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All Souls: remembering the dead

Sermon for All Souls celebration, St. Joseph of Arimathea Society Louisville, delivered at Meadow View Cemetery, Louisville, KY A little more than a month ago, a man I knew many years ago came to my church. I had not seen him in years. He sat for a while in our memorial garden where we bury the cremains of parishioners who have died. He also came into the sanctuary to light a prayer candle. This was remarkable to me because he is on the autism spectrum, and sometimes religious faith is a difficult concept to grasp and the emotions surrounding death difficult to process for people on the spectrum. He was dealing with the death of a relative he had never known, and that was what stood out to me the most, marking the death of someone he had never met or communicated with. I think that what he did was at the heart of All Souls Day, one where we mark and remember people we have known, or were aware of, who are no longer here with us.  It is important for us to remember the dead because ...
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All Saints Sunday: are you a saint?

Sermon for All Saints Sunday, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY Text: Revelation 7:9-17 , 1 John 3:1-3 , Matthew 5:1-12 This is one of those rare Sundays when All Saints falls on a Sunday. The last time this happened was in 2020, and before that, 2009. So, this Sunday provides an opportunity to think about the saints in our lives, to remember them, and look for the saints around us. At first glance, the readings for today seem to be a mish-mash from Revelation, the first letter of John, and the Beatitudes in Matthew. But there is a theme that I have encountered as I have offered reflections on several All Souls Day celebrations with the St. Joseph of Arimathea Society. In Revelation, the great ordeal that John mentions (in John’s time, persecution of Jesus’ followers) led to death. Contrary to popular belief, Revelation is not a prophecy of what would happen in the future, but instead a strongly-worded, image-filled recounting of what had already happene...
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The need for a universal morality

Sermon for Pentecost XXI, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY Text: Matthew 22:15-22 In 2023, I preached on this passage, and like any preacher with a few years spent in the pulpit, I am challenged with writing another sermon on this passage. The first sermon was perfect and said everything I wanted, so what else could I say? I went back and looked at what I wrote and realized that my theology, my own beliefs had changed, and I wanted to explore that change. In 2023 I wrote about voting as part of giving what belongs to Caesar, to Caesar.   “This is another instance where we run into having to give time to Caesar and time to God, and in both   cases in my eyes, they are equally important and we have equal responsibility for both. However, equal importance and obligation brings us close to blurring the lines between them, like seeing voting as a religious duty or attending worship services as a civic duty.”  It was that last line, “voting as ...
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Saying yes or no to authority

Sermon for Pentecost XVIII, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 21:23-32 If you have raised children, or remember your own childhood, part of this morning’s Gospel reading is familiar. You ask an older child, or maybe you were asked to perform some chore, be it taking out the trash, cleaning a room, or helping with yardwork. And the responses to such requests are often the same as the two sons in the reading, where one says no at first, then (sullenly) does it, while the other says yes and then does nothing. As a parent, it is a test of patience, and I commiserate with the father in the reading. For those with children, it does get better. This scenario is a test of authority, children testing the authority of their parents as they  mature and become more self-directed, doing things that they want to do. They become their own authority on what they will or will not do. They question the authority of their parents in this unfolding ability to...
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Words of the watcher and the sentinel

Sermon for Pentecost XV, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Ezekiel 33:7-11 , Matthew 18:15-20 During my high school years, I would swim in the pool in our school building after classes. Afterward, I would leave the building, cross the street, and take a city bus home with my hair still wet. Mistake number one. In the winter, I would do the same, and my hair would freeze until I got on the bus. Mistake number two. Given my "mistakes," I am quite sure that someone said to me, “You’re going to catch your death a cold,” implying that being outside with wet hair, in the cold no less, was going to cause me to have a possibly fatal respiratory infection. And this was said to me with great certainty. I was not convinced then, and I am even less convinced now because I subscribe to the germ theory of such illnesses. But it was nonetheless a warning to me that if I continued in my mistaken ways, I was going to suffer for them. Ezekiel shares some ...
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To be defiled or undefiled, that is the question

