Preaching the Scriptures

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson John 4:5-42 Christ in the Face of the Stranger More than four decades ago, Henri Nouwen wrote: “In our world full of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God, we witness a painful search for a hospitable place where life can be lived without fear and where community can be found. Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women, and obligatory for Christians, to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings. The movement from hostility to hospitality is hard and full of difficulties. Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Jonah 3:10-4:11 Jonah and the Problem of Mercy This is not my idea of biblical hero.   Jonah seems like a jerk.   Am I wrong?   This passage from the book bearing his name is the very end of the book.   And there is no redemptive moment.   In this passage he even builds his own personal grandstand to sit and see what he hopes will be the destruction of an entire city.   He is praying for 120,000 people to die.   And he is furious when they do not.   Jonah seems like a jerk. And not many people know this part of the story because every complicated Bible story from the Old Testament that has an animal in it is sanitized until it is safe for a nursery wall.   They all get the Kids Bop treatment.   Noah's Ark – the story of the time God killed almost everything on Earth – is the best example – but the Jonah story is very similar.   The whale thing is usually the only thing anyone knows abo...