Preaching on July 4

I am preaching tomorrow, while my pastor enjoys a last few days of vacation.  Ordinarily, I might stress about the fact that it's July 4, and how on earth can one please all the folks?  There will be the people who want to sing patriotic songs, and the people who want to mourn all the ways that the country went wrong.  Or at least, once upon a time, that's what I would have expected.

Tomorrow I'm expecting a very low attendance.  Our in-person attendance is about half of what it once was, and that number was never very large.  Now we rarely have more than 20 worshippers, and last week, it was considerably less.

I'm expecting attendance to be even lower tomorrow.  Attendance dips a bit when our pastor is out of town, and it dips a bit when there's a holiday week-end, and we still have a pandemic.

Still, let me finish my thoughts for my sermon.