Aug. 17, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
The Good News That God Is Near
August 17, 2025
First Reading: Jeremiah 23:23–29
23 Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? 24 Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the Lord. 25 I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, “I have dreamed! I have dreamed!” 26 How long? Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart? 27 They plan to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another, just as their ancestors forgot my name for Baal. 28 Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. What has straw in common with wheat? says the Lord. 29 Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?
Second Reading: Hebrews 11:29—12:2
29 By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land, but when the Egyptians attempted to do so they were drowned. 30 By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled for seven days. 31 By faith Rahab the prostitute did not perish with those who were disobedient, because she had received the spies in peace.
32 And what more should I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, 33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35 Women received their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection. 36 Others suffered mocking and flogging and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were stoned to death; they were sawn in two; they were killed by the sword; they went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, persecuted, tormented 38 of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains and in caves and holes in the ground.
39 Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40 since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect.
12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, 2 looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.
Grace to you, and peace, from God, the source of life, and from Jesus, the Christ, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
Today’s message is on the all-encompassing good news.
Last week, we made a distinction between belief and faith. Belief, as some of you may recall, is merely the acceptance of a statement that is true or that something exists. So, for example, “I believe that God exists” is a statement of belief. It’s a cognitive act, a kind of submission or assenting to a perceived or propositional truth.
Faith, on the other hand, is not merely an acceptance of a statement, insofar as it is true or not, but it’s an attitude of trust; exemplified, we saw last week, in the person of Abraham, who, as our Second Reading from Hebrews said, set out not knowing where he was going. So, an attitude of trust, whereby Abraham set out, not knowing where he was going.
It is exemplified in the people of Israel who, by faith, passed through the Red Sea, as our Second Reading says today, “as if it were dry land.” Now I don’t know about you, but that’s fascinating to me. I never thought of the faith required on the part of the Israelites to pass through the wet Red Sea. And of course, it’s faith.
This form of faith and attitude of trust is exemplified in the person of Jesus Christ, the ultimate “man of faith” whose complete trust made here what the author of Hebrew calls the “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” and won for us complete and total reconciliation with God.
In situations of doubt, when life is uncertain, when we are faced with difficult choices, when the path goes two ways, we should trust, therefore, in God, by asking ourselves, not only “what would Jesus do” as the pioneer of our faith, but “what would Abraham do,” as the one who set out not knowing where he was going.
So belief is belief that something exists. That’s redundant, but you get the idea… Faith is an attitude of trust. It involves the whole person, insofar as he or she trusts forward in light of God’s promises.
Now our talk about trust raises some questions. In what essential promise of God should we trust, especially when times are, like ours, difficult and uncertain—and our times surely are difficult and uncertain, wouldn’t you agree? A cursory scroll through the headlines of the week on a phone, or even in a newspaper, seems scary and bleak. War in Ukraine continues. War in the Sudan continues. Bloodshed in Gaza Palestine continues. The effect of climate change continues. The threat of AI to render millions of jobs obsolete, including those in the arts, like writing, continues.
So what is the essential, fundamental promise of God to each of us in times like these, in the face of threats like these? In other words, what is the Good News in the face of uncertainty? What is the Good News in which each of us can, and by the power of the Spirit, should trust?
Well, however we define the Good News as Christians, it always centers on one person, and I’ll give you a hint, his name starts with a G, Jesus! —That’s a joke from last week. Very grateful to Lee for her sense of humor. Jesus.
Now, some people focus on the good news of Jesus’s birth; how his birth is expressive of a light or a hope that has entered the world of darkness, and that the darkness, as the Gospel of John says, did not overcome it.
Others focus on the life and teachings of Jesus, especially as it relates to the poor. So, for example, the first words of Jesus, according to the Gospel of Luke, has him read from the scroll of Isaiah. It says, “And he came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up, and as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when he opened the book, he found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set the liberty of them that are bruised, broken or oppressed.’”
So the Good News can be Jesus’s birth, which is announced in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel. It can also be the life and teaching, specifically, of Jesus, especially as it relates to the poor, to the captive, to the oppressed. That is Good News to each of those groups, and that appears in Luke chapter 4.
Others, of course, focus on the Good News of Jesus’ death, an example of which appears in the first letter of John. It says, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth. But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another and the blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanses us from all sin.”
Now, that language of cleansing is really important. It goes all the way back to the book of Leviticus, whereby God received sacrifices from the Israelites; God received them cleansed by their blood. So, blood was a kind of cleansing agent, according to the ancient Israelites, and that language is preserved in the first epistle of John, as well as in the Letter to the Hebrews. This is a really important point to note. The sacrifice itself cleanses us. It does not simply appease God’s wrath.
People ask me, why do I make a big deal of this? Because the second of these two options, in my estimate, is not Biblical. It was written about 1000 years later by a theologian named Anselm, who said that God was angry with us because we sin; we therefore owe God a debt. We can’t pay that debt. So, in order to appease this bloodthirsty God, his son has to be butchered and killed. That is not in the scriptures. However, the language of sacrifice, understood as a cleansing agent, is. And the reason it’s important to me, is that it shows that God’s motive behind it is very different. One is for God to be satiated. The other, in this case, is for us to be cleansed.
