Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

 Epiphany III Texts: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10 , 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a , Luke 4:14-21 I have a confession to make. In Eucharistic Prayer A, when we recite the Holy Mystery “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,” I sometimes say “Christ has come again” and it is because of Paul’s metaphor of faithful Christians making up and being the body of Christ in the reading this morning. It is a wonderful and accurate metaphor because we become the Body of Christ when we gather together, as a community to worship, and as a community that serves the needs of people in the city. We are fed as a community, a body, at the altar with the sacraments of bread and wine to refresh and renew us spiritually, so that we can continue to be the Body in the world. When we leave at the end of the service, we don’t stop being the body. We spread out, still as a community of believers, connected by faith, to be the eyes, ears, hands, and feet of Jesus, still doing his work in the world. ...

 Christmas II, 2022 sermon delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville KY Text: Jeremiah 31:7-14 If you take the time to read the whole book of Jeremiah, you’ll find that it is depressing. Jeremiah was not a happy person. He was not someone you would want to invite to a party. He wrote pages and pages of criticism and in fact, his writing left such an impression that there’s a term for a long list of woes and complaints: a jeremiad. Yet, in the middle of this really depressing book of gloom and doom are three chapters expressing hope and joy, and our Old Testament reading this morning comes from one of those chapters. Those three chapters are called the Book of Comfort because they provide a sense of comfort and relief from the negative story and laments of the previous chapters. After hearing Jeremiah recount how God is punishing Israel for the sins of its inhabitants, we hear about a future where people are happy, and celebrating the goodness of grain and wine and oil, a...