cartoon of the prisoner with the ball and chain.

Jesus means us to experience this embrace, this forgiveness and then live it out day to day. For the way of Jesus isn’t a doctrine, it isn’t a set of directions you follow, it’s love itself.

The Kiss of Christ

Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov contains a long section imagining a Grand Inquisitor questioning Christ, like a Communist or Fascist or CIA interrogation. At the end of all the questions, at the end of all the darkness and threats and fear, Christ replies. And the reply is simple, wordless: Christ kisses the Inquisitor.

Lord Have Mercy On Me

There is a spiritual discipline that can help move us toward this. It’s very simple, a short prayer: “Lord have mercy on me.” That’s it, the whole prayer. It’s meant to be prayed over and over; some teachers suggest synchronizing it with your breath or your heartbeat. “Lord have mercy on me.” Over and over. You can pray this in the car, at a stoplight; you can sit quietly and say it over and over. What this prayer does is to focus us on our own forgiveness. It opens the door of the soul and lets things out.

We need this because so many of us owe so much, are burdened by so much. What are you carrying around that needs forgiving? What would you like to lay down, what would you give to get rid of the bonds of that burden?

Forgiveness isn’t about what we do for someone else; it’s what we experience through Christ from God. And if we live in that experience, we will stop asking how often to forgive others because we can’t focus on limiting forgiveness if we are living in the fullness of it.

That’s the tragedy of this unmerciful servant. He has the greatest prize of all given to him and he lets it slip through his fingers in the moment when those fingers grasp his own debtor. Just as Jesus says: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive others.” We say that every week, perhaps you say it at other times. Forgiveness is a dance, a rhythm of receiving and giving. We can’t do one without the other; the dance is both or neither.

Lord have mercy on me: this week, may you feel the embrace, the kiss of Christ in your life. May the forgiveness and new life he offers overflow like a wine glass poured too full until you have no choice but to share it.

Amen.

14th Sunday After Pentecost/A – Come See Jesus

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Come See Jesus

A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY

by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2017

14th Sunday After Pentecost/A • September 10, 2017

Matthew 18:15-20

Hear the sermon preached by clicking below

One of the big issues in my life is that I lose stuff. Do you find this? Keys, cellphone, little things: I misplace them. Last week on my boat I lost my phone. The boat is a small area. I knew the phone was there somewhere. Half an hour later, I resorted to begging a dock worker to call me so I could find it. I lose things all the time. Now if you lose things too, you can feel the problem of the people to whom Matthew is speaking in today’s scripture reading. He’s writing to a group of Jewish Christians about fifty years or so after Jesus left his earthly ministry and here’s their problem: they’ve lost Jesus.

Where Is Jesus?

How do you find Jesus? Where is he? How can we get him back? How can they find the assurance that he is present? How can they talk to him, walk with him, hear him. Where do you go to find Jesus? What are the directions that will allow us to come see Jesus?

The classic way to deal with this is simple: you make a statue of Jesus and hang him on the wall. All great Roman Catholic cathedrals have these; European art museums are full of pictures of Jesus, hanging there, easy to find. Of course, the problem is you have to go there to find him; that’s not much help if you want him with you, walking with you, where you are.

Another solution is just to make up a picture of Jesus. That’s what prosperity gospel preachers like Joel Osteen do. They give people a picture of someone with all the problems solved and tell them well that’s Jesus, be like him. They live like rich people which in our culture looks like living successfully. Their problem, of course, is that it isn’t Jesus they are portraying, it’s just living like a rich guy.

But how do you find the real Jesus? This scripture lesson is all about finding Jesus, it’s a sign that says, “Come see Jesus.” Listening to it is like reading a map, like someone saying, “Come see Jesus, he’s over here.”

“…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matt 18:20).

I know you’ve heard this saying of Jesus before; it’s frequently quoted, especially by Congregationalists. I wonder if we’ve really taken it seriously enough. Every time you and a friend get together and treat each other like Jesus treats people, every time you have compassion on a stranger the way Jesus has compassion on strangers, every time you treat someone like a child of God, the way Jesus treats everyone as a child of God—there he is. Every time we gather here in his name to worship, here he is. Every time one of our Boards or committees gets together and thinks about how to help people in his name, there he is. “…where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there…,” he says. Every time I visit with one of you in the hospital and we pray, there he is. All it takes is two or three of us, gathering in his name, for him to appear.

