Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Sermon for Pentecost XXI, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 22:15-22 We’ve been decluttering at home recently, which means a trip to the Meriwether electronics recycling center and a drop off at Goodwill. There’s usually no one around at Meriwether to check what I've brought in, but there’s always someone at Goodwill asking me if I want a receipt for the things I donate to the store. I never have said yes to a receipt because to me it wouldn’t be a true donation if I could lessen my annual taxes with my offerings. I have to give without receiving anything in return to feel that I am truly showing God’s love and giving things away. There’s another reason, though, and it comes from this morning’s Gospel reading where Jesus says the phrase that we hear every now and then: give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s. What I give to God is my material possessions and what I give to Caesar is my taxes. It can be a little difficul...

Sermon for Pentecost XVIII, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 21:23-32   The Gospel reading this morning reminds me of an Islamic parable of sorts that I first heard a long time ago. It involves Nasrudin, a Mullah or a learned leader in the Islamic faith. The story goes like this: One day the people in a village thought they would play a joke on Nasrudin. As he was supposed to be a holy man of some indefinable sort, they went to him and asked him to preach a sermon in their mosque. He agreed. When the day came, Nasrudin mounted the pulpit and spoke: “O people! Do you know what I am going to tell you?” “No, we do not know,” they said. “Until you know, I cannot tell you,” said the Mullah, overcome with indignation. He descended from the pulpit and went home. Slightly chagrined, a deputation went to his house again, and asked him to preach the following Friday, the day of prayer. That day, Nasrudin started his sermon with the same question as...

Sermon for Pentecost XV, 20203, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 18:15-20   If there is one thing that I have learned well during my time as a productive, contributing adult in our society, it is that when you have at least two or three people gathered together, for whatever reason, there will be politics. A leader will emerge, and as the group grows from two or three, an anti-leader may emerge to keep the leader in check and advance another operating philosophy of the group. This is not always a Good Thing, because where contrast and difference can be a productive influence, it can also be a destructive force. You can’t avoid politics and leadership, and how they are dealt with depends on the individual members and the reason for the group. So it isn’t too much of a surprise to have Jesus addressing this in the Gospel reading this morning. It’s one of the few passages where he is clear on what to do in a specific situation. The necessity of th...

Sermon for Pentecost XII, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 15:10-28   We have yet another baptism this morning, Navy, daughter of Stephanie and Bill, and granddaughter of Linda. I’m getting good practice with my baptism sermons from so many of them recently. We’ll come back to Navy’s baptism in a moment. There’s something we need to explore first. There is a midrash, or part of a Jewish set of rules based on the Hebrew Bible, regarding things we eat and drink from. One of the midrash passages reads as follows: “When the outside of a vessel is contaminated by an unclean liquid, its exterior is unclean;...but its interior and its rim and its hanger or its handle are still considered clean...When one is drinking from a cup with an unclean exterior, one need not worry about the liquid in one's mouth, that it will be contaminated by the outside of the cup and in turn will contaminate the cup.” In other words, if the outside of a cup is u...

Sermon for Pentecost IX, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 13:31-33,44-52   This morning’s Gospel reading has several short parables in a row that Matthew intends to use to illuminate aspects of the kingdom of God. Maybe they are about faith, how a small faith can still have great worth. Maybe it is about our relationship with God, where God would give up everything to keep a relationship with us alive. There is no common thread through these parables, no hidden message to be discovered that opens the heavens and the angels sing hallelujah. Each of the parables in the reading is a treasure itself found in God’s kingdom, a treasure that leads us to discover something new or something we didn’t think had any value. We are surrounded by yeast and flour, mustard seeds, fields, and pearls. But, those things won’t look like what we expect them to look like in our lives because they are metaphors. That is the challenge of reading these parables, ...

 Sermon for Pentecost VI, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY   Text: Romans 7:15-25a , Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30    Three weeks ago I was on vacation in the GTA, otherwise known as the Greater Toronto Area. GTA sounds cooler. We stayed in an AirBnB that had a washer and dryer, and on the night we did laundry, I threw a dishwasher packet into the clothes washer. My wife had said earlier that she had already dropped a laundry detergent packet in, but it didn’t register with me. When I realized what I had done, I told her, and said that I didn’t know why I had made that mistake. I take care of the laundry at home, as well as starting the dishwasher on occasion, so I know what the dishwasher packets look like. I knew that it was the wrong thing to do after it happened, but I did it for a reason that I couldn’t explain. The load I threw the dishwasher packet into were white and light-colored clothes, so there wasn’t a noticeable effect. Everythi...

 Reflection for Pentecost III, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Genesis 18:1-15, (21:1-7) , Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23) Rowan Atkinson is a British actor who played the character Mr. Bean on the British television comedy show of the same name. He more recently appears in a Youtube video telling a story of an encounter he had with a fan. The fan approached him in a store and told Rowan that he looked just like the character Mr. Bean, and could make a lot of money doing impressions. Rowan explained that he was that actor, but the fan wasn’t having it. He started to become irritated with this man who kept insisting that he was Rowan Atkinson, and this went on for a while until Rowan excused himself. I laughed at the story and its delivery, and then thought, “This fan got so close to having a good conversation with Rowan Atkinson, but he just couldn’t bring himself to believe that’s who he was talking to.” Abraham had a somewhat similar experience in th...

Sermon for Pentecost I, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Matthew 28:16-20 Welcome to the season of Pentecost! We started it last Sunday with a celebration of the Holy Spirit and continue with a celebration of the Trinity today. We have only two other major celebrations or feasts between now and Advent, which are Transfiguration Sunday in August, and All Saints in November. Pentecost is the longest season of the church calendar, when we put into action all that we have learned and experienced between Advent and Pentecost Sunday. In preparing this sermon, I had to check the liturgical calendar again to be sure that the Gospel reading was correct. It doesn’t fit today, Trinity Sunday. In fact, the only thing the passage has in common with the Trinity is the mention of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all three who make up the Trinity. And this is ok, because the doctrine of the Trinity was developed centuries after Matthew’s Gospel was fin...

Sermon for Easter VI, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 14:15-21 Every so often, I have heard someone declare with deep emotion that they love Jesus. And that is all that they say, leaving me hanging. It is hard for me to understand what they mean by loving Jesus, because I have understood love for someone to be between two physical people. How could you love someone who was no longer around, who you never met? And was this love romantic, or like friendship, or like someone you had married, or what, exactly? After hearing this for a while, I have sort of given up trying to understand what “I love Jesus” means, because I didn’t get it. Now, I would swoon over a picture of the beautiful actress Lauren Bacall, even though I had never been in her presence, but this is different. How could someone love Jesus? I began to understand this love when I read the Gospel passage we just heard this morning, and I began to understand when Jesus says “They w...

  Sermon for Easter III, 2023, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 24:13-35 If you haven’t  caught on by now, Easter is about resurrection and new life in Jesus, and we spend a fair amount of time working on what that means for us. But Jesus’ resurrection was not the first time that resurrection had happened. The world was resurrected from the great flood, as told in Noah’s story of building and saving animals on the ark. The Hebrews were resurrected from slavery to a free people that they were when Joseph gave his family land in Egypt to escape a famine. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, after Lazarus’ sisters begged Jesus to come save their brother from death. Now, these examples don't make Jesus’ own resurrection any less important or lessen its impact on the world. It does mean that God has shown the world God’s power, and that life is not linear, where we mark a birth, experience life following birth, and finally death following life. The...