St. Luke's Episcopal Church Newtown, PA

08/31/2026

While we tend to think of the Church as ancient, it is always new. When Saint Luke’s was founded in 1832, our nation was not yet fifty years old. Older members of this parish at that time—people who sat in the same pews we do—likely remembered George Washington’s troops passing through town after the Battle of Trenton. The skirmish on State Street in the winter of 1777, which the Newtown Historic Association so carefully recreated last month, was not distant history for them; it was possibly a childhood memory.

Veterans—and indeed casualties—of the American Civil War lie in our churchyard. It is said that cannon fire from the third day of Gettysburg could be heard in downtown Trenton; I dare say it could have been heard from our very doorsteps as well. And every Sunday, when I celebrate the Mass, I do so using a chalice inscribed to commemorate the safe return of a soldier—a son of this parish—from the Second World War in 1945.

Yes, we are surrounded by history. But history is not an end in itself. It reminds us that faithful people have gone before us, preaching, teaching, and celebrating the gifts of Faith in their own time. Jesus tells us in Mark 2:22, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins… But new wine must be put into new wineskins.” The Christian Faith is always new because it always transforms lives in the here and now.

Saint Luke’s exists to create a space where people can encounter the transformative power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. While we do this in a place and institution rooted in the history of our corner of the world, we are not a museum, nor a cultural preservation society. We are a church—alive, responsive, and continually renewed by the Spirit.

And so, we find ourselves in a season of trying new things. In the coming months, we will be offering several opportunities to grow, explore, and deepen our life together:

Behind the Scenes: Exploring Our Church — Began August 30, following the 10 AM Mass on the last Sunday of each month. A chance to learn, ask questions, and discover the living faith behind the ministries of Saint Luke’s.

Invite Your Grandkids Sunday — September 13, celebrating National Grandparents’ Day with joy, welcome, and intergenerational connection.

Monday Evening Book Study — Beginning September 14 at 7:30 PM as we read N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church. A rich exploration of Christian hope and the mission of the Church today.

Intergenerational Eucharist Soft Launch — November 15, from 5:30 to 7:30 PM, with a community dinner and a service designed to welcome all ages into the mystery and joy of worship.

These offerings are not random programs; they are new wineskins—new ways of making room for the Gospel’s transforming work among us. The wine is new because Christ is always doing something new. The Spirit is fermenting, expanding, reshaping us for the work God is calling us to do today.
While we are a very old church, I encourage you to think of us as a new church. I also encourage you to pray for the growth of our parish and to work toward building it up by inviting someone every week. We all love this community and the God whose love it embodies; let us continually share that love with others. It is too great a gift not to share.

Likewise, if you are a member of this church who has recently been on the periphery, I encourage you to return to Sunday worship. Participation in Christian community—hearing the Word and receiving the Sacraments—is not a suggestion; it is the very heart of our baptismal covenant. God expects it of us, and it is our greatest joy as followers of Jesus Christ.
Saint Luke’s has a long and storied past. But its future—our future—is being written right now. And it is full of new wine.

08/28/2026

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I was proud to present a Senate citation to Braedon Owen of Troop 29 in Newtown in honor of his achievement of the rank of Eagle Scout. For his Eagle Scout service project, he chose to refurbish the churchyard gazebo for St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Newtown, PA.

I always enjoy welcoming accomplished and driven young people like Braedon to my office and learning more about how they're serving our community. Please join me in congratulating him on this accomplishment!

08/23/2026

At the heart of the story of the Exodus are four women.

There are Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives who refuse to obey Pharaoh’s abominable decree to kill all Hebrew boys in the process of delivering them. It is because of their refusal, Exodus tells us, that God continued to increase Israel.

There is the unnamed Levite mother of the baby who would be named Moses. In an attempt to avoid Pharaoh’s decree that every Hebrew firstborn male be taken and drowned in the Nile, this brave mother hid her child for three months. When he could no longer be concealed, she made a watertight basket sealed with pitch, placed him among the reeds of the Nile, and trusted that God would protect and provide for the child.
And there is the daughter of Pharaoh, who found the child and ensured that he was cared for, despite knowing he was of the Hebrew people. It was she who named him Moses, because, the text tells us, he was drawn out of the water.

Four women—unrelated and perhaps unknown to one another—initiate the story of God’s deliverance of the Hebrew people from Egypt. They are not kings or warriors. They are not the usual material for heroism in the ancient world. Yet it is through them that God, improbably, saves his beloved people.

One of my favorite Christmas movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, isn’t really a Christmas movie at all; it is, rather, the story of how ordinary faithfulness and goodness truly hold the world together. Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, is an ordinary person—a son, a husband, a father, a local businessman—who always tries to do the right thing. And yet, like most of us, he cannot see the cumulative effect of a life well lived, and he despairs to the point of attempting to take his own life.

But George Bailey’s life shows the same quiet pattern as the four women in the opening chapter of Exodus. He saves his brother, protects Mr. Gower, gives up his dreams so others can flourish, and keeps choosing mercy over self‑interest. None of it looks dramatic. None of it feels like deliverance.
But when the angel Clarence reveals the world as it would have been without those small acts, we see that George’s ordinary goodness has been the very means by which an entire community was held together.
And that is exactly what is happening in the first chapter of Exodus—ordinary people doing what is right. None of them saw the cumulative effect of their righteous deeds. I can imagine each of them wondering what more they could have done, perhaps thinking their lives to be a miserable failure.

Yet it was through them that God acted to deliver Israel from Egypt and to demonstrate his justice, power, and providence to the world. Scripture is the story of ordinary lives raised to extraordinary ends by the grace of God. And this story, some 3,000 years old, still moves us today.
All of us struggle to see how our lives relate to the bigger picture. We assume that our daily choices don’t matter much. We’re just regular, insignificant people, after all. But who we are and what we do—even in the smallest ways—matters. It matters because it is through little things that God brings about great things. Jesus, after all, was the adopted son of a carpenter from a hill town in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. God takes what appears ordinary and does the extraordinary with it.

One of my favorite saints—and nearly the namesake of our daughter—is Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who was but a teenager when she entered the Carmelite Order. She wrote in her wonderful autobiography: “The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers, and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”

In other words, it is through lives faithfully lived in love for the present moment that God blesses us.

I don’t know about you, but I often read the news and feel completely helpless. There is so much evil in this world—so much cruelty, greed, irreverence, and pain. And if you’re like me, you probably don’t know where to begin in helping make this world a better place. But scripture tells us where to begin—not with grandiose, self‑involved schemes, but with humble acts of justice and love, continually done throughout a life. It is through such lives that God acts.

Cumulatively and over time, extraordinary things can be achieved through ordinary faithfulness. We, like George Bailey, may despair when we cannot see the fruitfulness of such a life, but through faith we trust that our lives matter and that God, as he did in Egypt, can and does bring redemption.

Jesus—whom Peter clumsily identifies as the Lord in this morning’s Gospel—is also the Lord of history. Through him, our stories and our lives are gathered up into one great story: the story of how he saves the world. Our lives may not seem significant, but in Jesus we are of extraordinary value. And like those ordinary women of old—three Hebrews and an Egyptian—our lives matter because God values them and, indeed, entrusts them with his righteousness. And through us, as in Egypt, even mighty empires can tremble and fall

08/23/2026

08/23/2026

08/16/2026

“God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.”

This church, I have to say, is a sheer miracle. Here we are in suburban Bucks County, worshipping in a two‑hundred‑year‑old church, using prayers composed or translated out of Latin more than five centuries ago during the tumultuous years of the English Reformation. Our spiritual forebears—sauntering to Holy Communion across a field in Norfolk in the year 1600—could never have imagined that people very different from themselves in almost every conceivable way would one day pray the same prayers, in largely the same wording, several centuries later across the Atlantic in a land yet unknown to English‑speaking people. How improbable is this place, this church, this faith.

All of history is the story of how God uses the circuitous path of chance and human decision to bring about his will and make himself known over and against forces that undermine that path. That we are here today, worshipping God as recipients of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is a miracle. We have received that heritage as the result of the slow work of God as it has been borne out through the long train of history. None of it was guaranteed, and none of it was even likely.

Over the past year or so, I have come to admire the Irish saint Columba, who—along with his community at Iona in Scotland—almost single‑handedly preserved the riches of the Western Christian tradition in the fifth and sixth centuries. He also, as my son Oliver knows, was the first person to record the supposed existence of the Loch Ness monster—and, as legend tells us, subdued the mighty beast. Columba, according to the medieval historian Adomnan, was “angelic in appearance, but even more angelic in heart.” The radiance of his piety and work shines for us today.

In the proverbial “dark ages” following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the monks at Iona preserved Latin and Greek classics as well as the writings of the early church fathers when such texts were destroyed or left to decay elsewhere. They scoured the remaining libraries of the Roman world and copied as much as they could. Not only did they preserve and curate; they created. The famous Book of Kells—one of the most exquisite works of art to arise from the early Middle Ages—was a product of Columba’s monks. But most importantly, Iona was a “faithful remnant” in a world that had descended into strife and Stygian darkness. They carried on the apostolic witness even as Viking raiders repeatedly sacked their community. They stood as a light over and against the darkness. That we are here today, worshipping in a Christian tradition with roots in the Celtic Church of the early Middle Ages, is because people like Columba remained steadfast.

In today’s lesson from Genesis 45, we hear part of the story of Joseph, who—because of his siblings’ jealousy—was left for dead in the wilderness, found by wandering merchants, sold into slavery, and by a circuitous series of events ultimately became a close advisor to the Pharaoh of Egypt. When a famine breaks out, Joseph, who oversaw the grain reserves, encounters his estranged siblings begging for food. God does not shame the errant brothers but uses this encounter to demonstrate his providence. Joseph says, “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.”

In the midst of the human catastrophe of a five‑year famine, God preserved a “remnant of Israel.” In the darkness of Egypt, God sustained that faithful remnant, eventually delivering them and returning them to the land of Canaan that had been given to Abraham. Through the circuitous path of history, God carried the Hebrew people through. Just as Columba preserved the light of the Gospel in his community at Iona, Joseph continued the promise of God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

The world in which we find ourselves is not too dissimilar from the worlds of Columba and Joseph. Our development, I believe, has outpaced our ability to evaluate its appropriateness through a moral lens. We may have increased our nominal connections through the internet, but we have sealed ourselves off from one another with walls of our own construction. The political traction in which we find ourselves as a nation is, I believe, a result of this. I can, for instance, log into ChatGPT and draft an email using artificial intelligence, and that same email can be—maybe even likely will be—answered by one drafted using the same technology: two machines communicating with one another with little interference from the human mind. Authentic, vulnerable community has been cast aside in favor of a primitive kind of tribalism rooted in nominal identities.

Seventy years ago, in Charlie Chaplin’s first talking movie The Great Dictator, Chaplin’s character said:

“We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in: machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little: more than machinery we need humanity; more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”

That is the world in which we live; it is the world of Egypt’s famine and the world of Columba’s dark ages. And the church today, I believe, shares the same vocation as Joseph and Columba: to be a light in the midst of darkness and a faithful remnant in a world that is forgetting what it means to be human. Today’s Psalm, 133, tells us, “Oh, how good and pleasant it is when brethren live together in unity!” It is for us to stand together, to love one another as God has loved us, and to shine as the morning star shines in the darkness before the approaching dawn.

08/16/2026

08/12/2026

This past weekend’s sermon:

“I have declared thy righteousness in the great congregation; lo, I will not refrain my lips, O Lord, and that thou knowest."

This is an old building. Shortly after I began my tenure as the priest of Saint Luke's, I spent some time exploring every nook and cranny of it. On one occasion, in a cupboard in the sacristy—that back room behind the altar—I found a small glass bottle, perhaps an old-fashioned medicine bottle, with a bit of water still inside. It was labeled in a small typewritten font:

Water from the River Jordan, brought from Palestine, April 10, 1930, by Miss Anna P. Chambers.

Later that same week, I wandered through our cemetery and found Miss Chambers's grave. The very woman who lovingly brought back water from the Holy Land for use in baptisms nearly a century ago now rests only a few yards from her cherished memento. In life and in death, Saint Luke's continued to be her home. For nearly two hundred years, this parish has stood in the heart of this historic borough, gathering generations into the life of Christ.

When Saint Luke's Episcopal Church was founded in 1832, it did not begin with a grand vision or a single wealthy patron. It began with three ordinary men—a doctor, a farmer-merchant, and a local landowner—who believed that the Christian faith, as received in our Anglican tradition, deserved a place in this community. Their graves, like Miss Chambers's, lie immediately behind where I am standing, and we continue their legacy today.

Phineas Jenks, a respected physician who trained under the Founding Father Benjamin Rush, spent his life tending to the physical needs of his neighbors. His home and medical practice—on the site now occupied by Starbucks on State Street—served as a center of healing and compassion. He served in the Pennsylvania legislature, led the county medical society, and worked tirelessly for the good of Newtown.

Yet his most enduring legacy is quieter. He helped establish a spiritual home where generations could encounter the healing presence of Christ. Through Dr. Jenks we see how God uses professional skill and civic responsibility as instruments of grace. It is surely no coincidence that our parish bears the name of the patron saint of physicians, Saint Luke. I suspect Dr. Jenks had something to do with that.

James Worth, a merchant and agricultural innovator, poured his energy into strengthening the life of Bucks County. He helped establish Episcopal worship not only in Newtown but in the surrounding communities as well. He was instrumental in founding Episcopal churches in Newtown, Hulmeville, and Yardley. Worth reminds us that the Kingdom of God grows when people invest their resources—their time, their money, and their influence—in places where faith can take root. His life shows us that generosity itself can become a form of evangelism.

William Paff, though less well documented, stands as a symbol of the many whose names do not appear in history books but whose faithfulness makes the Church possible. He offered what he had—likely land, labor, and steadfast commitment—and this parish was built. Paff represents the quiet saints whose contributions are known fully only to God.

Together, these three men embody a simple truth: the Church is built whenever ordinary people respond to God's call with ordinary faithfulness. Christianity, dear brothers and sisters, is the story of how God raises up ordinary people for extraordinary purposes.

Saint Luke's is not a grand cathedral. Its nave has never hosted the extraordinarily wealthy or the powerful. Its doorstep has never witnessed history on the scale of Christ Church in Philadelphia. Yet Saint Luke's has endured. Thousands upon thousands have been baptized, married, and buried from this little nineteenth-century church. For nearly two centuries, we have stood at the heart of this community as witnesses to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

When this church was built in 1832, it stood at the very edge of the borough, with nothing beyond the creek but open farmland. Today we find ourselves in the heart of a prosperous and bustling suburb. Much has changed, but one thing has not: Christ died for us, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

That enduring truth, faithfully believed by generation after generation in this place, is what has sustained this parish. In a world that often seems indifferent—even hostile—to the truth of the Gospel, Saint Luke's has remained steadfast. Beginning with Worth, Jenks, and Paff, and continuing through faithful souls like Anna Chambers and countless others whose names we have forgotten but whose works God remembers, the same witness continues.

And now it falls to us.

One day, perhaps a hundred years from now, someone else may wander through this church or walk through this cemetery and remember us. The question is not whether our names will be remembered. The question is whether our faithfulness will have left behind a parish where the Gospel is still preached, the sacraments are still celebrated, and sinners are still brought to the healing waters of baptism.

May those who come after us find that we, too, did not refrain our lips, but declared the righteousness of God in the great congregation

I close with a poem by George Herbert, aptly titled, The Church Floor. He wrote and, indeed, prayed:



Mark you the floor? that square and speckled stone,

Which looks so firm and strong,

Is Patience:

And th’ other black and grave, wherewith each one
Is checker’d all along,

Humility:

The gentle rising, which on either hand
Leads to the Choir above,

Is Confidence:

But the sweet cement, which in one sure band
Ties the whole frame, is Love

And Charity.

Hither sometimes Sin steals, and stains
The marble’s neat and curious veins:
But all is cleansed when the marble weeps.
Sometimes Death, puffing at the door,
Blows all the dust about the floor:
But while he thinks to spoil the room, he sweeps.
Blest be the Architect, whose art
Could build so strong in a weak

08/10/2026

🎒 Blessing of Backpacks & Behind the Scenes: Exploring Our Church
Join us Sunday, August 30th for a special Blessing of Backpacks at both services — a wonderful way to start the school year with prayer and encouragement!

Then, beginning that same day, we’re launching a new monthly program: “Behind the Scenes: Exploring Our Church.”
Come along after the 10 AM Mass on the last Sunday of each month to discover more about our church’s history, ministries, and community life.

We can’t wait to see you there! 🙏✨

08/09/2026

This weekend we hosted two liturgies from the 1662 and the 1789 Books of Common Prayer as well as hosting guests for tours of our historic building and grounds during Newtown’s America 250th celebration. We also distributed prayer shawls lovingly prepared for our recent high school graduates.