Beyond Fear

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Sermon for Sunday, December 22, 2019 || Advent 4A || Matthew 1:18-25

At the end of this sermon, I’m going to talk about the movie Frozen II. But first let’s talk about fear. Whenever an angel of the Lord appears in Holy Scripture, the angel always begins the message for the same four words: “Do not be afraid.” Today’s Gospel lesson is no exception. Mary’s fiancé Joseph has resolved to “dismiss her quietly” because of her pregnancy, but he takes one more night to sleep on the decision. During that night, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream and says, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. My question is: Why would Joseph be afraid to do this? I can think of many reasons for Joseph’s fear, and I want to talk about three of them this morning. We’ll dispense with the first two quickly because the third is where I really want us to focus.

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New Reality

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Sermon for Sunday, December 15, 2019 || Advent 3A || Matthew 11:2-11

You’re going to get sick of me saying this, but it has fascinated me for years, so I will say it again. Jesus almost never answers the questions people ask him. I know I started my sermon a few weeks ago with this same thought, but it’s so important for understanding how Jesus related to people in the Gospel. Jesus responds to questions, but he rarely answers them. When we take the time to compare his response to the thing the questioner was looking for, we see more clearly the path Jesus invites us to walk.

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Announcing Adam’s New Novel: The Islands of Shattered Glass

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A new novel of high fantasy and adventure from author Adam Thomas.

A million years of elven life
Will never rise with sun or moon,
Will never grant both bane and boon,
For lost they are in endless strife.

So says the “Dirge for Meilin’s Heirs,” the last poem written by night elf creativity before the War at Dusk consumed all art in the furnace of conflict. Decades of fighting between elven peoples have destroyed any hope for peace until a weapon of tremendous power reaches the field of battle. Each side believes the other deployed the mysterious weapon, which kills day elf and night elf alike, leading to the smallest chance for a cease-fire.

But even the smallest flame can keep the darkness at bay.With the elves locked in never-ending warfare, the Grasp flourishes. The criminal organization influences every business across the islands, and either the money rolls in or heads roll out. But when a small-time grifter runs afoul of the Grasp, she sets off a series of events that will bring together criminals, peacekeepers, warriors, and wide-eyed dreamers. When they collide, the War at Dusk will either end or go on forever, shattering anew the Islands of Shattered Glass.

 

Adam Thomas, writer of wherethewind.com, presents the third stand-alone novel set in Sularil, his own Tolkien-esque fantasy world. A lover of works of high fantasy ever since reading The Hobbit and Redwall way back in middle school, Adam brings his new offering to the genre with a story about the importance of coming together and letting go of the cycle of revenge. (For ages 14 and up.)

For a brief excerpt of The Islands of Shattered Glass, please click here.

Click here to purchase The Islands of Shattered Glass
on Amazon in paperback or kindle edition.

And check out Adam’s other fantasy offerings:
The Halfling Contagion
The Storm Curtain
The Shields of Sularil: Torniel, The Jeweled City, and True Sight

 

 

Change Your Hearts and Lives

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Sermon for Sunday, December 8, 2019 || Advent 2A || Matthew 3:1-12

About ten minutes into The Princess Bride, we meet Vizzini, Fezzek, and Inigo. The three brigands kidnap Princess Buttercup and set sail across the sea to another country, where the giant Fezzek scales the imposing Cliffs of Insanity with the other three strapped to him. All the while, the Man in Black has been chasing them, but Vizzini dismisses their pursuer, saying it would be “inconceivable” that anyone would have known they kidnapped the princess in the first place. And yet the Man in Black starts climbing the cliffs after them. “Inconceivable” says Vizzini again. Vizzini cuts the rope, and the Man in Black hangs onto the rocks: “He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!” The Spanish blademaster Inigo Montoya looks at Vizzini and says one of the more quotable lines in a film full of quotable lines: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

That line from one of my all-time favorite movies always comes to mind when I read today’s Gospel lesson because John the Baptist uses a word, a very special word, and I do not think it means what our society thinks it means.

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30 Minute Rap

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No sermon this week, as the intern at St. Mark’s had the reins for First Sunday of Advent. So I thought I’d share something I wrote a few weeks ago at a youth revival/retreat weekend. After hearing a talk given by one of the teens, we had about half an hour to compose a rap in response. This is the text of the one I shared with the group.

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Four Images of Grief

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I offered the following reflection on St. Mark’s All Souls Day services on November 2, 2019. I wrote most of it several years ago and have used pieces of it here and there, but I have not published the entire reflection until now.

During the next few minutes, I would like to share with you four images. I invite you to imagine these images as I describe them. Each one illustrates a facet of the impact of grief on our lives, something that grief does for us, something that grief is. Perhaps you will resonate with one or more of these images. Perhaps, the four that I describe will spur you to discern your own image for grief. I hope you will, because grief is an intensely personal thing, which makes it one of the hardest things to share. By trying to describe grief, we can give ourselves some language with which to talk about it, and thus find, in some small, yet meaningful ways, the ability to share it with others.

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I Will Give You Words

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Sermon for Sunday, November 17, 2019 || Proper 28C || Luke 21:5-19

Imagine with me the words of the Apostle Peter, spoken to his young cellmate on the eve of Peter’s death in the city of Rome around the year 64 A.D.

I heard about the great fire that swept through Rome, and I knew immediately that the authorities would blame us Christians. That’s why I came here – to support the community I knew would face persecution. And now here I am, arrested for arson – this is my fourth arrest, by the way – and I wasn’t even here at the time of the blaze. But facts don’t matter to those in power. Only keeping their power matters to them. 

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Engage, Expand, Reach Deeper

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Sermon for Sunday, November 10, 2019 || Proper 27C || Luke 20:27-38

I’ve said it many times, and I’ll say it again. Jesus rarely, if ever, answers the questions people ask him in the Gospel. Instead, he answers the questions he wishes they had asked. Today’s Gospel lesson is a case in point.

Jesus does not answer the Sadducees question because their question is disingenuous. They ask him a question designed to expose what they think is the absurdity of the resurrection. However, since they don’t believe in the resurrection, they really have no standing to ask a question about it. They are simply trying to get Jesus to trip into a bad sound bite. They have focus-group-tested a stumper, and they deploy it to make Jesus look bad.

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Play Your Game, Not Theirs

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Sermon for Sunday, November 3, 2019 || All Saints’ Sunday || Luke 6:20-31

The only person you can change is yourself. 

Recently, I began a practice of silent meditation every morning. For twenty minutes, I sit cross-legged on the center cushion of my couch, and I breathe the prayer-word “Maranatha,” which means “Come, Lord Jesus.” I decided to build this practice into my spiritual life because I felt myself changing for the worse. The culture of immediacy had captured me with its constant need for updating feeds. The tough subjects I was (and am) tackling in my person study didn’t have a space to go inside me because I was too cluttered with other, incompatible ideas. I talked about God so much that I had forgotten simply to dwell with God. 

And most perniciously, with the rising tide of negativity, hate, indignity, and disrespect in our society, I could feel these evil chemicals starting to build up in my system. In silence, God and I can purge them together, and I can feel the treatment beginning to gain ground on the disease.

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He/Him/His

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I recently added my pronouns to my email signature, and several people have asked me why. My friend Rowan suggested that I turn the pronouns in my signature into a hyperlink so when people are curious they can click the link to find out more. This is the article to which that link points.

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