Tag: Trust

Daunting Tasks

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Sermon for Sunday, December 24, 2023 || Advent 4B || Luke 1:26-38

(I was off yesterday, so no sermon from December 31st, but I preached two different sermons on December 24th. Last Monday, I posted the Christmas Eve sermon. Here’s the one for the Fourth Sunday of Advent.)

The reading we just heard from the Gospel According to Luke is one of my absolute favorite passages in the Gospel. I find the character of Mary so utterly compelling, so much a model for our inspiration. She only shows up a handful of times in the story, so let’s take this opportunity today to talk about Mary and about how her interaction with Gabriel sheds light on our lives.

The church calls the event of Gabriel coming to Mary the “Annunciation,” with a Capital A. This event gets its own feast day on March 25th (conveniently, exactly nine months before Christmas). Few events in the Bible have been painted more often by artists than the Annunciation. If I were laying out the story of the Gospel like a novel, then the Annunciation would be the Inciting Incident of the book because Mary’s “Yes” at the end of the passage sets in motion the rest of the events of the Gospel.

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In Whom I Put My Trust

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Sermon for Sunday, September 25, 2022 || Proper 21C || Psalm 91; Jeremiah 32

What does it mean to put our trust in God? I wrote this question to myself when I began writing this sermon on Tuesday after reading today’s psalm over and over again. As I began writing, I didn’t have an answer to this question, which seemed weird since I talk a lot about God and about faith. But when I put the question to myself – what does it mean to put our trust in God? – I had to stop and think really hard about what I mean when I say I trust God. Obviously, I finished writing the sermon, so I figured out something to say, but I wanted you to know that when I first typed that question on a blank document, I didn’t really know I was going to answer the question.

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Fear and Trust

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Sermon for Sunday, August 8 2021 || Proper 14B || John 6:35, 41-51

God created us to be beings of love and trust. We all start out that way, at least, but pretty soon the world teaches us a lesson I wish we all had the opportunity to unlearn. The world teaches us to fear, to be afraid of so many parts of life. This makes sense, because the world contains a lot of frightening things. When I was a kid we did not have active shooter drills in school like my children do now. Then the massacre at Columbine happened my sophomore year of high school, and school shootings have been a terrifying element of American society ever since. This fear is ever-present in my mind when I drop my kids off at school, hovering right below the resurgent pandemic.

Fear has a way of debilitating us, of shrinking us down and holding us hostage. Thinking about fear this week, I also had in my mind Jesus’ words from the Gospel lesson I just read. Those words started seeping into my consciousness. And I noticed that Jesus had sidled up right next to my fears and made them seem very small in comparison.

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Surge Capacity

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Sermon for Sunday, September 20, 2020 || Proper 20A || Exodus 16:2-15

At the end of this sermon, I’m going to talk about the prophetic voice of the movie Frozen II, but first let me talk about the church hymn board affixed to the wall to my left. This is the attractive wooden rack into which our altar guild slides in the numbers that correspond to particular songs in our hymnal. At the top of the rack, we display the particular Sunday of the church year. I haven’t touched the hymn board since the last time we used it. I’ve left it alone as a memento from our last in-person gathering. Right now the hymn board reads the “3rd Sunday in Lent.” Half a year ago. 

I remember the anguished discussion the vestry had about closing the church building back in March. We had no idea how bad the pandemic would get, but the writing was on the wall. Thankfully, the vestry made the hard choice in that moment of uncertainty. Now, six months later, we are faced with the opposite hard choice: how and when to invite people back to in-person services as we balance our need for physical proximity with our collective goal of deterring the spread of the virus.

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The God Who Sees

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Sermon for Sunday, June 21, 2020 || Proper 7A || Genesis 21:8-21

Today, I’d like to talk about Hagar. Specifically, I’d like to talk about Hagar’s vision and how God grants us the same capacity for faithful seeing that Hagar has. First, though, you might be wondering who Hagar is. Hagar is an Egyptian servant (or slave) in the household of Abram and Sarai (who during the course of the Genesis story have their names changed to Abraham and Sarah). When God promises Abram that God will give Abram countless descendants, the old couple don’t know what to do. They’ve never had children of their own, and now they’re way too old. Taking God’s promise into her own hands, Sarai offers her servant Hagar to Abram, saying, “It may be that I shall obtain children by her.” (If this sounds eerily like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is.)

