Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Romans 5:1-5   The Unshakable Foundation St. Philip’s, Norwood   Dear Church, I know you are tired…of waking up to a world of uncertainty…of warily doomscrolling your social media…of turning on and tuning in to a steady cycle of changes, chances, and crises.   I know you are tired…of the images of pain and suffering, of war and violence, of despair.   In the nation.   In the world.   And now very much seared into your soul.   I know you are tired…because you no longer know what to do or say or how to feel, because the emotions are so mixed these days, mixed to the point of muddled.   The foundations are being shaken.   Those things long taken for granted in our society are being questioned and undermined and, in some cases, discarded.   Trust has eroded as the very technologies we believed would usher in an information age have proved at least equally adept at transmitting misinfo...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 21:25-36 Shaken! I know what it is like to be shaken. When I was a kid my family lived, for a time, in this long brick ranch house.   It was built, I suspect, as something of a mansion; but by the time my family bought it, it needed some updates and some repairs.   But the main issue was that the neighborhood had changed.   Not in the way people often mean that; it had changed from what was probably an old forest to something one might describe as “shabby industrial.”   By the time we moved in there was a junk yard next door, which frequently smelled of burning tires.   And in the hills, just a few hundred yards above the house, there was a coal mining site.    Why I suspect the house was very nice when it was built, was because it still had, by the time we moved in, some very nice finishes.   The kitchen had these beautiful cherry cabinets.   The living room had a huge picture window. ...