Tag: Jesus

Not Running

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment
Sermon for Sunday, July 2, 2023 || Proper 8A || Genesis 22:1-14

I looked at my sermon archive, and I haven’t preached on the story of Abraham and Isaac since my first year at St. Mark’s. This story is among the strangest and most uncomfortable stories in the Bible. It’s easy to ignore this story, to skip over it, or trim it from the Bible because it doesn’t seem to fit our vision of God. But the truth of the matter is that this story is there; every Bible includes Genesis Chapter 22. So the question for us is how do we encounter this story that makes us recoil and squirm in our seats.

Well, I don’t want you to set your expectations too high about this sermon, because there’s a good chance that by the time I’m done talking this morning, you’ll still be recoiling and squirming in your seats. But I have to say – nine years ago, when I first attempted to preach about this passage, I found myself reading and re-reading it and discovering some beautiful truth in the midst of the disturbing story.

Continue reading “Not Running” →

The Distortion of Sin

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, June 25, 2023 || Proper 7A || Romans 6:1b-11

Every once in a while, I like to do what I call “nuts and bolts” sermons. These are teaching sermons about a particular element of our lives of faith, and today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Romans gives me the opportunity today to talk about a word we use a lot in the church, a word that I don’t think we understand very well. That word is “sin.”

Continue reading “The Distortion of Sin” →

Dignity

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, June 11, 2023 || Proper 5A || Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

I’d like to talk this morning about the concept of dignity. “Dignity” is one of those words I’ve often spoken when talking about really important things, but it’s also one of those words that I used for years without taking the time to understand it. I knew the concept of “dignity” was good for us to apply to ourselves and our fellow humans. I knew the Baptismal Covenant invites us to promise, with God’s help, to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” I knew that I have dignity and you have dignity and the person holding the cardboard sign at the traffic light near Wal-Mart has dignity. I knew that dignity had something to do with everyone being a beloved child of God.

Continue reading “Dignity” →

Who Are You Looking For?

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Friday, April 7, 2023 || Good Friday || Passion According to John

I know this is way out of sequence, but I forgot to post my Good Friday sermon back in April, and since we did not have a normal sermon for Trinity Sunday yesterday, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share what I said on Good Friday.

The Passion narrative we just heard can be quite overwhelming. It is by far and away the longest reading we listen to all year, and there’s a lot going on. So instead of talking about the entire Passion narrative, each year I like to focus on one little moment of it that speaks to the whole story. On this Good Friday, that moment happens right at the beginning of the story, so cast your minds back about ten minutes to the garden where Jesus is arrested.

Continue reading “Who Are You Looking For?” →

The Wind Blows Where It Chooses

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments
Sermon for Sunday, May 28, 2023 || Pentecost A || Number 11:24-30; Acts 2:1-21

At the end of last Sunday’s sermon, I asked this question: “Where do you see God’s presence today?” We talked about recognizing the presence of God in big things like sunsets and star-strewn skies and little things like the veins of a leaf and our breath. Today, I’d like to follow up last week’s sermon with a very simple concept that I’m then going to talk about for ten minutes. The simple concept is this: God’s presence is everywhere, so we must be careful not to limit the places where we look for that presence.

Continue reading “The Wind Blows Where It Chooses” →

Alabanza

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment
Sermon for Sunday, May 21, 2023 || Easter 7A || John 17:1-11

A lot of the songs we sing in church talk about God’s glory. And just in case our hymn selections don’t mention God’s glory on a particular Sunday, every service begins with a song we call The Gloria: “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God’s people on earth.” With these words we echo the angels singing to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth. Glory to God…we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.

Today we’re going to talk about glorifying God. This will be a nice, tidy three-point sermon: (1) why we glorify God, (2) how Jesus glorifies God, and (3) how we glorify God. And we’ll throw in some lyrics by Lin-Manual Miranda at the end for good measure. Sound good? OK, let’s go.

Continue reading “Alabanza” →

The Spirit of Truth

Published on by Adam ThomasLeave a comment
Sermon for Sunday, May 14, 2023 || Easter 6B || John 14:15-21

This sermon is about truth and lies. Specifically, this sermon is about the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves and the truth that helps us confront those lies. Every one of us constructs and reconstructs our personal narratives again and again. And the closer we come to the truth of those narratives, the more we will live authentically, resonating with the Spirit of Truth that is within us.

Jesus uses this term, “Spirit of truth,” in today’s Gospel lesson. He says, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know [the Spirit], because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”

Continue reading “The Spirit of Truth” →

Stephen the Red Shirt

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, May 7, 2023 || Easter 5A || Acts 7:55-60

The folks who put together our schedule of Bible readings did something really weird today. In our first lesson, they gave us the very end of the story about Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian faith. But they skipped everything about him leading up to his execution. So for the sermon today, I’m going to go back and talk through his story because the way it is written gives us a few things to think about.

But first – Star Trek.

Continue reading “Stephen the Red Shirt” →

The Two Endings of John

Published on 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.

Continue reading “The Two Endings of John” →

Simon, Lazarus, Philip, Mary

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments
Sermon for Sunday, April 9, 2023 || Easter Sunday A || John 20:1-18

Good morning and welcome to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on this cold and sunny Easter Sunday. I’m Pastor Adam Thomas, and today we are celebrating our tenth Easter together in this special place on Pearl Street. During the season of Lent, I preached a four-part sermon series on the verse John 3:16, which culminated in this new interpretation of the most famous verse in the Bible: 

For God so loved the entirety of Creation that God revealed God’s own self in the gift of God’s only Child: to draw us deeper into relationship with God, to find our place in God’s story of reconciliation, and to embrace the true life of God’s presence now and forever.

I’d like to spend today’s sermon offering a bit of a coda to the sermon series and speak again about God drawing us into deeper relationship. This makes sense to do on Easter Sunday because today is the day we celebrate God’s full and eternal embrace of Creation through the power of the Resurrection of Jesus.

Continue reading “Simon, Lazarus, Philip, Mary” →