Field Notes: Stories from St. Martin's

All week at Vacation Bible School the kids learned a "festal shout," two big words for whenever they saw how amazing God is. Wow, God! This VBS Sunday children's message starts there, with the line from our psalm, happy are the people who know the festal shout, and turns it loose on a place every kid in Keller knows: the Fort Worth Zoo. There is a marker at the zoo that tells a story...

Outside Pilot Point there is a cemetery called St. John's, the oldest Black cemetery in Denton County. Around four hundred people are buried there, and only about twenty graves still have a stone. Someone working to save it said these people have been buried twice. Once in the ground, and once by being forgotten. This short homily from our early service starts on that ground and lets Paul answ...

Three historical markers stand within a few steps of each other on a trail in North Arlington. One remembers a peacemaker who freed captives and brought them home. One remembers a raid that attacked a village. One remembers a treaty that opened a people's land to be taken. A mercy, a killing, and a displacement, all on the same small patch of ground. That is where this sermon begins. It turns...

A land company promised poor settlers nearly two million acres of North Texas. For some of them the promise fell apart and left only graves on the prairie. That is where this sermon begins, at a roadside marker in Grapevine, and it turns out to be where Paul begins too. In Romans 4 he points us to a promise made to a man whose body was as good as dead and a womb that was closed, and he tells us wh...

You leave vacation days on the table. You overschedule the summer. You live like the whole thing falls apart if you stop. This Trinity Sunday sermon is the Gospel’s answer to that exhaustion: you are not the main character of the story. God is. Drawing on Genesis 1, Psalm 8, 2 Corinthians 13, and the Great Commission in Matthew 28, we walk through what the Trinity actually means for a tired life....

In this Pentecost Sunday message, the Rev. Mark Odieny opens with a disarmingly honest confession: as a youth leader in Kenya, he once faked speaking in tongues to meet the expectations of his peers. That moment of pretending becomes the launching pad for a frank exploration of how deeply human the desire to perform and impress truly is. Drawing on 1 Corinthians, Mark connects the divisions in the...

What does your mom have to do with evangelism? More than you think. This sermon starts with a simple question: if you wanted to tell someone about a woman who shaped your life, what would you say? You wouldn't hand them a spreadsheet. You wouldn't list her measurable outputs. You'd testify -- about how she loved you, showed up for you, changed you. So why do we think sharing our faith...

On the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Fr. Alan Bentrup preaches from Acts 7, John 14, and 1 Peter 2 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas. Two of the most misused texts in the New Testament show up in this week's readings. John 14 has been turned into a border checkpoint. 1 Peter 2 has been stamped onto a flag. Both readings have been used to draw the circle small and keep people out....

The Reverend Ayo Omoniyi delivers his sermon for Good Shepherd Sunday, "Jesus is the Door."

What does it mean that the risen Jesus keeps saying the same thing? To frightened disciples behind a locked door. To Thomas in his doubt. Over and over: "Peace be with you."In this Easter Sunday sermon at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan explores John 20:19-31 and what the resurrection has to do with a plumber named Mike Jesus, a week of doubt, and the moment...

All week we have been listening. A crowd. Water poured out. A hammer. And then silence. T onight the ground shook. In this Great Vigil of Easter service from St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan offers a brief reflection on what the resurrection actually sounds like: not a quiet next chapter, but an earthquake. The sound of a door torn off its hinges from the inside. The so...

Easter is not optimism. The people in this story are not people for whom hope came easy. They watched their friend die. They buried him. They came back to the tomb in the dark because they didn't know where else to go. Jeremiah wrote to survivors who had lost everything: the people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness. Not after the wilderness. In it. That is the world Mary Mag...

You know this sound. The hammer comes down. The nail bites in. The sound is blunt and final and it does not apologize for itself. In this Good Friday sermon from St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan sits with that sound and refuses to move past it too quickly. Because before we get to Easter, we have to hear what love actually sounds like when it goes all the way. It was no...

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus picked up a basin and poured water. In this Maundy Thursday sermon from St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Fr. Alan explores the soundscape of the upper room: the water poured out, Peter's protest, the silence of sleeping disciples, and the kiss of a friend who had already decided to betray him. All of it. And still the water kept pou...

The Rev. Mark Odieny preaches on Ezekiel 37:1-14.

The healing in John 9 is not the good news. Not for this man. The moment he receives his sight, everything else starts falling apart. His neighbors don’t recognize him. The Pharisees interrogate him twice. His own parents hand him over in the middle of his trial to protect themselves. And by the end of the chapter, he has been thrown out of his community, his synagogue, and every structure that wa...

She didn’t come to the well at noon by accident. She came because it was the only time no one else would be there. She had arranged her whole life around not being seen. And Jesus was already waiting. In John 4, Jesus crosses every boundary that should have kept him silent — and has the most theologically rich conversation in the Gospel with a Samaritan woman who has known grief, loss, and the wei...

In this sermon from St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Keller, Texas, Father Alan explores one of the most honest questions people ask in the dark: Does God really love? Drawing from John 3:1–17 and the story of Nicodemus, this message unpacks the radical scope of John 3:16, what it means that God loved the world, and why that changes everything. This sermon is part of the Lent series Listen to...

What does Lent really mean? Sometimes it’s not found in grand gestures or perfect spiritual disciplines, but in ordinary interruptions. In this Ash Wednesday reflection, I share a simple encounter at the gym that completely reframed how I see Lent. An old friend, recovering from surgery and carrying concern for his wife’s upcoming procedure, asked me to pray for him. It happened because my routine...

Before you even walk into church on Sunday morning, you have already heard dozens of voices. Kids. Spouses. News alerts. Inner criticism. Expectations. Demands. In Matthew 4:1–11, Jesus walks into the wilderness and hears a different kind of voice: “If you are the Son of God…” This sermon begins our Lenten series, Listen to Him . But this is not a self-help message about how to resist temptation b...

On the last Sunday before Lent, we stand between celebration and ashes. At the Transfiguration, Jesus shines with divine glory on the mountain. But the heart of the moment is not just the light. It is the voice from heaven: “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”As we move from Jazz Mass joy and Shrove Sunday celebration toward Ash Wednesday and the road of Lent, this sermon invites us to se...

The Rev. Mark Odieny preaches on Matthew 5:13-20.

In this sermon, we turn to Matthew 5 and the Beatitudes to ask a simple but brave question: Who are we becoming as a church? Jesus’ Beatitudes are not rules to follow but a vision of the kind of community God is already forming among us. This sermon explores how a Beatitude shaped church becomes authentic, merciful, courageous, and grounded in grace. The question is not whether we can achieve this...

What do we do when violence silences a voice and the world feels less safe? In Matthew 4, Jesus begins his public ministry not in a moment of calm, but after John the Baptist is arrested. This sermon reflects on how Jesus responds to injustice and violence, how lament becomes the soil of God’s work, and what it means to follow Christ when silence would be unfaithful. Preached in the shadow of real...

What does Christmas mean once the carols fade and the candles burn low? In this sermon on John 1:1-18, we turn to the opening of John’s Gospel, where Christmas is not told through shepherds and mangers, but through mystery and meaning. John pulls the curtain back to the very beginning and shows us who Jesus really is: the eternal Word, the Light that shines in the darkness, and God who has come ne...