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Welcoming Angels

A sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 17
Jazz Mass
August 31, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Proverbs 25:6-7; Psalm 112 ; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 ; Luke 14:1, 7-14

The seminary professor was going on sabbatical. He was a scholar of the early monastics, the desert fathers and mothers of the Church, so he traveled to Egypt to visit one of the oldest continuing monasteries in Christendom. He flew to Cairo, hopped in an SUV with a driver, and headed out. The highways turned to streets, which turned to paths, which turned to impressions, which turned to sand. Eventually they were bounding through the desert with no discernible way forward. But soon they came to the monastery. He got out of the car, went to the large doors, and knocked. No answer. He knocked again. No answer. He knocked a third time, rather desperate, because his driver had already taken off back across the desert. Finally, the door creaked open, and a monk who looked about as old as the desert motioned him inside without saying a word. In silence, he took him to a table in a dark room, brought out food and water. Before the monk walked off, he turned to the visitor and softly said, “By the way, we welcome you as an angel–just in case.”¹

In Memoriam: Catherine Stokes Baran

A sermon at the Burial of the Dead
August 30, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 23; Romans 8:14-19, 34-35, 37-39; John 14:1-6

Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav’ns joy,
Sphear-born harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers

Those words belong to John Milton’s poem “At a Solemn Music.” The poem, later set to music by Hubert Parry, describes the power of music. Milton takes us to the heights of heaven where the music flows unabated and uncompromised. Milton also dives into our own hearts, where that music, once pure, is so often discordant and corrupted by sin, death, and the sorrows of this life. Milton goes on:

Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ
Dead things with inbreath’d sense able to pierce,
And to our high-rais’d phantasie present,
That undisturbèd Song of pure content,
Ay sung before the saphire-colour’d throne
To him that sits theron
With Saintly shout, and solemn Jubily…
Singing everlastingly;

What are you carrying?

A sermon for Education Sunday
Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 15
August 24, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Isaiah 58:9b-14 ; Psalm 103:1-8 ; Hebrews 12:18-29 ; Luke 13:10-17

My mother was worried I would end up hunched over. I don’t remember how old I was, but maybe it was the start of junior high. My backpack was heavy with books, and at that time it was popular to just use a single strap instead of both straps of the backpack. My mother was worried that the heavy pack would hurt my back. She worried it would bend my back, induce scoliosis, like the woman in today’s gospel. She insisted I use both straps. And why, she wondered, was the school requiring us to carry so many heavy books? More on backpacks in a moment.

Great Big Faith

A sermon for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 14
August 10, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Genesis 15:1-6 ; Psalm 33:12-22 ; Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16 ; Luke 12:32-40

I was accused of thinking too small. I was gathered around a table with a group of pastors from different denominations. The question of faith had come up while discussing a church building project. “All I need is $1 million,” a pastor friend had said. Yeah, I’ve thought that, too. He went on, “I have faith that God will make it happen.” He was naming it, throwing it out in the universe, and he was claiming it as his own. He was asking us to have faith with him. Surely if we all did this together, like some incantation, God would have to bring it about–and quickly. The problem for me was I don’t think that’s how faith works. Maybe I was thinking too small. I was told I needed a great big faith.

The Last Accounting

A sermon for the 8th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 13
August 3, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23 ; Psalm 49:1-11 ; Colossians 3:1-11 ; Luke 12:13-21

The big success story had a tragic bent, one that many people didn’t know about. Bill was a priest who was dying. He had a good and loving family–at least it seemed so. He had gone home on hospice care, and he wasn’t expected to make it long. I was called to administer last rites. I walked into the quiet house and to the back room. Bill was there in his bed, his wife and children with him in the room. The air in the room was sober, and it grew more sober as a man in black walked in. It always does. I had not expected Bill to be conscious, which more and more is the norm for last rites. But he was. I walked over, patted him on his hand, leaned down and said gently, “Hello, Father. I am here to give you last rites.” Bill’s head jerked back. “Last rites?!” He croaked out his alarm. At first it appeared no one had told him he was dying. I learned later he had refused to believe it, convinced he could make it through. But he died that night.

