Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Sermon for Advent IV, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Isaiah 7:10-16 , Matthew 1:18-25 The Old Testament and gospel readings this morning touch on a chapter of the book we’ve been discussing in the Sunday morning study group, that is, “The Bible Says So” by Dan McClellan. There’s a connection between the passages in Isaiah and Matthew that involves Mary and can dramatically change how we perceive her, but that’s not the focus this morning. Mary figures in another way in both passages. Matthew’s Gospel was written by a Jewish author for other Jews to show them that Jesus was the Messiah that they had been waiting for, and the gospel reading is among the first of many examples we come across. This may seem like an academic exercise, but it is important to understand the foundation that our faith, our beliefs, and the words that we pray every Sunday are built on. We start with the story of Ahaz, the king of Judah, and a historical event mentioned i...

Sermon for Advent I, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Isaiah 2:1-5 , Matthew 24:36-44 On September 23rd, or the 24th of this year, the Rapture was predicted to happen, according to a South African  preacher. We’re all still here, so it didn’t happen. But this event has ties to this morning’s gospel reading because of the imagery of two people working side-by-side and one of them being taken. This raises a question: why are we reading an apocalyptic passage on the first Sunday in Advent, the first day of a new Church year? It really doesn’t fit the season of anticipation and joy at the birth of Jesus, any more than Halloween skeletons fit with decorating for  Christmas. That's not to say that the reading is relevant. It is relevant because it call on us to prepare. But what are  we preparing for, and how?   The Rapture was the creation of the fervent mind of John Nelson Darby in the 1830s as part of his development of  Dispe...

Sermon for Pentecost XXII, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 20:27-38 We are all familiar with the very first verse of the Bible, you know, the one that says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep…” It’s been in every Bible we’ve ever opened, but  there’s one small problem with that wording and our belief based on it, because that is not exactly what the original Hebrew says. The very first Hebrew word in Genesis is “Bere’sheet,” which indicates an ongoing action. Translating the Hebrew closely, the first sentence of Genesis would read in English, “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep…” This creates a problem for us because it changes a possible understanding of the story of Creation. Where we might read “In the beginning…” to say God created the Earth out of no...

Sermon for Pentecost XIX, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 18:1-8 Three weeks ago, we took a road trip vacation to Memphis and then on to New Orleans. Weeks before we left, my son wanted very much to see the Bass Pro Shop pyramid building near the Mississippi river in Memphis. He had mentioned it so much that on our first morning, my wife said “Let’s go there first and get it over with.” We weren’t so much interested in seeing this oddity as we were in stopping his reminders that he wanted to see it. Once we were there, it turned out to be impressive - it was a huge outdoor sporting goods store under a 7 story tall pyramidal roof with hotel room balconies overlooking the sales floor. There was even a restaurant and observation deck at the top. He also asked us to drive over the Mississippi River and step out of the car so that he could say that he had been in Arkansas. And, we did that on our way to New Orleans. We all wanted to “set foot” i...

Sermon for Pentecost XIII, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 14:25-33 In my first semester in college, a couple of my dormmates were recruited by the Maranatha Campus Ministries , a new religious movement that was just shy of a cult. One guy, Brad, came to school with the impression that being on his own was about partying all night and sleeping in, which meant he was on his way to failing out a couple of months into the semester. Around the beginning of October, he started hanging out with the Maranathas, and soon after that he was preaching fire-and-brimstone street-corner diatribes at their meetings. He was spending more and more time with them, and his grades didn’t improve. His parents found out what was going on and came in mid November to pack him up and bring him home.  Again in this morning’s gospel reading, we hear strong words from Jesus, first saying that to be his disciple we have to hate our family, and then that we have to take...

Sermon for Pentecost X, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 12:49-56 This morning’s Gospel reading doesn’t sound like Jesus as he appears in other passages we’ve read, and this isn’t the first time we have run across this change in tone. This is the challenge of reading all four Gospels all the way through, where we are confronted with Jesus not being as consistent as we want him to be. He is human like us, yet divine like God, and it is this mystery of being both that we wrestle with as we encounter the human and the divine. It can be disorienting where we want the predictable consistency of the Jesus we want to see. The reading starts with Jesus saying he is bringing fire and division, and compared to the gentle love expressed in the Beatitudes, that makes it even more challenging. My first thought on hearing of fire and division is to think of our present political and cultural times, but I’m not going to go into that. That fire and division...

Sermon for Pentecost IX, 2025, delivered at St. Alban The Martyr Episcopal Church, Morehead, KY Text: Luke 12:32-40 In 2008, I finished a slightly masochistic pursuit of a Masters degree in Biochemistry while working full time, raising two children, and volunteering for the Red Cross. Then, 9 years ago, as we were clearing out our house in preparation for moving across town, I came across boxes that had my notes and exams and thesis rough drafts. I knew that I had the degree, that I didn’t need my notes any longer, but I fought the decision to throw them out. They represented three years of hard work and sacrifice, three years of wondering if I had what it took to graduate, three years of putting a lot of things on hold. They had value from my emotional and mental investment in achieving a goal and proving to the world that I was smart enough. I wasn’t going to sell them, but Jesus’ words to the rich man in this morning’s Gospel have run through my mind when I think back to that time. ...

Sermon for Pentecost VII, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Genesis 18:20-32 ,  Luke 11:1-13 If you, like me, heard the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel reading this morning, you may have thought, “This isn’t the Lord’s Prayer that I know. I don’t know what that is.” We’re so used to the version of the prayer in Matthew’s Gospel because it is part of every liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer . And honestly, this version in Luke looks more like the bullet points I put in my PowerPoint slides at work. Bullet points are great for outlining why you think your idea is a really good one, but it doesn’t work for prayer. And yet, that’s what it seems Luke has written. If we step back from the experience of prayer for a moment, what we see are theological points that Jesus lays out in response to a disciple asking how to pray. In Matthew, we’re given the prayer, but in Luke, we have to work toward prayer, understanding why we pray, and the illustrations in t...

Sermon for Pentecost IV, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 10:1-1, 16-20 One spring day in 1990, I was doing laundry at a laundromat in Neudorf, a suburb of Strasbourg, France. I stepped out of the building for a moment and looked down the street several blocks and saw two young men, and I immediately knew who they were. They wore black pants, a white short-sleeved button-down shirt, a thin black tie, and a black name badge. They eventually entered the laundromat and I was right: they were LDS missionaries. We spoke French, and they didn’t realize at first that I was American until I told them. We broke into English at that point. LDS missionaries are bound by an absolute rule of their church that they must always be together, or within sight or hearing of each other at all times. Imagine doing that for two years, instead of a few weeks for the seventy [or seventy-two, depending on what version of the bible you read - EPW] that Jesus sends ou...