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St Thomas

Sermon for Seventh Sunday of Easter

By Rector's Corner, Sermons

Christopher Thomas Sermon for Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A – 5/24/20 Acts 1:6-14 Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11 John 17:1-11 For anyone who knows me well, I’m just not a person who is big on “PDA’s,” Public Displays of Affection. You know what I’m talking about. Intimacy of any sort played out in a public setting. Now, who knows why that is. We could analyze my upbringing, maybe I didn’t see or experience many examples of PDA’s growing up, or maybe it’s all my time being inculcated to be a “Proper Southern Gentleman” who keeps his feelings and emotions private, to himself. Who knows? I’m sure I can and probably will spend lots of money trying to figure this out! And I didn’t grow up as a big “hugger” either. If you ever saw the movie “Dirty Dancing,” I’m sure you remember that iconic scene where Patrick…

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May 24, 2020

Being Quiet

By Christian Formation

“We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly — spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.” Susan Taylor My soul was renewed this past week by the gift of spending time with our two grandsons. They are ages six and four, and the wonder and curiosity they express about virtually everything around them are infectious. I recently made up something I named the “quiet game” that we play together, one that builds on their innate sense of delight and curiosity. In this game, I set a timer for anywhere from thirty seconds to a minute, and the rules are that we all have to be completely quiet, listening to all the sounds that we hear in the silence. When the timer goes off, everyone takes turns naming the sounds they heard. The beauty of this game is that we…

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May 23, 2020

Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

By Christian Formation

Books of Note for St. Thomas the Apostle’s Readers and Their Friends. This month’s feature book is Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, by Alec Ryrie | Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019 ISBN-13: 978-0-674-24182-4 Particularly pertinent for the Doubters of St. Thomas Church, Unbelievers is a refreshing, provocative take on the origins of unbelief. Ryrie, of Church of England extraction, is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University in the UK. Instead of falling into the old grooves of argument, Ryrie rejects the general opinion that atheism and unbelief arose in response to the 18th Century Enlightenment in Europe. Modern unbelief instead, he contends, is not so much a response to ideas big or small, but is instead emotional. Two main emotions, anger and anxiety, are at the roots of modern secular unbelief. These two strains of emotion spring up vividly much earlier than the Enlightenment,…

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May 21, 2020

Doubters’ Happy Hour – May 26

By Upcoming Events

Please join the Doubter community for our next Happy Hour, May 26 at 6 pm, as we welcome Dr. Joretta Marshall discussing Caring for God’s People in the Age of Corona. In the age of Corona, it is becoming evident that we must rethink the ways that we take care of each other and ourselves. Unprecedented times call for reimagined ways of actively managing our own mental, physical, and spiritual health and how we engage each other and the world around us. Social-distancing, isolation, and lack of shared space are all so antithetical to the message of Jesus Christ. Who better to help us think this through than Dr. Marshall! Joretta is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Care at Brite Divinity School, where she also served as Academic Dean. Additionally, she has served on faculty at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Iliff School of Theology, and Eden Seminary. Joretta has served…

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May 21, 2020

Happy Feast of the Ascension!

By Rector's Corner

This is the day that Jesus Christ returns to heaven, 40 days after his miraculous resurrection on Easter, marking the end of his earthly journey through humanity and the beginning of his role as our chief Advocate and intercessor. Ascension neatly bookends God’s great incarnational act, God’s dwelling among us, Emmanuel, from birth, death, resurrection, and return to the Father. It really is the circle of life that we experience in so many, varied, mysterious and wonderful ways. Christ’s return to God hastens images of this great vacuum in time between his leaving and what will come. My New Testament professor, Dr. Warren Carter describes this time as “the time between the now and the not yet.” Jesus has left, with promises of return in power and great glory; but when? He neglects to say when. A seemingly critical detail! And that “time between the now and the not yet”…

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May 21, 2020

Sermon for Sixth Sunday of Easter

By Rector's Corner, Sermons

Christopher Thomas Sermon for Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year A – 5/19/20 Acts 17:22-31 Psalm 66:7-18 1 Peter 3:13-22 John 14:15-21 When you’re weary, feeling small When tears are in your eyes, I will dry them all I’m on your side, oh, when times get rough And friends just can’t be found Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down – Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon & Garfunkel Troubled. Troubled. Troubled. Paul Simon penned those iconic words, as Simon & Garfunkel’s anthem of angst took to the airwaves and pretty much summed up the feelings of a nation, maybe even a world, that was, “troubled,” to say the least. The year was 1970, and the world was on the edge of crises, the Vietnam War, raging all around, politics deeply dividing nations, peoples, communities, friends, families. Sound familiar? To say that things were “troubled” would have been…

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May 19, 2020

Let’s Talk Things Out

By Christian Formation

Two years ago, this month, there was something quite positive happening that also captured global attention. Several hundred million people from around the world tuned in to watch the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle. And while they have also been in the news quite a bit since their wedding day, I actually want to focus in this column on a story about Prince Harry that first aired in the spring of 2017, a year before his wedding. In a very candid interview, Prince Harry talked honestly about his mental health struggles as a young man. I wrote a column about this interview at the time that it was aired, and have now decided it would be worth repeating some of that column. The reason is because so many people are currently facing mental health challenges due to the stress and loss that they are feeling in this…

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May 16, 2020

Basics of the Faith/Inquirer’s Class

By Christian Formation

Your faithful clergy are hard at work preparing a most unusual on-line “Basics of the Faith/Inquirer’s Class” to deepen our spiritual journey together and also to prepare those who wish to join with St. Thomas the Apostle and the Episcopal Church in a more formal way, through confirmation, reception, or reaffirmation. The class is open to all, and especially geared to those who may be new or have been visiting, and want to learn more about our worshipping community. We will be using John Westerhoff’s text, “A People Called Episcopalians: A Brief Introduction to Our Peculiar Way of Life.” We’ll explore five main areas of Episcopal life – identity, authority, spirituality, temperament, and polity. (And we will throw in a little St. Thomas history for good measure!) The text is available on Amazon.com or from Church Publishing. We’ll meet Wednesday evenings June 3 – July 8, 6:15 pm – 7:30…

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May 14, 2020

The Strangest of Journeys

By Rector's Corner

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” – Hebrews 11:1, NRSV I feel like you and I, dear Doubters of Great Faith, are on the strangest of journeys, this path we’ve been led into, not of our own choosing, but borne of necessity, at the most peculiar of times, in the very infancy of our relationship together. It’s the time when Rector and congregation, like partners who have wed, learn through acts, and signs, and words, and deeds, what trust, and hope, and, indeed, faith, and “faith-full-ness” (to be filled with faith) look like. I refer to you as “Doubters of Great Faith” for a reason. To my way of thinking, that is a sign and symbol of your great courage to live in the place of tension between that which you can see, that which seems so obvious, and that which…

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May 14, 2020