Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Sermon for Pentecost XXV,2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Mark 12:38-44 When I was growing up, my parish had a Lenten tradition of giving out cardboard UTO mite boxes to the children in the parish. We would then drop coins into the box during Lent, and on Easter we would bring them back, and up to a large open plywood cross in the front of the sanctuary. The cross would then be filled with the mite boxes. More recently, I have understood the significance of those boxes full of coins, inspired by the Gospel reading of the widow and her two copper coins. There could be a whole other sermon about filling a cross with coins for another time. Suffice it to say that each penny I put in was a sacrifice of sorts, particularly since I was way too young to work, and my parents hadn’t started giving me an allowance. The word mite descended from German, to mean something small, and in Flemish refers to a thin copper coin, so the concept is of something smal

Sermon for Pentecost XXII, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Job 38:1-7, 34-41 ; Mark 10:35-45 Early in 1991, I made a phone call to the office of the Diocese of Indianapolis. I knew that there was a meeting coming up for people in discernment in the Diocese, and I had been meeting with a small committee in my parish in Bloomington, working on my discernment. I asked where the meeting would be, and the person on the other end said that they would get back to me. A few minutes later, I got a call from my Rector saying that I would not be attending the meeting or moving forward in the process toward the priesthood. I was crushed, but I figured out later that I was asking what James and John were asking Jesus: to be placed in a position of authority because they wanted to be there, or because they felt they were qualified. I had the same attitude of being qualified, and I was looking for a career right out of college. Jesus answered me, John, and James by

Newsletter item published September 27, 2024 This has been an unusual election season by any measure. A lot of rhetoric from and posturing by candidates for elected offices has been carried by the media. We have been looking for, and sometimes heard some signs of what the two presidential candidates will do if elected, and the same is true for congressional, state, or local races. However, if we look beyond all of what we have been exposed to in the campaigns, we find a deeper level of discussion about who we are and who we want to be as a nation, and as an American society. The campaigns and debates talk about specific ideas that fall into categories of good or bad, or competing postures of belief or apostasy, or claims of a coming triumph or apocalypse. It is not surprising that we fall back on our faith to make sense of what we hear and talk about, and defend our beliefs from people who tell us that we are gravely mistaken in who we agree with and support.  There are two opposin

Sermon for Pentecost XIX, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Mark 9:38-50 A while ago, a Facebook friend of mine posted a question, “Why does my box of salt have an expiration date on it?” There were several responses, one being “it’s an FDA thing; any food item has to have an expiration date,” and another response was actually a question “can you still use it past the expiration date?” I finally posted “I’m still working on how salt could go bad.” Chemically, table salt is one of the most stable things we have to eat. You don’t have to worry about getting it wet, you don’t get bugs in it like you do with sugar or flour, and you can’t burn it. There's bourbon smoked salt, sure, but have you ever seen fire-roasted sea salt on the grocery shelf? Even at Trader Joe's? So, when I read in this morning’s Gospel where Jesus asks how can you use salt that has lost its saltiness, it stood out to me. How can salt not be salt, and not taste like salt,

Sermon for Pentecost XIII, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 6:56-69 This morning’s Gospel reading sounds a little familiar, similar to the reading for the fifth Sunday in Easter at the beginning of John 15. In that passage, we heard Jesus say. “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” This morning we hear, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” The word “abide” appears again in our cycle of Gospel readings, representing a theme in John's Gospel. This time it is a more positive statement than what we heard about the vine. It says the same thing, though, that there is more than one way in which we can live in or dwell in Jesus. While one way sounds like we’re eating Jesus and the other sounds like we’re a plant, both are metaphorical, whether we are a part of Jesus or that he is a part of us. Contrary to what has been said negative

Newsletter item published July 26, 2024. Late Saturday night on July 13, I began to see headlines telling of an assassination attempt on former President Trump at an election rally. My heart sank at the thought that someone felt that this was necessary, and that they felt that it would solve the problem they thought was justified by murder. As I was preparing for the first worship service the next morning, I looked over the Gospel reading, which was the story of Herod having John the baptizer beheaded because his wife hated John ( Mark 6:14-29 ). I immediately saw parallels in that story and the drama of the attempted assassination and thought back to the article I wrote in last month’s newsletter about civil political discussion. In both cases of murder and attempted murder, someone justified their call for death by a morality built on self-righteousness and loathing, a seething hatred of someone amplified by power. In the case of Herodias, she hated John because he called out her