Dec. 7, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
The Teaching of Paul
December 7, 2025
READINGS
First Reading: Isaiah 11:1-10
1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
2 The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
3 His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see
or decide by what his ears hear,
4 but with righteousness he shall judge for the poor
and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
6 The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
7 The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
9 They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
10 On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
Second Reading: Romans 15:4-13
4 Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. 5 May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, 6 so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
7 Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. 8 For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the ancestors 9 and that the gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
“Therefore I will confess you among the gentiles
and sing praises to your name”;
10 and again he says,
“Rejoice, O gentiles, with his people”;
11 and again,
“Praise the Lord, all you gentiles,
and let all the peoples praise him”;
12 and again Isaiah says,
“The root of Jesse shall come,
the one who rises to rule the gentiles;
in him the gentiles shall hope.”
13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Gospel: Matthew 3:1-12
1 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
’Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight.’ ”
4 Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5 Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, 6 and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins.
7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, 9 and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
11 “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Sermon:
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 sermon, as I mentioned at the outset of our service, is the teaching of Paul. Remember that; pay close attention. I’m going to share with you a teaching of Paul you may have never heard.
Before. I do that, however, I would like to review briefly what we discussed last Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, which is, as you know, the first season of the Church year. We talked accordingly about making a new church year resolution. I identified a couple of things I would like to do better in the coming church year. I would like, first, to be more grateful. I would like, second, to be more charitable to my neighbor. And I would like, in the spirit of Advent, to be more hopeful.
I invited you to identify a New Year’s Christian resolution that you might work on in the coming year, and together, we pray to the Holy Spirit to enable us to cultivate and activate these various dispositions or resolutions.
Today we’re going to talk about how Paul divides life “fifty-fifty”: 50% of life, you can’t control, and in life the other 50%, you can. 50% in life you can’t control. There are things in the other 50% of life that you can.
Our First Reading for today is going to focus on the first 50%: things you can’t control. And our Gospel Reading, when we hear from John the Baptist, will focus in part, on the second 50%—that is, the things you can control.
So, let’s talk about the first 50%, of things you can’t control in life. You know that our world and the world of the Bible—at least I hope you do—have one thing in common, both then and now, both in the eighth century of Isaiah and in the first century of Jesus and Paul, as well as in the 21st Century of America: many of us feel as though things are beyond our control. For example, in the news this week, ozone depletion, the Supreme Court legalizing gerrymandering, a growing digital tsunami of artificial intelligence, ICE raids, not only on immigrants, but also on U.S. citizens. The list, as you know, goes on and on and on. And for those of us who pay attention to the news, whether it’s in the local paper or on our phones, it sometimes, at least for me, makes me feel helpless. Perhaps some of you feel the same way.
I am certain that the audience of Isaiah, again, from our First Reading, felt the same way. First Isaiah, which is the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah—Isaiah totals, 66 chapters—the first 39 were written during the eighth century. They were written right before the Assyrians invaded the northern 10 Tribes of Israel. They were also written during a time like ours, of great social unrest, corruption and injustice.
Now incidentally, the second portion of Isaiah, and you’ve heard me say this several times, if not many, was probably written by a woman; that’s chapters 40 through 55, during the exile in Babylon.
And the last part of Isaiah, 55 to 65, was written after the Jews returned from Babylon to their homeland, which had been desecrated by the Babylonians to rebuild their temple and start anew.
So we’re dealing here with ancient Israelite history, just before the Assyrian invasion. And with regard to the Assyrians, I’ve also said this before, they were something like the ISIS of the eighth century, known, among other things, for beheading their victims in war. So how do we know that social unrest and injustice was prevalent during the time of first Isaiah? Well, as you can see in the First Reading, the author doesn’t address problems that don’t exist. Take a look at verse 4.
He writes, “But with righteousness, God shall judge for the poor and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth and with the breath of his lips. He shall kill the wicked.”
That means that the poor at the time were being mistreated. That means that the oppressed of the time, the marginalized, were getting the short end of the stick. And so, this prophet, speaking on behalf of God, addresses those problems in many ways. He is like his successor, the prophet Amos in the seventh century, who will say much the same thing.
Now, when you read the Bible, you can do it in at least two ways. You can read it as though it is a window through which you see events unfolding in the ancient world, and that’s what’s happening here. Through this window of Isaiah, we can see how the poor are being mistreated and how the lone prophet stands up on behalf of God and condemns those who mistreat the poor and those who exploit them unfairly.
You can also, which I try to do as well in my sermons, turn that window into a mirror and then ask yourself, once you’ve done the hard work of historical circumstance investigation, ask yourself, how does it apply to me? What does this tell me about our situation or my own?
So the author is addressing great social unrest and corruption, and you can imagine that the people who were being exploited, many of the people in Isaiah’s time, felt helpless, like perhaps some of us do. Felt as though events were beyond their control.
Now, if you think only Isaiah, or rather his audience, felt helpless, think again. If you turn to the Gospel of Matthew, our Gospel Reading for today, you’ll see the same thing. Matthew was a Jewish Christian writing to other Jewish Christians of the eighth decade of the first century. I had a mentor who used to compare Matthew to someone sitting in his office, you might say, looking through his window at a synagogue, and writing his Gospel; so he’s addressing problems that specifically Jewish Christians would have been facing toward the end of the first century.
Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which appears only in the Gospel of Matthew, was written to identify Jesus with Moses, who gave the Law of God to the Israelites on the mountain. Jesus, the new Moses, or we might say, Moses 2.0, reinterprets that law from a high mountain. And Jesus, at the end of this Gospel, will commission his disciples to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from yet another mountain.
