Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

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...

June newsletter article On Monday, May 12th, 59 white South African farmers (Afrikaners) arrived in the US, because according to the President, they were being persecuted in South Africa. They were said to be political refugees, despite no news of any sort of persecution being reported inside or outside of South Africa. While they are a minority, making up around 7% of South Africa’s population, they own around 80% of the farmland, giving them continued economic influence after losing political dominance with the end of apartheid. Shortly after their arrival, the Episcopal Church refugee relocation service was asked to help with settling the Afrikaners as a requirement of a refugee settlement grant from the government. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe released a statement saying that the Episcopal Church would not provide assistance because, “In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa...

 Sermon for Easter VI, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 5:1-9 Clay and Christopher were a gay couple that my wife and I knew in Bloomington, IN in the mid- to late-1980s. Christopher was from West Virginia, and a high church Episcopalian. Clay was Eastern Orthodox, and had grown up here in Louisville. They were both graduate students at IU, and had been together for about 10 years when we knew them. They were a wonder to me, being a newly-wed. About thirty years later, Kim looked them up, and was shocked to see that they had moved to Pennsylvania, and that Clay had died first in 2010, then Christopher a few years later. We strongly suspected that they had died of AIDS, and having known them in the later 20th century, we knew that there were people who blamed them for their own deaths, and said that an HIV infection was a moral sentence from God. If I had a wish for them, it would be that they were still alive, and that their dignity had been...

 Sermon for Easter III, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 21:1-19 I love you all. I really do. This may be a surprise to some who I don’t know very well, and that is because love occurs in the context of a relationship. I have good relationships with many people here, but with some others I have more of a passing relationship. But I love you just the same. There is the question of what do I mean by expressing love for all of you? Do I feel the same way about everyone? That is the issue we face with the gospel reading this morning, specifically toward the end where Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” The problem with the English language is that we have few words for love: adore, love, affection, fondness, and friendship, and they don’t exactly fit the Greek words for love that Jesus and Peter use. We have to explain what we mean when we say “I love you” to someone. Those Greek words of love used in the reading are agapé, meaning an unco...

Maundy Thursday sermon, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Back in early October, I went to New Orleans on a short business trip. Meetings were to start on  Monday morning, so I flew out Sunday late morning, after participating in the book study here. Keep in mind that I went straight to the airport from here, so I was wearing my clerical collar. I was a bit self-conscious, and very aware of how I might appear to others. While waiting at the gate in Louisville’s airport, I watched a woman struggle with folding up a large stroller while she tried to hold on to her toddler. Eventually, I got up and asked if she needed help, and then walked over to help her. She was slightly embarrassed, but we got her stroller packed for the flight. I reflected on this and realized that had I not been wearing my collar, I might not have gotten up to help. Why was that? Arriving in New Orleans, my seatmate for that flight wrestled her suitcase from the overhead bin as the passeng...

 Sermon for Lent 5, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY. Text: John 12:1-8 On my birthday in 2014, I bought a new car. My 2003 Toyota Corolla was beginning to look worn, and my son Michael was going to start driving lessons soon so the car could be his to drive. I had looked at several new cars and the one I settled on was a Toyota Camry. I had three trim packages to consider, and my wife Kim nudged me toward the top package. It felt unnecessary and extravagant to have a sunroof, heated seats, a backup camera, and motion detectors. Keep in mind that I thought power windows were a luxury. “It’s time to indulge yourself. We can afford it,” she said. The car was an indulgence, but it got me to where I needed to go in comfort: to see my daughter in New York, to funerals, to my ordination, and it faithfully took me to Nashville and back multiple times as I cared for my mother in the last three months of her life. Yes, I could have done all of that in a cheaper...

 Parish newsletter item. Just last Sunday as I write this, and a few weeks ago as you read this, we stumbled through the Rite 1 Eucharist [in the first Sunday of Lent]. I say stumbled because there were hitches in the service from the language it was written in. We don’t usually use this rite, but for those of us who are of a certain age, it was familiar because we grew up with a similar sounding rite in the 1928 prayer book. The language used in both the current and previous prayer books comes from Elizabethan English, spoken and written in the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s. It is the same language used by Shakespeare, and what the King James Version of the Bible was written in. The language further evolved into the more modern form that our Declaration of Independence was written about 200 years later. Because we pray in a modernized version of very early Modern English, it can be a challenge to understand what exactly we are saying. The tone of the early Eucharistic services has...