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Into Your Hands

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Sermon for Sunday, May 10, 2020 || Easter 5A || Psalm 31

It really got to me this week – the isolation, the distance. One day, I got home a little before dinnertime. Leah gave me a hug, and I realized it was the first time that day someone had touched me. I had been feeling agitated all day, and in that moment I knew why. My primal need for physical contact had not been met. What a relief it was to go home to someone who would embrace me. Then I thought about all the people, those I know and love and those I don’t know and am still called to love, who haven’t touched another human being in two months. I couldn’t even make it a day! So when I read our lessons for today, one verse of the psalm leapt off the page:

Into your hands I commend my spirit,
for you have redeemed me,
O Lord, O God of truth.

Into your hands. I talk about God’s hands all the time. Every single time I pray for someone who is sick, I end the prayer with, “May God hold you in the palm of God’s hand.” I love to sing the Irish blessing, which ends in a similar fashion: “May God hold you in the hollow of God’s hand.” For a long time, I’ve been inviting other people to see themselves as being held in this loving grip. For some reason, I hadn’t seen myself as being held there. 

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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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Psalm 130, Expanded

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Sermon for Sunday, July 1, 2018 || Proper 8B || Psalm 130

Psalm 130 holds a special place in my heart. You all know my father comes up fairly often in my sermons because his nearly 30 years of ordained ministry have had such a profound impact on my own. Psalm 130 is his favorite psalm. I’ve often heard him recount with eloquence and tenderness a moment with God out on the ocean when he felt like the watchmen waiting for the morning. Because Psalm 130 is his favorite, it has become one of mine too. So when the psalm came up in our rotation today, it called out to me, and I’d like to share my thoughts on it with you in the form of a meditation. Continue reading “Psalm 130, Expanded” →

I Can Be Love

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Sermon for Sunday, February 5, 2017 || Epiphany 5A || Matthew 5:13-20

It’s week five of our sermon series where we’re imagining our way into God’s point of view. Today we were going to talk about God seeing, naming, and celebrating us as enlightened. I’m still going to get to the content of what I planned to say in a bit, but I need to start from a different place today.

You see, like many of you the two weeks since the inauguration have set my head spinning. I sat down on Monday afternoon to try to find some clarity in the turmoil, and I accidentally wrote this sermon. I didn’t mean to. I was writing a list of recent events to help clarify for myself what’s been going on. After writing the list and reading it over again, this sermon started pouring out. The list was a distillation of recent tactics employed to centralize governmental authority in a small cadre of like-minded men. As I reviewed what I had written, I found the feeling that has been creeping around inside me since the end of election season suddenly no longer creeping, but strutting. That feeling is fear. Continue reading “I Can Be Love” →

I Can Be Love

Published on by Adam Thomas1 Comment
Sermon for Sunday, February 5, 2017 || Epiphany 5A || Matthew 5:13-20

It’s week five of our sermon series where we’re imagining our way into God’s point of view. Today we were going to talk about God seeing, naming, and celebrating us as enlightened. I’m still going to get to the content of what I planned to say in a bit, but I need to start from a different place today.

You see, like many of you the two weeks since the inauguration have set my head spinning. I sat down on Monday afternoon to try to find some clarity in the turmoil, and I accidentally wrote this sermon. I didn’t mean to. I was writing a list of recent events to help clarify for myself what’s been going on. After writing the list and reading it over again, this sermon started pouring out. The list was a distillation of recent tactics employed to centralize governmental authority in a small cadre of like-minded men.*  As I reviewed what I had written, I found the feeling that has been creeping around inside me since the end of election season suddenly no longer creeping, but strutting. That feeling is fear. Continue reading “I Can Be Love” →