Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 21:5-19   When Will This Be? St. Paul’s, Schenectady (Rotterdam)   I woke up late on that Saturday morning – just in time to watch my Saturday morning favorites: NBA Inside Stuff, Saved by the Bell, and Looney Tunes.   But on this particular Saturday, something wasn’t quite right.   I could sense it almost immediately.   Instead of bustle, the house was eerily silent.   No one was milling about.   The television screen was a powerless dull grey.   Every room I explored revealed the same unsettling discovery: nothing.     I have two parents and two younger siblings, and so the silence, and absence, was notable.   I was a child in the days before cell phones and so my investigative options were limited.   You might remember that back in those days if someone wasn’t at home, by their landline, or right beside you, there was no way to reach them.   It was as if they...

  The Rt. Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Mark 13:1-8   When? St. Stephen’s, Schuylerville   Sometimes you just don’t know what to say to Jesus.   Have you ever had that experience?    Well, so did at least one of Jesus’ disciples.   And so he just blurted out, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”   And probably the stones were large.   And certainly the Second Temple appeared quite large, especially to a citizen of the 1 st century, in the days before skyscrapers and NYC and the UAE.   But Jesus meets that awkward outburst with something much more serious.   And then, it seems, no one talks again until they get to the Mount of Olives.   But in the silence, the disciples’ minds were racing.   They were wondering.   Because once again, they could not make sense of Jesus.   Neither could they make sense of a world that can’t seem to help but fall apart.   The disciples: they a...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Exodus 17:1-7   Water in the desert   The desert was dry The anxiety sky high The question was: why?   Why did God rescue them from slavery in Egypt only to leave them to die a more terrible death: a death of thirst, parched mouths terrorized by the ubiquitous dust, lips broken, organs failing?   Why would Moses and his miraculous staff hatch a brilliant escape plan but not map out the vast wilderness?   Why did it have to end this way?   Egypt wasn’t good.   But also it wasn’t death.   There they were abused by their taskmasters.   They were slowly erased, ground into the sandy ground.   It was suffering but suffering with water and food and so suffering they could, at least, survive.   In Egypt, they cried out to God in desperation but not this desperate; out in that dry desert the sands of time poured through the hourglass much more quickly.   In Egypt, the future was bl...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson John 14:1-14   Do Not Let Your Hearts be Troubled   This was not how things were supposed to go.   They had a nice little evening planned.   They had reserved a spacious room for a special meal.   And together they, all thirteen, were going to celebrate salvation, the ways in which God had written this powerful story of liberation on the muddled mess of human history.   They were going to eat and drink and tell stories.   They were going to sing hymns and say prayers.   It was going to be lovely, holy, perfect.   But it wasn’t perfect, not at all.   Instead, from the moment the settings were placed, things started falling apart, coming unraveled.   It was just one thing after another.   The party, as it progressed, took on a suffocating pall.   And everyone could feel the life drain from the room.     The foot washing, in retrospect, was the beginning of the e...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Matthew 2:1-12   Scary Baby   I too have been afraid because of a baby – but for reasons very unlike the king.   All those times that now, in retrospect, after raising two babies, don’t seem scary at all, but in the moment did: When I was first alone with that tiny human, when my wife took a well-deserved first post-partum shower, and being a new dad became very real.   It was just the two of us, in that bright, sterile hospital room – him clueless about the world, me clueless about parenthood.   Of course, it was that very moment when that little baby decided to fill his diaper for the first time, which is, in itself, a scary scene, something right out of a horror movie.   And I remember that anxiety I would feel when the baby monitor would begin to sound and his little form would begin to stir in his crib – Jen at a meeting miles away.   I would spring into action; get the bottle warmer ready and pray tha...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Haggai 1:15b-2:9 The Problem of Nostalgia and the Promise of the Future Haggai.   We don’t talk a lot about the book of Haggai.   Actually it’s a bit of a stretch to even call it a book; it is only two chapters long.   You heard a fairly high percentage of the entire volume this morning.   Haggai really kinda puts the ‘minor’ in minor prophets. It appears that even his career as a prophet was rather abbreviated.   The prophecies contained in the book bearing his name occur over just a four month period.   Besides a couple of name drops in Ezra there is no other mention of him in the Bible.   And even those two mentions give us nothing as far as biographical information is concerned.   It seems that God took out a short-term lease on him; hired him for a very specific task: to cheer on a building project.   Probably not exactly the orders he expected when he said, “Here I am, Lord.   Send me.” ...

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. ...