God’s Providence

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Sermon for Sunday, February 11, 2024 || Last Epiphany B || Mark 9:2-9

I’ve noticed over the years that one of the enduring themes of my sermons has to do with perspective, with the manner in which we perceive our place in God’s creation. This is going to be one of those sermons.

The only way we perceive the world is from the standpoint of our own bodies. When I look up at a blue sky, I can’t be sure that I’m seeing the exact same shade of blue that you see because we have different configurations of all the little anatomical bits that make up our eyes. Beyond vision, think of a tall staircase rising before you. Someone with good, young knees might think nothing of climbing those stairs. But someone else with older, creakier knees might look for an elevator. 

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The Spiral

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Sermon for Sunday, February 4, 2024 || Epiphany 5B || Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39

A single, solitary verb in today’s Gospel reading got stuck in my mind this week, and this entire sermon has spun out from this one verb. It’s a sermon about the spiritual life, a sermon about how the spiritual life is not walked in a straight line, but in a spiral. 

I’ll get to this special verb in a minute, but first let’s talk about Godly Play, this beautiful way we introduce the life and language of faith to the children of this church. Rather than teaching didactic lessons, Godly Play shares stories. The children sit in a circle with the storyteller and pay attention to the words of the story; the motions; the physical elements like sand, felt, and wooden figures; and even the silence in the midst of the story. After the story is finished, the adult mentor leads the children in a round of wondering, asking open-ended questions that purposefully do not have single correct answers in order to invite the children to put themselves into the story.

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Ten Years of Thanksgiving

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Sermon for Sunday, January 28, 2024 || Epiphany 4B || Psalm 111

My heart is full this morning, my friends. My heart is full of thanksgiving for God’s presence in the midst of this assembly. Today is our tenth annual meeting together. Ten years. Sometimes I can hardly believe it has been that long. Then I look at my children and remember they were in utero ten years ago, and now they can reach the cups in the upper kitchen cabinet. On a ten-year anniversary such as this, the first verse of today’s psalm speaks to me: “Hallelujah! I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, in the congregation.”

So that’s what I’m going to do this morning. I’m going to give thanks to God with my whole heart in the midst of the congregation. As I share with you stories from the last ten years that make me thankful, I invite you to remember your own way into thanksgiving. For thanksgiving is a posture for generous living, an attitude of abundance that leads us to notice God’s presence everywhere we look.

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Tarshish and Nineveh

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Sermon for Sunday, January 21, 2024 || Epiphany 3B || Jonah 3:1-5, 10

In last week’s sermon, we talked about discerning God’s overarching call in our lives, about looking within ourselves for the Holy Spirit’s flame illuminating what brings us most fully alive. Today’s sermon is an extension of last week’s, but today, instead of talking about God’s overarching call, we’re going to talk about God’s movement through our daily walks. We’re going to talk about God inviting us and shaping us into the truest versions of ourselves. And to enter this discussion we’re going to start with the prophet Jonah.

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A Deep Breath (updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, January 14, 2024 || Epiphany 2B || 1 Samuel 3:1-10

Today, I’d like to tell you an Epiphany story. An epiphany is a revelation of a deep truth or a recognition of the holy in one’s midst. We tend to think that epiphanies happen suddenly – like lightning striking – but, usually, what we think of as epiphanies are the shining culmination of longer treks towards discovery. The story I’m going to tell is one of those epiphany stories. It’s a story about me, but, by the time I get to the end of it, I hope you will see that it’s also a story about you. This is the story about how God called me to be a priest.

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Washing with the Holy Spirit

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Sermon for Sunday, January 7, 2024 || Epiphany 1B || Genesis 1:1-5; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

Every year on the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we read the story of Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan. Jesus comes up out of the water after John dunks him in the river, and Jesus feels the presence of the Holy Spirit alighting on him like a dove. Our other two readings today speak of the Spirit as well. In the reading from Genesis, a “wind from God” sweeps over the face of the waters at the beginning of creation. In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul baptizes a dozen folks, and they discover the Holy Spirit’s power granting them spiritual gifts. In the Gospel, John the Baptist speaks of the difference between his baptizing with water and the one coming after him baptizing with the Holy Spirit.

That’s the line that caught me this week: Jesus baptizing with the Holy Spirit. The word “baptize” is the Greek word that means “to wash.” It makes total sense to be washed with water. But what does it mean to be washed with the Holy Spirit?

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Daunting Tasks

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Sermon for Sunday, December 24, 2023 || Advent 4B || Luke 1:26-38

(I was off yesterday, so no sermon from December 31st, but I preached two different sermons on December 24th. Last Monday, I posted the Christmas Eve sermon. Here’s the one for the Fourth Sunday of Advent.)

The reading we just heard from the Gospel According to Luke is one of my absolute favorite passages in the Gospel. I find the character of Mary so utterly compelling, so much a model for our inspiration. She only shows up a handful of times in the story, so let’s take this opportunity today to talk about Mary and about how her interaction with Gabriel sheds light on our lives.

The church calls the event of Gabriel coming to Mary the “Annunciation,” with a Capital A. This event gets its own feast day on March 25th (conveniently, exactly nine months before Christmas). Few events in the Bible have been painted more often by artists than the Annunciation. If I were laying out the story of the Gospel like a novel, then the Annunciation would be the Inciting Incident of the book because Mary’s “Yes” at the end of the passage sets in motion the rest of the events of the Gospel.

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The Prince of Peace

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Sermon for Sunday, December 24, 2023 || Christmas Eve || Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20

I’ve been taking a lot of deep breaths lately. Leah showed me this special way to breathe that she learned in her nursing classes. You breathe in through your nose, pause, and then keep breathing in. Hold for a moment, then exhale slower than you inhaled. Let’s try it together. In, then in again, hold, exhale slowly. You might notice that the pause on the inhale enables you to fill your lungs more fully, to expand your chest, to feel extra spacious inside. I’ve been practicing this type of breathing in my more anxious moments lately and it has helped me embrace the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.

That’s what I’d like to talk about tonight – God’s peace, which we hear about from the Prophet Isaiah and the angels singing to the terrified shepherds. In our world, which is constantly torn apart by war and oppression and environmental cataclysm, our embrace of God’s peace stands as a radical act of witness against all the death-dealing ways of the world.

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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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Winning Christmas??

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment

In the Gospel, Jesus mentions that we can tell when summer is coming by the budding of the fig tree. He recognizes that we’re pretty good at figuring out what’s ahead. Arthritic knees feel the storm before it strikes. “We’ve got to talk” means Friday’s dinner date is off. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning. If we humans are paying attention (even just a little bit), not much can slip by us.

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