“You are the light of the world.” Jesus says these words to his disciples as a great crowd listens in to his teaching that we now commonly call “The Sermon on the Mount.” You are the light of the world. In John’s account of the Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the Light of the World”, but here in Matthew, he’s not talking about himself. He’s talking to his followers and to the readers of the Gospel and (a few thousand years later) to us.
You are the light of the world. And Jesus keeps going with two more images – the city on the hill and the lamp on the lampstand – as things that, like the light, should never be hidden. And then he says, to make sure everyone understands his meaning: “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”
Sermon for Sunday, October 16, 2022 || Proper 24C || Luke 18:1-8
“Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” So Luke tells us before sharing the story of a woman whose primary attribute is her unflagging persistence. But I wonder how many of us might like to tiptoe past Jesus’ reason for telling the story in the first place – his desire for his followers (then and now) to pray with dogged persistence, to pray always.
We might like to tiptoe past this notion because it seems so unrealistic. How could we possibly pray all the time? Maybe Jesus is thinking that if he starts as high as “always,” then when we bargain him down, we’ll still be praying sometimes.
Or maybe not. Jesus doesn’t really seem to be one for haggling. Maybe he really does yearn for us to pray always, to pray with the same unflagging persistence as the widow demonstrates in her quest for justice. If that’s the case, then the popular understanding of prayer isn’t going to cut it; that is, an understanding of prayer as simple wish fulfillment. We need a bigger definition of prayer.
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.
Note: This week’s essay is a sample of what I’m working on during my sabbatical – a series of pieces in which I am interrogating my own past and looking for the societal underpinnings of my unconscious biases, especially in the realm of racism and white supremacy.
I have always loved fantasy and science fiction. Star Trek: The Next Generation is still, and probably always will be, my favorite TV show. As a young child, I watched Return of the Jedi until I wore out the VHS. In sixth grade I cut my long-form fantasy teeth on the Redwall series by Brian Jacques and The Hobbit. It took me three tries to get through The Lord of the Rings, but I finally did it in ninth grade, and then I read it every year for a decade. My senior year of high school, I read 35 Star Wars novels. Frank Herbert’s Dune blew my mind somewhere in there, but I can’t remember exactly when.
So it’s no secret I am a proud member of many fandoms: LOTR, Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, the MCU, the whole Whedonverse (especially Buffy and Firefly). Engagement with some of these creative properties has shaped me from childhood. I learned the meaning of true friendship from Frodo and Sam. I learned the value of leadership with integrity from Captain Jean-Luc Picard. (And I learned the best way to sit down in a chair from Commander Riker.)
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.
A new novel of high fantasy and adventure from author Adam Thomas.
Plague strikes the state of Felmire.
The queen and prince fall victim.
The princess seeks a cure.
Princess Rynliana Caris Feldonsire survived the plague, but no one else has. Halfling midwife Liralee Broderil believes she knows why. Could it be the result of a secret elixir she gave Ryn when the princess was a newborn baby struggling to breathe? If so, the eternal lotus might hold the cure to the contagion destroying the human population of Felmire. But the mysterious plant blooms only one day a year, and only a Lotusborn like Ryn can find it. Will she be in time to save her people?
Mourning for his dead wife and son, Ryn’s father Tarion sinks deeper into grief and retreats from his duty as monarch of Felmire. His younger brother Reave takes it upon himself to discover a cure for the plague. Reave seeks help from the upstart healer and arcanist Victus Graves who has noticed something strange about the halfling immigrants to Felmire. None of them has contracted the illness. Are the halflings the key to curing the contagion? Or are they the cause?
Adam Thomas, writer of wherethewind.com, presents the second 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 pair of strong female heroes and a story about walking through grief and about how we treat refugees among us. (For ages 14 and up.)
For a brief excerpt of The Halfling Contagion, please click here.
Click here to purchase The Halfling Contagion on Amazon in paperback or kindle edition.
A new novel of high fantasy and adventure from author Adam Thomas.
The Storm Curtain is open.
The Three Sisters have fallen.
War has come to Arillon.
