Category: Worship

The Imposition of Ashes

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Sermon for Wednesday, March 5, 2025 || Ash Wednesday || 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

In just a few minutes we will participate in a ritual that we do exactly once a year. On Ash Wednesday, we come to the altar rail, kneel like we do for Holy Communion, and receive the “imposition of ashes.” I will scrape two lines of soot on your foreheads, making the sign of the cross. And I will say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Admittedly, this is a strange ritual, but its weirdness gives it power. Today’s service is one of the more memorable liturgies of the church year specifically because the imposition of ashes is so strange and potentially off-putting.

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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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Sabbatical Retrospective, Year 2023: The Funeral Homily

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During my sabbatical, I’m not writing new sermons, so on Mondays I am choosing one post from every year of WheretheWind.com to highlight. In 2023, my church was in the midst of an unprecedented number of deaths and funerals in the parish. This sermon was a response to that reality and is now one of the most often viewed posts on this website.

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Sabbatical Retrospective, Year 2010: The Pews in the North Transept, A Remembrance

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During my sabbatical, I’m not writing new sermons, so on Mondays I am choosing one post from every year of WheretheWind.com to highlight. In October of 2010, the historic chapel at my seminary burned down. I wrote this reflection about my experience in that awkward, beautiful building.

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2023 Christmas Pageant: Part of God’s Story

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This pageant takes the form of a bedtime picture book being read to a roomful of children. The story is the traditional Nativity story, but with one problem: the characters keep forgetting to appear! So the storyteller recruits the children to be part of the story God is telling. In the end, the whole assembly is invited to be part of God’s story.

In the beginning, God had a story to tell: the greatest story ever told, the story of Creation. And God began that story with four simple words: “Let there be light.” Everything God created was a character in the story: birds and bugs, land and lizards, fish and flowers, mammals and the moon. For untold generations, God’s story of Creation grew in the telling until a new group of characters entered the tale, characters who somehow knew the story was being told.

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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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The Crowd’s Four Lines

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Sermon for Sunday, April 2, 2023 || Palm/Passion Sunday A || Matthew 26:36 – 27:56

At the end of today’s service, we will present the Passion Gospel, the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, and death. We will read it like a play, with myself and others taking on the various parts. One of the parts is the crowd, and that’s where you come in. If you follow along in your program, you will notice about two-thirds of the way through the reading that you, the members of the congregation, are playing the part of the crowd. You have four lines, and I’d like to spend a few minutes during this short sermon to talk through those four lines in order to prepare you to say them.

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The Lens of Love

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Wednesday, February 22, 2023 || Ash Wednesday

I’ve been preaching a lot lately about belovedness: the Beloved Community, God calling Jesus the “Beloved,” God calling us “Beloved” because we, too, are children of God. This idea of belovedness has stuck to my heart like glue, and so I can’t imagine it will leave my preaching any time soon. And that’s because belovedness is not just an idea, but a lens – a lens through which we see the world.

And as I turn this lens of love onto today’s service of Ash Wednesday, I realize just how tender this service is. I know that sounds strange. “Isn’t this service all about our sinfulness and our transience?” you might think. “Aren’t we preparing for a Lenten season of self-denial and repentance? How could this service possibly be tender?”

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New Ministry

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This weekend, I preached at the Celebration of New Ministry for a friend and colleague instead of preaching at St. Mark’s. Here is the sermon I offered at the service on Saturday.

I’m so glad to be back at St. Ann’s worshiping with you today. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Adam Thomas. I’m the pastor of St. Mark’s Church in Mystic, and I was the priest-in-charge consultant here at St. Ann’s while you all were discerning the evolving nature of the parish’s relationship with the Rev. Anita Schell. That process began way back in pre-pandemic days of 2019 and continued doggedly through the scary and interminable months of the worst of the pandemic. And now here we are – four years on from Anita’s arrival – celebrating a new ministry.

If that sounds strange to you – celebrating a new ministry after the priest has been here longer than many priest-parish relationships last in the first place – if that sounds strange to you, then believe me, I’m right there with you. I had to puzzle out what I thought about it in order to write this sermon. And what I realized is that today we have the opportunity to celebrate two seemingly opposite realities, that, in the end, are both ways that we encounter God’s movement in this world. Our God is a both/and kind of God, and today we celebrate a both/and reality here at St. Ann’s.

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The Funeral Homily

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Sermon for Sunday, January 29, 2023 || Epiphany 4A

On this day of our Annual Meeting, I’d like to spend this sermon time fulfilling a request from a number of people over the last few months. Today, I am going to share with you some of the elements of the funeral homilies I have preached over the last year. Because funerals are mostly attended by family and close friends, very few of the members of our church have heard me preach at a funeral. And yet we are all grieving in one way or another the deaths of so many of our church family – 23 of whom we have buried in the last year. A funeral homily is my chance to set the life (and new life) of the person who died within the greater context of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So today, on this day of our annual gathering, we are going to remember those who have died, and I am going to share with you some thoughts on heaven and the eternal love of God.

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