August 23, 2026 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from August 23, 2026
READINGS
First Reading: Isaiah 51:1-6
1 Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
you who seek the Lord.
Look to the rock from which you were hewn
and to the quarry from which you were dug.
2 Look to Abraham your father
and to Sarah, who bore you,
for he was but one when I called him,
but I blessed him and made him many.
3 For the Lord will comfort Zion;
he will comfort all her waste places
and will make her wilderness like Eden,
her desert like the garden of the Lord;
joy and gladness will be found in her,
thanksgiving and the voice of song.
4 Listen to me, my people,
and give heed to me, my nation,
for a teaching will go out from me
and my justice for a light to the peoples.
5 I will bring near my deliverance swiftly;
my salvation has gone out,
and my arms will rule the peoples;
the coastlands wait for me,
and for my arm they hope.
6 Lift up your eyes to the heavens
and look at the earth beneath,
for the heavens will vanish like smoke,
the earth will wear out like a garment,
and those who live on it will die like gnats,
but my salvation will be forever,
and my deliverance will never be ended.
Second Reading: Romans 12:1-8
1 I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, 5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. 6 We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; 7 ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; 8 the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Gospel: Matthew 16:13-20
13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” 14 And they said, “Some say John the Baptist but others Elijah and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15 He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17 And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
SERMON— Pastor Dan Peterson
Grace to you, and peace, from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
For some of you, at least, this will be the last sermon you hear me preach from this pulpit. Realizing that, I decided to preach on what I’m calling “The Only Thing That Matters.”
I’d like to begin today’s sermon with a single observation: I am nothing.
I never broke a single record in high school sports. Nor could I play an instrument to save my life. I never climbed the corporate ladder. A CEO, a movie star, a famous author, or an astronaut. I am not a politician, a famous human rights activist, or a decorated survivor of a foreign war. I am not the first to do anything.
I am nothing.
But the truth is, all of the people I have just named—as well as every other human being on this planet—are nothing, too.
From dust they come, and to dust they—we—shall return.
“Man,” the Christian philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal writes, “is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature.”
“We,” to quote the book of James, “are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”
Indeed, as Martin Luther wrote shortly before he died, “We are all beggars.”
That observation, “We are all beggars,” reflects a truth every grace-centered Christian should know: namely, that we come to God, as we do to the Lord’s Supper, with empty hands.
We can never earn God’s love, God’s mercy, or God’s forgiveness. We rely entirely on God’s mercy to sustain us and claim us, to reform us, and to redeem us.
Now I say none of this to depress you, but to help you appreciate, as I do, the fact that every single breath; “every single flash of being,” to quote an old Buddhist phrase; every moment of life, including its renewal and transformation, comes to us pure gift.
Everything comes to us as pure gift. None of it is deserved. None of it is earned. Much of it is unappreciated, and beyond that, much of it is taken for granted.
The 19th-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher once said, “To me, all is miracle,” and in a certain sense, he is right. Instead of simply believing in miracles as isolated disruptions of scientific law, we should learn to see the existence of nature itself, the brute fact of existence itself, as the ultimate miracle.
Something came out of nothing.
In the twentieth century, as some of you know, the famous scientist Albert said much the same thing. “There are only two ways to live your life,” he once wrote. “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.” I love that sentiment.
Yet, as a Lutheran Christian, there is one thing I would change. Instead of saying, “All is miracle,” I would emphasize that “All is grace,”— and indeed, all is by grace.
Let me explain. Martin Luther considered the core teaching, the core doctrine, the core belief, the core article by which the church stands or falls to be that we are “justified” or aligned, to God by God. It is a work of God. It is by God’s doing.
When I say “justified,” I think here of Microsoft: to justify a text, you align it. In this case, God aligns it. God aligns us with Godself.
There is nothing we can do to earn God’s love, or make ourselves right with God. Thus, when the Apostle Paul talks about how in Christ we become a new creation, according to Second Corinthians, he clarifies, and I quote, “that all this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself in Christ, and now entrusts us with the same ministry of reconciliation.”
