Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Our resurrected life after Easter John 20:1-8 As I compose this sermon on a Saturday morning, I am sitting in the sunroom of my home, and the sun is shining. I see the dogwoods at the rear of the backyard in bloom, and I see cardinals flying around, looking for a place to build their nests. The grass is getting tall, and I will cut it later today. My backyard neighbor is out puttering around, and has sneezed multiple times from the pollen in the air. My large black cat, Hunter, is sleeping beside me. Life is happening all around me in bright colors, bright light, and in many different forms. Sitting in my sunroom for a while during the week-end has become important, because I otherwise spend 40 hours a week in my basement office, with no windows to look out of, and light yellow walls and a fluorescent light overhead. My connection to the world is only through a computer monitor and my phone, on occasion. I will not look at social media today, or the news headlines. I am setting aside t...

For the past 6 years on Good Friday, I have taken the day off to participate in the Good Friday service at church, and to have a quiet day in recognition of Christ’s death on the cross. I have been invited twice to deliver a short homily in those years, and the theme both times has been about passing through death to be able to live a resurrected life. The death I referred to was the death of old habits and ways of living life, of old attitudes and perceptions that all lead to a life of brokenness, and falling short of the life Christ called us to live. It was the beginning of mourning the loss of familiar ways of sabotaging our lives, so that on Easter we could celebrate the resurrection of our lives into something new, something better, something holy. It was, and still is, a message worth contemplating and taking to heart. It is hard, though, to think about metaphorical and spiritual death when we are currently surrounded by real death caused by a virus we can’t see. New York City h...

Delivered on the First Sunday of Christmas, 2019 at the Church of the Advent, Louisville, KY Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer. If you’ve been around children or raised your own, you know the following scenario. I was on my way out of the door when my 4 year old daughter asked me where I was going. I replied that I was going out to mow the lawn. She asked “Why?” I replied “Because the grass is growing and needs to be cut.” Pregnant pause. “Why does the grass grow?” “Because the sun shines on it, and the rain waters it, and it just grows.” Another pause. “Why does the sun shine?” and so on, and the questions keep coming until you throw your hands in the air and say “Just because.” At that point, you know you’ve lost the conversation. But that question “Why?” has an underestimated power to cut through all of the hows and whats and wherefores and lay open the central belief, or reason ...

Where is God? Ezekiel 37:1-14 , Psalm 130 , Romans 8:6-11 , John 11:1-45 I don’t think that there’s anyone who can’t relate to the first verse of today’s Psalm, 130. in the past weeks:      Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord;      Lord, hear my voice; *let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication. We have prayed hard as we watch the coronavirus spread across the country. We have worked hard at trying to limit its damage to our bodies, our society, and our economy. We have looked to the government for help, and are confused when we see faces staring back at us. I follow a private COVID-19 healthcare provider board on FaceBook, participated mostly by nurses. The posts are at once humbling, heroic, poignant, and horrific. It is also a glimpse into what Italy has been facing for the past month. There are posts about the strain on healthcare workers of taking care of large numbers of patients, the emotional overload of...

Readings: 1 Samuel 16:1-13 John 9:1-41 Nothing much happened to me this week in my new rhythm of life. I have been working from home, and will be for at least the next several weeks. I’ve gotten into a routine where I wake up at 6 AM, and am logging into work by 7, and finish up around 4 PM or so, depending on the urgency of requests that come to me. This new life is one where I feel disconnected from the pandemic, and distant from others around me yet still have things I must get done. It is difficult to do, but the internet, as much garbage as it contains, also contains ways in which we can connect and build a community. I regularly interact with people from Australia, England, and France in an on-line Facebook group, the kind of community that is impossible to have in the physical world. I am expanding that sense of community to people who live near me, or at least in the same country. Still, it is a strange feeling to be at home, away from the drama that the pandemic brings, sort o...

Fear in the Viral Wilderness Based on the text Exodus 17:1-7 Moses has a problem. Through a series of events in Egypt, he found himself a leader that he didn’t want to be, leading his people out of slavery that they didn’t want, into a wilderness that no one knew about. And now, his people are complaining, holding him responsible for following God’s will for them. When we in North America read about the wilderness, we assume old-growth forests shading streams, animals lurking just beyond our sight, birds singing in the trees, and lush if not thorny undergrowth. But for the Hebrews, the wilderness was a desert, sparse of vegetation, animals, and water. The Sonoran or Painted Deserts outside of Las Vegas and in Arizona are closer to what the Hebrews found themselves in than forests. We find ourselves in our 21st Century version of a wilderness, defined by medical authorities, public health strategies, and personal and community hygiene, fleeing from a largely unknown disease-causing v...

Readings: Joel 2:1-2,12-17 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10 Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21 Delivered on Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020 at the Church of the Advent, Louisville, KY. Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord my strength and my redeemer. “What are you going to give up for Lent?” That was the question my mother would ask us a week or so before Lent began, when I was growing up. We went to St. Francis in the Fields then, and the younger children’s participation in Lent was centered around United Thank Offering mite boxes. We would drop pennies or extra change into the box and then on Easter morning, stack them in a large white wooden outline of a cross in the sanctuary. There was an unspoken, definitely un-Easter comparison of how heavy your box was to someone else’s, and a vague feeling that you fell short if your box was too light. As we grew older, we were introduced to the idea of giving up something more than loose change, an...

John 6:24-35 So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Then Jes...

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, Oh Lord my strength and my redeemer. Prayer is one of those funny things that we talk about doing all of the time, but I suspect that in reality, we don’t have a clear idea of what prayer actually is. Or, perhaps, we know how we pray, but we don’t really know how others pray. There are popular images of children, in their innocence, kneeling with their head down, hands together below their chin in an iconic posture of prayer. Or, there is the image of weathered hands in a praying position, drawn by Albrecht Duerer, accompanied by the apocryphal, emotion-laden legend that the hands were of his brother, who worked in the mines to finance Albrecht’s art training. Or, there is the woman I once encountered at a hospital chapel, who was kneeling on the floor with her arms propped up on the seat of a chair, praying out loud for the medical staff who were taking care of a relative. Her tone of voice was one ...

The second Sunday in Easter: Growing in faith from our doubts John 20:19-31 This morning’s reading always follows Easter. It is at the opposite end of what Easter is: the human need for tangible proof. Between Easter and this Sunday’s story of doubting Thomas, we wrestle with the core of Christian faith versus the facts of the story. Where Easter is the celebration around an event that can’t be understood in rational terms, the story of Thomas is our natural reaction to it. Thomas voices what we feel at times or have dealt with, that is, an attempt to understand Jesus’ resurrection and our faith in purely rational terms. To echo last week’s theme, they both don’t make sense and aren’t supposed to, because faith in Jesus and his resurrection comes from a spiritual connection to them. And like Thomas, we struggle to balance our natural attraction to the facts, rather than balance them with a spiritual understanding of the resurrection. Thomas’ crisis is not so much a crisis...