A New Way

A sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 12
July 27, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)

How many baptisms have you seen happen in this room, right back there at that font? If you think about it, I bet you can see the whole thing in your head. The candidate comes forward; if they are a child, they are accompanied by parents and Godparents. They renounce evil and promise to follow Christ ahead of anything else in this world. They make vows. Water is poured. Prayers are said. Three handfuls of water in the Name of the Trinity. Oil blessed by the bishop. A candle representing the light of Christ shining brightly within us.

The Better Part

A sermon for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 11
July 20, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Genesis 18:1-10a ; Luke 10:38-42

Do you ever get bothered by a passage of Scripture? Today we have one that makes plenty of us uncomfortable. We read that Martha, who has a sister named Mary, welcomes Jesus into her home. That is to say, Martha is in charge. We know from the gospel of John that these are the sisters of Lazarus, whom Jesus raises from the dead. They are Jesus’s good friends, and they give this rabbi who normally does not have a place to lay his head, a bed for the night. They welcome him, and with him his company of disciples. But these two sisters take very different approaches to Jesus’s visit. Mary, we read, sits and listens at Jesus’s feet. She takes the position of a disciple, learning from the master. Martha, on the other hand, gets to work getting things ready. Cooking. Setting the table. Getting the wine. All of the things that go into making a visit like this one a success. More than that, these things were demanded by society. In Jesus’s time, hospitality, welcoming others into your home, was not just a matter of being polite. It was a religious obligation. Martha is trying to fulfill what God expects. It is not an accident that in Greek, the words for “many tasks” are polle diakonia. Diakonia–we get deacon from that word. Service is an important, even religious, matter.

The Innkeepers

A sermon for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 10
July 13, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Luke 10:25-37

Cindy and Charlie were innkeepers. They didn’t know it, but they were. Friends from church, they were in my life as a child, from around age 7 when my single mother started going back to school until around age 12 when they moved to Oklahoma. But for those years they were innkeepers to my brother and me. We spent as much time with them–maybe more time–than we did at our own home while mom was in nursing school. When mom couldn’t be there, Cindy stepped in. She picked us up from school, made us breakfast burritos and dinners galore, let us help make banana pudding. She was the one who told me it was high time to start wearing deodorant. And because mom hadn’t met the man I call my dad yet, Charlie stepped in more than once, helping me make my pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts, or going to the dad-and-son events at school. He taught me how to operate a lawn mower, and how to rake leaves. That’s what the innkeepers do–they step into lives for a time. They bring their ministries of healing to the wounded, providing love and support. They may not know it, but they do the work of Jesus. That was Cindy and Charlie.

You Can’t Do Anything

A sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 9
July 6, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, Arkansas

Readings: Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16 ; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Why does St. Paul spend so much time talking about circumcision? It is at the very least odd; and honestly, it is a little impolite. But here he is, yet again in Galatians, talking about circumcision. He wants the Galatians to know they do not need to be circumcised–he would even prefer that they were not. And here we are, centuries later, blushing, or at least trying to read quickly through the passage so as not to call attention. There are children present, and maybe even visitors who surely did not come to hear this. “Preacher,” you may be thinking, “move on and talk about the love of God, or forgiveness, or grace. For the sake of politeness, just ignore Paul.” But I can’t, because what St. Paul is talking about has everything to do with the love of God and forgiveness and grace.

Freed for Freedom

A sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 8
June 29, 2025, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, Arkansas

Readings: Galatians 5:1,13-25 ; Luke 9:51-62

Free is not your right to choose
It’s answering what’s asked of you
To give the love you find until it’s gone

I don’t listen to secular music much. I am a church nerd through and through. My Spotify playlists are populated with the hymns of the Church, at least generally. The lines of the old hymns make me catch my breath, as the beauty and greatness of God are captured, or at least glimpsed, in a few words. But there are exceptions. There are a few non-hymns on my playlists with lines that make me breathless. Many of them come from the band the Avett Brothers, an American folk rock group. I quoted a few of those lines a moment ago, lines about freedom from their song “Ill with Want.” It’s a song about how greed consumes and leaves us sick and empty-handed. The only remedy, they sing, is the freedom found in giving love away, and ultimately giving ourselves away. For in the end that is what is asked of us by Jesus himself: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Or, from today’s gospel: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Free is not your right to choose
It’s answering what’s asked of you
To give the love you find until it’s gone