So where do you go to find Jesus? The answer is specific: you go to others. And one sure place is to the gathered congregation of his followers. One of the jobs of pastors is to listen to excuses for not going to church. I learned early not to tell people on airplanes I’m a pastor, for example, because they would tell me why they didn’t go to church last Sunday. High on the list of excuses is, “I find God in nature.” Sometimes nature means the golf course, sometimes another place. And, of course, we’ve all felt the stirring of inspiration seeing God’s creation. Sometimes that may work; often that is inspiring. But it’s a chancy thing. If you want to be sure Jesus will come along, if you want to be sure about finding Jesus, you need a congregation, you need two or three or more other followers.

The second thing it’s important to notice here is the number required. Jewish scribes had settled on ten men as the minimum number to get God to be present. The book of Genesis records a wonderful conversation between Abraham and the Lord. The Lord is angry at Sodom and decides to wipe them out. Abraham asks whether the Lord will wipe out the righteous with the sinners. Abraham asks if 50 righteous people would be enough; God agrees 50 would be plenty. Abraham goes for 40; God says ok, 40 is enough. Finally, Abraham gets the Lord down to ten: ten righteous men will be enough to stop the destruction. From this, Rabbis deduced the requirement that ten righteous men are needed.

Now Jesus reduces this. Notice that he doesn’t specify gender: it’s not just men, it’s any followers of Jesus, and it only takes two or three. This is the foundation for our church order. Where some believe that it requires a whole structure of bishops and officers to constitute a church, Congregationalists believe it only takes a congregation, meeting in covenant for worship. How big a congregation?—two or three.

So if you want to see Jesus, come to the congregation; where faithful followers gather, he promises presence. The verse before this makes it clear: “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” The reason is that what we are doing is what Jesus is doing: we are literally the body of Christ in the world because he is present here with us, in us. Christ is present here and this is our destination: to go where he is, to be with him, to walk with him.

But it’s not enough to have a destination, you also need directions on how to get there. Navigation can be tricky. When I’m sailing, I write down the buoys I’ll pass, the courses to take. I still make mistakes. Last week, I was coming back from a little cove and I suddenly realized I’d misread one of the buoys that marked a big shoal and I was about to run aground; I had to change direction fast to be safe.

What are the directions to Jesus?

The directions are in the part just before his statement about presence. One of the issues the early church faced is what to do about people who hurt each other in the church. So here it is, laid out in detail: first you tell them they hurt you—-you say ouch!-—and if they repent, you forgive them. If that doesn’t work, you get some other folks to mediate between you, and when they repent, you forgive them. And if that doesn’t work, you get the whole congregation involved and if they repent, you forgive them. Finally, if even that doesn’t work, you treat them like outsiders; in other words, following Jesus, you give them special love and care.

Now if you listened closely to these directions, you heard the same word over and over: “you forgive them.” The directions to Jesus are to forgive; the directions from Jesus are to forgive. The first step on the way to Jesus is forgiving others and accepting forgiveness ourselves.

Nelson Mandela was a young lawyer leading a revolution in South Africa when he was arrested in 1962. Beaten, imprisoned, he might easily have become hardened and bitter. Instead, he let the love of God bloom in his heart. He learned to forgive. In 1990, after 27 years, he was finally freed. Desmond Tutu, a bishop in South Africa said this.

Before Nelson Mandela was arrested in 1962, he was an angry, relatively young man. He founded the ANC’s military wing. When he was released, he surprised everyone because he was talking about reconciliation and forgiveness and not about revenge.

Mandela became the first President of a new South Africa. Many had predicted a racial civil war. Thanks to his efforts and example of forgiveness, his nation sought instead reconciliation and became a model for this.

It’s no accident that this section on forgiveness is connected to encountering Jesus: forgiveness is the path to gathering in his name, to his presence.

