I’m preaching this weekend at Ruma and Evansville, Il. I haven’t led worship or written a sermon or preached since the first Sunday in November last year. So I may need to be retrained. Plus I’m figuring out how to wear my readers since having cataract surgery. Do I wear them close to my eyes which would mean I can read fine, but the people will be all fuzzy. Or do I wear them on the bridge of my nose which may make me look as wise as an owl or well, who knows as I look over the tops.

Now I wrote my sermon today on Isaiah 43:16-21 in which God tells the exiles in Babylon about how he made a dry path through water to deliver Israel from slavery in Egypt, but now they are to forget that past event because he is putting into action a new plan to turn the dry desert into a land flowing with rivers of water. God is doing this not only to return his people to their homeland, but also that they might praise him.

All this looks forward in the Gospel lesson to the time the religious teachers of the law and senior priests will arrest Jesus and his subsequent death will be our deliverance from all our wrongdoing and subsequent death.
That I already have my sermon written by Thursday night is good, right? Well maybe, because based on past experience I am going to worry this sermon within an inch of its life by Sunday morning. I just can’t leave well enough alone.

When I’m done I’ll file it and if I go back to it in the future I will wonder what I was thinking preaching such a mish mash.
Life ain’t easy folks.