Preaching the Scriptures

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a Body Someone in this room, in the very room in which we are now gathered, is a kidney.   Someone else in this room is an eyeball.   Or at least that is what the Apostle Paul would have us believe, that is the analogy he spins in today’s reading from his first letter to the Corinthians. There are many metaphors and analogies used to make sense of the Church – this mysterious mystical Christian community of which each baptized person is a member.   The image of the Body of Christ is one of the most enduring – perhaps because we all have bodies and each of those bodies is made of basically the same parts.   Being embodied is a universal human, and divine, experience. We all have kidneys, or at least one.   And, from here at least, it appears we all have eyeballs.   And I think we can all admit that those parts are better when they are firmly connected to the other parts of our body; that ...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 3:15-17, 21-22 Eclipse I don’t presume to know what John was thinking when Jesus showed up at the river, at his river, John’s river.   But I do know that the people who were there, the crowds that journeyed all the way out into the desert, they came to see him.   They came to get a glimpse of the man wearing the camel skins, eating the locusts.   They came to experience his unique, fiery style.   They came to be pushed under the water by his rough hands, in the corner of the river he carved out for himself.   They came for John…until they didn’t.   He was the star…until he wasn’t. Until John the Baptist was eclipsed, like the secondary star in a binary system.   And then the people moved on.   And now, in our Bible, Jesus is the primary star; John is a minor character, in the story only to support the main character.   Once he had his own disciples – until they left to follow his much more imp...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Matthew 2:1-12 I Wonder… It’s all very mysterious really, this story of these visitors from the east.   Mystery: mystery writes its story in the inspired imaginations of wondering readers who, across the centuries, have found their hearts captured by this tale.   We have inherited these inspired imaginations, these wonderings.   Because, you see, there is actually, if you read the story carefully, very little detail included in the Gospel telling according to Matthew – the only one of the four Gospels to include this story at all.   Over the years this story has grown and changed.   Over the years names have been bestowed upon these visitors; but the Gospel writer mentions nothing of names. Over the years the number of visitors has been fixed at three in the Western world – no doubt because three gifts are listed; but the Gospel writer gives us no count or census.   The gifts were expensive; perhaps there...