Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Sermon delivered on Easter II, 2022 at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY   Text: John 20:19-31   For 13 years, starting in the year 2000, I worked in biomedical research at U of L. I generated data every day, and the words said to me “If it isn’t written down, it didn’t happen” were the reason why I kept a detailed notebook and every machine printout from every experiment. It was a world of numbers and facts, much like the world where we prepare our tax returns, or know how many square feet our home is, or what the Angels baseball pitcher Shohei Ohtani’s ERA is this year (it’s 3.18). This is a familiar world to us, and one that Thomas and the disciples were living in when Jesus appeared to them in the closed up house. They wanted the facts, hard proof that Jesus was still alive, and who could blame them? They had spent months or years following Jesus around the countryside, listening and learning from him a new way to look at the world, themselves, and God. They had c...

  Two weeks ago, my family and I took a week-long vacation to Cleveland, and then Columbus, Ohio. I know; Cleveland? Who goes to Cleveland for vacation? There were actually some interesting things to see in Cleveland, and as we have on past vacations, we stayed in an Air BnB. This one was a fairly sparse, fourth-floor apartment in the warehouse district near the city core that was walking distance to several things we wanted to see. We went to nearby Chagrin Falls for a few hours, and was waited on by an exuberantly cheerful waitress at a diner. Chagrin Falls has a long history of civic participation and service, and this was shared with visitors through plaques, and signs, and an active village life. I felt like the town was welcoming us and telling us about things and people that were important to it.  Two days later we left Cleveland for Columbus, heading for another Air BnB. This one, we quickly discovered, was in an urban neighborhood that had been red-lined 50 years ago,...