Tag: Jesus

Being Saved

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Sermon for Sunday, March 14, 2021 || Lent 4B || Numbers 21:4-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians says something in today’s second lesson that makes my heart sing: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”

This is one of those verses that makes me take a deep breath after reading it, a cleansing breath of the Holy Spirit who is so vibrantly present in those words. “For by grace you have been saved through faith…”

Today I want to talk about being saved. And I have to start, as I have before, down in the Deep South.

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The Cross of Compassion

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Sermon for Sunday, February 28, 2021 || Lent 2B || Mark 8:31-38

In less than a year, COVID-19 has killed 500,000 Americans. We passed that grim and horrifying milestone last week. Half a million Americans are being grieved by millions more. Half a million. I can barely conceive of that many people. It’s as if you went to Atlanta, Georgia and the entire city was suddenly empty. I almost didn’t write this sermon because I could not imagine what I could say in the face of such a statistic – a statistic tied to the very real lives and deaths of friends, families, neighbors, and strangers across this country.

But then I read today’s Gospel lesson in light of this grim reality. And this commonly read passage hit me in a new way, a way I had never seen before, a way that sheds light on how we might hold the reality of devastating loss as we also push forward to a different future than any of us expected.

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Follow Me

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Sermon for Sunday, January 24, 2021 || Epiphany 3B || Mark 1:14-20

I wrote two sermons this week. The first I wrote on Tuesday during my normal sermon writing time, and it was an excruciating few hours in which I never found the flow that normally comes when I’m writing. I wasn’t in tune at all, and the words came out all wrong, and I couldn’t find an ending, which is a sure sign that I never found the thread I was looking for. I finished this unwieldy collection of paragraphs, shrugged, and said to myself that I would clean it up on Saturday. Perhaps it was salvageable. 

But I’ll never know because on Wednesday, I listened to the young poet, Amanda Gorman, speak at the presidential inauguration, and she lifted my heart and soul with her poetry. If you haven’t listened to her poem. “The Hill We Climb,” I encourage you to do so later today. Find it on YouTube, and let her words lift you too. I listened to Amanda Gorman’s words, and her flow pulled me back into resonance with my own flow. And I knew I needed to write another sermon. This second sermon began forming in my mind even as I listened to her speak. The invitation Jesus extends to his first disciples sang in my heart, this invitation to “follow me.”

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I Saw You

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Sermon for Sunday, January 17, 2021 || Epiphany 2B || John 1:43-51

Imagine with me the memories of the disciple Nathanael, thinking back to that fateful day when Philip invited him into Jesus’ circle.

This is a story about seeing. But first I need to tell you about my best friend Philip. Philip was always the one who was quick to believe. Every few months he would come to me way too excited about a new guru he had heard about or a get-rich-quick scheme or an investment opportunity. He always gave me the hard sell: You don’t know what you’re missing! How much money do you have! We can pool ours together and buy a full share! This is a once-in-a-lifetime deal! Well, Philip’s deals were more like once-in-a-fortnight deals, considering how often he fell for them.

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One Step Behind Jesus

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments
Sermon for Sunday, January 10, 2021 || Epiphany 1B || Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

I was in the middle of exercising late Wednesday afternoon when I received panicked texts from a friend and from my mother at the same time. Do you see what’s going on at the Capitol right now? We are very shaken. Are you all okay? I immediately switched over from YouTube to live coverage on CBS and left it on until well past sundown, unable to tear my eyes away from the ugly spectacle. In one way, the events of Wednesday were shocking: after all, a hostile force has not breached the Capitol since the War of 1812. But in all other ways, Wednesday was the natural outcome of years of lies, incitement, manipulation, demagoguery, and (most pertinent for this sermon) heresy. That’s not a word I use very often, but it is important, especially in tumultuous times like these, to use the right words for things. I’ve been thinking and praying for three days about how to address the events of Wednesday in this sermon, and the only way I can wrap my head around them after so little time is to begin with the heresy on display this week and then counter it with Gospel.

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The Garden and the Wasteland (updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, January 3, 2021 || Christmas 2 || Luke 2:41-52

They say that every therapist should be in therapy. Likewise, every priest should participate in spiritual direction. Without trained professionals helping us pastors notice God’s movement in our lives, one of two things happens. We either forget to rely on God, thus emptying ourselves of all nourishment even though a feast is perpetually spread before us. Or we decide we don’t need to rely on God, because we are doing just fine on our own (thank you very much!) and the same starvation results. We pastors are a rather thick bunch, usually quite stubborn when faced with the Almighty, because the Creator-of-All-That-Is rarely seems to fit the predictions of our seminary studies.

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My LEGO Jesus

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The people at the churches where I have served as a pastor know how much I love LEGO. New sets were always my favorite birthday and Christmas presents growing up (still are), and I still have about 99% of my childhood LEGO bricks from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Back then, LEGO minifigures all had yellow heads and hands. They all had the same two black dots for eyes and small smile. The first minifigures debuted in 1978, and variable facial expressions appeared first in 1989, and….

Yikes. I had to stop myself from going on a long ramble about the history of LEGO minifigures. Here’s a great infographic from LEGO which tells it way better than I can.

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The Upside Down

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Sermon for Sunday, November 1, 2020 || All Saints A || Matthew 5:1-12
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There are many ways to describe the overarching narrative of the Bible, the connective tissue that weaves through the many and varied voices and genres that make up the library of our Holy Scriptures. One theme describes God’s love and grace restoring all of creation back to God. Another tells a family story and invites all who read it to share in that story. A third way of viewing the thrust of the biblical narrative is what I’d like to focus on today. This third way sees our holy texts speaking to an upside down world – speaking God’s yearning for justice and peace in order to empower people to partner with God to turn the upside down world right side up.

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Three Kinds of Power (With a Lot of Help from Star Wars)

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Sermon for Sunday, October 4, 2020 || Proper 22A || Philippians 3:4b-14

Today, I want to talk about power. Like the word ‘love,’ we use the word ‘power’ to mean several things, which makes any discussion about power challenging. I’m going to move through three understandings of power, and I hope you will stick with me because the third one is the one we are aiming for. Also, I’m going to use Star Wars to illustrate the three types of power. (I’ve only used one Star Wars reference this year, so I’m well within my limits.)

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I Don’t Know (Third Base!)

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Sermon for Sunday, September 27, 2020 || Proper 21A || Matthew 21:23-32

There are a lot of contenders for most famous comedy routine of all time. There’s Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch or perhaps, “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” There’s the cheeseburger skit from the early days of Saturday Night Live. There’s George Carlin’s seven words you can never say on TV (which are also words I won’t say in a sermon). But they all fall short of one comedy routine, the absolute pinnacle: the baseball routine of Abbott and Costello, commonly called “Who’s on first.” The Yankees have some players with very strange names, and as Abbott teaches the players to Costello, Costello gets increasingly confused and frustrated.

Abbott begins by telling him the infielders: “Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know’s on third.”

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