Tag: hope

The Field at Anathoth

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Sermon for Sunday, September 28, 2025 || Proper 21C || Jeremiah 32:1-3a, 6-15

This sermon is about hope. More specifically, this sermon is about what we do when the world is falling apart. And we’re going to start today with the Prophet Jeremiah, who lived at a time when the world as he knew it was ending. Centuries earlier, the Assyrians had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. But the southern kingdom of Judah held on, thanks in part to the geographical impregnability of Jerusalem. Now, in the early sixth century BCE, the Babylonians were the conquerors, and they were laying siege to Jerusalem. Jeremiah, like the Prophet Isaiah before him, told the truth about the present circumstances: that divisions in his society, a widening gap between rich and poor, and a lack of care for the most vulnerable were all signs of Judah crumbling from within. This only emboldened aggressors like Babylon, and here they were, at the very gates of the city. Indeed, in 587 BCE, the Babylonians succeeded in conquering Judah. In the process, they destroyed the temple and took a host of prominent Judeans into exile.

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Fearing Death

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Sermon for Sunday, May 11, 2025 || Easter 4C || Psalm 23

Today, on this beautiful Sunday morning in springtime, when plants are growing and animals are having babies, we’re going to talk about…death. Now, as you can probably tell, I am not dead. So I have no special information to impart to you about what happens after we die. I have only my hope in the resurrection, that the essence of who God created us to be embraces new and abundant life in a way that we cannot even imagine in the midst of our physical existence. I have only this hope in the resurrection and my faith in the promise that Jesus makes to prepare a place for us and bring us to himself, so that where Christ is, we may also be.

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The Presentation

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, February 2, 2025 || The Feast of the Presentation || Luke 2:22-40

Today is a special feast day in the church. We call today the Feast of the Presentation, and this feast celebrates the event in the life of Jesus when Mary and Joseph brought their infant son to the Temple in Jerusalem to present him to the Lord and make a sacrifice. Today, I’d like to focus on the practice of presenting something to God in this sacred worship space. I’m going to speak abstractly for the second half of this sermon, so let me start with the concrete moment in the service that we call The Presentation.

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Breathe in the Holy Spirit

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Sermon for Sunday, September 1, 2024 || Proper 17B || Mark 7:1-23

Today we’re going to spend the bulk of the sermon breathing through a guided meditation. We’re going to invite the Holy Spirit in through our inhalations; then, with our exhalations, we will breathe out into the world the values of a life lived following Jesus. But before we get to the meditation part, just a little background.

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Even the Good One

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Sermon for Sunday, April 30, 2023 || Easter 4A || Psalm 23; John 10:1-10

This sermon is about God remaining faithful even when tragedy or pain or grief keep us from acting out our faith. Before I start, though, I need to share a trigger warning. I will be briefly talking about the death of a child.

Between March 2020 and May 2021, this building was closed to the public due to the pandemic restrictions. For fourteen long months, we gathered together via Zoom and YouTube, worshiping together in love any way we could as we supported one another through the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. During those services of Morning Prayer, I shared with you 27 of the songs I’ve written over the course of my life. That’s every song I’ve ever written (that’s fit for people to listen to). Well, every song but one. There’s one particular song of mine that I deliberately did not sing during those fearful months because I didn’t think I’d be able to get through it. The song is raw and it does not end on a particularly joyful note. But I think now the time is finally right to sing this song for you.

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The Candle Flame of Hope

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, June 12, 2022 || Trinity Sunday C || Romans 5:1-5

This is another sermon about hope. I’ve been preaching about hope a lot lately because hope seems to be in short supply these days. I look inside myself and I see my hope candle guttering. It’s still lit – miraculously  – but the small flame is floating in a sea of wax. I want to believe that my hope candle will never actually extinguish, that no matter how much or how little wax is left, the wick will always hold a flame. I want to believe that, and I think I do…which is ironic because it seems like I need hope to believe I will always have hope. And maybe that’s how it works. Perhaps hope reignites itself like a mythical phoenix rising from the ashes.

I want to talk about hope on this Trinity Sunday because the Holy Trinity is both the source of our hope and the culmination of our hope. 

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A Most Ingenious Paradox (updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, November 28, 2021 || Advent 1C || Jeremiah 33:14-16

Did anyone stay up late last night to watch the ball drop in Times Square? I didn’t. If memory serves I have stayed up until midnight on New Year’s Eve exactly once in my life. I think it was my senior year of high school, and I’m pretty sure my friends had to keep waking me up. So, I was definitely asleep for the ball drop last night. But did any of you stay up? Show of hands?

No one?

Did I open up the wrong sermon?

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The Funeral Anthem: A Meditation

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Sermon for Sunday, September 13, 2020 || Proper 19A || Romans 14:1-12

Today’s sermon is a meditation. In a minute, I’m going to invite you to find a relaxing sitting position, which will be easier on your couch than if you were here sitting on a hard pew. I decided to offer a meditation today because recently I’ve been feeling my jaw clenching more and more. Sleep isn’t restful. I’m on edge all the time. I’d wager you are responding to the abnormally high level of stress in our society in similar ways. A friend of mine has a newborn in the NICU whom he says is there because he has to “remember to breathe.” I think that goes for all of us right now.

So, in lieu of my regularly scheduled sermon, I’d like to lead us all through a meditation designed to bring our ultimate future into this present moment. This is a meditation about God’s presence and promise when death is an ever-present reality. I’m offering it because today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans includes a paragraph that we read as the third stanza of the opening anthem at the beginning of every Episcopal funeral. All four stanzas are quotations from scripture, and I’d like to meditate on them with you this morning. This might seem like a strange thing to do – focus on words spoken after someone has died. But these words are shared with those who remain, and I believe these scriptural truths actually help to bring us more fully alive.

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Deep Breaths with Palestrina

Published on by Adam Thomas4 Comments
Sermon for Sunday, March 22, 2020 || Lent 4A || Psalm 23; John 9:1-41

I usually listen to really upbeat music when I’m writing my sermons, often the Piano Guys, who do instrumental mash-ups of pop and classical music. Their driving rhythms mixed with familiar melodies propel me forward as I write. I’m sure I bop my head along, my fingers click-clacking across the keyboard in time with the percussion. When I sat down to write this sermon, I put on the Piano Guys like normal. But about thirty seconds into the first song, I had to switch to something else.

Because today is not normal. Today is about as far from normal as I can remember since the days following September 11, 2001. As I thought and prayed my way into today’s sermon, I noticed just how un-calm I was. I had not slept well in several nights. I had pain in my jaw, always a sign of stress. I had a thick knot of anxiety in my chest. I looked beyond the anxiety and felt a roiling mix of other emotions, which I’ll get into in a moment. Realizing my state on un-calm, I changed the music. I selected a setting of the mass in Latin by the Renaissance composer Palestrina, who never fails to help me take deep breaths.

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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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