Tag: Joseph

New Possibilities

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Sermon for Sunday, December 7, 2025 || Advent 2A || Isaiah 11:1-10

Today’s sermon is about the unexpected grace of new possibilities. As we continue in our Advent season of preparation and anticipation, we practice opening ourselves up to how God is moving in our lives in the same type of unexpected ways that God moved in the lives of Mary and Joseph as they welcomed Jesus into the world. Mary practiced this openness when she said “Yes” to the angel. Joseph practiced this openness when he made a family with Mary despite pressure to reject her. Our openness to new possibilities is a symptom of the hope we place in the God who makes all things new. So let’s talk about new possibilities today: first we’ll look at the beginning of this morning’s reading from the Prophet Isaiah, then we will talk about three ways we can test that the new possibilities we are reaching for come from God.

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The Painting in Nazareth

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Sermon for Sunday, January 5, 2025 || Christmas 2 || Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23

This is a sermon about biblical role models. After the service, I would love to hear what character in the Bible inspires you like Joseph inspires me. So be thinking about for the next ten minutes while I talk.

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The Christmas Pageant (Taylor’s Version)

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I wrote the dialogue and lyrics for this new Christmas Pageant, which kids from my church performed yesterday on the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It was a blast! (And, obviously, despite the assertion in the first paragraph, the real Taylor didn’t help us – but her music did.) Here’s the video of the pageant, followed by the script.

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Sabbatical Retrospective, Year 2017: The Uniqueness of the Incarnation

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During my sabbatical, I’m not writing new sermons, so on Mondays I am choosing one post from every year of WheretheWind.com to highlight. In 2017, I preached this sermon on Christmas Eve.

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2023 Christmas Pageant: Part of God’s Story

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This pageant takes the form of a bedtime picture book being read to a roomful of children. The story is the traditional Nativity story, but with one problem: the characters keep forgetting to appear! So the storyteller recruits the children to be part of the story God is telling. In the end, the whole assembly is invited to be part of God’s story.

In the beginning, God had a story to tell: the greatest story ever told, the story of Creation. And God began that story with four simple words: “Let there be light.” Everything God created was a character in the story: birds and bugs, land and lizards, fish and flowers, mammals and the moon. For untold generations, God’s story of Creation grew in the telling until a new group of characters entered the tale, characters who somehow knew the story was being told.

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Practicing Awareness

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Sermon for Sunday, December 3, 2023 || Advent 1B || Mark 13:24-37; Luke 1:26-38; Matthew 1:18-25

Today we begin again. We begin a new cycle of the church year, of services and celebrations, of feasts and fasts, that provide us the scaffolding for practicing our awareness of God’s presence in our lives. That’s what I’d like to talk about today on this First Sunday of Advent: practicing our awareness of God’s presence.

As the beginning of the church year, Advent is a time of recommitment. We recognize that in all the changes and chances of life, we often fall asleep in our lives of faith. We start sleepwalking through life, going about our days in a fog of tasks and to-dos, and we don’t pause often enough to practice God’s presence in the midst of everything. In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus implores his disciples and us to keep awake for the signs of God’s presence. You know by the blooming fig tree that summer is near, he says. You can read the signs of nature, but only if you keep your eyes open to seeing them. Therefore, keep awake!

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Joseph’s Letter

Published on by Adam Thomas2 Comments
Sermon for Sunday, December 11, 2022 || Advent 4A || Matthew 1:18-25

Imagine with me a letter written by Joseph to his father on the night Joseph had the dream of the angel that today’s Gospel reading narrated.

Joseph, eldest son and protégé, to Jacob, my father, mentor, and confidant: Blessings and peace to you, my mother, and my brothers and sisters.

By the time you read this letter, I will have left home. I awoke in the still hours of the night to write it, and I imagine that when I leave, the sun will be many hours from rising. I hope someday you will welcome me back into this house. I know it will not be tomorrow or the next day. But someday, I hope.

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Beyond Fear

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Sermon for Sunday, December 22, 2019 || Advent 4A || Matthew 1:18-25

At the end of this sermon, I’m going to talk about the movie Frozen II. But first let’s talk about fear. Whenever an angel of the Lord appears in Holy Scripture, the angel always begins the message for the same four words: “Do not be afraid.” Today’s Gospel lesson is no exception. Mary’s fiancé Joseph has resolved to “dismiss her quietly” because of her pregnancy, but he takes one more night to sleep on the decision. During that night, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream and says, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. My question is: Why would Joseph be afraid to do this? I can think of many reasons for Joseph’s fear, and I want to talk about three of them this morning. We’ll dispense with the first two quickly because the third is where I really want us to focus.

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God’s Perfect Love: A Christmas Pageant

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[The stage is set with two chairs next to a table with a third chair behind it, like a late night talk show. The narrator functions as the “host” of the talk show interviewing guests.]

Narrator

Welcome back. My next set of guests have a wonderful, inspiring story to tell.

This story is about fear and love. I want to tell you that up front so you can listen for those two things — fear and love. The Bible says in the first letter of John: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.” This story we share today happened because God so loved the world that God gave us this Perfect Love in the form of God’s own child. This story tells how Perfect Love became a person. The fancy word for “became a person” is Incarnation. For the Incarnation to happen, God chose several people to help. Every one of them was afraid, and the love of God gave them the chance to serve despite their fear. Continue reading “God’s Perfect Love: A Christmas Pageant” →