Sermon for Saturday, February 14, 2026 || Celebration of New Ministry || Numbers 11:16-17, 24-30; Psalm 146; Romans 12:1-18; John 15:9-16

Greetings from the other side of the country. My name is Adam Thomas, and I am the rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Mystic, Connecticut. Yes, that is the place made famous by the 1980s coming-of-age film Mystic Pizza. And yes, there really is a pizza place named that; it’s around the corner from my church. I am so glad to be here for this celebration with you for three reasons. First, I got to escape the unprecedented run of single digit temperatures in New England. Second, three of my best friends from different phases of my life all live here somehow, and I’ve gotten to visit everyone. And third, I get to speak with you this morning about your new partnership in ministry with a friend I met half a lifetime ago, the Rev. Bret Bowie Hays.

Now, this sermon is not going to devolve into a roast of Bret. I promise I’m going to talk about God and church in a minute. But just so you know why I’m the one preaching today – besides his family, I’m probably the person in this church who has known Bret the longest. We met on the first day of orientation at Virginia Theological Seminary way back in the halcyon days of the summer of 2005. We became fast friends, bonding over our love for pizza, theological discourse, and Star Trek. We spent many a night in the dorms together at VTS, him watching Star Trek and me falling asleep watching Star Trek. Bret was a groomsman in my wedding; he’s godfather to my son; and he is one of those friends you can call up and chat to for an hour when you’re driving to a meeting at the diocesan office. After priestly ministry in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Florida, he has arrived here in California as your next rector. And I am so excited about the new partnership in God’s mission you here at Trinity Episcopal Church and Bret have begun together.

As you continue getting to know one another at the outset of this new ministry, I invite you to embrace three words for your life together. May God grant you the grace to make your ministry together faithful, collaborative, and renewing.

The word ‘faithful’ is a beautiful word. Faithful. Full of faith. The idea of faithfulness includes several properties. At its foundation faithfulness has to do with our personal and communal relationships with God. We believe that God is the Faithful One, the One who always fulfills God’s promises, the One who has spoken and continues to speak Creation into being since the beginning. Our ability to be faithful is a symptom of God’s faithfulness. Indeed, throughout Paul’s letters, Paul uses a curiously ambiguous phrase over and over again. The phrase could translate as “faith in Jesus Christ” or the “faith of Jesus Christ.” Thankfully, we don’t have to choose. This ambiguity is part of the expansive both/and nature of God. We have faith in Jesus because of the surpassing faithfulness of Jesus.

The faith that we exercise manifests most often in both our trust in God and in our own trustworthiness. Faith is the energy of fidelity, the binding fibers of all healthy relationships. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus has just told his disciples: “I am the vine, you are the branches.” As the vine, Jesus connects us to one another through his abiding faithfulness. This word – ‘abide’ – is a special word in the Gospel according to John. Across the Gospel, Jesus “abides” again and again with people, and he invites them to abide with him.

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”

The act of abiding is the result of living faithfully. Faith is not something you have. Faith is something you do. Faith is the energy that sustains relationships in challenging times, the fuel to stick-with-it through thick and thin, and the impulse to keep reaching out to one another and to God during the hardest of days. As you celebrate your new ministry together, remember to be faithful to God and to one another. Such faithfulness will deepen your relationships beyond the mere transactional. Nourish one another with God’s abiding love, and your relationships will transform you, as you continue to grow into the people God made you to be.

Along with faithful, I invite you to see your new ministry together as collaborative. You and Father Bret are partners in mission, laborers together in God’s vineyard. Bret is here to help empower, encourage, and equip you for ministry, not to take away your responsibilities and do everything himself. He is a faithful leader whose mission is to raise up faithful leaders. You fulfill this mission collaboratively, as each of you discerns, as Frederick Buechner said, where your deep gladness intersects with the world’s deep hunger. Then, with God’s help, you continue your discernment collectively, sharing how your deep gladnesses overlap. Together, you look at the deep hunger of your local community and the wider world, and you propel your collective missional gladness towards those hungers.

This collaborative nature of ministry goes all the way back to Moses, as we heard in the reading from the book of Numbers. Moses needs help administering the mobile nation of Israel, which had become a military enterprise 600,000 soldiers strong, along with women, children, and elders. Moses could not adjudicate every issue across the whole nation. He needed help, so God commands him to gather seventy elders, upon whom God shares some of God’s spirit. Two of the elders, Eldad and Medad, oversleep and miss the meeting. But the spirit still falls upon them in the camp! The people are aghast, Joshua chief among them. But Moses recognizes that God’s Spirit cannot be contained and proclaims a great wish: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”

We believe that God has done just that. God’s Spirit fell upon the apostles on the Day of Pentecost, empowering them in their mission to spread the Gospel. God’s Spirit poured out upon Cornelius and his companions – Gentiles! – when they heard Peter preach the word. Through our Baptism, we are sealed by that same Holy Spirit and commissioned to live out the promises of our Baptismal Covenant. We do this collaboratively, not responding “I will,” but responding “We will, with God’s help.” St. Paul makes the collaborative nature of ministry explicit in today’s reading from the letter to the church in Rome:

“For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.”

I invite each of you to pray with this list and discern how God is calling you into collaborative ministry with Father Bret. God knows he can’t do it all. And that’s okay, for you also have the Spirit of God upon you.

And finally, along with faithful and collaborative, I invite you to make your ministry together one of constant renewal. Yes, today we are celebrating the beginning of a new ministry. At the same time, we worship a God who continues making all things new. As you grow closer in faith and collaboration, ensure that your worship remains enlivening, your community nourishing, and your mission responsive to the ever-changing needs of the world. Stagnancy is the enemy of worship. Tradition can be honored without being deified. And new opportunities can find themselves hand in hand with ancient rites. Remain open to how God might be moving in new ways in the life of this wonderful church.

As you practice this intentional openness, I urge you to keep today’s psalm in your mind, for it compels us to respond in our own current context to the psalmist’s venerable words:

“Happy are they who have the God of Jacob for their help!
whose hope is in the Lord their God…
Who gives justice to those who are oppressed,
and food to those who hunger.
The Lord sets the prisoners free; the Lord opens the eyes of the blind; *
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
The Lord loves the righteous; the Lord cares for the stranger;
he sustains the orphan and widow…”

These are the priorities of God’s mission, repeated time and time again through the Hebrew Scriptures. They remain the priorities of God’s mission today. Practice both charity and justice right here in your own community. Be agile in your response to the needs of the world. Protect the rights of others. As Paul says, “Let love be genuine; hate what is evil; hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection.”

I’ll close today with this mutual affection. Mutuality is the value that powers partnership. You and Father Bret are entering into a mutual relationship that, with God’s help, will remain faithful, collaborative, and renewing. May God bless you with abiding love, the pouring out of God’s Spirit, and the compassion, creativity, and courage to partner together in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation.