Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

 Sermon for Christmas I, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 1:1-18 On Christmas Day, I realized that I was responsible for today’s sermon. This shouldn’t have been a surprise because I make the sermon schedule, but so much else was going on that it slipped from my attention. That's my story. We just heard the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke four or five days ago on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve, and it is very familiar to us. We have Luke to thank for some of the details that we see everywhere in images, movies, and crêches because it tells us where Jesus came from. There is another version of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of Matthew that focuses on Joseph resolving the problem of being only engaged to Mary, who was pregnant. It has the three wise men visiting from the East, but not the manger scene. It tells a different story than Luke, and presents Jesus’ identity from a different perspective. The Gospel of Mark starts with Joh...

Sermon for Advent IV, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 1:39-45 , Hebrews 10:5-10 There is nothing like a shared experience with someone to understand what you’re going through, and where that experience may take you. Deacon Jan Scholtz at St. Matthews and I went through the Diocesan School of Ministry in the same class, learning the same things and sharing with each other what we learned. There was one significant difference between us, though: I had started the official diaconal discernment process with the Diocese, and Jan had said several times that she wasn’t interested in the diaconate. Her call and discernment came a couple of years later, and we met again here where she performed her internship as I was preparing for ordination. What she was going through at that time was still fresh in my mind, and I shared with her what had been next for me that she would experience. We both saw our discernment happening in the other person. Jan’s a...

Sermon for the first Sunday in Advent, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 21:25-36 Welcome to the new Church year, year C for scripture reading, where we will read the Gospel of Luke for most of it. We gather on the First Sunday of Advent, starting the Christmas season with a rather un-Adventish, un-Christmassy reading. Foreboding and fainting and distress do not sound like the cheer or the anticipation we experience in the Christmas season, and this reading sounds a bit like the doom-and-gloom passage we heard in Mark two weeks ago . It is also reminiscent of something I read recently , that goes like this: “I do not wish to force any one to believe as I do; neither will I permit anyone to deny me the right to believe that the last day is near at hand. These words and signs of Christ compel me to believe that such is the case. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in ...

Sermon for Pentecost XXVI, Delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY, 8 am service Text: Mark 13:1-8 “My what big buildings there are here!” That was me, repeating what a disciple said to Jesus, but I was in New York City. There are tall buildings there, some really tall, so I can imagine the disciple’s reaction in Jerusalem. Instead of steel and glass, the buildings and the Temple in ancient Jerusalem were made of large cut stones, larger than the stones that houses back in Galilee were made of. And then Jesus throws water on the disciple’s wonder by saying something outrageous, that all of the buildings would be thrown down with nothing but rubble to remain. That alone could be the point of this morning’s passage, but these comments come immediately after Jesus calls attention to the widow and her meager contribution to the temple treasury. When you read this passage with the widow in mind, the context changes to one of destruction of gifts, and the possibility tha...

Sermon for Pentecost XXV,2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Mark 12:38-44 When I was growing up, my parish had a Lenten tradition of giving out cardboard UTO mite boxes to the children in the parish. We would then drop coins into the box during Lent, and on Easter we would bring them back, and up to a large open plywood cross in the front of the sanctuary. The cross would then be filled with the mite boxes. More recently, I have understood the significance of those boxes full of coins, inspired by the Gospel reading of the widow and her two copper coins. There could be a whole other sermon about filling a cross with coins for another time. Suffice it to say that each penny I put in was a sacrifice of sorts, particularly since I was way too young to work, and my parents hadn’t started giving me an allowance. The word mite descended from German, to mean something small, and in Flemish refers to a thin copper coin, so the concept is of something smal...

Sermon for Pentecost XXII, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Job 38:1-7, 34-41 ; Mark 10:35-45 Early in 1991, I made a phone call to the office of the Diocese of Indianapolis. I knew that there was a meeting coming up for people in discernment in the Diocese, and I had been meeting with a small committee in my parish in Bloomington, working on my discernment. I asked where the meeting would be, and the person on the other end said that they would get back to me. A few minutes later, I got a call from my Rector saying that I would not be attending the meeting or moving forward in the process toward the priesthood. I was crushed, but I figured out later that I was asking what James and John were asking Jesus: to be placed in a position of authority because they wanted to be there, or because they felt they were qualified. I had the same attitude of being qualified, and I was looking for a career right out of college. Jesus answered me, John, and James by ...

Newsletter item published September 27, 2024 This has been an unusual election season by any measure. A lot of rhetoric from and posturing by candidates for elected offices has been carried by the media. We have been looking for, and sometimes heard some signs of what the two presidential candidates will do if elected, and the same is true for congressional, state, or local races. However, if we look beyond all of what we have been exposed to in the campaigns, we find a deeper level of discussion about who we are and who we want to be as a nation, and as an American society. The campaigns and debates talk about specific ideas that fall into categories of good or bad, or competing postures of belief or apostasy, or claims of a coming triumph or apocalypse. It is not surprising that we fall back on our faith to make sense of what we hear and talk about, and defend our beliefs from people who tell us that we are gravely mistaken in who we agree with and support.  There are two opp...

Sermon for Pentecost XIX, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Mark 9:38-50 A while ago, a Facebook friend of mine posted a question, “Why does my box of salt have an expiration date on it?” There were several responses, one being “it’s an FDA thing; any food item has to have an expiration date,” and another response was actually a question “can you still use it past the expiration date?” I finally posted “I’m still working on how salt could go bad.” Chemically, table salt is one of the most stable things we have to eat. You don’t have to worry about getting it wet, you don’t get bugs in it like you do with sugar or flour, and you can’t burn it. There's bourbon smoked salt, sure, but have you ever seen fire-roasted sea salt on the grocery shelf? Even at Trader Joe's? So, when I read in this morning’s Gospel where Jesus asks how can you use salt that has lost its saltiness, it stood out to me. How can salt not be salt, and not taste like salt,...

Sermon for Pentecost XIII, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 6:56-69 This morning’s Gospel reading sounds a little familiar, similar to the reading for the fifth Sunday in Easter at the beginning of John 15. In that passage, we heard Jesus say. “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” This morning we hear, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” The word “abide” appears again in our cycle of Gospel readings, representing a theme in John's Gospel. This time it is a more positive statement than what we heard about the vine. It says the same thing, though, that there is more than one way in which we can live in or dwell in Jesus. While one way sounds like we’re eating Jesus and the other sounds like we’re a plant, both are metaphorical, whether we are a part of Jesus or that he is a part of us. Contrary to what has been said negative...

Newsletter item published July 26, 2024. Late Saturday night on July 13, I began to see headlines telling of an assassination attempt on former President Trump at an election rally. My heart sank at the thought that someone felt that this was necessary, and that they felt that it would solve the problem they thought was justified by murder. As I was preparing for the first worship service the next morning, I looked over the Gospel reading, which was the story of Herod having John the baptizer beheaded because his wife hated John ( Mark 6:14-29 ). I immediately saw parallels in that story and the drama of the attempted assassination and thought back to the article I wrote in last month’s newsletter about civil political discussion. In both cases of murder and attempted murder, someone justified their call for death by a morality built on self-righteousness and loathing, a seething hatred of someone amplified by power. In the case of Herodias, she hated John because he called out her...