Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

9th Sunday after Pentecost sermon delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY  Text: John 6:1-21 This story of Jesus feeding the five thousand is the only miracle (or as John describes it, a sign) that appears in all four Gospels. And with a few variations, nearly all of the details are the same in all four Gospels. This similarity is significant, because the Gospel of John was written completely separately from the Gospel of Mark, and separately from Matthew and Luke who were reading Mark as they wrote their Gospels. This story was already a meaningful part of the life of the church in the years that the Gospels were written, and it was a way of telling the world who Jesus was. This story opens chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, which is so important to us now that we will read it for the next four Sundays as an interruption to reading through Mark’s Gospel this year. It is about Jesus, and bread, and much, much more. The story opens by telling us that the disciples, faced w...

   Delivered on the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY. Text: Mark 6:1-13 There’s a familiar image in America of the hometown boy who leaves for greater things and then returns home to a celebration as a hero. Cassius Clay, the black American boxer who grew up in Louisville’s West End and eventually changed his name to Muhammad Ali, had a parade in his honor when he returned from the 1960 Olympics with a gold medal. “Who do you think you are?” “You got no right to be here, to be talking like that, to have what you have.” That was what he said he heard on the streets or in restaurants in Louisville in the days after the parade in his honor. And that was what Jesus heard when he returned to Nazareth where he had grown up. Jesus addressed the crowd that gathered around him, made up of people who had known him over the years and had grown up with him or had watched him grow up. They were astonished by what he was saying and teaching, and they...