Preaching the Scriptures

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Exodus 32:1-14   Seen   They were afraid.   And they felt alone and abandoned.   They were stranded in that vast and hostile desert when Moses just walked away.   He left them.   And now, there was no one left to lead the way.   No one left to escort them to the Promised Land.   No one left to walk out in front, to hear and execute the divine navigation.   No one to rescue them from hot sands and parched skin, from this scorching purgatory.     They were shriveling in the sun, wasting away day by day, stuck in neutral.   They were miserable.   But it wasn’t their fault that Moses ditched or died.   It was just clear that Moses was out of the picture.   And so there was nothing to do, nothing to see.   And they desperately needed to catch a glimpse of something.   Aaron was the one Moses left in charge.   He was the backup, the placeholder. ...

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 Matthew 20:1-16   Not Fair   This parable is not fair.   And this landowner, he does not appear to be great at business.     And I do hope the people in Jesus’ crowd understood that this story was a folksy parable – because if they took this as entrepreneurial advice, financial ruin was all but guaranteed.   In this strange parable, the owner of the vineyard is employing a highly questionable business model.   If the landowner followed this strange pattern daily, it would not be long before the morning shift suffered some serious atrophy; laborers would keep a lower profile at sunrise – even though the landowner, as the parable reminds us, does pay a fair daily wage.   Most of the laborers would apply in the late afternoon – knowing that their hourly rate skyrockets as the evening approaches.   As the word got out, and it would, the fields would become drastically understaffed and under-worked...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Matthew 16:21-28   Victory   And finally, since we are on a roll with these, my last announcement is this: the 2023 NFL season begins on Thursday.   And that means, once again, I will root for the Cleveland Browns to appear in their first ever Super Bowl.   Once again I will tell myself, as I have so many times before: this could be the year.   I have cheered on the Browns for as long as I can remember; the Browns are like a family inheritance: you don’t choose them as much as you get them.   And, over the years, that has, admittedly, left some scars.   As a little boy, I cried because of “The Drive.”   And then the next year, when I was seven, I cried because of “The Fumble.”   And at a young age, I developed a hatred for John Elway that required of me many prayers of repentance.     As painful as those experiences were, being a Browns fan only grew more difficult as I aged. ...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Acts 6:8-7:2a, 51c-60   Stones   What becomes of these stones?   Ancient as the worlds, as old as time.   Declared good by the God who crafted them at the beginning, in the beginning.   But now heaped around the body of a saint.   Stained with his blood.   Silently they sleep as the horror of the scene steals the life from a child of God, and the humanity from the frenzied perpetrators.   The ones who took and tossed and killed.   These stones could have been something else, served a more noble purpose.   They could have cushioned the head of Father Jacob, as he dreamed of angels and ladders.   They could have made an altar and felt the heavenly fire called down by Elijah.   They could have formed the foundation of the Temple, been a brick in the wall, or even become the chief cornerstone.   They could have fasted with Jesus in the wilderness, resisting the temptation to be...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Genesis 45:1-15   Pit, Prison, Palace: Joseph and the Salvation Story   The brothers were speechless because they were afraid.   They were afraid because standing before them was a ghost, a ghost that they created.   A ghost that had haunted them for years, pursued them in their dreams and in their nightmares.   But only in dreams and nightmares, until now.   Now this one they could not forget was weeping before them.   Joseph: he finally caught them – and they could not escape because they could not wake up because this was not a dream.      It had to be true; every word, every tear: it had to be true.   No one in Egypt knew their secret.   No one else in the world, not even their own father, knew the true story.   They never told anyone.   The real truth was too terrible to speak, what they had done – and to their own baby brother.   They had lived with that lie...

  The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52   The Kingdom of Heaven   The crowd was skeptical, because the evidence was lacking.   Despite Jesus’ prayer for the kingdom to come, everywhere they looked it appeared to be business as usual.   The Roman soldiers still harassed them; their taxes still funded an enemy empire; the roads were still lined with cruel, bloody crosses.   Jesus prayed for the arrival of a new kind of kingdom, but nothing changed.   Jesus talked a lot about what could be, about a future better than their present, but, as far as anyone could tell, there was nothing to see.   It is actually the problem with all things God: the obscurity of it all.   An invisible God haunting this physical world, occasionally lighting a bush on fire, infrequently knocking a bloodthirsty zealot off of a horse.   But those are the splash moments, the outliers; mostly everything else is pretty quiet; mostly God is f...