Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Maundy Thursday, 2021 Delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Based on John 3:1-17, 31b-35 Maundy Thursday is one of those nights I wish we could experience more than once a year. The closeness I feel toward my friends in the parish, the fellowship, and the sharing of a meal has an appealing intimacy of a shared holy experience. Then again, if we did have Maundy Thursday more than once a year, it would lose some of the mystique and rarity that makes it stand out as a particularly holy day of the year. When I consider the story of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet and how we have memorialized it, there is a question in my mind about what we are doing here tonight. Is the service, specifically the foot washing, a ceremony, or a ritual? A ritual is defined as a transformative event, such as the Eucharist where bread and wine become sacraments of the body and blood of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Something changes during the service, and we too can be c...

 It has been a while, but I remember the days of hearing “Dad?” “Dad?” “Mom?” “Mommmm?” as my children wanted or needed attention. All day long. You love them, but you can’t complete a thought because they keep calling your name. Reading the Old Testament story of Samuel was a reminder of those days, just with the roles reversed. God keeps calling Samuel without saying what God wanted. Who said that there isn’t humor in scripture? God calls Samuel by name, three times in the night, and Samuel gets up each time and goes to Eli, thinking it was he who called. Samuel would have naturally thought that Eli was calling, because Samuel had not yet learned to listen for God’s voice, even though he slept in the temple. Eli was the chief priest in that temple at Shiloh and a mentor to Samuel, but he was preoccupied with his sons, also priests in the temple. His sons abused the people who came to make sacrifices, and took the offerings of meat for themselves to eat, instead of treating them w...

Sermon, Christmas II, 2020 Luke 2:41-52 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Merry Christmas to you on this, the 10th day of Christmas. We are getting close to Epiphany, which is on Wednesday, and as I mentioned last Sunday, is when the incarnation of God in Jesus was recognized and celebrated by three Wise Men from the East. They saw a star in the sky and realized that it meant something special, that it was a sign to them. This is how we typically think of an epiphany and are most familiar with the story and what it means. In a broader view, an epiphany is the revelation of something that we previously didn’t know, or were unaware of. We’ve all had that experience of learning something new, sometimes something that seemed obvious in hindsight but is new and fresh, and our mind races forward to reinterpret what we know or have experienced with this new knowledge. I had an ...

Christmas I 2020 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Louisville KY John 1:1-18 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Merry Christmas to you all on this first Sunday of Christmas. Our savior is born, coming into a dark world to bring light and life and peace to us. Advent has led us to this Christmas season, four weeks of preparation for what the Gospel of John opens with: the incarnation of God as Jesus, the Christ. Four weeks is not a lot of time to prepare for Immanuel, or God among us, so if you don’t feel prepared, fear not. Hardly anyone can prepare themselves in that short period of time. I’ve come to the conclusion that while Advent, like Lent, is a fixed part of our church calendar, the things we do during those two seasons don’t have to be limited to just four or six weeks. In fact, it is much more realistic to look at that preparation as requiring as much time as we need to fully understand what we’...

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...