Sermon for Pentecost XII, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 15:10-28 Thirteen years ago, I finished up a three-year position at a high-containment microbiology laboratory. We handled, stored, and studied various bacteria and viruses that cause significant disease. We were highly trained and constantly aware of what was clean, sterile, or potentially contaminated, and the mindset that Jesus addresses in the Gospel this morning was how we thought. We assumed that equipment or spaces were contaminated unless we could verify that they had been cleaned. However, we did not throw out expensive contaminated equipment; we instead cleaned it, restoring it to a usable condition. This is ultimately what Jesus’ first point was in the Gospel reading, that people are not inherently unclean, or defiled, but that things they say, and I would add what they do, are what defiles them. And, when it comes to people whom we believe are defiled by nature, as the...
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Of seeds, yeast, treasure, and a pearl

Sermon for Pentecost IX, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 13:31-33,44-52 This morning’s gospel reading is a scattershot of parables that illustrate the kingdom of heaven, and there does not seem to be a connection between them. In fact, the commentaries I read as I prepared this sermon say to not try to bring them all together, but instead pick one and focus on it. I am known for not always reading the instructions first, which earns me looks of exasperation. But, I think there is a theme here, something that links these separate illustrations of the kingdom of heaven together other than just being illustrations of the kingdom. The theme has three parts to it. The first is the butterfly effect, the second is sorting out what is in the kingdom, and the third is what leads us to the kingdom. The butterfly effect is an older mathematical theory that says that small, seemingly insignificant changes in a large, random environment creates large...
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Jesus' yoke and burden

Sermon for Pentecost VI, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Texts: Psalm 145:8-15 , Romans 7:15-25a , Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30 If you are like me, of a certain age, and grew up in the church using the 1928 prayer book , the sentence toward the end of the gospel reading will be familiar, and I can still recite it by heart: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you.” It was one of several scriptural quotations said right after the absolution of sins, and they were called the “comfortable words.” I didn’t appreciate the Elizabethan English that the 1928 prayer book preserved until I read Shakespear’s plays in high school. I also glossed over the word “travail” until one day during the service I realized what it meant: it came directly from the French verb travailler, meaning to work, or to labor, and suddenly the sentence made sense to me. It was an invitation from Jesus to bring our laborious burdens to him so that we coul...
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The Disciples' trial run

Sermon for Pentecost III, 2026, delivered at St. Pal's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 9:35-10:8 About 20 years ago, I wound up a four year commitment to the Red Cross as a disaster volunteer. I was part of a crew that drove and set up a tricked-out Ford Excursion SUV that could bring the internet to wherever it was, as well as provide radio communications on just about any frequency needed. It was a complicated truck to operate, and my first deployment was with the truck manager, Mike. He knew how to do everything with it, and I learned a lot from him. My next deployment was for a hurricane disaster response in Florida with another crew member, and that was when I really felt unsure of my abilities. But Mike had confidence in me, and we did ok while on the job. I realized that my first deployment with Mike was a trial run, and the second was the real thing. The disciples’ experience of going out for the first time and actually doing what they had seen Jesus do was ...
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Pentecost 2026: What is the best language?

Sermon for Pentecost 202, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Acts 2:1-21 , 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13 , John 20:19-23 Recently on a Facebook group that I help manage, someone posted in German about a medical problem they had with their child. Facebook, in its helpful wisdom, automatically translates posts in one language into the language of the reader with a fair amount of accuracy. Except this time. In the German post, the word “Antriebslosigkeit “ was used and is translated by the Google Translate app to mean “low drive.” However, in the Facebook post, it was translated as “impotence,” and I alerted the poster, in German, to this potentially embarrassing mistranslation. I suggested “Energielosigkeit” which translates to “lack of energy,” that was more appropriate for what the poster wanted to say. Soon after, a Dutch member, who also speaks English, German, and French chimed in and offered to help with translating vocabulary. I gratefully accepted the of...
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