Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

  Sermon for Easter III, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 24:13-35 If you haven’t  caught on by now, Easter is about resurrection and new life in Jesus, and we spend a fair amount of time working on what that means for us. But Jesus’ resurrection was not the first time that resurrection had happened. The world was resurrected from the great flood, as told in Noah’s story of building and saving animals on the ark. The Hebrews were resurrected from slavery to a free people that they were when Joseph gave his family land in Egypt to escape a famine. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, after Lazarus’ sisters begged Jesus to come save their brother from death. Now, these examples don't make Jesus’ own resurrection any less important or lessen its impact on the world. It does mean that God has shown the world God’s power, and that life is not linear, where we mark a birth, experience life following birth, and finally death following life. The...

I want to share with you three vignettes of my life that have all come together on this holy night of Maundy Thursday. During my junior year in college, I lived in a co-ed French language and culture dorm. Men were on the first floor, and women, including the residential assistant, lived on the second floor. The RA was named Ruth, and her mother was Korean and Catholic, and her father was American and Jewish. Ruth and I got to know each other. She introduced me to kim chi, and I learned to read Korean script. On Sunday nights, we studied and did homework together for a class we were both taking, but it was always interrupted at the same time by a phone call from her boyfriend living in Puerto Rico. Ruth and I later had a falling out a little before her boyfriend visited around Easter that year, and we barely spoke to each other in the weeks after. One night just before finals week, one of the guys on my floor was outside, blind drunk. She came to me and said “I know you don’t like me, ...