Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Homily for Maundy Thursday, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Tonight we find ourselves at the end of Lent. It has not been a time to focus on the rules, but on the discipline needed to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, which is harder than following rules. It has not not been a time to endlessly mull over and confess how we fall short, or the mistakes we’ve made, or the failures we have had. All of that is easier to do than changing ourselves and our lives to be more like Jesus. For me, Lent has been instead six weeks of examining where I am in my journey toward becoming Christ-like in what I say or do. My ordination vows speak to changes that I strive for, changes in me to do what we believe Jesus would be doing today. And in fact, you don’t need a collar to fulfill the vow to “serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely.” You don’t need a title like “The Reverend” to fulfill the vow “to make Christ and his redemptive love known, b...

Newsletter item for St. Paul's Episcopal, May, 2024    On February 16 of this year, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling that stated that frozen embryos, a result of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), were in fact children when applying the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act to cases in Alabama. This is extraordinary because no other legal precedent has addressed the personhood of fertilized embryos in this way. The court’s decision came from an appealed lower court judgement in which three families lost stored embryos due to an accident, and the hospital was sued under the Act for damages. The state supreme court ruled that the Act did apply because it considered fertilized embryos to be children under the Act. This has advanced the belief that life begins at conception for pro-life supporters, thus showing that all abortions are immoral. I will explore the bioethics of IVF and the implications of the court’s decision in this article. The idea that abortion is murder is based on o...

Sermon for Lent III, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Exodus 20:1-17 , 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 Somewhere on the internet, there is a meme floating around in the form of a picture of a posted sign. The sign reads, “It is illegal to read this sign.” So, by the time you have read the sign to be informed that you must not read it, you have broken a law. The opportunity to choose not to read the sign and not break a law is removed, so you go straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. It seems arbitrary and unfair to be subject to such a law with that kind of notification, but the sign and the law are very clear. Fortunately, we are not usually confronted by such laws and rules, but we are surrounded by secular and religious rules all the same. There are religious rules from tradition that we encounter for Lent, compared to the obligatory rules of conduct like the ones in the Temple when Jesus disrupted it. And there are rules for our behavio...

Article for the March parish newsletter, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY On February 20th of this year, my wife Kim and I were supposed to leave for a trip to the Holy Lands. On October 8th of last year, one day into the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza strip, I realized that the trip would be cancelled. Since then, I have watched the conflict unfold with a range of emotions from anger to sadness to grief. I will not discuss the details of the conflict here but instead discuss how we’re talking about it, which is not well.  America has long had close ties with Israel, and we have only recently talked about bigotry openly in our society. This has complicated already difficult discussions in our highly polarized country that politicizes any topic associated with emotional reactions. If you acknowledge that tens of thousands of Gaza civilians have died in Israel’s military actions, someone is likely to call you out as antisemitic and supporting terrorists. If y...