Preaching the Scriptures

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Good Friday 3-30-18 Good Friday: Dark I’ve only been buried alive once.   Now, the guide called it spelunking, but I know better.   The first thing you notice down there is the darkness. I had never before, and have never since, experienced that kind of darkness.   It was so thick I could feel the weight of it on my skin.   I felt like the air down there must be turning my lungs black.   It was as if the outside world no longer existed, like before God spoke “Let there be light.”   Under the earth, in that abyss, there was a complete absence of light.   It was so dark you almost forget what light is. Something else that I remember from the caves was the moment it occurred to me that this was all very real.   It was not an amusement park.   There were no neatly marked paths or guiding lights, no exit doors for the faint of heart.   It was just me and my head lamp in a vast unmarked, unmapped subterranean maze.   Getting lost or injured or f

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Lent 4B 3-11-2018 John 3:14-21 What are you looking for? What are you looking for? These are the very first words Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John.   Andrew, the one who will become his first disciple, is following him on the banks of the river like an awkward fan seeking an autograph and Jesus turns and rather abruptly says to him, “What are you looking for?” It is a question Jesus never stops asking, a question that passes eternally from his lips to our burning hearts: what are you looking for?   And it is a question that becomes especially poignant during this season of Lent, this season that exists in the shadow of the cross.   And as looming shadows often do, sooner or later, this shadow too draws our eyes to its source.   And as the days of Lent shorten, our gaze moves from the shadow on the ground to the cross, and then from the rugged wood of the cross to the ragged body of the one who is lifted up on that cross.     I find it