Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 19:1-10   Up a Tree   Luke is a Gospel of fascinating stories: the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the afterlife adventure of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and, of course, the story of Zacchaeus, a man forever enshrined in song as “the wee little man.”   But while the other stories are all parables told by Jesus, the Zacchaeus story is the tale of an actual encounter.   Zacchaeus was not a character created by Jesus, neither was his story a fragment of divine imagination.      This is the real life story of a real man.   A rich man.   A business man.   A wealthy adult human who, in this story, is discovered up in a tree – in public – not exactly the place one might expect to find grown man of means. Zacchaeus climbs a tree by a crowded street and his favorite sports team did not even win a championship, which I think might be the only acceptable circumstance under which an adult human is allowed to climb a tree in public.   Zacchaeus,

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c   Stressing with Naaman   Everybody is stressed out.   You’re stressed out.   I’m stressed out.   Kanye West is stressed out.   Everyone who has to be around Kanye West is stressed out.   And most importantly, for our purposes today, every single person in the Naaman story is a little stressed out.   Because stress is a such a big deal in our nation – a nation in which almost half of the adult population has quit a job because of stress, a nation in which workplace stress cost over $300 billion per year, before COVID – researchers spend a lot of time researching it. [1]   And according to the numbers, at least half of those researchers are stressed about all of that stress research – maybe even more than half because what they have found is that stress is contagious.     We don’t really need that research to know that stress is contagious because we have Naaman.   Naaman’s stress is so contagious it bursts off of the

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4   What are you waiting for?   What is he waiting for?   What is this ancient prophet, with his unusual name, waiting for?   What is this holy man, standing at his watch post, shouting from his tattered soul, praying from his deepest depths: what exactly is he waiting for?     Because nothing good is on the horizon; nothing good is coming his way.   Destruction and violence are before him.   Is he waiting for them to finally arrive?   Strife and contention are on the rise.   Is he waiting for them to reach their full stature?   A foreign army is at the gate, eager to seize dwellings that are not their own.   Is he waiting to hand over his keys?   The enemy is on a mission to gather captives like one might gather up the sand of a vast desert.   Is he waiting to be swept up and carried away?   What is he waiting for?   The prophet and his people were faced with a hopeless future.   The nation was waiting for the apocal