Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Matthew 28:16-20   Go! St. John, Delhi   Another week; another mountain.   The disciples have once again gathered at altitude to watch the resurrected Jesus leave.   It feels like we just did this.   Two Sundays ago, on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, on the Sunday after the Ascension, we heard of a similar scene, that time from Luke’s perspective, this time from Matthew’s.   And while the stories do bear a striking resemblance, there is an important distinction between these two goodbyes.   In the telling we heard two weeks ago, the disciples were told to huddle up in an upper room and prepare for the coming of the Holy Spirit.   That is not the message of this Gospel passage, these final verses of Matthew’s Gospel.   In Acts, the disciples were directed to wait; here they are told to “GO”!   This “go” is famously how the Gospel of Matthew ends.   It is a stirring and memora...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Genesis 12:1-9   Go   The momentum had stalled.   The first eleven chapters of Genesis, and, by extension, of the Bible, begin with a tremendous explosion of life.   In the beginning, God created.   And in the context of that wildly productive expression, God made all of these diverse and vibrant perpetuating lifeforms.   God intended that the spark of life, spoken forth by a divine word, would grow and spread, be fruitful and multiply.   But instead, it stalled.   The author of Genesis, before telling the story of Abram and Sarai, leads us into a surprisingly barren land, a world in which death and desolation had taken hold, a world in which hope had hit the wall.     The teeming possibility of Eden’s Garden had withered.   No longer in those paradisal bounds, the story is set now in Haran.   And there was no hope in Haran.   In the final verses of the previous chapter, we...