Gospel – Where the Wind…

For it is Written

Published on March 10, 2025April 7, 2025 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, March 9, 2025 || Lent 1C || Luke 4:1-13

I’ve never been able to get over the fact that the devil quotes scripture in today’s Gospel reading. Twice Jesus defends himself from the adversary’s onslaught using words from the scriptures. Jesus is so full of the Holy Spirit that the words of life spill from him and counter the devil’s temptation. “One does not live by bread alone.” “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” I imagine the tempter was getting pretty darn frustrated. But the adversary adapts, and for the third attack, the devil uses the same tactic.

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The Christmas Pageant (Taylor’s Version)

Published on December 23, 2024January 13, 2025 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

I wrote the dialogue and lyrics for this new Christmas Pageant, which kids from my church performed yesterday on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It was a blast! (And, obviously, despite the assertion in the first paragraph, the real Taylor didn’t help us – but her music did.) Here’s the video of the pageant, followed by the script.

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This Teaching is Difficult

Published on August 26, 2024September 16, 2024 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, August 25, 2024 || Proper 16B || John 6:56-69

At one time or another we’ve all edited our bibles. We’ve decided – consciously or unconsciously – that something in the bible doesn’t fit our worldview and so we skip it. Our pre-selected readings on Sunday morning do this pretty often, leaving out verses that make us squeamish. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, went so far as to cut – literally cut – passages out of his bible, mostly Jesus’ miracles, because they didn’t jibe with his deistic thinking. Narrowing down our focus to Jesus’ words alone, there are still plenty of things we’d really rather skip. Today, I’d like to talk about what we do when we find ourselves skipping over some of Jesus’ words.

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The Foolishness of God

Published on March 4, 2024March 25, 2024 by Adam Thomas2 Comments

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

Published on February 19, 2024March 11, 2024 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

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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The Two Endings of John

Published on April 17, 2023May 8, 2023 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, April 16, 2023 || Easter 2A || John 20:19-31

The year was 2003. It was a drab, wet December day in Charleston, West Virginia. I was at my parents’ house for Christmas break during my junior year of college. We went to the movies and saw The Return of the King, the third and final film in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I’ve been a huge Tolkien fan since I was a kid, and I loved the movies. I was nervous going into the third one, hoping fervently that the filmmakers wouldn’t mess it up. They didn’t, and I wound up crying so hard for the last half hour of the movie that I gave myself a migraine headache.

The thing about this movie, and the biggest thing that critics disliked about it – despite it winning all eleven academy awards it was nominated for – is that the movie ends about six times. Over the last twenty minutes or so, the movie keeps ending! It closes the story on this region and this set of characters, then on that region and that set of characters. Again and again, it ends, until, finally, Samwise Gamgee walks home to his front door, picks up his little daughter and says, “Well, I’m back,” which is exactly how the book ends too.

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The 26-Foot U-Haul

Published on January 2, 2023January 23, 2023 by Adam Thomas1 Comment

Sermon for Sunday, January 1, 2023 || Feast of the Holy Name || Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 2:15-21

This sermon is about emptying ourselves of all the junk inside us so there is more room for God to fill. And boy do I have a good example to start with. My family moved this week. We bought a house here in Mystic and moved out of the rectory. Our new house is quite a bit smaller than the rectory, so we needed to downsize in a hurry. Every Tuesday and Friday for the last few weeks, we have filled the garbage and recycling cans and watched the truck’s grabber arm scoop up all our accumulation. We’ve made several trips to Goodwill with books and toys and games and clothes. We’ve put pieces of furniture up on Facebook Marketplace. And still our new house is full.

How did we end up with so much stuff?! When I moved out of my dorm after grad school, I could fit everything I owned in my compact car. But I needed the 17-foot U-Haul for the move out of my townhouse in West Virginia, then the 20-foot U-Haul for the next move, then Leah and I needed the 26-foot U-Haul when we moved to Mystic. Then the kids were born, and our stuff, you know, **Explosion Noise**.

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The Cliffhanger

Published on April 5, 2021May 3, 2021 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, April 4, 2021 || Easter Sunday B || Mark 16:1-8

That’s it then. That’s the end of the Gospel: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a cliffhanger to me, like the end of part one of a two-part television episode. My favorite TV show of all time, Star Trek: The Next Generation ended four of its seven seasons on cliffhangers to entice the viewer back in the fall. (That’s how television used to work, by the way.) The most memorable was the end of Season Three when Captain Picard was captured by the Borg, and the season ends when the Enterprise crew has developed a new weapon to take out the Borg cube and Commander Riker says, “Fire,” and then the picture goes dark and the words “To be continued…” flash across the screen. I had to wait all summer to see what happened when the Enterprise fired the weapon from the modified deflector dish! And I was seven-years-old. Waiting was not my strong suit.

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We Wish to See Jesus

Published on March 22, 2021April 12, 2021 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, March 21, 2021 || Lent 5B || John 12:20-33

“We wish to see Jesus.” So say a group of Greeks to Jesus’ disciples, a request that touches off the events of the week leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion. We wish to see Jesus. Who among us has not said some version of these words. “If only I could see Jesus, then everything would make sense!” Jesus seems to anticipate such a desire because after the resurrection he says to his disciples, “Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

Indeed, Jesus blesses us with belief in him and his life-giving Way, even though we have never seen him – at least not in his first century flesh. When we adjust our eyes and our vocabulary so they resonate with our faith, we begin to see Jesus everywhere we look. “We wish to see Jesus,” say the Greeks in today’s reading. I’d like to spend the rest of this sermon seeing Jesus – seeing Jesus in the grand narrative of the Gospel of John that leads up to this moment. As we go through the story, notice how seeing Jesus in the Gospel helps us see Jesus in our lives.

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Three Stories of Jesus

Published on September 2, 2019September 23, 2019 by Adam ThomasLeave a comment

Sermon for Sunday, September 1, 2019 || Proper 17C || Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16

In her last sermon with us Pastor Stacey Kohl reminded us that stories are powerful things. Sharing stories helps us make meaning, pass on tradition, teach lessons, deepen relationships, learn from one another’s experience, and grow closer to God. Today, I’d like to share with you three stories, all sparked by a single verse from today’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” I’d like to share with you a story about Jesus Christ yesterday, a story about Jesus Christ today, and a story about Jesus Christ forever. Each of these stories is about Jesus and about me, and if I do my job right, each will also be about you.

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