Author: Adam Thomas

The Bedtime Story (Updated)

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Sermon for Tuesday, December 24, 2024 || Christmas Eve || Luke 2:1-20

Imagine with me a quiet moment when Jesus’ mother Mary and Mary Magdalene have gone for a walk together by the Sea of Galilee. The Ascension has come and gone, and they are missing Jesus. So Mary Magdalene asks his mother to tell her a story from Jesus’ childhood. Mary ponders for a moment and then begins:

As a boy, Jesus had trouble falling asleep. He wasn’t afraid of the dark or of monsters under his bed. He just had so much energy. Even a day full of running up hills and building rock forts couldn’t tire him out. When he couldn’t sleep, I would sing him a lullaby and run my fingers through his hair. Sometimes, after a few notes, he’d say, “Not tonight, Mama. Tell me the story instead.” The story. I was always glad when he asked me to tell him how he was born because, when the story remained silent in my heart, it always threatened to transform into a dream and vanish.

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The Christmas Pageant (Taylor’s Version)

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I wrote the dialogue and lyrics for this new Christmas Pageant, which kids from my church performed yesterday on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It was a blast! (And, obviously, despite the assertion in the first paragraph, the real Taylor didn’t help us – but her music did.) Here’s the video of the pageant, followed by the script.

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Decency

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Sermon for Sunday, December 15, 2024 || Advent 3C || Luke 3:7-18

On June 9, 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy sat in a hearing room and attacked a young lawyer named Fred Fisher for communist sympathies. Fisher was a member of Joe Welch’s law firm, and Welch did not take kindly to McCarthy bringing up Fisher, considering Welch had a deal with McCarthy’s own lawyer, Roy Cohn, that neither Fisher’s past nor Cohn’s own dubious history of missing the Korean War draft would be brought up at the hearing. But McCarthy could not help himself. And so Joe Welch spoke words that have gone down in history, thanks both to their televised nature and their puncturing of McCarthy’s indestructible aura. “Have you no sense of decency?” Welch asked. “At long last have you left no sense of decency?”

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The Dawn from on High

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Sermon for Sunday, December 8, 2024 || Advent 2C || The Song of Zechariah (Luke 1:68-79)

There’s a wonderful scene in the movie The Two Towers, which is the middle film of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I know I talk a lot about Star Wars in sermons, but my love for The Lord of the Rings is even greater than my love for Star Wars. So stick with me while I describe the scene. The people of Edoras have left their homes to take shelter in the great bastion known as Helm’s Deep. A few days before the flight to the supposedly impregnable fortress, the wizard Gandalf raced out of Edoras on his majestic steed Shadowfax in order to round up the cavalry spread across the country of Rohan. “Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day,” Gandalf told Aragorn. “At dawn, look to the east.”

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Ah! Bright Wings

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Sermon for Sunday, November 24, 2024 || Reign of Christ B || John 18:33-37

Today, on the last Sunday of the church year, we celebrate the Reign of Christ. We celebrate the universal scope of God’s presence breathing life and meaning throughout creation. We celebrate that the true God is always bigger than our cramped understandings of God. And we do more than celebrate today. On this day, we renew our conviction to participate in the Reign of Christ as we pray for God’s reign to be present on earth as it is in heaven.

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Love and Good Deeds

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Sermon for Sunday, November 17, 2024 || Proper 28B || Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25

Every night at dinner at my house, my family shares a simple ritual before we say grace. We go around the table and say where we saw kindness that day. When Leah and I take our turns, our kindness is often that the other person made dinner. Many times, mine also come from people at this church whose kindness ripples out in a multitude of ways. Every kindness we share at dinner stems from a small, simple act, and each alone doesn’t seem like it amounts to much. But when we collect the kindnesses together, we add them, like stitches, to a great tapestry of goodness and love.

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The Future

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Sermon for Sunday, November 10, 2024 || Proper 27B || The Book of Ruth

Today, I am going to begin where last Sunday’s sermon finished, with the future. I ended by saying, “And Jesus is here, walking with us into the future where God is already, always, and eternally present.” For some of us, that future looks bleaker than it did a week ago. For others, that future looks brighter. But no matter our place on the ideological spectrum, none of us knows what the future holds. And such unknowing is prime fodder for anxiety.

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God is Present

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Sermon for Sunday, November 3, 2024 || All Saints B || John 11:32-44

Here we are. November 3, 2024, the day we celebrate all the saints. We are two days before a momentous election that pits vastly different visions of this country against each other. The world is mired in the midst of multiple ongoing wars in which so many innocent people have died. We’re grappling with increasingly common and destructive natural disasters due to climate change. And on a personal level we are contending with issues ranging from physical and mental health to addictions to economic hardship to interpersonal relationships. Anxiety and stress are high. Time is fleeting. The future approaches, and we have no idea what it will hold. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been holding tension in my shoulders for so long that I don’t remember what it feels like to be relaxed.

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Listening Well

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Sermon for Sunday, October 27, 2024 || Proper 25B || Mark 10:46-52

This sermon is about the art of listening, specifically about how Jesus listens and how we can emulate his practice. Our ability to listen impacts every relationship we have: our spouses and families, our friends and neighbors, our church and community members, our political and ideological opponents, and our partners in God’s mission.

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New Book: “How to End Christian Nationalism”

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Recently, I was given the opportunity to be part of the team of folks helping to launch Amanda Tyler’s book How to End Christian Nationalism. After pre-ordering the book, the launch team sent me an uncorrected proof PDF of the text to read ahead of the book’s launch. I finished it just in time to get this reflection out ahead of the official release date, tomorrow, October 22nd. I was so glad to read this book, written by the lead organizer of Christians Against Christian Nationalism, because of Amanda Tyler’s long personal history with the issue, as well as her connections with so many others who she interviewed for the book.

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