Years ago, a wise teacher of preachers advised us to prepare our sermons with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. His point was that sermons had to be relevant to the day-to-day lives of our people, and the best way to insure that would be to focus on what is going on in our people's world. That is good advice.

So what has the newspaper (or the television or radio or internet or whatever) had for us this week? Probably something bad — a flash flood here or a shooting there or another scandal in Washington. All of those lend themselves to sermonizing, but be careful about leaving it there. Our lectionary text from Isaiah simply soars with words of hope. When we are confronted with one piece of bad news after another in the papers each day, the temptation to despair can be…