Preaching the Scriptures

Together   You don’t need the ashes that will be left on your forehead today.   You do not need to wear the charred remains of burnt palm leaves on your face.   You do not need to showcase my dusty thumbprint for your co-workers or for the other parents in the school pick-up line.   You don’t need these ashes.   These ashes, they only say what is already known.   To some they will say that you are strange; people probably already know that, probably already think that.   To some they will say you are religious, a Christian; hopefully people don’t need ashes to know that.   And while these ashes might remind others that you are strange and religious, that is not the point of this Lenten exercise.   These ashes are nothing more than a sign of your frailty: of the mistakes you make, of the comings of which you fall short, and of the death you will someday die.   They are for you, but you do not need them.   I suspect you do n...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Psalm 126   The Final Sunday on the South Lawn   Sometimes I see old pictures, pictures from a time that no longer exists, pictures from way back in the year 2019.   And in those old pictures the world looks different.   There are no masks, of course, very little concern about personal space, and an alarming lack of distancing, and that is always a bit striking.   But more than that, I see in those old pre-pandemic pictures a people who have not yet lived under the cloud of disease.   They have no idea that life is about to stop.   And change.   And change.   And change.   And scar them in ways still not entirely known.   They have no idea how many people they will bury, hundreds of thousands of people killed by a virus of which they have not yet heard.     Those pre-pandemic people had no idea how a world would respond to a global pandemic of this magnitude.   They co...