holy-week – Storied Grace

Walking in Newness of Life

A sermon for the Great Vigil of Easter with Holy Baptism
April 4, 2026, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation]; Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 [The Flood]; Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea]; Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all]; Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones]; Zephaniah 3:14-20 [The gathering of God’s people]; Romans 6:3-11 ; Matthew 28:1-10

Sometimes we think the dye is cast, fate is determined, there is nothing more to be done. Sometimes we think we’re done for and there’s no way out. Sometimes we think that evil and sin have won, and we are tempted to give up on the goodness and power and love and grace of God. Sometimes we think the tomb gets the last word, and we are tempted to resign ourselves to fear and despair. Sometimes we think those things. But then the grace of God descends like lightning, and the earth shakes, and those things we feared most become like dead men, and we hear the message of the angels: Do not be afraid. Then we meet Jesus on the road and we hear his promise. And like the women at the tomb, we are overcome with great joy. For although we thought there was only a dead end, God transforms our fear into a mission and sends us out as witnesses to his love and grace. Instead of walking in our funeral clothes, we find we are walking in newness of life, as children of the living God.

Music on a Battlefield

A sermon for Good Friday
April 3, 2026, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42; Psalm 22

There may not have been a worse place than Marine Outpost Con Thien during the Vietnam conflict. Soldiers sent there, soldiers like Scott Harrison, described it as a death sentence. Scott said that it felt like “a matter of time,” a matter of time before being wounded, before being killed. Scott was 19 years old–far too young to find yourself in hell. He was there for a year. I told you about Scott and his Carousel of Happiness with hand-crafted wooden animals and whimsical music and mountain views and flowery meadows in Colorado yesterday evening. But before the Carousel and its happy visions, there was a battlefield, and death, and the smell of flesh, and a small music box. Before the Carousel in a mountain meadow there was the place of a skull, Golgotha, Calvary, outside the city walls of humankind.

Carousel Medicine

A sermon for Maundy Thursday
April 2, 2026, at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35; Psalm 116:1, 10-17

In a Colorado meadow, there is a carousel. It’s called the Carousel of Happiness, and you will hear laughter and the classic carousel tune played from an old theatre organ. You will see 57 hand-carved wooden animals—tigers and swans and rabbits—painted with bright colors in a restored 1910 building, with outdoor light streaming in, surrounded by flowers and mountains. It’s an idyllic vision, and you can’t help but smile. And you just might run into the owner Scott Harrison, a Marine Corps veteran and old fashioned woodworker. But what does this have to do with Easter? What does this have to do with the table, and the cross, and the tomb? What do any of our lives, the ordinary and extraordinary, have to do with Easter? Everything. And I want to tell you about it over these three holiest of days.

He Remembers Us

A sermon for Maundy Thursday
April 17, 2025 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Hot Springs, AR

Readings: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35

I visited Mary in her home. It was a room in a nursing care facility; far from the best one in town. Just a single room. She kept the place dark. It was like going into a tomb. Mary was 97 years old and had lived in that dark room for going on 20 years. She had no family, no friends, she said. She had called because she was Episcopalian once, when she was a child. She had been baptized in an Episcopal church, and her aunt took her to Sunday school sometimes. Not often, it didn’t sound like. She didn’t like the nursing home chaplain who had come by, so she called me. She called and asked me to step into her darkness, into this living tomb at the end of the hall. I stayed for an hour or so, and she told me her story. I will share her story with you over the next three days.