August 2, 2026 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from August 2, 2026
READINGS
First Reading: Isaiah 55:1-5
1 Hear, everyone who thirsts;
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread
and your earnings for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
3 Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.
4 See, I made him a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.
5 Now you shall call nations that you do not know,
and nations that do not know you shall run to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel,
for he has glorified you.
Second Reading: Romans 9:1-5
1 I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit—2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own brothers and sisters, my own flesh and blood. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; 5 to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Christ, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.
Gospel: Matthew 14:13-21
13 Now when Jesus heard [about the beheading of John the Baptist,] he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and blessed and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and were filled, and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
SERMON— Pastor Dan Peterson
The Story We Tell
Grace to you and peace from God, the source of abundant life, and from Jesus, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
According to the Lutheran pastor and theologian David Lose—I’ve mentioned him on occasion before—we are narrative beings.
We use stories to make sense of our lives.
The stories we tell ourselves disclose everything from our simplest pleasures to our most basic loyalties. They determine how we vote, the way we organize our time, whom we select as friends, and for whom or what we choose to live.
For Lose, the problem is that Christians in America no longer even know some of the most basic details about their story, the story of Jesus, much less how it might shape their lives.
Other narratives have taken its place, claiming territory that once belonged solely to the church and the culture that supported it. These narratives offer more than just news or entertainment; they harbor truth claims that vie for our attention and compete for our allegiance—each of which, whether it be proclaimed from a pulpit, as I do now, touted on the cover of a major magazine, or hidden in the logo of an expensive brand, is part of a larger story about what constitutes the good, the beautiful, and the true.
Some of these stories are subtle, and others are obvious.
Nike’s long-running slogan “Just Do It” belongs in the “obvious” category. It tells the story of success and how it comes to those who pursue their dreams by prioritizing action over analysis. Clearly, a helpful mindset to instill among people in the market for buying shoes. Just do it! Buy that pair!
Pepsi has historically relied on slogans that associate drinking its products with youth and happiness. From 1984 to 1988, and again from ‘90 to ‘91, it billed itself, as some of you remember this: “The Choice of a New Generation.” A year later, it switched to “Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi!”
More recently, and I mean within the last two years, it introduced the slogan “Thirsty for More” to tell the story of people who chase what they desire, while conveniently underscoring an attitude that leads to more intake of… Pepsi.
Other narratives in American culture are harder to detect. Movies, music, video games, and memes all contain narratives that tell us how to live and make sense of our lives. You and I each day are being bombarded, knowingly or not, with these stories. Politicians seem particularly adept at using narratives to promote their party, themselves, and the legislation they support.
These include the Alarmist Narrative, “You should be afraid.”
The Scarcity Narrative, “There is not enough.”
The Entitlement Narrative, “You deserve more,” and the Power Narrative, “Might makes right,” as in Operation Epic Fury.
The Vanity Narrative, “Image is everything,” supports a beauty product industry that generates billions of dollars a year in profit.
These stories shape our lives. They belong to the culture in which we live, move, and have our being.
The New Testament contains narratives that often contradict the ones we encounter in contemporary American culture. This is why Paul advises us in Romans 12 to be “not conformed to the world,” or why John talks about how we are “in the world but not of the world.” The narratives of our faith often counter the narratives of a consumer capitalistic society.
In Acts 2, for instance, the early followers of Jesus replaced the story of scarcity with one of abundance, by sharing their belongings, selling their possessions, and distributing the proceeds “to all as any had need.”
In our Gospel reading for today, Jesus likewise challenges the scarcity narrative by feeding 5,000 men with merely five loaves of bread and two fish, despite the insistence of his disciples to send the crowd away due to insufficient provisions. Matthew’s version of the story adds a minor detail to make a major point.
There was so much to eat that the disciples had to gather leftovers, 12 baskets-full. They had morethan enough. That’s the narrative.
Now, there are a number of things about this story you may not know. For the sake of brevity, let me focus quickly on three of them. First, this story is not the only one of its kind in Scripture.
Not only do other accounts of it appear in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Luke and Mark; it also appears in 2 Kings from the Old Testament during a time of famine. There, a man came to the prophet Elisha to give him the first fruits of a harvest, as was the custom of the time. In his sack he had 20 loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain. Let me repeat that; these numbers are important: 20 loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain.
Elisha, rather than taking it for himself, said, “Give it to the people and let them eat.”
But his servant said, “How can I set this before 100 people?”
So Elijah repeated, “Dude, brah!” (Wait, that’s not in the text.) “Give it to the people and let them eat, for thus says the Lord: They shall eat and have some left.” In other words, the Lord is trustworthy. Have faith; God will provide.
That is the story by which Elisha is operating: “Have faith, God will provide.”
The servant then set the 20 loaves of barley before the 100 men, and they ate and had some left over, “according, the text says, to the word of the Lord.”
Now there are some incredible similarities between this story about Elisha and the story about Jesus in our Gospel reading for today. At the same time, as you can probably tell, there are big differences between these two stories.
Quiz: How many loaves of barley did Elisha have? 20.
Now, how many men did Elisha feed? 100.
Now, how many loaves of bread did Jesus have? Five, plus two fish,
And how many people did Jesus feed? 5,000.
These numbers, these differences, are important. Jesus does way more with less.
It’s as if Matthew is saying, “Yes, God was doing something back then through the prophet Elisha, but look at what God is doing now through Jesus Christ.”
The story shows that while Jesus belongs to the same prophetic tradition, what God was doing through him was much greater than anything that had come before. And that’s my first point: God is doing something big in Jesus. God is doing something big in Him, for others, according to our Gospel reading for today.