For the next few Sundays, we’re going to think about this theme, see what Jesus says, imagine what it means to live out forgiveness in our daily lives. Perhaps in your life, there is someone you need to forgive; perhaps you need to seek someone’s forgiveness. Perhaps you need to feel God’s forgiveness.

The farther we walk on the path to forgiveness, in our prayer life, in our daily life, the closer we come to Jesus. “Come see Jesus”, is the gospel invitation: come see him here, come see him in the light of the forgiving love he shares and that we share in his name.

Amen.

Face Forward

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Click Below to Listen to the Sermon Being Preached

Face Forward
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY
by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor
18th Sunday After Pentecost/C • September 18, 2016

What’s your favorite recipe? Most of us have one: a set of steps we go through to make something we like. We have recipes for the way we live, too, patterns that tell us how to do things from weddings to funerals. We live, in fact, with a great store of patterns that whisper with the voices of the past. How do planning sessions usually start?—“What did we do last year.” These voices are like ghosts, telling us how to do things, what we should do. But the ghosts can blind us to new possibilities. Henrik Ibsen’s play, Ghosts, traces the downfall of an entire family because they are controlled by their past. Which way are you looking: are you seeing only where you’ve been or looking forward to new possibilities?

Living With Change

Jesus lived in the midst of great economic changes. For centuries the villages of Galilee had functioned with a few very poor and even fewer very rich people. The hillsides were terraced and full of small farms and olive groves. The villages themselves were home to craftspeople like Jesus’ father, a maker of wooden tools. History focuses on the blood and fire of battles and kings; in the Galilee, life went on, day to day, year to year, in the same way for hundreds of years. People were born, lived, died. New settlers moved in, others left. Not much changed.

But after a long period of civil wars and wars of conquest, the Roman Emperor Augustus had created a settled system of rule. Rich Romans and others, benefitting from trade and Imperial preferment, began to buy up the small farms and turn them into larger businesses. Of course, these people didn’t want to live out in the rural areas; having pushed small farmers off the land, they hired managers, stewards, who had the authority to act on their behalf, while the owners themselves lived in luxury in cities. Often the former farm owners worked for the new landowner but now as a kind of sharecropper, owing a portion of the produce to the new owner. These loans were written with owed amount including interest payments, often large ones; after all the sharecropper had no choice but to accept the terms.

The Situation of the Steward

I’ve taken this detour into economics, hoping you’ve stayed with me, so you will understand the situation behind the parable we read. Imagine the man called the steward in the story. Perhaps he grew up on one of the little family farms that no long exist. Perhaps his family had lived there for generations, passing the land down. But the chain has broken; things have changed. Imagine how happy he must have been when he got the job as the steward for the big landowner. No more trying to scratch out a living; no more worry about the bills. His position would make him a big man in a small town.

So he makes deals, loans; after all, that’s his job. Some of these are large. The amounts in the story are tremendous: the oil amounts to 900 gallons of olive oil. The steward himself works on a commission; the more he squeezes the farmers, the more he makes. So while he may have been a leading citizen, I imagine he was someone people more feared than liked. When he walked into the local tavern, conversations quieted, people looked away, perhaps someone behind on his loan left.

When someone got hurt by his pursuit of profit, I imagine him saying, “It’s not personal, it’s just business.” Perhaps he crosses some lines; perhaps he makes a few shady deals, perhaps his accounting is off or perhaps he just openly steals. There are complaints, maybe there is an investigation. We don’t know how things came to a head, but there is a crisis. He’s about to be fired.

Now imagine the night after this message. He’s about to go from a big man in a small town to unemployed. This crisis isn’t just business: now it’s him and it’s personal. He considers the alternatives, rejecting them one by one: ‘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.” [Luke 16:3] Shame, strength, these things limit his alternatives. But he has one thing going for him: he’s a smart, crafty guy. That’s what got him into trouble in the first place; now he uses it to find a way forward. He uses it to change things.

Making a Change: Facing Forward

The change he makes is to put relationships first. His only hope is to create a situation where he will, as he says, be welcomed into the homes of people in the town. So one by one he calls them in. One by one, he cancels the interest on their loans.