The orcs of Ornak have taken the islands known as the Three Sisters, bringing sudden war to the coast of Arillon, a country on the grand island of Sularil. Hopelessly outnumbered, an alliance of humans, dwarves, and elves attempts to slow the orcs’ march towards the immense city of Thousand Spires. How could the small country of Ornak contain such an overwhelming force? This is the question on the minds of Sularin general and soldier alike.
Only one person is in a position to find the answer. New recruit Grail, an elf of the Oruana Kir, is shipwrecked on her way to the front and finds herself washed ashore on the coast of Ornak. Will she remain alone in a hostile land to find answers? Or will she return across the sea to rejoin her best friend Daxa Torn in the fight? Whatever she decides, one question haunts Grail more than any other: why can she not commune with animals, taking their shapes like the rest of her people?
Adam Thomas, writer of wherethewind.com, presents the first 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 own offering to the genre with a pair of strong female heroes and a story about finding family and releasing shame in the midst of turmoil and war. (For ages 15 and up.)
For a brief excerpt of The Storm Curtain, please click here.
Click here to purchase The Storm Curtain on Amazon in paperback or kindle edition.
Sermon for Sunday, May 21, 2017 || Easter 6A || Acts 17:22-31
I’m going to start today’s sermon with a statement, which I hope is confusing enough to make sure you want to stay with me for the next ten minutes while I unpack it. Are you ready? The statement is this: None of us has ever actually worshiped God. That’s the statement – none of us has ever actually worshiped or prayed to or talked about God.
Are you sufficiently confused? Good! I was so confused when I started working on this sermon that I spent a good hour trying to figure out what to say first. In the end I decided to invite you into my confusion and see if together we can find our way out. We have the Apostle Paul to blame. In our passage from the book of Acts this morning, Paul finds himself in Athens, Greece. He strolls the boulevards looking at the statuary dedicated to various gods of Greece and other nations. And then he comes across one altar with the inscription: “To an unknown god.” Paul decides this unknown god is the God of of his ancestors and the Father of his Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul stands up at a gathering of the local scholarly elite and proclaims to them just who he thinks this unknown god is.Continue reading “Magnetic Mercy”→
Sermon for Sunday, April 23, 2017 || Easter 2A || John 20:19-31
Near the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Stone Table cracks and Aslan returns to life. His adversary had executed him on that table in place of the boy Edmund. The witch thinks she has won a decisive victory, but Aslan knows of deeper magic than she. So the witch doesn’t expect the risen lion to appear at her castle while she’s off trying to conquer the land of Narnia. But that’s what happens. Aslan, the Christ-like figure of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, races to the witch’s home to free all those whom she had turned into statues. And do you know how he releases them from their captivity? He breathes on them.Continue reading “So I Send You”→
(Sermon for Sunday, October 20, 2013 || Proper 24C || Luke 18:1-8 )
“Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” So Luke tells us before sharing the story of a woman whose primary attribute is her unflagging persistence. But I wonder how many of us might like to tiptoe past Jesus’ reason for telling the story in the first place – his desire for his followers (then and now) to pray with dogged persistence, to pray always.
We might like to tiptoe past this notion because it seems so unrealistic. How could we possibly pray all the time? Surely Jesus is engaging in hyperbole. Perhaps he’s thinking that if he starts as high as “always,” then when we bargain him down, we’ll still be praying sometimes.
Or perhaps not. After all, Jesus doesn’t seem to be one for haggling. Perhaps he really does yearn for us to pray always, to pray with the same unflagging persistence as the widow in the parable demonstrates in her quest for justice. If that’s the case, then the popular understanding of prayer isn’t going to cut it; that is, an understanding of prayer as simple wish fulfillment. We need a bigger definition of prayer.
Pauline Baynes (c) C.S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.
And so I submit as Exhibit A my yearly dive into C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. This time around, the beginning of Book Four, The Silver Chair.
Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole are trying to escape a mob of bullies at the Experiment House, their ghastly boarding school. Jill has been crying, and the bullies can smell tears from hundreds of yards away. From their hiding spot, the two targets hear the angry shouts of the searchers. Eustace looks at Jill and wonders aloud if they might be able to escape to That Place. He begins calling out, “Aslan, Aslan, Aslan!” Even though she doesn’t know what he’s saying, Jill follows his example: “Aslan, Aslan, Aslan!” The bullies draw near, and Eustace and Jill scramble through the laurels and up a steep slope. The weathered old door in the wall is always locked, but this time – miraculously – the knob turns. And the two children step into Aslan’s country.
