Aug. 24, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
Keep Practicing
August 24, 2025
First Reading: Isaiah 58:9b–14
9b If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
10 if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
11 The Lord will guide you continually
and satisfy your needs in parched places
and make your bones strong,
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water
whose waters never fail.
12 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
13 If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs;
14 then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Grace to you, and peace, from God, the Father, and from Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
One of the things that I’ve been doing over the past few months is trying to boil down the message that I’m giving to two or three words. And so today I want you to listen for two words, as a kind of takeaway from today’s message.
Let’s start, however, with a quick review. Last week, we talked about the good news that God is near; that “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” as Psalm 23 says, “I shall fear no evil, for You are with me,” says the psalmist. Or again, our First Reading last Sunday, God is so near that “God fills all things, all things in heaven, and all things on earth.” Or again, Matthew 1:23, where Jesus is identified as Emmanuel, or God with us. Or again, the last chapter of Matthew 28, the last verse, where Jesus promises to His disciples, and by extension, each one of us, “Lo, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
That is Good News. In a time where it feels often like God is far off, where there are all kinds of threats facing each one of us, where a single scroll through a news feed makes one depressed, anxious or afraid, the good news, the best news, the great news, is that God has not abandoned us. God is near to us, especially in the person of Jesus Christ.
That was last Sunday. Today, we’re going to talk about something a little different. We’re going to talk about Søren Kierkegaard, the most neurotic philosopher in the history of Western culture. Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish Lutheran philosopher who lived in the 19th century. He died at 42 years old, in 1855. As one of my professors in graduate school said, “He was a nut, but he was a smart nut.”
This “nut” wrote 7000 pages of manuscript in the short span of 10 years. He had 14 writing desks in his Copenhagen apartment, and he had one thesis. And his one thesis was this: “The state Christianity of mid-19th century Denmark was not the Christianity of the New Testament.”
He was not a very popular person, especially with clergy, in particular, the bishops. The state Christianity of mid-19th century Denmark, full of pomp and circumstance, full of hypocrisy, worldly in every way, was not the Christianity of the New Testament.
Now you’ll see what he’s doing here. Deliberately, Martin Luther had 95 theses (or tweets, we might say); Søren Kierkegaard just had one. After he finished his prolific writing career, he is said to have collapsed out of exhaustion in the streets at 42 years old. He died a month later, his last words being, “The bomb explodes, the fire will follow.”
Talk about a legacy. He’s right, at least insofar as saying that Christianity, as a religion, as a faith, is extremely difficult to follow. He once wrote that “it is much easier to worship Jesus than to follow him.” He said he knew one thing, that at least he was honest with himself, and could admit, unlike his contemporaries, that he wasn’t Christian, that he was on the way to becoming Christian.
This reminds me of statements in the book of Acts, as well as Second Corinthians, where the author of Acts says, “We are being saved,” not that we are saved. We are being saved—that it is a process by which a person is on the way toward becoming truly Christian. Again, in 2 Corinthians, Paul uses the same kind of language, not that we have been reconciled, but we are being reconciled; that this is a lifelong process by which God, slowly, over the course of our lives, gradually turns us not only to God, but from God back to our neighbor.
He reminds me of Martin Luther, and I said these words at the memorial of Pat Sobeck, some of you remember her, “a true Christian is a rare bird in heaven.” A true Christian is a rare bird in heaven.
Now, as many of you know, the Gospels, in line with Kierkegaard’s teaching, are full of hard sayings that make Christianity especially difficult. Consider Matthew 19: “Teacher,” a young man says to Jesus, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers, “After fulfilling all the commandments, if you wish to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and then come follow me.” The result, the young man goes, sells all his possessions and gives the money to the poor, right? No, when the young man heard this, “he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” That is a hard teaching.
Now, the prophets as well, are full of hard teachings. If you take a look at the First Lesson, you’ll see one of them. This is from what scholars call “third Isaiah.” Isaiah was written over the course of several centuries, in three main segments. This is the last; it was written after the Jews who were in exile in Babylon had returned and rebuilt what had been destroyed, namely, their temple as well as the city of Jerusalem.
The author writes, “If you remove the yoke from among us, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, If you offer your food to the hungry”—so, obviously, he’s speaking here in the voice of God—“and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like noonday again.”
“If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.” How many homeless people over the course of this week have you walked past? I’ve walked past several. I feel guilty about it, but I have walked past several. This is a hard saying. I know I can do better. Again, “If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday.” This is a hard saying.
So, what do we do? How do we deal with this kind of difficulty at the center of Biblical Judaism and early Christianity?
