RoboPreacher

and cause us in her ways to go Luke 1:5-13, 14-25, 57-80 : \It was Zechariah’s shift, again … Zechariah could remember the first time he served as priest at the altar of the Lord. He’d been anxious . Worried he’d mess up. But, that was long time ago.   Over the course of the years , though, Zechariah had served as priest plenty of times. And in that time, life, as it is wont to do, had gone by … Zechariah got married . He and Elizabeth built a life together.   And while it wasn’t the most glamorous life, it was a good one. They were happy enough with it. They couldn’t ask for more… Except … Except one thing; they hadn’t had a child . …And while it may not be our child situation, we all have barren places in our lives. Don’t we? Places where things haven’t gone the way we expected. Places where, despite all our efforts , we haven’t been able to make them come out a’right… That was Zechariah and Elizabeth’s lot.   ...

you’d be frightened by the open hand The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke! We can relate to this story, can’t we? Those of us who have been commissioned to share the Good News; we all know what it’s like to lose our voice… There are a few reasons the church loses its voice these days. First; we’re not as powerful as we once were. There’s more folks who mark “no religion” on their census, than there are Lutherans, you know. We lose our voice as one after another, more and more folks walk away from the church… Second, in these changing days, we’re far too likely to turn on each other. In the face of the new challenges the church must address, we turn on each other and fall into internal dissension. We lose our voice when we get too caught up in our own little squabbles to bother speaking to those folks who have walked away from the church; or those folks who have never been in a church in the first place. The most devious reason we lose our voi...