Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

Sermon for Pentecost IV, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Mark 4:26-34 The last sentence of this morning’s Gospel reading makes a point about Jesus’ parables, where Mark describes how Jesus uses them to illustrate a teaching, but then he explains his teachings to his disciples privately, in direct terms. Christian scriptures are not the only holy writings to include this way of teaching spirituality. Zen Buddhism does something similar using koans (Ko-ahns). Koans are short stories whose illustrations are sometimes plain, sometimes contradictory or paradoxical, and they are meant to be meditated on and understood spiritually. I’ll give two examples that are fairly straightforward. One day Banzan was walking through a market. He overheard a customer say to the butcher, “Give me the best piece of meat you have.” “Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You can not find any piece of meat that is not the best.” At these words, Ba...

Article for the St. Paul's Episcopal Church parish newsletter, May 31, 2024 Toward the end of my senior year in college, a shanty town made of cast off cardboard, pallets, and parts of tents appeared in Dunn Meadow, the large field in front of the Student Union at Indiana University. Prior to the shanty town’s appearance, students and some faculty had been pressuring the University to sell off its investments in companies that were in apartheid South Africa, or did business in the country. The University administration said that it would not for various reasons, and the student protesters increased their presence until in April, 1986, the shanty town appeared. There were more rallies and teach-ins against apartheid and the administration’s refusal to divest, and the shanty town was inhabited throughout the summer. When the 1987 academic year began, the returning students showed little interest, and with fall rains the spot became a mudhole. In November, the shanty town was taken do...

 Sermon for Trinity Sunday, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 3:1-17 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard, read, or have seen that quote from the Gospel of John, I would be a rich man. It is at once a neatly packaged statement of Christian faith and a sentence so familiar that we are prone to give it only passing attention. Because of its familiarity and importance, it tends to draw our attention away from what is discussed between Jesus and Nicodemus in this appointed reading. This reading was chosen specifically for this Trinity Sunday, yet what it has to do with the Trinity is not clear. So, I want to set aside for a moment God loving the world and sending Jesus to it, and search for this connection with the Trinity. Nicodemus has come to Jesus at night to talk about who Jesus is and what he’s been doi...

Sermon for Easter VI, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville. KY Text: John 15:9-17 Hearing this week’s Gospel reading, it is clear that we are not done with the word “abide.” It appeared in last week’s reading eight times, and we hear it three more times this morning for a total of eleven times. That’s a lot of abiding, or living in Jesus. And even though we have read these passages over two Sundays, they are part of one continuous thought. Last week , we heard that we are a branch of a vine, tended by God, supported by Jesus, with us producing the fruit. This fruit is not like any other fruit we may make because it comes from living in and being a part of Jesus. So, this is ultimately God’s fruit that we bear, nourishing others around us who are hungry for the good news that Jesus has brought. This concept of abiding, or living, continues this week and leads to a conclusion where we have been elevated beyond just being faithful followers or disciples of Jesus...

A few weeks ago, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest the fate of Gazan citizens at the hands of the Israeli armed forces. His death joins similar acts of protest going back decades. That someone would die by setting themselves on fire is horrific, and it raises questions about what leads to such drastic steps, and what it means for the cause they died for. There is more to Aaron’s story that hasn’t been part of the discussion around his death as we respond to it and to the desperate situation Gazan civilians find themselves in. This article will explore those responses. When I first heard of Aaron’s death, it reminded me of another young man’s death in 2018. John Chau was an evangelical Christian who felt that God was calling him to contact and save the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island, in the eastern Indian Ocean, from the devil and from hell. As John grew up in the 1990s, he was enamored with stories of adventurous mis...

Sermon for Easter V, 2024, delivered at the Church of the Transfiguration, New York, New York. Text:   John 15:1-8   When I read this morning’s Gospel for the first time in preparing this sermon, I appreciated the wonderful examples that Jesus gave of the vine and the branches, and the fruit that is produced from them to describe relationships. The examples worked and made a lot of sense as I read along, and then I got to the line “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” And the loveliness vanished. It is not unlike the passage earlier in John 14 where he says that no one can come to the Father except through him. These passages have been read specifically to enclose, exclude, rarify, and separate those in the group from those who the group doesn’t want to be around. That reading leaves me uncomfortable and unsure, because I also read in John 4 about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at ...

Homily for Maundy Thursday, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Tonight we find ourselves at the end of Lent. It has not been a time to focus on the rules, but on the discipline needed to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, which is harder than following rules. It has not not been a time to endlessly mull over and confess how we fall short, or the mistakes we’ve made, or the failures we have had. All of that is easier to do than changing ourselves and our lives to be more like Jesus. For me, Lent has been instead six weeks of examining where I am in my journey toward becoming Christ-like in what I say or do. My ordination vows speak to changes that I strive for, changes in me to do what we believe Jesus would be doing today. And in fact, you don’t need a collar to fulfill the vow to “serve all people, particularly the poor, the weak, the sick, and the lonely.” You don’t need a title like “The Reverend” to fulfill the vow “to make Christ and his redemptive love known, b...

Newsletter item for St. Paul's Episcopal, May, 2024    On February 16 of this year, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling that stated that frozen embryos, a result of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), were in fact children when applying the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act to cases in Alabama. This is extraordinary because no other legal precedent has addressed the personhood of fertilized embryos in this way. The court’s decision came from an appealed lower court judgement in which three families lost stored embryos due to an accident, and the hospital was sued under the Act for damages. The state supreme court ruled that the Act did apply because it considered fertilized embryos to be children under the Act. This has advanced the belief that life begins at conception for pro-life supporters, thus showing that all abortions are immoral. I will explore the bioethics of IVF and the implications of the court’s decision in this article. The idea that abortion is murder is based on o...

Sermon for Lent III, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Exodus 20:1-17 , 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 Somewhere on the internet, there is a meme floating around in the form of a picture of a posted sign. The sign reads, “It is illegal to read this sign.” So, by the time you have read the sign to be informed that you must not read it, you have broken a law. The opportunity to choose not to read the sign and not break a law is removed, so you go straight to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. It seems arbitrary and unfair to be subject to such a law with that kind of notification, but the sign and the law are very clear. Fortunately, we are not usually confronted by such laws and rules, but we are surrounded by secular and religious rules all the same. There are religious rules from tradition that we encounter for Lent, compared to the obligatory rules of conduct like the ones in the Temple when Jesus disrupted it. And there are rules for our behavio...

Article for the March parish newsletter, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY On February 20th of this year, my wife Kim and I were supposed to leave for a trip to the Holy Lands. On October 8th of last year, one day into the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza strip, I realized that the trip would be cancelled. Since then, I have watched the conflict unfold with a range of emotions from anger to sadness to grief. I will not discuss the details of the conflict here but instead discuss how we’re talking about it, which is not well.  America has long had close ties with Israel, and we have only recently talked about bigotry openly in our society. This has complicated already difficult discussions in our highly polarized country that politicizes any topic associated with emotional reactions. If you acknowledge that tens of thousands of Gaza civilians have died in Israel’s military actions, someone is likely to call you out as antisemitic and supporting terrorists. If y...