Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Epiphany 4A 1-29-23 Micah 6:1-8   What does the Lord require of you?   What does the Lord require of you?   That’s a big question.   But what if I told you: the answer to this highly consequential question is actually in this text – hidden in the sixth chapter of this twenty-seven-hundred-year old book.   Is it even possible that a minor prophet, who lived and worked more than 700 years before the birth of Jesus, clued us in to the secret of life and the heart of God ages ago?     This portion of Micah chapter 6, the one we heard this morning, is sometimes read as a court transcript, the record of a legal contention between God and Israel, with the mountains presiding.   And given the nature of the Hebrew Bible it is not surprising that one might go there.   It is certainly not without precedent; in fact, much of the prophetic canon is shaped by the legal process.     The pas...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Genesis 2:18-24   Making Things Good   In the beginning, God was pleased – at least that is the impression one gets when reading the creation story that opens our Bible.   God made and God liked what God made.   Everything is evaluated and called good.   Water = good.   Dry land = good.   Plants yielding seed = good.   Lights in the dome of the sky = good.   Winged birds, great sea monsters, even creeping things = good.   God makes things and those things are good.   But it gets better; God decides that the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts.   After stepping back and evaluating all of those good things together, God decides that the whole of creation is, in fact, very good.   God is pleased.   But in all of that goodness, there is still something amiss; something is not quite right.   God continues to look around at this very good creation until ...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Mark 10:2-16 Talking Divorce We're gonna talk about divorce today. And I realize that for some of you, divorce is an uncomfortable topic; for some of you it drags up painful memories and hurt feelings – from your own divorce, or from your parents' divorce, or maybe from the broken marriage of a child, grandchild, or close friend.   And I understand, that the Church has a complicated history with the topic – which is why many priests and pastors will today preach Hebrews or hold a St. Francis’ Pet Blessing or focus on the second half of this Gospel, the part about children; and I get that.   In fact this very passage from Mark's Gospel has often been used to pulverize people in one of their most vulnerable moments.   This Gospel has been used by religious leaders to further victimize women in abusive marriage relationships.   For those unexpectedly abandoned by their spouse, this text has, at times, been used to cause ad...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Genesis 3:8-15 The One Thing that is Not Good In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the Earth, God declared the creation good.   Each new day, something new; each new day, something good: light and darkness, Sun and Moon, the planets in their courses, animals and plants, and a human being – all created by God, all given the ultimate seal of approval.   And at the end of the work, God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. Well, almost everything. After taking some time to look things over, to double-check the work, God caught one aspect of the creation that could not be called good, one oversight in an otherwise flawless creation.   In the second chapter of Genesis, God observes and declares, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” And so God creates one more thing: a community.   God sees that it is not good for a person to be alone; and so God blesses the first person w...