Tag: Jesus

Foreigners

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Sermon for Sunday, March 8, 2026 || Lent 3A || John 4:5-52

Only once in my life have I truly felt like a foreigner. It wasn’t on our honeymoon in South Africa because we were ensconced at a small game reserve the whole time. It wasn’t in Israel because I was there as a tourist doing touristy things. It wasn’t even when I visited Haiti because, though I stood out due to my pale skin, every Haitian I met made me feel like family. The only time I have ever felt like a foreigner was the first day of the second half of sixth grade when I walked into Mrs. Green’s social studies class at Hillcrest Middle School in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

There were three things that marked me as a foreigner, an immigrant from the cold, distant land of New England. First, I was the new kid. Second, I did not know I was supposed to call my teacher, “Ma’am.” And third, I had a wicked Rhode Island accent. In a comedy of errors that is seared into my memory, when I needed a drink of water, I asked, “Can I go to the Bubbl-ah (Bubbler)?” It took about ten minutes to figure out I meant the water fountain, at which point I could only go if I addressed Mrs. Green as “Ma’am.”

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How Can These Things Be?

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Sermon for Sunday, March 1, 2026 || Lent 2A || John 3:1-17

This sermon is about the cultivation of that wonderful gift of God known as curiosity. The older I get, the more I realize what I don’t know and the more I value curiosity. It’s strange. There seems to be an inverse relationship here. When I was younger, I should have been more curious, but I thought I knew way more than I did, so I did not cultivate curiosity. Now that I am edging into my mid-forties, my curiosity piques all the time. I get excited to learn new things, to explore topics that I never knew would interest me until I started digging into them. I love being curious.

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Done and Left Undone

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Sermon for Sunday, February 22, 2026 || Lent 1A || Romans 5:12-19

Today, on this first Sunday in Lent, I’m going to talk with you about sin. “Sin” is very much a “church” word, a word that we use liturgically in our Confession of Sin and a word that crops up in the Bible, nowhere more frequently than in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which we read this morning. “Sin” is such a “church” word that we have trouble decoupling it from our liturgical expression in order to see how sin operates in big and little ways in our everyday life. So today we are going to reexamine Sin so we can get a better look at its patterns in the world.

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The True Fast

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Sermon for Wednesday, February 18, 2026 || Ash Wednesday || Isaiah 58:1-12

Out of all the feasts and fasts of the church year, Ash Wednesday is the one most liable to be misunderstood. We engage in the (admittedly strange) ritual of scraping soot on our foreheads to remind us of our existential limitations. We participate in this ritual because we humans have the troublesome habit of casting ourselves as the stars in the universal drama of God’s Creation. But the ashes tell a different story: one of transience, of fleetingness. And this makes sense, considering that if the history of the universe were a calendar year, humanity would make its appearance a second before midnight on December 31st.

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Faithful, Collaborative, Renewing

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Sermon for Saturday, February 14, 2026 || Celebration of New Ministry || Numbers 11:16-17, 24-30; Psalm 146; Romans 12:1-18; John 15:9-16

Greetings from the other side of the country. My name is Adam Thomas, and I am the rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Mystic, Connecticut. Yes, that is the place made famous by the 1980s coming-of-age film Mystic Pizza. And yes, there really is a pizza place named that; it’s around the corner from my church. I am so glad to be here for this celebration with you for three reasons. First, I got to escape the unprecedented run of single digit temperatures in New England. Second, three of my best friends from different phases of my life all live here somehow, and I’ve gotten to visit everyone. And third, I get to speak with you this morning about your new partnership in ministry with a friend I met half a lifetime ago, the Rev. Bret Bowie Hays.