Can you imagine their reaction? Suppose your mortgage company called and said, “We’ve reviewed your account and decided to give you the title, free and clear.” Suppose your credit card company said, “We’ve decided to cancel your remaining balance. Thanks for being a customer.” Imagine it: can you? It’s hard isn’t it, because these things don’t happen. It’s hard to imagine the joy of those people in the story. It’s hard to believe that joy. Change is like that. We are so used to living from where we’ve been, we forget to face forward.

Jesus tells this story about an amazing change, and it takes your breath away. What happens here is wrong, what happens here is illegal. This steward has no business using his client’s business to improve his relationships, to set himself up for the future.

Reacting to the Parable

This story is so wrong that even before Luke wrote it into his gospel, preachers were trying to figure out why Jesus told it. The parable itself is just the first seven or so verses of the reading; the other lines are a series of interpretations. One commentator said, “You can almost see the sermon notes here.” We can even hear an echo of the disciples at verse eight, where it says, “The master commended the dishonest manager..” The word that’s used there for ‘master’ is usually translated, ‘Lord’; it’s the same term used for Jesus. Imagine Jesus telling his disciples this story, see them waiting for him to condemn such dishonest, money grubbing, cheating stewards and then see the surprise on their faces when Jesus ends the story with the dishonest steward coming out great at the end after cheating his employer, just as he had cheated others. What can the Lord have in mind?

What Is Jesus Saying?

Perhaps it is meant to show the disciples how to face forward. The crisis of discipleship cannot be met with old recipes and his disciples must face a new world where they find new ways. We see this all over the preaching of Jesus. “Forgive,” he says, and what is forgiveness but the decision to cut the chains of past hurts and face forward into a future without the dead weight of old anger, old resentment, old fear? In his ultimate moment, at the last supper, he will remind them of Jeremiah’s vision of a new covenant, not like the old covenant. His whole life, his death, his resurrection are meant to show God breaking into our lives in a new way.

An Example of Facing Forward

The movie Scully is a simple story of a 208-second long flight that began as an ordinary trip from LaGuardia airport to Charlottesville, VA. I’m sure the passengers were full of everyday thoughts as they waited to board, found their seats, stowed their luggage. I can almost say the speeches of the flight attendants as the flight got underway. “Please make sure your seatbelt are securely fastened…The cabin door is now closed, cellphones must be turned off or placed in airport mode for the duration of the flight…” The aircraft backs away from the terminal, taxis into position, the pilots are given clearance and there is that exhilarating moment when they are rushing down the runway, jumping into the air in a moment that still seems magical.

The flight departed at 3:25 PM. Three minutes into the flight, when the airplane was still under 10,000 feet, the magic ended. Hit by a flock of birds, both engines died. The airplane was powerless; decisions had to be made. The recipe said to return to the airport and land the plane.

At first, Captain Sulzberger, the pilot announced he was taking this option but within seconds he realized it wouldn’t work. Moments later he committed to landing the aircraft on the Hudson River off Manhattan. Water landings are extremely difficult but Sulzberger believed that although this wasn’t the right answer, it was the right course of action.

At 3:30, less than five minutes after departing, he successfully landed in the Hudson; flight attendants evacuated the passengers onto the wings, some going into the river. All were rescued, along with the flight crew, by police and ferry boats. Sulzberger saved 155 lives that day by facing the future in seconds. The movie focuses on the FAA investigation and attempts to show the old recipes would have worked: it ends with the understanding that it was Sulzberger’s capacity to face forward in seconds that saved those people’s lives.

Facing Forward With Jesus

“On the way…” is the most frequent comment about Jesus. He always faced forward and it’s significant that this shocking story of change beyond normal boundaries is addressed explicitly to his disciples.

Every day brings occasions that ask whether we will follow the recipes we’ve been given or face forward and find new answers. I wonder: what blessings would you plant facing forward? I wonder: Jesus mentioned even a small seed, a tiny one, like a mustard seed, might just grow into a huge, unexpected tree, might have an effect we never imagined.

Amen.