Tag: Jesus

Ten Things I Have Learned About Death and Grief

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Sermon for Sunday, April 12, 2026 || Easter 2A || John 20:19-31

As I read today’s Gospel reading for the umpteenth time in my life, something new struck me. Ten of the disciples are together, locked in the house for fear of the authorities. They are together in their grief and confusion over the fact that Jesus’ mission ended with such violence and immediacy a few days before. What are they going to do now? How could it all have gone so wrong? The ten of them sit together, I imagine, staying silent for long periods of time interrupted by little bursts of conversation: trying to make sense, trying to comfort.

Then there’s Thomas. He’s the only one not with the others. He’s off somewhere by himself. I imagine Thomas walking the streets of Jerusalem, alone with his thoughts and his tears. He was the one ready to die with Jesus when they went to see Lazarus and his sisters. And then he ran off like everyone else. Unlike the others, Thomas is alone in his grief and confusion. Maybe also the jagged knife feeling of betrayal. He knows he cannot face the others right now. He needs to be alone.

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Joy is Not Made to be a Crumb

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Sermon for Sunday, April 5, 2026 || Easter Day A || Matthew 28:1-10

Dear friends, welcome to St. Mark’s on this special feast of the Resurrection that we call Easter Sunday. Every Sunday is technically a feast of the Resurrection, but this one is extra special because it comes on the heels of our week of walking with Jesus during the difficult days of his Passion: his arrest, trial, condemnation, walk to the cross, crucifixion, and death. And now, three days later, we celebrate his rising in the power of the promise that nothing, not even death, can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

This fundamental truth of Creation is worth celebrating every single day, this truth that nothing can separate us from God’s love. We sing “Alleluia” today for the living and for the dead and for generations yet to come, all of whom God loves in the eternal NOW of God’s presence. We praise God today – for that is what “Alleluia” means – because God is faithful and fulfills the promise to be with us always.

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Virtues

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments
Sermon for Friday, April 3, 2026 || Good Friday || Isaiah 52:13–53:12; John 18:1–19:42

This year I decided to preach this short homily before the reading of the Passion Gospel because I would like to offer you something to reflect on while you listen. I invite you to listen for the virtues that Jesus displays during this heartwrenching story, and I invite you to reflect on what virtues you live by without which you would not be able to recognize yourself. Don’t worry if you didn’t take that in just then; I’ll repeat the invitation at the end.

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Baby Donkeys

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Sermon for Sunday, March 29, 2026 || Palm/Passion Sunday A || Matthew 21:1-11

This is a sermon about baby donkeys. Well, really it’s a sermon about peace, but the thing you probably will remember about it is the baby donkey. Today, we celebrate an event in the life of Jesus, an event that was so momentous that it appears in all four accounts of the Gospel. At the beginning of the service, we read Matthew’s version of this event: Jesus’ triumphant ride into Jerusalem at the beginning of the week leading up to Passover. The way Jesus decides to enter the city demonstrates to the people of his own time and for people of all time Jesus’ conscious and dedicated embrace of nonviolence. And it all comes down to a baby donkey.

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The Language of Embrace (Updated)

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, March 22, 2026 || Lent 5A || John 11:1-45

Today’s sermon is about the promise of the resurrection. And we’ll start today at a windswept cemetery as a funeral comes to end. The prayers have all been prayed. The earth has been cast on the shining, glossy coffin. The low murmur of voices mingles with the whisper of the wind through the long, cemetery grass. The new widow rises from the velvet-covered folding chair, the triangle of the blue field and white stars of the American flag peeking out from under her arm. A line of black-clad people forms, and they begin to file past her. You watch her receive with grace each well-meant, but well-worn sentiment. You join the line, and soon it’s your turn. You grasp her hand in both of yours and wait for the words to come.

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The Light of the World

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Sermon for Sunday, March 15, 2026 || Lent 4A || John 9:1-41

This sermon is about perspective, about aligning our worldviews in order to see by Jesus, the Light of the World. But before we talk about that, we have to do something I really don’t like doing in sermons. We have to critique the translation of the Bible we use for Sunday readings. Here are the verses we are going to look at today from the beginning of our Gospel lesson:

As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” (John 9:1-5)

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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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