Category: Sermons

77 Times

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, September 17, 2023 || Proper 19A || Matthew 18:21-35

This sermon is about forgiveness. And we enter into this discussion, as we have several times recently, through the experience of Saint Peter. I’ve been talking a lot about Peter over the last few months, and that’s because he appears more in the Gospel than any other character besides Jesus. In Matthew’s account of the Gospel, which we’ve been reading this year, Peter is even more prevalent. Peter is something of the spokesperson for the disciples; he doesn’t seem to have a filter of any kind. He has no problem asking Jesus questions or answering Jesus’ questions, which he always seems to do with gut responses.

In today’s Gospel reading, Peter has just heard Jesus talk about what to do when there is conflict among the faithful. And now Peter wants to pin down how many times he has to forgive someone. Knowing that Jesus is the generous sort, Peter shoots high. Seven times. Seems a bit excessive, but still in the ballpark of reasonable. And it’s a nice number that, in Peter’s culture, evoked a sense of completion.

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In My Name (updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, September 10, 2023 || Proper 18A || Matthew 18:15-20

This morning I’d like to talk about one of the reasons we share Holy Communion during our Sunday worship services. But first, I’m going to talk about the movie Shakespeare in Love for about three minutes.

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I Will Be With You

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Sermon for Sunday, September 3, 2023 || Proper 17A || Exodus 3:1-15

After such a heady and confusing sermon last Sunday, I thought today would be a good time for something completely different. About twice a year, I preach from the perspective of a character in the scripture. Today, I am going to be Moses. Please imagine with me Moses near the end of his life, talking to his protege Joshua, who is fretting about taking on the role of leader upon Moses’s death.

“I will be with you.” That’s what God promised me all those years ago. “I will be with you.” The memory is as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. God spoke to me, called me to my life’s work, and made me that singular promise: “I will be with you.”

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What We Mean When We Say “God”

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, August 27, 2023 || Proper 16A || Matthew 16:13-20

I want to start today’s sermon off with a preemptive apology. I’m pretty sure it’s too early in the morning and too hot in here for the amount of heavy thinking I’m about to ask you to do. But I hope you will forgive me for the possible confusion I am about to place in your brains. This confusion has to do with what we mean when we say the word: “God.”

There are two big challenges that we must confront when we talk about what we mean when we say “God.” First, God, as a concept, is too big for us to define in a way that does not limit that which is, by definition, limitless. And second, we can only speak about God from our own perspective, which is narrowed by our particular identities and socialization. There is no way to speak about God without speaking from our collective stockpile of metaphors and stories.

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Mini-Sermons: “Lectionary Teaching” and “Irrevocable”

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Sermon for Sunday, August 20, 2023 || Proper 15A || Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

This morning’s sermon is really two mini sermons stuck together – the first is a teaching about the way we read the Bible in church and the second is a look at today’s lesson from Paul’s Letter to the Romans. They teach you in seminary only to preach about one thing per Sunday, but I’m breaking that rule today because these two things fit together pretty well.

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Right Here

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments
Sermon for Sunday, August 13, 2023 || Proper 14A || Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

Out of all the characters in the Gospel, Peter has got to be the most relatable. At various points in the story, Peter is impetuous and confused and terrified and insightful and ignorant and, in today’s story, waterlogged. Across the narrative, Peter rarely comes off as a hero. I’ve always found Peter’s characterization fascinating because Peter was one of the most powerful people in the early church. If he had wanted to, he could have rewritten his own history to make himself appear more heroic. But he didn’t. He let the record stand, warts and all. This most powerful person in the early church shows up in the story of the Gospel as a regular guy, who’s stumbling around trying to follow Jesus, just like the rest of us.

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Scattering Seeds

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Sermon for Sunday, July 16, 2023 || Proper 10A || Matthew 13:1-19, 18-23

Jesus says some pretty strange stuff in the Gospel. At least this stuff is strange when we try to fit it into the way the world is instead of allowing these strange things to help us imagine a better world, a new world made more beautiful by the love, peace, and justice of God.

We try to ignore the strangeness because it’s Jesus saying these things, and we’ve had two thousand years to get used to them. But if we cast ourselves back into the sandals of those folks piled on the shore beside the sea, those folks listening to this weird, yet charismatic and compelling itinerant preacher, we hear the strangeness anew. And we realize that Jesus speaks like this because he’s trying to get people to shift their perspective, to see that new, more beautiful world.

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I Will Give You Rest

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
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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