Preaching the Scriptures

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16   The Miracle that Matters Most   At this point, even the promise is old.   You see, this isn’t the first time Abram, better known as Abraham, heard from God.   This is just the latest in a series of conversations – each one substantially the same.   It is a testament to Abram’s stubborn hope that he even answers the third call.   The devastating lack of divine follow-through suggests that perhaps this God is all talk.   See, nothing ever happened.   The first time Abram heard the voice of God he was a younger man, virile, ready to sire a future, ready to fill a tent with the children of his beloved.   But that was a long time ago.   He had listened intently to that mysterious voice; it gave him hope – contagious hope; even Sarai, better known as Sarah, started to believe they might one day have what they had only dared to dream.   Abram left his family, his homeland, all he knew, in search of that promise – the promise i

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Genesis 9:8-17   The True Story of Noah   What people always want to know about the oldest stories is: are they real?   Are they true?   And the answer is, that of course they are true.   The best stories, the stories that stick in the soul, are always true – even if they don’t belong in the history books.   How I know they are true is that though they are old they continue to be remade and relived.   You likely haven’t built an ark to ride upon the primordial          chaos.   But I suspect you have surveyed the wreckage that chaos left behind in your life and felt the cold empty weight of despair.   You see, everyone talks about Noah’s flood, but they never think about what it feels like to live with the emptiness left behind by the receding waters.   This story is marketed to children.   It has cute animals and a boat.   It has a colorful rainbow.   And that is usually where we insert the end.   And we leave out that after the rainbow

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Joel 2:1-2, 12-17   Broken Hearts   The first words of the book of the prophet Joel feel eerily appropriate this year, as if the ghosts of our ancient past understand our pandemic present: “Hear this, O elders,” he shouts across the centuries, “give ear, all inhabitants of the land!   Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your ancestors? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.”   His people were dying of pestilence; ours die of plague.   Our lives changed in Lent last year.   And here we are again.   Walking this austere season in what we hope are the waning days of a time of imposed austerity.   Lent beckons us to renewed spiritual discipline, even as we are wearied by a year of sacrifice.   Lent calls us to take up the cross, even though our spirits are buckling under the weight of a year of heavy lifting. Some churches and Christian leaders have ques

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Mark 1:29-39   Big Expectations; Little Miracle   The author of the Gospel of Mark sets the bar incredibly high from the get-go.   Verse one of this book is a theologically dense sentence fragment and the lens through which every moment in Jesus’ life is meant to be viewed.   It reads, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”     It is difficult to set the expectations much higher than that.   Messiah.   Son of God.   The readers’ hopes, informed as they are by the messianic expectations articulated in the Hebrew Scriptures, are impossibly high from the outset.   If, in fact, this Jesus is the Jewish messiah for whom they have long waited, is there anything that he cannot do?   This is the question the opening begs.   Mark tells us, before we even have the pleasure of meeting Jesus in his Gospel, that Jesus is the Messiah.   Mark tells us, in verse one of chapter one, that he is the Son of God.   And so the possibiliti