Many of you have heard me preach this before. Some of you heard this yesterday in our Catechism class. And so for these reasons, it is easy to become ambivalent, to lose the zeal Paul had for proclaiming it, or Luther had for shouting it.
So let me be clear about why it is so important. Affirming that everything we have ultimately comes to us by grace—our breath, our life, attitudes, our talents, our transformation, and our salvation—is not a mere formula, or belief. It is a view of life, and more than that, it is a Way. It is a way of life, the Way of Grace; the Way that takes nothing for granted, the Way that sees everything not simply as miracle, but as pure, unearned gift.
You remember what I said a moment ago about Schleiermacher and Einstein, how instead of saying all is miracle, I would add or emphasize that all is by grace. Well, I am certainly not the first person to make such an observation. Luther says the same thing in his explanation of the Apostles’ Creed. As most of you know, the first line of the Creed says, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Well, Luther asks, “Okay, what does this mean?” “What is this?” His answer may surprise you.
He writes, “I believe that God has created me together with all that exists. Furthermore, God has given me and still preserves my body and soul. All of this is done out of pure fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!”
Luther adds an exclamation point to make his point loud and clear. None of it comes from me! All of it is given to me without any merit or worthiness. Creation, not just at one point in the past, but in each and every moment, is a pure act of shining grace.
We don’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. We receive it, knowingly or not, as a pure expression of God’s love. I remember a pastor some years back saying, “Theology 101: God is love. End of class.”
You know, as a Christian, if you think that existence itself is the only thing God gives us, think again. The transformation and renewal we experience in Christ also comes to us exclusively by grace. In fact, one of the biggest ideas of the Reformation, that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, depends on Jesus coming to us.
There is, we teach, absolutely nothing we could ever do to be worthy enough to make our way to God. God, through Christ, always comes to us.
Indeed, as a popular Lutheran theologian once put it, “You cannot go up the down escalator.” Even faith, as Paul teaches in our Second Reading for today, is a gift from God by the Holy Spirit.
Now, for some, this might sound fatalistic or depressing. You mean, there is nothing I can do to be saved? All of it is in God’s hands?
But to Paul and to Luther, as well as those who sympathize with Luther, whether they call themselves Lutheran or not, this is good news. This is great news. This is the best news.
Through Christ, God sets us free.
God sets you free from having to worry about getting saved by being good enough, or by doing enough, or by having the right kind of spiritual experience, so that in freedom we can love and serve our neighbors.
“Simply put,” writes the author Kelly Fryer, “Luther said, ‘we are set free so that we can serve,’ and this isn’t Luther’s pipe dream. This comes directly from the Apostle Paul. “We are no longer slaves to sin,” he writes, “we are slaves to righteousness.”
God doesn’t need our good works; our neighbor does!
And why do we serve and care for our neighbor? Well, sometimes we do it out of guilt, and that’s better than doing nothing at all, I concede. But ideally, we do it out of gratitude. That’s how we often feel when we receive a gift, and that’s what life and salvation are—pure gift.
Looking back over these past ten years as your pastor, I can now say, comfortably, that I was, and am, nothing. The only thing about my ministry that matters is the message of grace and gratitude as essential to the Christian life.
Grace, and gratitude, as essential to the Christian life.
Everything we have is by grace, and for that we should be grateful.
The Apostle Paul sums up the Christian life beautifully when he says, "Give thanks in all circumstances,” or “in all things,” as some translations read. “For this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
His choice of words here are crucial. Giving thanks in all things or circumstances is not the same thing as giving thanks for all things! We obviously don’t give thanks for sin, sickness, death, or disease, but we do give thanks for the life we receive unconditionally in the midst of these things; the life that is promised after these things as well, just as we give thanks for the new life we receive, unconditionally, in and through Jesus Christ.
To summarize the entirety of ten years, the only thing that matters is grace, and the response of gratitude.
In the 15 seconds of silence between now and the Hymn of the Day, I invite you, accordingly, to do one thing, and that is to join me in giving thanks for grace.
We may all be beggars by nature, but we are made rich in Jesus Christ, filled with the spirit of awe at what we have been given, and a desire to share the good things we’ve been given—our time, our talents, and our treasure—with others.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.