Words of the Mouth and Meditations of the Heart

 Sermon for Christmas I, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: John 1:1-18 On Christmas Day, I realized that I was responsible for today’s sermon. This shouldn’t have been a surprise because I make the sermon schedule, but so much else was going on that it slipped from my attention. That's my story. We just heard the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke four or five days ago on Christmas Day and Christmas Eve, and it is very familiar to us. We have Luke to thank for some of the details that we see everywhere in images, movies, and crêches because it tells us where Jesus came from. There is another version of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of Matthew that focuses on Joseph resolving the problem of being only engaged to Mary, who was pregnant. It has the three wise men visiting from the East, but not the manger scene. It tells a different story than Luke, and presents Jesus’ identity from a different perspective. The Gospel of Mark starts with Joh...

Sermon for Advent IV, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 1:39-45 , Hebrews 10:5-10 There is nothing like a shared experience with someone to understand what you’re going through, and where that experience may take you. Deacon Jan Scholtz at St. Matthews and I went through the Diocesan School of Ministry in the same class, learning the same things and sharing with each other what we learned. There was one significant difference between us, though: I had started the official diaconal discernment process with the Diocese, and Jan had said several times that she wasn’t interested in the diaconate. Her call and discernment came a couple of years later, and we met again here where she performed her internship as I was preparing for ordination. What she was going through at that time was still fresh in my mind, and I shared with her what had been next for me that she would experience. We both saw our discernment happening in the other person. Jan’s a...

Sermon for the first Sunday in Advent, 2024, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 21:25-36 Welcome to the new Church year, year C for scripture reading, where we will read the Gospel of Luke for most of it. We gather on the First Sunday of Advent, starting the Christmas season with a rather un-Adventish, un-Christmassy reading. Foreboding and fainting and distress do not sound like the cheer or the anticipation we experience in the Christmas season, and this reading sounds a bit like the doom-and-gloom passage we heard in Mark two weeks ago . It is also reminiscent of something I read recently , that goes like this: “I do not wish to force any one to believe as I do; neither will I permit anyone to deny me the right to believe that the last day is near at hand. These words and signs of Christ compel me to believe that such is the case. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in ...