Tag: Peter

The Other Side of the Boat

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Sermon for Sunday, May 4, 2025 || Easter 3C || John 21:1-19

Let me start like this: I am not going to talk about Star Wars today. I was all prepared to write a sermon chock-full of Star Wars references because today is the unofficial Star Wars holiday, May the 4th, as in “May the Fourth be with you.” (And also with you.) But then I read the Gospel lesson for today, the story of Peter and the others fishing after the resurrection, and a powerful memory from my recent life surfaced. I feel compelled to share this memory with you instead of talking about Star Wars. And if you know me, then you know this compulsion must be pretty strong. So I’m going to spend a good chunk of this sermon sharing the story of my last conversation with a 101-year-old man the day before he died.

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The Unbroken Circle

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Sermon for Sunday, September 22, 2024 || Proper 20B || Mark 9:30-37
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Imagine with me the memories of the Apostle Peter, near the end of his life, thinking back to that day in Capernaum that is described in our Gospel reading this morning.

We didn’t think Jesus could hear us on the road. He was lagging behind us, chatting with people who had come in from the countryside to see him. Only Philip, his self-appointed bodyguard, had hung back with Jesus. The rest of us were hungry and eager to get to my house, where they knew my mother-in-law would put out a fabulous spread. But for the moment, our hunger and exhaustion had gotten the better of us, and a stupid argument broke out. We argued about which one of us was the greatest of Jesus’ disciples. I thought I had a pretty good claim on the title, given that I was always by Jesus’ side, but so were the sons of Zebedee. Others thought it might be Thomas for his devotion or James the Zealot for his zeal. Bartholomew, ever the jokester, voted for Jesus’ shadow because it followed him everywhere.

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The Spiral

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Sermon for Sunday, February 4, 2024 || Epiphany 5B || Isaiah 40:21-31; Mark 1:29-39

A single, solitary verb in today’s Gospel reading got stuck in my mind this week, and this entire sermon has spun out from this one verb. It’s a sermon about the spiritual life, a sermon about how the spiritual life is not walked in a straight line, but in a spiral. 

I’ll get to this special verb in a minute, but first let’s talk about Godly Play, this beautiful way we introduce the life and language of faith to the children of this church. Rather than teaching didactic lessons, Godly Play shares stories. The children sit in a circle with the storyteller and pay attention to the words of the story; the motions; the physical elements like sand, felt, and wooden figures; and even the silence in the midst of the story. After the story is finished, the adult mentor leads the children in a round of wondering, asking open-ended questions that purposefully do not have single correct answers in order to invite the children to put themselves into the story.

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77 Times

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Sermon for Sunday, September 17, 2023 || Proper 19A || Matthew 18:21-35

This sermon is about forgiveness. And we enter into this discussion, as we have several times recently, through the experience of Saint Peter. I’ve been talking a lot about Peter over the last few months, and that’s because he appears more in the Gospel than any other character besides Jesus. In Matthew’s account of the Gospel, which we’ve been reading this year, Peter is even more prevalent. Peter is something of the spokesperson for the disciples; he doesn’t seem to have a filter of any kind. He has no problem asking Jesus questions or answering Jesus’ questions, which he always seems to do with gut responses.

In today’s Gospel reading, Peter has just heard Jesus talk about what to do when there is conflict among the faithful. And now Peter wants to pin down how many times he has to forgive someone. Knowing that Jesus is the generous sort, Peter shoots high. Seven times. Seems a bit excessive, but still in the ballpark of reasonable. And it’s a nice number that, in Peter’s culture, evoked a sense of completion.

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Right Here

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Sermon for Sunday, August 13, 2023 || Proper 14A || Romans 10:5-15; Matthew 14:22-33

Out of all the characters in the Gospel, Peter has got to be the most relatable. At various points in the story, Peter is impetuous and confused and terrified and insightful and ignorant and, in today’s story, waterlogged. Across the narrative, Peter rarely comes off as a hero. I’ve always found Peter’s characterization fascinating because Peter was one of the most powerful people in the early church. If he had wanted to, he could have rewritten his own history to make himself appear more heroic. But he didn’t. He let the record stand, warts and all. This most powerful person in the early church shows up in the story of the Gospel as a regular guy, who’s stumbling around trying to follow Jesus, just like the rest of us.

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Simon, Lazarus, Philip, Mary

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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.

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With Open Hearts and Outstretched Arms

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Sermon for Sunday, May 15, 2022 || Easter 5A || Acts 11:1-18

I need to warn you right off the bat that I’ve preached this sermon before. Not these exact words (I wrote these words earlier this week). But this sermon, and the ideas behind it, I have preached on multiple occasions over my fourteen years of priesthood. I’ve preached this sermon so many times because I think it is so easy to miss the second (maybe third) most important moment in the entire New Testament. Well, maybe fourth most important. Whatever, it’s in the Top 5.

You might be flipping through your program looking for what I’m talking about right now. After all, it’s just a random Sunday in the middle of the season of Easter. What could we have possibly read this morning that is important enough to make the Top 5 moments of the New Testament? Would you believe I’m talking about the end of the First Lesson from Acts Chapter 11? Now you’re looking at your program and trying to remember what ____ read. Wasn’t it about Peter eating things he didn’t think he was supposed to eat? And there was a sheet acting like a picnic blanket or something?

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Peter and Jesus

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Sermon for Sunday, May 1, 2022 || Easter 3C || John 21:1-19

I can only imagine the maelstrom of thoughts roiling in Simon Peter’s head in the weeks following Jesus’ resurrection. At the last supper, he promised Jesus: “I will lay down my life for you.” He was willing to draw blood when they came to arrest Jesus in the garden. He followed Jesus all the way to the gate of the high priest’s house. And then everything fell apart. People began recognizing him and he felt afraid and in his fear he did something he never dreamed he would do, not even in his worst nightmare.

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Catching People

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Sermon for Sunday, February 6, 2022 || Epiphany 5C || Luke 5:1-11

Imagine with me the Apostle Peter, who is in Rome near the end of his life, thinking back on that day when he met Jesus by the lake of Gennesaret.

“He sounds like my kind of fellow,” I remember saying to a traveler at my stall, just days before I met Jesus in the flesh. The traveler was gossiping with the rest of my customers about the goings-on in his hometown of Nazareth. According to him, an angry mob nearly threw Jesus off a cliff for something he said in the synagogue. That was the first thing I heard about him. Like I said, my kind of fellow.

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Of Asparagus and Introspection

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Sermon for Sunday, May 9, 2021 || Easter 6B || Acts 10:44-48

One of my favorite questions to ask people is this: “What is a food you used to not like but now you like very much?” Pretty much everyone can answer this question, even if they have to reach all the way back to childhood. For me, the answers are many. I was not an adventurous eater as a child, but ever since I got married, my tastes have broadened. I started eating avocados and beans and hummus and shellfish. Recently, Leah invited me to try muscles. And to my surprise, I found I liked them a lot.

The reason I like asking this question about food is that it gets people into a mindset that we don’t often put ourselves into willingly. The question forces us to think about a time when we changed our minds. You used to think asparagus was gross…and now it’s among your favorite vegetables. What changed?

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