The days are surely coming…We can’t go back.

(I preached this sermon in response to Jeremiah 31:31–34 and John 12:20–33. You can find the video of the sermon and worship service here.)

Take in the events of the last 12 months. We live in a time of great and rapid change as well as upheaval. We wear masks most places we go — not that we have gone to many places in the last year.

For most of us, just over a year ago the word Zoom was probably only associated with sports cars. And now we zoom pretty much everything and with everyone. There’s even a term for too much zoom — zoom fatigue.

We’re in the midst of a pandemic that drags on, although we seem to be moving in the right direction now thankfully — we’ll see if that holds up. As of yesterday, there were over 539,000 Covid-related deaths in the US since this started last March. These Covid-related deaths made 2020 the deadliest year on record in US history — far outpacing our normal number of deaths each year, and even deadlier than years in which we were consumed by wars, which cause a higher than normal death count.

We’ve had a contentious political season that culminated in a violent assault on the capitol that left five people dead as well as lingering deep divisions in the nation. Will those divisions heal? I don’t know.

We’re struggling as a nation with white supremacy and toxic nationalism — do we acknowledge that these things exist, that they are a serious problem, and that many people’s lives and families have fallen…