Tag: Bible

The Foolishness of God

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Sermon for Sunday, March 3, 2024 || Lent 3B || 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

In today’s sermon, we’re going to indulge in a bit of foolishness. Now, I’m aware that no one – myself included – likes to feel foolish. Feeling foolish quickly spirals into embarrassment, into red cheeks and hot faces, and we get the urge to escape as soon as possible. We all know the awful feeling of being laughed at instead of laughing with. (Though I have always loved Robin Williams’s line in the movie Dead Poets Society: “We’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing near you.”) We go to great lengths not to feel foolish, going so far as not to learn new skills in adulthood because we really don’t want to be bad at them when we’re starting out. This is why I can’t ice skate or hit my driver.

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Trust This Good News

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Sermon for Sunday, February 18, 2024 || Lent 1B || Mark 1:9-15

On this First Sunday in Lent, we always hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. If you’re wondering if you nodded off during the Gospel reading and missed the details of the temptations, don’t worry. You didn’t nod off. The Gospel According to Mark skips the details in favor of moving the story along quickly from one beat to the next. And that gives us the opportunity to focus on a different element of the story this morning. As Mark moves us swiftly past Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness, the Gospel writer tells us, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

I’d like to spend our sermon time today breaking down this single sentence because there’s a lot in it. By the time we’re done, I hope you will have an understanding of the concept of “good news” as Jesus is using the term.

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Tarshish and Nineveh

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
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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Bearing Walls

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, March 20, 2022 || Lent 3C || 1 Corinthians 10:1-13

There are many sayings that people think are in the Bible, but they are not actually there. “God helps those who help themselves” is a notable example. The crazy thing about that one is that it’s pretty much the opposite of what we find. Rather, Paul says, “Encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). Then there’s the oft-quoted, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” Nowhere to be found. How about “Money is the root of all evil?” This one’s closer. It’s “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10). But none of these hold a candle to what has to be the most popular saying that people think is in the Bible but isn’t. Do you know what it is?

“God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

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An Instructed Service of Morning Prayer

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sunday, November 15, 2020

Today, in lieu of a sermon, I’d like to offer an “instructed” service of Morning Prayer. We’ve done this in the past with services of Holy Eucharist, which was our principal act of communal worship before the pandemic moved us online. While we could continue to worship God following our normal Eucharistic service, our inability to share Holy Communion with one another at a distance led me to shift our weekly gathering to the other type of service found in the Book of Common Prayer. This is the service of Morning Prayer, one of two services of what is called the “Daily Office.” Today, we are going to walk through the elements of the service as we engage in them, and I will share a few historical, liturgical, and theological thoughts as we go.

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The Threefold Voice

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Sermon for Sunday, May 3, 2020 || Easter 4A || John 10:1-10

I imagine Jesus looking out over the fields beyond Jerusalem and seeing shepherds moving their flocks towards the sparse patches of green in the distance. He turns to his followers and says, “You see those shepherds out there. I am the Good Shepherd.” Then he begins spinning out his metaphor, telling a story as the people watch the grazing sheep beneath the big, open sky. The shepherd goes into the fold,” Jesus continues, and “the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.”

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God-Breathed

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Sermon for Sunday, October 20, 2019 || Proper 24C || 2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5

We’re going to have a bit of a shorter sermon today* because the real sermon happened between the services with so many people coming together to feed our neighbors in New London County. So here’s a short teaching sermon about Holy Scripture, specifically about the very special word used to describe scripture in our reading from the Second Letter to Timothy.

The contents of the Bible rarely comment on themselves, and this morning we heard the most well-known commentary. The letter says, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

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Sabbatical Notes, Week 8: The Kokh Tomb

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments

The events of my pilgrimage to the Holy Land are still too near for me to write about with any kind of perspective, so today I thought I’d offer you a short example of the recontextualization of Jesus’ story that I have learned from walking the land where Jesus walked. Continue reading “Sabbatical Notes, Week 8: The Kokh Tomb” →

One Gospel

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Sermon for Sunday, April 7, 2019 || Lent 5C || JOHN 12:1-8

Today’s sermon is a full on teaching sermon. I’m going to talk to you today about the books of the New Testament that we call the Gospel. I’ll begin with a trick question. How many Gospels are there? (Don’t answer that because you’re going to want to say “four.”) If you listened carefully to how I introduced the Gospel reading a minute ago, you heard a hint at the correct answer. “The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John.”

There is only one Gospel, and that’s the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Gospel, by the way, means “good news.” The numerical confusion stems from the fact that this one Gospel reaches us by way of four different perspectives (or “accounts”), which we name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That’s why I said “according to John” a minute ago. The “according to” is a really important preposition because it reminds us which perspective on Jesus’ Gospel we are working with in the moment.

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Twisted Scripture

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Sermon for Sunday, March 10, 2019 || Lent 1C || Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

I always think of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis when I read the Gospel lesson for the first Sunday of Lent, particularly this year when we read the story of Jesus’ temptation as told by the Gospel writer Luke. In the book, C.S. Lewis pens a couple dozen imaginative letters from Screwtape, a Senior Tempter in the devil’s bureaucracy, to his nephew Wormwood, who is in charge of tempting one particular man. The letters present an incisive look at the moral and spiritual life through the lens of that which might lead such a life astray. The book is wildly creative and written so well that sometimes you find yourself agreeing with Screwtape and then realize you got suckered in by the temptation. This book is just so good.

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