The latter of these two, as you see in First John, as you see in the book of Hebrews, and as you see in Martin Luther and his translation of Romans 3, where this language of sacrifice is used as expiatory; it means it cleanses us, not this other language that we derive from Anselm. So the motive is different. God, using this language, cleanses us of our sin through the blood of Christ.
Others focus on the Good News, finally, of the resurrection of Jesus. And here I often think of 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says, “If Jesus is not raised, your faith is in vain and you are still in your sins.” For Luther and for others, the Good News was not complete, was not valid without the resurrection, because it’s in the resurrection that Jesus finally defeats the greatest enemy of God, which is death itself.
So there you have it, Good News with respect to four different points on the timeline of Jesus’s life—his birth and the hope it symbolizes as Good News; his life and the teachings of Good News, especially as they concern the poor; his death as Good News, insofar as his blood, according to ancient Hebrew teaching, reconciles us with God by cleansing us; and finally, his resurrection, which carves out a path for us that was not present before, namely, a path into eternal life where God defeats death.
Whew.
Now, obviously there are other ways to define the Good News from a biblical perspective, not least of which is that God empowers us through the Spirit in the face of uncertain or difficult times. We see evidence for that in today’s reading. My favorite text with regard to the good news of God’s empowerment is Philippians 4, where Paul says, “I can do all things through Him.” That is, Christ, who strengthens me. Now, is that not Good News? I can do all things through him who strengthens me. I can face hardship, Paul says, beatings. I can face various calamities. I can be shipwrecked. I can face the loss of a loved one. I can face the end of a relationship. I can deal with the end of a life that was filled with meaningful work. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. What incredible news.
But this morning, I’m going to suggest a former kind of Good News that encompasses all of these, that encompasses all of these, and that Good News is simple. It’s just three words.
Take a look at the first verse of our First Reading. This is from Jeremiah, chapter 23. Can you guess, based upon this single verse, what the good news is?
I heard it. Yes! Bingo: “God is near.”
23 Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? 24 Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth?
Now, when I read the first clause of that, “Am I a God near by?” I already had my sermon written.
I already had my sermon written: the Good News is that God is near.
How is God’s nearness Good News for us as Christians? Well, one author, a Jewish author of a wonderful book called The Hidden Face of God, writes against the backdrop of the Hebrew Bible, that is, for us, the Old Testament.
“One reads in the first four books of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the four gospels, a story in which, after centuries of God’s hiddenness, God once again manifests His presence visibly in human form.”
So, for those of you who are visiting today: many times I’ve preached about the fact that if you look at the overarching, chronological narrative of the Old Testament, God gradually disappears. God gradually disappears, such that by the end of the overarching narrative, God is not even mentioned in certain books, like Esther and of course, my favorite, the Song of Songs.
The Good News therefore among Christians is that God, perceived to be far off, has once again come near. That God, perceived to be far off, has once again come near.
Suddenly, you start to see, or at least I start to see, the Good News that God is near encompassing the entire storyline of Jesus. In his birth, what is the name given to Jesus? Emmanuel. Matthew 1:23. “God is with us.” God is near. In his life, Jesus says, regarding the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed, “Whatever you do to the least of these you do to me.” The Good News is, that he is there.
And then again in his death, I think of the scene where Luke has Jesus between the two thieves, or revolutionaries on the cross; even criminals: Jesus experiences death with them and all of us. You cannot imagine a more profound way of God being near than God identifying with the scariest aspect of human life, which is death itself, passing through it and coming out the other side!
And then in the resurrection: Do you know the last phrase of the Gospel of Matthew? Jesus says to His disciples, and by extension, to each of us, each of us: “And lo, I am with you always to the end of the age.”
His birth: God is near. His life and teachings: God is near. His death: God is near; and His resurrection: God is near.
And if you can’t remember any of these (and you should; there will be a test next week!) if you can’t remember any of these, think of the promise, the Good News of Psalm 23:4. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for You are with me. Your rod and their staff, they comfort me.”
God is near, even, and especially when God seems far off. God our companion, our friend, especially in Jesus Christ—that is the Good News.
So how do we respond to the Good News that God is near? It’s simple. I came up with this, referring to myself: shut up and show up. “Shut up and show up.”
Do you know, one of the biggest fears I had becoming a pastor, was how I would provide pastoral care to people who are dying? How weak and vulnerable I felt. Who am I? Somebody not trained in the medical profession, to be there as the minister of healing in the face of death! And then, after one colleague put it, I learned just to show up. I learned just to show up.
And that’s what today’s Gospel is inviting you to do, as well, as members of Christ’s body: shut up and show up. We become God’s presence, then, to our neighbor in need. We become Christ to a friend who we console, who’s grieving. We bring God’s presence to the hospitalized and the homebound, two of whom we welcome back today in the congregation. We show kindness to a person on the street. We give evidence that we care for them. These are all different ways of shutting up and just showing up.
And yesterday, I had the privilege with our assisting minister, Susan Evans, to visit a 91-year-old member of the congregation. I thought we were bringing God’s presence to her. She brought God’s presence to us too, didn’t she?
That’s the Good News. Show up. You become vessels of God’s presence to others. The Good News is that God is not only near to you and me, but through you and me, near to someone else, someone in need of care and compassion. God is near. That’s the Good News.
Now show up. Bring that Good News to someone else. Be the bearer of that Good News to someone in need.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.