Immediately after they arrive, Eustace falls off a cliff, but a lion arrives just in time and blows him to safely to Narnia. The lion – naturally – frightens Jill Pole. She tries to slip away, but the lion begins questioning her. Her showing off caused Eustace’s fall, she confesses. For that display of pride, the lion gives her a task to perform. “Please, what task, Sir?” asks Jill.
“The task for which I called you and him here out of your own world,” says the lion. This response puzzles Jill. Nobody called them. They called out to – Somebody – a name she wouldn’t know. Wasn’t it she and Eustace who asked to come?
“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” says the lion, Aslan, the Christ-like figure of Lewis’s fiction.
This exchange between Aslan and Jill Pole illustrates most vibrantly the foundational principle of our bigger definition of prayer. You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you.
The Catechism in the back of the Book of Common Prayer states the same thought like this: “Prayer is responding to God, by thoughts and by deeds, with or without words.” Years ago, when I first read this definition, I was flabbergasted. I had never thought of prayer as anything more than asking God for stuff. God, please give me a kitty that doesn’t scratch me. God, please help us win our soccer game. God, please make Grammy not sick anymore. Now, please don’t misunderstand, I’m in no way condemning these prayers of intercession and petition. Rather, every kind of prayer fits into a larger framework. Petition and intercession, which popular culture misunderstands as “wish-fulfillment,” are several bricks up from the foundation of prayer.
That foundation is, of course, God. More precisely, the foundation of prayer is God’s presence in our lives and God’s call upon our hearts. “Prayer,” says the Catechism, “is responding to God.” We never initiate a prayer. Our prayer is always a response because God has always been active, has always been breathing our lives into being.
Think of prayer as a phone call. You and I never dial the number: we only have the option to answer the phone when it rings. You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you. When we choose to answer, we affirm our desire to participate in our relationships with God. Prayer, then, is the inclination of our lives towards God, our response to what God is already doing in our lives.
How full of light and love would those lives be if we took seriously Jesus’ desire for his followers to pray always? How much light and love would we bring to those around us if we strove with unflagging persistence to respond to God in every situation?
If prayer is everything we do in response to God, then Jesus’ call to “pray always” seems a little more realistic – still challenging, still demanding discipline and rigor, but more realistic just the same.
Monastics down through the ages have practiced this bigger definition of prayer. Even the lowliest jobs at the monastery – peeling potatoes or weeding fields – were prayer. Monks prayed many times a day in their chapels, but the labor they performed in the meantime was prayer, as well. They “prayed always,” because they saw everything they did in their lives as a response to God’s presence. While we don’t have strict priors delegating our labors, we can still import the monastic example into our lives.
Look at your day, your week, your year. How do your engagements and actions display your response to God’s movement in your life? As a member of a family, God calls you to love and enjoy and forgive your spouses, children, parents, and siblings. As a person made in God’s image, God calls you to discover your authentic self, the version of yourself that God sees and celebrates. As a servant of God, God calls you to perform that one way in which you can bring light and love to the lives of those around you. When we respond to God in all these areas of our lives, we pray. We affirm our relationships with God. We live the abundant lives that Christ offers to all.
The prayers we pray this morning in our worship service, the lessons we hear, the music we sing, the meal we share, all nourish us for a life of prayer between now and next Sunday. Jesus yearns for us his followers to pray always, to respond to God’s movement at all times. This brand of unflagging persistence surely is challenging. But the good news is this: even attempting to pray always is a response to God. Even realizing that we aren’t praying always is a response to God. Every impulse towards generosity, welcome, hope, joy, love, and service is a response to God. As are the cries of our hearts when all is dark. Each day of our lives, we are met with myriad opportunities to pray, to be responsive to God’s movement. And this same movement gives us the grace to respond.
“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” says Aslan to Jill Pole. “We love because he first loved us,” says the writer of the First Letter of John. Likewise, we pray because God first called us – called us into expansive, abundant relationship with God. What will our response be?
Where the Wind... 