Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Maundy Thursday sermon, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Back in early October, I went to New Orleans on a short business trip. Meetings were to start on  Monday morning, so I flew out Sunday late morning, after participating in the book study here. Keep in mind that I went straight to the airport from here, so I was wearing my clerical collar. I was a bit self-conscious, and very aware of how I might appear to others. While waiting at the gate in Louisville’s airport, I watched a woman struggle with folding up a large stroller while she tried to hold on to her toddler. Eventually, I got up and asked if she needed help, and then walked over to help her. She was slightly embarrassed, but we got her stroller packed for the flight. I reflected on this and realized that had I not been wearing my collar, I might not have gotten up to help. Why was that? Arriving in New Orleans, my seatmate for that flight wrestled her suitcase from the overhead bin as the passeng...

 Sermon for Lent 5, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY. Text: John 12:1-8 On my birthday in 2014, I bought a new car. My 2003 Toyota Corolla was beginning to look worn, and my son Michael was going to start driving lessons soon so the car could be his to drive. I had looked at several new cars and the one I settled on was a Toyota Camry. I had three trim packages to consider, and my wife Kim nudged me toward the top package. It felt unnecessary and extravagant to have a sunroof, heated seats, a backup camera, and motion detectors. Keep in mind that I thought power windows were a luxury. “It’s time to indulge yourself. We can afford it,” she said. The car was an indulgence, but it got me to where I needed to go in comfort: to see my daughter in New York, to funerals, to my ordination, and it faithfully took me to Nashville and back multiple times as I cared for my mother in the last three months of her life. Yes, I could have done all of that in a cheaper...

 Parish newsletter item. Just last Sunday as I write this, and a few weeks ago as you read this, we stumbled through the Rite 1 Eucharist [in the first Sunday of Lent]. I say stumbled because there were hitches in the service from the language it was written in. We don’t usually use this rite, but for those of us who are of a certain age, it was familiar because we grew up with a similar sounding rite in the 1928 prayer book. The language used in both the current and previous prayer books comes from Elizabethan English, spoken and written in the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s. It is the same language used by Shakespeare, and what the King James Version of the Bible was written in. The language further evolved into the more modern form that our Declaration of Independence was written about 200 years later. Because we pray in a modernized version of very early Modern English, it can be a challenge to understand what exactly we are saying. The tone of the early Eucharistic services has...