Preaching the Scriptures

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 11:1-13 Prayer I have knocked; I have knocked on unanswered doors. I have searched; I have searched and did not find. I have asked; I have asked questions into the bottomless abyss from which no answer ever emerged. And so have you. Not every time. But some times. You have prayed for a healing that never came. A solution that was not solved. You have knocked at the door and it seemed the knock just echoed through an empty house. I chose to preach on this text because I really did not know what to say about that – especially in light of today's Gospel. Now I don't think prayer is a sanctified magic spell. I don't think using the correct words or doing it the right way guarantees desired results. If that were the case sporting events would get very complicated. All those prayers going back and forth could get pretty confusing for heaven. And we can be sure, a lot of the prayers would be prayed for sporting eve...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 10:38-42 Mary and Martha When I was in college, my junior year, I was an RA, a Resident Assistant. It was the year that Gallup released their StrengthsFinder test. And every RA was required to take the test. The idea was that once we identified our strengths, we could then lead our fellow students from a place of strength. It was a nice test actually: everybody won because everyone had some strengths. Out of the however-many strengths Gallup identified, each person was given a list of their Top Five. Of course then, because it was a college, we had to talk about those strengths at length with our classmates; we were given exercises to accentuate our strengths; we wrote essays. We were probably even graded on how well we expressed our feelings about our results. Anyway, I don't remember all of my strengths. But I do remember my number one strength: achiever. And while all strengths are special and equally valuable, I was...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 10:25-37 The Wrong Question Every day we log on, or turn on the TV, or pick up the newspaper to find yet another bleeding, hurting, desperate person being passed by – a young black or blue body gunned down, a lonely gay or lesbian teen contemplating suicide, a desperate refugee longing to survive. And still the question rings out in our country, our culture, our world: “Who is my neighbor?” And it is always the wrong question. It is the wrong question because it is a question in search of an exception, an excuse, a reason not to love. It is the wrong question and we have to stop asking it. The lawyer in today's Gospel begins with a test. And the test quickly becomes something else all together. Because it always does. Jesus, I think, tries to make love very simple for us; but in doing so, it complicates it terribly. It seems simple because of the lack of distinction: love God and love people. There are no exceptions, no as...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Deuteronomy 10:17-21 & Matthew 5:43-48 Dual Citizenship There is an almost certainly apocryphal story about the young James Madison, the man who would later go on to become secretary of state and then the fourth president of these United States. Madison, was, like most of you, an Anglican; and the Anglican Church was at that time the established church of his native Virginia. As the story goes, he once witnessed some of his fellow Anglicans harassing and hammering some poor defenseless Baptists. Seeing those state-sponsored churchmen bully those of a minority sect, it is said he decided right then and there that the developing nation must have a separation between church and state – an idea that was later codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution. Now, much more likely is that this idea became urgent for him after seeing six Baptist ministers jailed for preaching without the formal permission of his state – an act that...