Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21     Stop Waiting for Jesus   Almost ten years ago I re-wrote a sermon.   On a Friday.   In the background, the babbling of a toddler clashed with the increasingly devastating news reports coming through my television screen.   As I struggled to find words, something worthwhile to say to my people, something to say about something unspeakable, the death toll kept rising.   Parents kept weeping.   I was a new dad and I was watching people live my worst nightmare.   Except for the exceptionally cruel people with their conspiracy theories, it felt like the entire nation wept with the people of Newtown, Connecticut.   How could we not?   Twenty children, little children, children barely able to tie their own shoes.   Six adult staff members.   All stolen away without mercy and without warning.   The victims walked into school, an elementa...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Acts 11:1-18   Even the Gentiles   I’m not sure one can truly understand this story from the book of Acts unless you first understand the story of Jonah.   I don’t mean the big fish part.   I don’t mean the stuff they put in illustrated Children’s Bibles.   I mean the real reason Jonah ran away to Joppa when God gave him orders for Ninevah.     At first it is a mystery; the reader can’t actually know why Jonah refuses the mission because the book does not immediately tell us.   And so we are, initially, left to speculate.   Ninevah was the capital of an enemy empire.   And so at first it seems like maybe Jonah is afraid of what will happen to him there.   The city was infamously wicked and violent.   It was a scary place.   And for Jonah, a foreigner, it would have been especially scary.   But it turns out, that’s not it.   Jonah’s reason is not clear until th...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Acts 9:1-20   The Conversion of Saul   Saul was not the kind of guy you want to know.   I’m not saying he didn’t have friends; he did.   You didn’t want to know them either.   Saul and his friends were the bad guys; the kind of guys who are fueled by hatred and the cruelest brand of prejudice; the kind of guys who believe the worst conspiracy theories and spread the vilest rumors.   Saul and his friends, on the road to Damascus, were a first century lynch mob, breathing threats and murder, gleefully terrorizing the early Church, men on the forefront of an attempted religious cleansing.   Hatred was their business, maybe even their chosen hobby.   Saul, the ringleader of this violent band, had a reputation – and it was not a good one.   Ananias, in today’s passage from Acts, shares with God what he has heard about Saul.   Saul, from Ananias’ lips to God’s ears, had done much evil to the sa...