Sermon - 12/5/21

<p>Notes for Sermon on the Second Sunday of Advent at Faith, Okemos, December 5, 2021 based on Luke 3:1-6</p> <p><em>In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius…the word of God came to John</em>. </p> <p>And in this first year of Joseph Biden’s presidency….when Gretchen Whitmer is governor, Elissa Slotkin, our district 8 congressional representative, Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, our senators, Craig Satterlee, our synod bishop, and Elizabeth Eaton, our presiding bishop, the word of God still comes to us:  comes to me, to Deb, to Bruce, to Chris, to Phylis here in this worship space and to all worshiping with us online. </p> <p>To us now in this still beautiful, but lately too often also dangerous wilderness, in a country deeply divided over masks and vaccinations, in a violent world – filled with tragedies like that at Oxford High School, with unsettling threats of violence from a student at Holt Junior High, in a world infected by a wily, ever mutating virus, in a nation embroiled in heightened tensions over the fate of Roe v.Wade… to us in this violent, tension-fraught wilderness, the word of God still comes...  It is a voice crying in the wilderness:  Prepare the way of the Lord….</p> <p>It is a voice I so want my children to hear.  I can see in the faces of our three children  a pervasive weariness, both physical and psychological. I see and read and hear over and over  the wide spread anxiety of a  world  more and more characterized by meanness and hardness of heart,</p> <p>But to us the word of God has come, still comes, “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”  The word of God calls us to an immersion, a deep and daily washing away of our sins and of the sins of the world…calls us to a baptism, acknowledging our need and earnest desire for a stirring in our hearts, for the mercy of God to save us, for God to save the people of Okemos, of Michigan, of the United States, of South Africa, of Namibia, to Syria, of Afghanistan, of Ukraine, of Germany, of Russia.</p> <p>Th