Tag: Atonement

Three Definitions of Passion

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Sermon for Sunday, April 13, 2025 || Palm/Passion C || Luke 22:39–23:49

At the end of today’s service, we will read the Passion Gospel together. This is the tragic and beautiful story of Jesus’ last hours, one of only a handful of stories that appears in all four accounts of the Gospel. We call this reading the “Passion” Gospel because the word “passion” comes from the Latin “passio,” (and Greek “pathos”) which mean “to suffer.” In English, when we say “passion,” we’re usually talking about a type of overwhelming devotion to something or an intense romantic connection to someone. But both of these English definitions benefit from the word’s origin, for both are things we will suffer for.

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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 Com-passion Gospel

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Sermon for Sunday, April 10, 2022 || Palm/Passion Sunday C || Luke 22:39 – 23:49

Today we begin Holy Week, our first one on-site here at St. Mark’s since 2019. The last two years we’ve had video presentations of the Passion Gospel, but this year we will hear it read live at the end of the service. The Passion Gospel tells the harrowing tale of Jesus’ arrest in the garden, his sham trial before the council and the Roman authorities, his enduring of the whipping and mocking, his slow walk to the site of his own execution, and finally, his death upon the cross. We call this story the Passion because the ‘passion’ comes from the word ‘suffering.’ We could just as easily call it the Compassion Gospel because in it Jesus does not just suffer in a vacuum; he suffers with and for the people he came to serve. I have to be clear here, though. Jesus’ suffering did not happen in order to fulfill the whims of a bloodthirsty God. His suffering happened because he would not abandon his people when his mission of love and justice ran into the fist of an oppressive empire.

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Being Saved

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Sermon for Sunday, March 14, 2021 || Lent 4B || Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians says something in today’s second lesson that makes my heart sing: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

This is one of those verses that makes me take a deep breath after reading it, a cleansing breath of the Holy Spirit who is so vibrantly present in those words. “For by grace you have been saved through faith…”

Today I want to talk about being saved. And I have to start, as I have before, down in the Deep South.

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The Cross of Compassion

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, February 28, 2021 || Lent 2B || Mark 8:31-38

In less than a year, COVID-19 has killed 500,000 Americans. We passed that grim and horrifying milestone last week. Half a million Americans are being grieved by millions more. Half a million. I can barely conceive of that many people. It’s as if you went to Atlanta, Georgia and the entire city was suddenly empty. I almost didn’t write this sermon because I could not imagine what I could say in the face of such a statistic – a statistic tied to the very real lives and deaths of friends, families, neighbors, and strangers across this country.

But then I read today’s Gospel lesson in light of this grim reality. And this commonly read passage hit me in a new way, a way I had never seen before, a way that sheds light on how we might hold the reality of devastating loss as we also push forward to a different future than any of us expected.

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Magnetic Atonement

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, March 25, 2018 || Palm/Passion B || Mark’s Passion

The mystery of just what the crucifixion of Jesus Christ accomplished is too grand for any single metaphor to capture. And that’s what theories of the crucifixion are. Every one is a metaphor, a description of something using the terminology of something else. From the earliest years after the crucifixion, Jesus’ followers sought to make sense of the event, but every explanation fell short of the whole truth. So they kept adding new metaphors to the mix. Taken together, we see a clearer picture of the length and breadth of God’s love and grace displayed in the Passion of Jesus Christ. Yet the entire picture eludes us, and will always do so.

St. Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” But that shouldn’t stop us from looking. And so, fully aware that this is one of myriad metaphors for what is happening on the cross, I’d like to you talk about what I call “Magnetic Atonement.” There are plenty of other names for this idea, but the “magnet” is my metaphor of choice today. Continue reading “Magnetic Atonement” →