Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13   A Prayer for a New Year   This is my planner.   It is brand new.   The cover is not yet worn or dirtied.   It has not yet been mangled by the assorted contents of my backpack, the place it will spend much of this next year.   There currently is not a single mark on its pages.   Nothing has been crossed out or checked off.   It will never again be quite as pristine as it is this morning.     This planner is a little different from the planners one might find at Staples or Target because this planner begins with today, November 28, the first Sunday of Advent.   You see, it is the Episcopal Liturgical Appointment Calendar.   It is decorated with Bible verses and tiny little candles mark the feasts of the Church.   Even though, like probably many of you, I trust my phone to keep my appointments, to vibrate in my pocket 15 minutes before each meeting...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Revelation 1:4b-8   Christ the King Sunday   It is not lost on me that this letter, what we call the book of Revelation, was written by a lonely prisoner, about a God who seemed to be losing, and a King whose obituary had been published about seven decades earlier.   And so we could dismiss this whole thing as wishful thinking or even the delusions of an underfed exile.   And that is fair because John, the writer of these visions, imagines all kinds of unrealistic things: like tears wiped dried and no more death and a broken world made into heaven on earth.   Or we can choose to believe in the unbelievable.   And remember that it is the work of God to plant dreams in the very places hope goes to die, like an island prison in the middle of the Aegean Sea.     I am not sure how this strange series of apocalyptic visions escaped the island and found its audience on the shore, but the ecstatic dre...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Isaiah 25:6-9 & Revelation 21:1-6a   Living Dreams   Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our years away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.   But what if they don’t?   What if dreams never die?   What if they ride the ever-rolling stream of time, passed down through the ages like the most precious of family heirlooms?     Today, on this All Saints’ Sunday, we look to the heavens and we marvel at those who blind our eyes with their dazzling halos; they stand before us like guiding stars leading us to the crèche of Christ but at a seemingly impossible distance.   We hang them in the sky, light years above our human toil.   Untouchable.   Beyond reach.   Imagining they possess, like comic book heroes, supernatural abilities with which we are simply not blessed.   But in truth the only thing that separates the saints of old from us, besides...