So, he’s a Moses figure, which makes perfect sense. This author, a Jewish Christian, drawing on Jewish tradition, is fashioning Jesus in a Jewish way to make sense to his Jewish Christian audience. He describes them in the Sermon on the Mount as “poor in spirit.” What does that mean? Well, “poor in spirit” is an expression that we use to say feeling hopeless, feeling destitute, feeling depressed.
And so, you remember what I just said, about how the text is a window through which we can see what’s happening in the world of the time. Well, you can ask yourself here, why would have Jewish Christians of the latter part of the first century been feeling hopeless? Well, the answer is Rome, the Roman occupation of Judea, where the Jews lived and where Jerusalem was located. In 66 A.D., there was a Jewish revolt to overthrow the Imperial Roman authorities. The Romans came in. They crushed the revolt, and they destroyed the very temple the Jews had rebuilt some 500 years earlier.
So, you can imagine, in the context of a Gospel like this, written probably about a decade or so after the destruction of their temple, their central place of worship, that these people were obviously feeling helpless and poor in spirit. They were occupied by a controlling power. Their central place of worship had been destroyed, and many of their young men had been killed in a revolt that was led from 66 to 70 A.D. by the occupying power.
So, our question this morning is this, in the face of corruption, like we see Isaiah addressing in our first text, in the face of injustice, in the face of fear, in the face of helplessness, in the face of hopelessness, how do Isaiah, and in our Gospel Reading for today, John the Baptist, respond?
That’s why we’re here, isn’t it, among other things, to learn from these ancient writers how, from faith, we might respond to many of the same problems that they were experiencing too, 2,500 years ago?
Well, they begin, as you heard, with a word of judgment, particularly in Matthew. 90% of all references to “hell” in the New Testament appear in the Gospel of Matthew. That writer was hell-bent. Things were not going well. He drew on a metaphor. The word for “hell” in the language is Gehenna, which referred to a garbage dump outside the city gates of Jerusalem, where people were weeping and their teeth were gnashing, and use that as a metaphor to point to life absent the presence of God.
So why would this author speak of judgment? Because both he and Isaiah are addressing people who feel helpless, being occupied by oppressive powers or being exploited by people in power with wealth. But not for long; Isaiah, in particular, quickly turns from judgment—to hope. Take a look at your First Reading again, verses 6 and 9. In verse 6, the author utilizes one of the most powerful visions of hope in all of world literary history.
He writes, “The wolf shall lie with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them.” Very special language for Christians. During the time of Advent, “a little child shall lead them.” And then again, in verse 9, “They will not hurt or destroy my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of God, the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” In the language of the New Testament, this is the kingdom of God, which not only affects human relationships, but also rights the wrongs of nature, nature that is often red in tooth and claw.
And so the author has a global vision of what God’s justice will look like in the future, and he invites his audience to focus on that in the face of their feeling helpless. In other words, he’s telling the people listening to him, “accept the 50% in life you can’t control. Turn it over to God.”
Turning to 1 Peter 5, we read one of my favorite verses in the Bible: “Cast all your anxiety on the Lord because He cares for you.”
Or again, going back to Psalm 130, “Let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord, there is mercy.”
So, on the one hand, when it comes to the 50% part of life we can’t control, this author in Scripture invites us to hope, to place our anxieties on God, and to trust in God accordingly.
But John, in the Gospel reading for today, does more than hope. He does more than invite us to play the waiting game. He invites his audience to focus also on the other 50%, that is the 50% in life we can control. Yes, the wrath of God is coming, he says—that’s the 50% we can’t—therefore, turning to the 50% we can, he says, “bear fruit worthy of repentance” in verse 8.
Now that’s tricky to unpack, but it makes me wonder, what are the fruits of repentance? Well, it’s a new kind of life to which we’re called as Christians, one I spoke about last week, where we’re more grateful for what we have, and more charitable to our neighbor. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance;” that, with the help of the Spirit, is part of what we can control.
And in the book of Isaiah, we can also work for justice, not assuming that we will achieve the vision Isaiah is speaking of, but knowing that in a small way, here and now, each of us in this room can do our part. fifty-fifty.
Now some of you may recognize the teaching of fifty-fifty, In a famous 20th century prayer. Can you guess what it is? The Serenity Prayer. Listen carefully:
“God, grant me the serenity or peace to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
These words come from a famous theologian, one, if not more of you, will recognize: Reinhold Niebuhr, middle of the 20th century; and they have since been used by 12-step groups to identify the part of life where they feel powerless, but then to focus on the part of life where they are empowered to make changes.
Life is fifty-fifty. Accept the things you cannot change, and then focus on the things you can.
And you know, it’s not just there in John the Baptist, it’s there in Jesus, too. He says, in Matthew, the same gospel, “Do not worry about tomorrow.” That’s the first 50% of things, things you can’t control. “For tomorrow,” he continues, “will bring worries of its own.” Today’s trouble is enough for today. That’s the second 50%.
Now, as I was writing this, I was trying to imagine images we could use to talk about fifty-fifty, maybe glasses. One lens: things you can’t control, the other lens: things you can. See life through those lenses, or then—and this took me not only back to my own church office, but also to the 1990’s where, before we were using AI and laptops, we had file drawers on either sides of our desk. Well, the first file drawer, say, to your left is the file of things you can’t control. Those go in there and you give that to God. The second file to your right are things you can control.
Focus on those, fifty-fifty. So, for some perspective, our little congregation isn’t going to solve the problem of waste and pollution globally, but and I confirm this with Susan Evans before the service, we have saved dozens and dozens and dozens of pounds of plastic just by recycling through Ridwell. