Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

 It has been a while, but I remember the days of hearing “Dad?” “Dad?” “Mom?” “Mommmm?” as my children wanted or needed attention. All day long. You love them, but you can’t complete a thought because they keep calling your name. Reading the Old Testament story of Samuel was a reminder of those days, just with the roles reversed. God keeps calling Samuel without saying what God wanted. Who said that there isn’t humor in scripture? God calls Samuel by name, three times in the night, and Samuel gets up each time and goes to Eli, thinking it was he who called. Samuel would have naturally thought that Eli was calling, because Samuel had not yet learned to listen for God’s voice, even though he slept in the temple. Eli was the chief priest in that temple at Shiloh and a mentor to Samuel, but he was preoccupied with his sons, also priests in the temple. His sons abused the people who came to make sacrifices, and took the offerings of meat for themselves to eat, instead of treating them w...

Sermon, Christmas II, 2020 Luke 2:41-52 St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer. Merry Christmas to you on this, the 10th day of Christmas. We are getting close to Epiphany, which is on Wednesday, and as I mentioned last Sunday, is when the incarnation of God in Jesus was recognized and celebrated by three Wise Men from the East. They saw a star in the sky and realized that it meant something special, that it was a sign to them. This is how we typically think of an epiphany and are most familiar with the story and what it means. In a broader view, an epiphany is the revelation of something that we previously didn’t know, or were unaware of. We’ve all had that experience of learning something new, sometimes something that seemed obvious in hindsight but is new and fresh, and our mind races forward to reinterpret what we know or have experienced with this new knowledge. I had an ...