Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Sermon for Pentecost VII, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Genesis 18:20-32 ,  Luke 11:1-13 If you, like me, heard the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel reading this morning, you may have thought, “This isn’t the Lord’s Prayer that I know. I don’t know what that is.” We’re so used to the version of the prayer in Matthew’s Gospel because it is part of every liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer . And honestly, this version in Luke looks more like the bullet points I put in my PowerPoint slides at work. Bullet points are great for outlining why you think your idea is a really good one, but it doesn’t work for prayer. And yet, that’s what it seems Luke has written. If we step back from the experience of prayer for a moment, what we see are theological points that Jesus lays out in response to a disciple asking how to pray. In Matthew, we’re given the prayer, but in Luke, we have to work toward prayer, understanding why we pray, and the illustrations in t...

Sermon for Pentecost IV, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 10:1-1, 16-20 One spring day in 1990, I was doing laundry at a laundromat in Neudorf, a suburb of Strasbourg, France. I stepped out of the building for a moment and looked down the street several blocks and saw two young men, and I immediately knew who they were. They wore black pants, a white short-sleeved button-down shirt, a thin black tie, and a black name badge. They eventually entered the laundromat and I was right: they were LDS missionaries. We spoke French, and they didn’t realize at first that I was American until I told them. We broke into English at that point. LDS missionaries are bound by an absolute rule of their church that they must always be together, or within sight or hearing of each other at all times. Imagine doing that for two years, instead of a few weeks for the seventy [or seventy-two, depending on what version of the bible you read - EPW] that Jesus sends ou...