Well, I think the first thing we can do is agree with Søren Kierkegaard. We should acknowledge, as Paul says, that we fall short of the glory of God, that we sin, that at best, we are on the way, and that we need God’s grace daily to motivate us to stop and acknowledge people who are less fortunate than we are, to treat them with dignity as human beings.
So, we stop, we acknowledge, we admit, we confess. That’s one response, but I think there’s another response to the grace of God that we can do. And it’s in two words. You ready? These are your two words for the day: keep practicing.
Keep practicing. Rehearse the life God wants you to live. You know that our best athletes are great athletes because they practice? Maybe that’s true as well of Christians, that they become better the more they practice.
“Well, great, PD,” somebody might say; “Great, Pastor Dan, how do we practice this faith? Where do we practice this faith, and when? When do we practice this faith?”
Well, I want you to turn once more to our First Reading for an answer, the last paragraph:
If you refrain from trampling the Sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the Sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
Notice again that line: “if you honor it, not going your own ways, serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs.” The Sabbath is an opportunity to rehearse the life God intended. Isn’t that amazing?
The Sabbath is an opportunity to rehearse the life God intended. I used to think all this stuff about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian of the 20th century, who talks about how in Jesus, we are called to be a person for others. I used to think that was exclusively in the New Testament. How wrong was I? Again: “If you honor the Sabbath, not going your own ways, serving your own interests or pursuing your own affairs, then you shall take delight in the Lord.” It’s there in the Old Testament too.
Now I know people in this congregation are across the spectrum when it comes to belief in God. Many of you question your faith. Some of you identify as agnostic. But this is something we can all follow, practicing a life for the sake not only of ourselves, but for the community in which we live, so that the common good is established. Keeping the Sabbath is a way of practicing abundant life, the life that life itself intended.
And here’s the great news: by being here this morning or reading this intently at home, you are practicing your faith. You’re practicing the life God intended for you and me in the person of Jesus Christ, a life that is described as abundant. A second century theologian says the glory of God is the human being fully alive, and that full life means not only living for oneself, but living for those around you.
By being here or setting time aside at home to honor God, you are rehearsing the way God wants you and me to live in the world, to help make this world a better place. And boy, does it need you now more than ever.
So how do we do that in worship, on the Sabbath, our Sabbath? Well, when we confess our sins, or when we receive communion with our hands out, we are practicing humbling ourselves. Humbling ourselves. There is so much arrogance in our culture. Worship gives us an opportunity to do the opposite, to practice receiving, to humble ourselves.
And then we have the Sharing of the Peace. This is an opportunity to practice reconciliation, to be quick to forgive. That’s something almost entirely missing in our culture.
So, humbling ourselves; acknowledging that we may not have all the right answers; acknowledging that our way is not the way of everyone else; acknowledging that we have become focused on ourselves, rather than those around us. So, we practice that by receiving communion and share the peace, where we practice reconciliation, where we practice what Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer: to forgive others, to be hospitable toward others.
Now, I’m going to tell you that one of the best things I hear as your pastor is when visitors come to Queen Anne Lutheran Church, and they tell me afterward, “This church was so welcoming.” I don’t care what they think about my sermon. I mean, I hope they like it. I know they like Kyle’s music, I hear that all the time, and he does it to the glory of God… But it’s when people come and are received. Welcomed. Hospitality.
We practice it, finally, in the Offering. This is where we rehearse giving back, in response to all the things that God, or Life, or whatever you want to call it, has given us, as well as through our ministry to help others, especially, the less fortunate.
So worship itself, as I’ve said many times before, is an opportunity to rehearse and practice the way of living that God intended, so that all of us might not only become better in the faith that we practice, but also so that the world might become better through us.
We practice humbling ourselves at Communion. We practice forgiveness and reconciliation in the Sharing of the Peace, and we practice generosity, giving back, in response to all the things that life, that God, the fullness of life, has given us. And most important of all, we do what each one of you chose to do this morning: We show up. We come to church. We practice. Or if we can’t show up, we set aside time at home to practice, to pray, to be in the presence of God, to remember others, especially those less fortunate.
Dear Friends in Christ,
Søren Kierkegaard was right. It is better, more honest, more humble, to acknowledge that we are not Christians, but that we are becoming Christians, that again, as we read in the Book of Acts, we are being saved, or again, as we read in Second Corinthians, that we are being reconciled. And one way to do that, in response to the gifts we receive from God, from Life itself, is to show up, whenever possible, as you’ve done today. In short, my message to you this morning is simply this:
Keep practicing.
In Jesus’s name, Amen.