Tag: Moses

A Resounding Yes (Updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, August 30, 2026 || Proper 17A || Exodus 3:1-15

Twelve years ago this week, I preached the most personally impactful sermon of my entire ministry. They say if the sermon doesn’t resonate with the preacher, it won’t resonate with anyone else. I never know for whom I am writing a particular sermon, but that one twelve years ago was for me. I needed to hear it, and it turned out so did a lot of other people. Today, I’m going to revisit that sermon because it’s message is perennial, and it turns out I need to hear it again now.

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Who Did Not Know Joseph

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Sermon for Sunday, August 23, 2026 || Proper 16A || Exodus 1:8 – 2:10

Today we’re going to talk about the past, specifically about how the past is a story continually being written and rewritten. We’ll start with a few famous sayings about the past in order to ground us, and then we’ll look at the most ominous sentence in the entire Bible, which begins our reading from the book of Exodus this morning. By the end of this sermon, I hope we will all have a new appreciation for our roles in ensuring access to a story of the past that is as accurate to the events of history as possible.

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God and Not-God (Updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, June 15, 2025 || Trinity Sunday C || John 16:12-15

Nine years ago on Trinity Sunday, I preached a sermon called “God and Not-God: A Short History.” I’m going to preach a portion of that sermon again this morning before veering off in a different direction. This short history comprehends five truths that God has revealed to us, culminating in the truth of the Holy Trinity. But we need to begin at a more fundamental starting place.

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The Foundation of Being

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Sermon for Sunday, March 23, 2025 || Lent 3C || Exodus 3:1-14

I need to apologize in advance for this sermon because it is going to be both theologically and grammatically dense. Today we’re going to talk about God’s response to Moses when Moses asks God what God’s name is. God has just given Moses his mission to bring the Israelites out of Egypt and lead them to the Promised Land. Moses is aware of his severe lack of credentials, so he says, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?”

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Never Alone (updated)

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Sermon for Sunday, October 6, 2024 || Proper 22B || Mark 10:2-16

Taking the lead from the Gospel reading this morning, today we are going to talk about divorce and adultery. But mostly, we are going to talk about Jesus’ surpassing dream for all creation – that none of us and no part of that creation will ever truly be alone.

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I Will Be With You

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Sermon for Sunday, September 3, 2023 || Proper 17A || Exodus 3:1-15

After such a heady and confusing sermon last Sunday, I thought today would be a good time for something completely different. About twice a year, I preach from the perspective of a character in the scripture. Today, I am going to be Moses. Please imagine with me Moses near the end of his life, talking to his protege Joshua, who is fretting about taking on the role of leader upon Moses’s death.

“I will be with you.” That’s what God promised me all those years ago. “I will be with you.” The memory is as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. God spoke to me, called me to my life’s work, and made me that singular promise: “I will be with you.”

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I am of Paul

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, January 22, 2023 || Epiphany 3A || 1 Corinthians 1:10-18

This sermon is about the danger of fundamentalism, but it’s going to take me a few minutes to get there. I need to start like this: something’s going on in the Church in Corinth. We don’t know exactly what because we only have Paul’s side of the story. But we know that within a few years of its founding, fractures have appeared between the church’s members. Later in the letter, Paul references a few issues that divide the people: issues around what to eat, issues around who is most important in the church, and issues around which spiritual gifts are the best. Paul addresses all of these before culminating in his great poem about love – you know, “Love is patient, love is kind,” etc. 

But here at the beginning of the letter, Paul talks about another type of division that goes beyond the ideological. Paul has heard that the members of the Church in Corinth are assigning themselves to camps based on certain individuals. There’s Paul. There’s Apollos, who was another church planter in Paul’s orbit. There’s Cephas – that’s Simon Peter. And there’s Christ.

Okay, I’m going to get in the weeds here for a minute. Fair warning. I promise it’s important.

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The Temple of His Body

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Sermon for Sunday, March 7, 2021 || Lent 3B || John 2:13-22

Today marks the one year anniversary of closing the building of St. Mark’s due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Two days before the Third Sunday in Lent last year, the vestry met in an emergency capacity and made the heart-wrenching decision to close the church building for two weeks. At the time, the two-week closure was designed to help public health officials get a handle on where the virus was so they could begin tracking it. But two weeks became four, then a season, and now we mark a year. I went back and found the letter I sent to the parish about closing. It is clear in the letter that I had no conception that our building closure would last as long as it has. I could only comprehend two weeks at a time. I nursed a hope that we would be together by Easter. In March 2020 I would never have been able to conceive that we would still be apart the following Easter. But our building closure will last at least that long and most likely longer.

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Prophecy

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Sermon for Sunday, January 24, 2021 || Epiphany 4B || Deuteronomy 18:15-20

This is a sermon about prophecy, but first I want you to put a question in your mind because I’m going to ask it again at the end, and I don’t want you to be caught off guard. Here’s the question. How are you challenging the world of today in order to make the future better?

Got it in your mind? Good. Because that question is the essence of prophecy. How are you challenging the world of today in order to make the future better? We’ll get back to that question in a few minutes. For now, let’s talk about Moses and prophecy. 

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Prayer and Anxiety

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Sermon for Sunday, October 18, 2020 || Proper 24A || Exodus 33:12-23
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Today I’d like to talk about prayer and anxiety. You can probably figure out why these things are on my mind since we are less than three weeks from a presidential election, cases of covid-19 are spiking in our county, millions of people are out of work, many are on the verge of eviction, and the governor of Michigan was recently the target of an attempted kidnapping by a group by domestic terrorists. And that’s like ten percent of the stuff I wanted to put in this introduction. Whew. Deep breath.

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