Now, this sermon is not going to devolve into a roast of Bret. I promise I’m going to talk about God and church in a minute. But just so you know why I’m the one preaching today – besides his family, I’m probably the person in this church who has known Bret the longest. We met on the first day of orientation at Virginia Theological Seminary way back in the halcyon days of the summer of 2005. We became fast friends, bonding over our love for pizza, theological discourse, and Star Trek. We spent many a night in the dorms together at VTS, him watching Star Trek and me falling asleep watching Star Trek. Bret was a groomsman in my wedding; he’s godfather to my son; and he is one of those friends you can call up and chat to for an hour when you’re driving to a meeting at the diocesan office. After priestly ministry in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Florida, he has arrived here in California as your next rector. And I am so excited about the new partnership in God’s mission you here at Trinity Episcopal Church and Bret have begun together.

As you continue getting to know one another at the outset of this new ministry, I invite you to embrace three words for your life together. May God grant you the grace to make your ministry together faithful, collaborative, and renewing.

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Words Matter

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Sermon for Sunday, February 1, 2026 || Epiphany 4A || Micah 6:1-8

This sermon is about telling the truth. But to enter into a discussion about truth-telling, we first have to talk about words. Specifically about how our words can both curtail and expand our thoughts, and about how those in power can create societal narratives based on the words they choose. Language is a tool of creativity. The way we tell our creation story begins with God speaking creation into existence: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” In the Hebrew language the “word” happens to people like the prophet. The Word of God is an encounter that compels the prophet to action. Likewise, the Gospel of John identifies the person of Jesus as the Word of God, the ultimate happening of the Word as it becomes flesh and dwells among us as a human being.

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Seven Ways

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Sermon for Sunday, January 25, 2026 || Epiphany 3A || 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

There is so much going on in our world today, from armed conflicts stoked by authoritarian overreach to civil wars in overlooked parts of the globe to the rising stakes of climate catastrophe. As a country, we must band together against state-sanctioned violence, hatred, xenophobia, and the scapegoating of vulnerable groups. Closer to home, our neighbors need stable, affordable housing options, food security, and better health outcomes supported by reasonable healthcare insurance. All of these crucial issues are swirling around us as we come to worship God here at St. Mark’s this morning. And while I am not going to address these issues directly in this sermon, everything we do here helps us respond to the needs of the world, as we partner with God in God’s mission. Because today is the day of our annual meeting, you can think of this sermon as a “State of the Church” address. And what better way to talk about the state of the church than to talk about how we are engaged in God’s mission of healing and reconciliation.

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Jesus’ First Conversation (Updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, January 18, 2026 || Epiphany 2A || John 1:29-42

“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks John’s two disciples.
“Rabbi, where are you staying?” they respond.
“Come and see,” Jesus says.

This is the first conversation Jesus has with anyone in the Gospel According to John. We’re going to dwell on these three lines of dialogue today. On the surface level, it’s a pretty simple exchange in which Jesus welcomes a couple of people to walk with him for a while. But the Gospel always operates on multiple levels. The first layer speaks to the surface meaning. This layer is easy for Jesus’ listeners to access, and so they become drawn in. Then the second, deeper layer of meaning presents itself. Those who listen for this second layer, who do dive deeply, find rich, life-giving substance in Jesus’ words.

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Bring Forth Justice

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Sermon for Sunday, January 11, 2026 || Epiphany 1A || Isaiah 42:1-9

I wrote a version of this sermon on Tuesday, which is my normal sermon-writing day. Then the events of Wednesday happened – ICE agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis – and I knew I would be writing a new sermon on Saturday. But the more I reflected on what I had planned to say, the more the bulk of the words I wrote on Tuesday made sense to share this morning, not despite of the events of Wednesday but because of them.

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The Missing Verses

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Sermon for Sunday, January 4, 2026 || Christmas 2 || Matthew 2:13-15, (16-18), 19-23

In a 2003 song, the band Death Cab for Cutie sings, “So this is the new year / And I don’t feel any different.” That’s about how I feel today, and it’s not a great feeling. The new calendar on our kitchen wall features pictures of our kids and our nieces and nephews a year older than they were in last year’s calendar. But other than that, nothing has changed. The turn from December to January is symbolic only. Four days ago, we marked that the earth completed another revolution around the sun, but every day could mark the same. Indeed, other calendars set the date later this year: Chinese New Year is February 17th, Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) is September 11th.

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