Category: Sermons

I Will Give You Rest

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Sermon for Sunday, July 9, 2023 || Proper 9A || Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

This is a sermon about rest. The concept of rest is on my mind because one week from today, after church services, lemonade on the lawn, and premarital counseling, I will be on vacation for three weeks. I will be able to rest in a way that I’m unable to do for the bulk of the year. While I will miss you all, I am really looking forward to my vacation. At the same time, thinking of vacation as the only time to rest is not a great way to maintain a healthy, balanced life. God built rest into the very fabric of creation, and everyone (me more than most) can learn from creation’s example.

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Not Running

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Sermon for Sunday, July 2, 2023 || Proper 8A || Genesis 22:1-14

I looked at my sermon archive, and I haven’t preached on the story of Abraham and Isaac since my first year at St. Mark’s. This story is among the strangest and most uncomfortable stories in the Bible. It’s easy to ignore this story, to skip over it, or trim it from the Bible because it doesn’t seem to fit our vision of God. But the truth of the matter is that this story is there; every Bible includes Genesis Chapter 22. So the question for us is how do we encounter this story that makes us recoil and squirm in our seats.

Well, I don’t want you to set your expectations too high about this sermon, because there’s a good chance that by the time I’m done talking this morning, you’ll still be recoiling and squirming in your seats. But I have to say – nine years ago, when I first attempted to preach about this passage, I found myself reading and re-reading it and discovering some beautiful truth in the midst of the disturbing story.

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The Distortion of Sin

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, June 25, 2023 || Proper 7A || Romans 6:1b-11

Every once in a while, I like to do what I call “nuts and bolts” sermons. These are teaching sermons about a particular element of our lives of faith, and today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans gives me the opportunity today to talk about a word we use a lot in the church, a word that I don’t think we understand very well. That word is “sin.”

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Laugh Tracking (Updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, June 18, 2023 || Proper 6A || Genesis 18:1-15; 21:1-7

Going to California this past week for my grandmother’s long-awaited funeral kept me from having as much time to write a sermon as I normally have. So I went back into my archives and guess what? The very first sermon I preached as an ordained priest fifteen years ago was for this particular Sunday. So I thought I’d bring it out of mothballs, dust it off, and share an updated version with you. The sermon is about laughter.

Now, when I was a little kid, I often told jokes that only made sense to me. My parents encouraged me to finish my jokes like Fozzie Bear, the hapless stand-up comic of the Muppets (you know, “Wocka, wocka!”). This told them it was time to laugh. My sense of humor and comic timing didn’t come into their own until my late teens.  So maybe that’s why I never employ the old sermon technique of beginning with a joke. I used to get laughs by making oblique references to my age, but I’m forty now, so I don’t think that’ll work anymore. Let’s try: “Back when I was born during the Reagan administration…”)

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Who Are You Looking For?

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Friday, April 7, 2023 || Good Friday || Passion According to John

I know this is way out of sequence, but I forgot to post my Good Friday sermon back in April, and since we did not have a normal sermon for Trinity Sunday yesterday, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share what I said on Good Friday.

The Passion narrative we just heard can be quite overwhelming. It is by far and away the longest reading we listen to all year, and there’s a lot going on. So instead of talking about the entire Passion narrative, each year I like to focus on one little moment of it that speaks to the whole story. On this Good Friday, that moment happens right at the beginning of the story, so cast your minds back about ten minutes to the garden where Jesus is arrested.

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The Wind Blows Where It Chooses

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Sermon for Sunday, May 28, 2023 || Pentecost A || Number 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

At the end of last Sunday’s sermon, I asked this question: “Where do you see God’s presence today?” We talked about recognizing the presence of God in big things like sunsets and star-strewn skies and little things like the veins of a leaf and our breath. Today, I’d like to follow up last week’s sermon with a very simple concept that I’m then going to talk about for ten minutes. The simple concept is this: God’s presence is everywhere, so we must be careful not to limit the places where we look for that presence.

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Alabanza

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Sermon for Sunday, May 21, 2023 || Easter 7A || John 17:1-11

A lot of the songs we sing in church talk about God’s glory. And just in case our hymn selections don’t mention God’s glory on a particular Sunday, every service begins with a song we call The Gloria: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God’s people on earth.” With these words we echo the angels singing to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth. Glory to God…we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.

Today we’re going to talk about glorifying God. This will be a nice, tidy three-point sermon: (1) why we glorify God, (2) how Jesus glorifies God, and (3) how we glorify God. And we’ll throw in some lyrics by Lin-Manual Miranda at the end for good measure. Sound good? OK, let’s go.

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The Spirit of Truth

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Sermon for Sunday, May 14, 2023 || Easter 6B || John 14:15-21

This sermon is about truth and lies. Specifically, this sermon is about the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves and the truth that helps us confront those lies. Every one of us constructs and reconstructs our personal narratives again and again. And the closer we come to the truth of those narratives, the more we will live authentically, resonating with the Spirit of Truth that is within us.

Jesus uses this term, “Spirit of truth,” in today’s Gospel lesson. He says, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know [the Spirit], because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”

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Stephen the Red Shirt

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, May 7, 2023 || Easter 5A || Acts 7:55-60

The folks who put together our schedule of Bible readings did something really weird today. In our first lesson, they gave us the very end of the story about Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian faith. But they skipped everything about him leading up to his execution. So for the sermon today, I’m going to go back and talk through his story because the way it is written gives us a few things to think about.

But first – Star Trek.

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Even the Good One

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Sermon for Sunday, April 30, 2023 || Easter 4A || Psalm 23; John 10:1-10

This sermon is about God remaining faithful even when tragedy or pain or grief keep us from acting out our faith. Before I start, though, I need to share a trigger warning. I will be briefly talking about the death of a child.

Between March 2020 and May 2021, this building was closed to the public due to the pandemic restrictions. For fourteen long months, we gathered together via Zoom and YouTube, worshiping together in love any way we could as we supported one another through the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. During those services of Morning Prayer, I shared with you 27 of the songs I’ve written over the course of my life. That’s every song I’ve ever written (that’s fit for people to listen to). Well, every song but one. There’s one particular song of mine that I deliberately did not sing during those fearful months because I didn’t think I’d be able to get through it. The song is raw and it does not end on a particularly joyful note. But I think now the time is finally right to sing this song for you.

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