Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Ash Wednesday reminds me that the church year is a cycle, a never-ending loop of time where we experience several different sets of emotions and spiritual events. We have the anticipation of Advent and Christmas, the wonder of Epiphany, the work of the Spirit at and after Pentecost, the elation of Easter, and now the sober reflection of Lent. Over the years, I have worked to make Lent a little different each year to keep it from becoming routine and stale, something that only lasts for the first two weeks. The tradition of Lent has been to confess sins and repent of them, but that seems too narrow when I confess my sins daily in Morning Prayer and on Sunday at the Eucharist. There is a necessary element of looking deeply and honestly at our failings, things we did that we shouldn’t have done, things we didn’t do that we should have done, and those are not part of daily devotions. This is an essential part of the Lenten experience, but not one that should lead us to wallow in our broken...

Sermon for Epiphany V, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY. Text: Matthew 5:13-20 I have been thinking about salt a lot recently, mostly as a question “Do you have any salt for sale?” at various hardware stores or places like Walmart or Meijer. Salt is a valuable thing to have at specific times, like when you need to sharpen flavors in a meal or melt snow and ice. So, when Jesus says “You are the salt of the earth,” I want to say, “Yeah, but I need to get out of my driveway. Is shoveling snow not enough to make a difference in the world?” Jesus also says that I am the light of the world, which is nice, but sunlight is better at melting snow than I am using salt. And then Jesus says he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and I start to think that maybe he’s going to do something about the people who run the stop sign at the end of my street. But the Gospels are not about seasoning food, or dealing with snow and ice, or enforcing someone’s la...

 Sermon for Epiphany II, 2026, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Isaiah 49:1-7 , John 1:29-42 I was a late work bloomer, meaning that I didn’t start a serious career until I was 31. The opening sentences of this morning’s reading from Isaiah would have been lost on me at that age: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.” To be fair, few of us know what we are called to do at birth, but it took quite a while for me to hear and understand that call, and to see myself as an effective part of God’s work. My epiphany came from looking back at the false starts and dead end jobs I had that became a revelation to myself of what I had to start with. And now as I look back in semi-retirement, it is much more obvious and I wish I had started sooner on the path I eventually followed. Bu...

Sermon for Christmas I, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 2:13-18   A Merry Christmas to you all. I think for most of us, we had a good Christmas. We celebrated with family and friends, or had a quiet day, or maybe had to work and celebrated in another way. I have to think of my friend who is having her first Christmas without her mother and is having a hard time this season. Hearing her talk about it brings the day or two of celebration to a halt and the reality of life returns, but it doesn’t bother me. It is a reminder to me that my experience of Christmas is not shared by everyone, and our gospel reading this morning reflects this as well. Sometime after Jesus is born, Joseph and his family are warned by God to flee to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous search to kill Jesus. We’re reading this just three days after Christmas, and tomorrow is the feast of the Holy Innocents, a commemoration of the death of all the children in and around ...

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...