So, if God is doing something big through Jesus, point one, what is Jesus doing?
This is my second point. The answer is that he’s changing the narrative, from one of scarcity, to one of abundance.
We see this already in the Elisha story. Remember what his servant said. He asks, “How can I set this 20 loaves of barley before 100 men?”
That’s the narrative of scarcity, a narrative that would have a lot of power in the context of, you remember this, a famine. “How can I set this 20 loaves of bread before 100 hungry men?” The disciples in our Gospel reading for today say the same thing.
“This is a deserted place,” they tell Jesus. Again, “There is no food, and the hour is now late. Send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.”
That’s their story. That’s the narrative of scarcity. “There is not enough; people should fend for themselves.” Sound familiar? That’s a dominant cultural narrative today. “There is not enough; people should fend for themselves.”
Yet, like Elisha, Jesus offers a counter narrative.
“They need not go away,” he says. “You give them something to eat; there will be enough.” God will provide.
Understandably, this astonishes the disciples. Why?
Because they lack faith. Because they see the world through different eyes. How can God provide enough food for 5,000 men if they only have a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish? This is a very poorly-planned church barbecue! There isn’t enough food to go around. It would take a miracle to feed all these people.
Such is the narrative of scarcity, the story the disciples tell themselves, and Jesus, and by extension us, in the Gospel reading for today.
But here’s what’s amazing, and this brings me to my third point: The disciples are wrong. There is a miracle in today’s Gospel reading, only not necessarily the one we might think.
Most of us probably assume the miracle is that Jesus somehow magically fed 5,000 men with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. But to me that’s the small miracle.
The big miracle, again, to me, is the whole point of the story, and that miracle is this: These men denied their selfish, sinful nature by sharing provisions they already had at the direction of Jesus Christ.
That’s the big miracle: These men denied their selfish nature by sharing the provisions they already had at the direction of Jesus Christ.
That totally changes the narrative, doesn’t it? Thanks to their trust in Jesus, who places his trust in God, they realized that they had enough after all. All they needed were the eyes of faith through which to see it.
Jesus started something the crowd mirrored by adding to the provisions he gave them, so that everyone could eat and be filled. In so doing, he changed the story. He changed the narrative. “There is not enough” became “we have what we need and then some.” That is the narrative of abundance. That is the narrative in this story of Jesus Christ.
Okay, you say, this makes sharing what people already had in today’s story the bigger miracle. How?
Well, again, think about it. According to the Lutheran confessional writings—those are the founding documents of the Lutheran Church— “Sin is embedded in our nature.”
That word “embedded” is very important. I can’t get into the weeds here, but if you would like to know more about it, I’d be happy to nerd out after the service and share with you why they chose that word. But the language suggests that we are inherently flawed, that we are fundamentally selfish, that we are out for ourselves, which explains why we have to teach children to share. We are inviting them to contradict their nature. It is not in their nature, much less ours.
Yet, by God’s grace—and this is the miracle—by God’s grace, which we name in holy baptism, we are being saved, as it says repeatedly in the Book of Acts. In Christ, daily we are being reoriented to God and neighbor in a way that contradicts the sin embedded in our nature, which is exactly what happens in our Gospel reading. A large group of human beings, thanks to Jesus, contradict their selfishness by sharing what they have with others, which ensures that all are fed.
That’s the big miracle.
God’s kingdom, however fleetingly, becomes reality in the process. Jesus, along the way, is supremely glorified. That, dear friends, is the big miracle in today’s story as I read it. It is also essential to the Christian story as I read it, and it belongs to the story of Queen Anne Lutheran Church, as I read you.
Now, as most of you know, and I mentioned it briefly at the beginning of the service, I will be leaving at the end of the month. I am so grateful for the ten years we’ve had together, and I wouldn’t change any of it. I depart, I hope, on good terms.
What, I wonder, will the story be that you tell yourselves once I leave?
Will you lapse into a narrative of fear and scarcity, the way Elisha’s servant and the disciples of Jesus did in today’s story?
Will you worry that the church won’t flourish somehow after I’m gone?
Will you fear that we might lose our forum programming; or, to quote one of my favorite poems by W. B. Yeats, that “the center will not hold”?
Or will you live into the story about yourselves that I see—that you have a good thing going here; a clear, inclusive mission that led to us becoming an RIC congregation; new faces among you, including not only in the pews, but today, as evident in our assisting minister; the incredible momentum we, thanks to the Spirit, have built, as evident in programming like Jazz on the Grass; the amazing leadership you have in our church Council and Personnel Committees; a budget, thanks to your incredible generosity that’s in the black in summertime; the difference you make through various drives; quilt-making, as well as the nonprofits you steadily support; the hospitality you show strangers and newcomers to our congregation—and most importantly, and I can’t stress this enough, the presence of Christ and the Spirit among you as we gather in their name.
That, in my view, is your story.
It’s a story of a small but healthy congregation, where what we are today may not have seemed possible in the past. It is our story, and if we believe it, it is that we have more than enough; that God, as we venture forward, will provide—just as God did for the people Elisha addressed, and just as God did for the 5,000 people Jesus addressed.
David Lose is right; we are narrative beings. We use stories to make sense of our lives. Yet sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves can limit us and deprive others of what they need.
That is why we need Jesus. He changes the story. He shows us that with God, all things are possible. If Jesus can inspire 5,000 people to share what they have, so that no one goes hungry, the big miracle, as I regard it in today’s gospel reading—imagine what He is, and can be, doing here. That is our story. That is your story.
And all God’s people said to this story, “Amen.”