The third chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, a document written about 50 years or so after the events it recounts, details the context into which the word of John the Baptist was spoken. The manner in which St. Luke creates the scaffolding of the story helps us to understand the deeper context of what was happening – and the specificity of what he writes, and the names the Evangelist lists put the events into the historical context of the people who first heard these words.

If you accept (as I do) that this account was written something like fifty years after the events it recounts, then you can paraphrase some of the details of the opening sentence of the reading into a bit of Rhode Island context as such:

In the first year of Gerald Ford’s Presidency, when Phillip Noel was Governor of Rhode Island and Buddy Cianci (the Prince of Providence) was elected as mayor, John Seville Higgins was the Bishop of Rhode Island and John Allin the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church; the Word of God came to a man named John who lived in the Fourth Ward of City of Newport in Rhode Island…

John said what the Prophets before him had said in the Book of Revelation, that the time of reordering and rectification was coming near…

You can view the sermon directly here.