Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Luke 4:1-13   Trust in the Wilderness   Forty-eight hours is the longest I have ever fasted.   Two days and not even close to forty.   And I was miserable.   Sitting hungry, in the woods, in the rain, with a plastic tarp.   And the only flat, stable surface was a rock, but there was a nest on the underside, filled with, what I think were, yellow jackets, or anyway something that stung.   And I so I sat on the saturated ground.   And rather than be enlightened, or become a holier person, I cursed the skies and the rain and my pants, which were too big, and my thumb, which I cut with my off-brand Swiss Army knife.   And the devil never arrived – either because he wasn’t impressed with my two day fast, or because he saw that he wasn’t needed.   Of the two wilderness stories we are given today, I relate much more to the one in Deuteronomy.   And not just because Jesus is much better ...

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Romans 8:26-39   Trusting the Grip I just stared at the picture.   Looking at the faces.   They were my brothers and my sisters in Christ, they were even fellow members of the Anglican Communion, but they did not really like me; they were browner than I am – which, of course, is not difficult.   The men mostly had beards.   The women, they wore coverings on their heads.   They sat there in the church, looking at the one standing in the pulpit, holding a camera.   And they smiled, with their lips and their eyes, they smiled.   The church, it was full.   And I just stared. Mostly it was just a picture of people in a church – an Anglican Church.   There was nothing extraordinary about the quality of the picture.   In almost every way it was common, normal.   But for one thing: the picture was taken in the heart of Baghdad, at St. George's Church.   There they sat, people of all ...