Most Christians spend a lot more time thinking about Jesus than we spend thinking about John the Baptist.  We remember John when Jesus is baptized, get a little taken aback by his appearance and his diet, and move on.  After all, we know who the main character of the story is:  Jesus of Nazareth.  If anything, we move out into the wilderness with Jesus and, glancing over our shoulders, we think, “Well…that guy was a character.  Kind of weird though.”

The story of our earliest ancestors in faith is a story of liberation.  They had been slaves for generations.  Across generations, they had become very good at one thing:  making bricks, the basic building blocks that the Egyptians needed.  It wasn’t that other people couldn’t have made them, too.  Bricks are not fine art.  However, these people had made them for so long and their bricks were so reliable.  Why change a good thing?

Today, I want to begin a sermon series on gratitude.  This may seem like an odd choice at a time when so many people are disoriented and saddened and anxious about the state of our nation. It feels to some of us like we’re in exile. Here’s the thing, though:  anyone can be grateful when everything is going your way. What if it is possible to be a grateful person, whatever comes our way?

I am going to be honest with you this morning:  I am so sick of

American politics.  Understand, I love the ideal that is America:  a nation where there is liberty and justice for all; a land that welcomes the “tired and poor and huddled masses,” a land in which the constitution is upheld, the rule of law is maintained, and the will of the people is honored.  This is the land where no one is above the law, where justice is blind, and where everyone has the opportunity to pursue happiness.  In practice, America has always fallen short of that ideal but has had moments of brilliance in which we have come close, or at least caught a glimpse of, what it would mean to actually be that nation.  From the start, we came together to form a more perfect union.  This remains our struggle 225 years later.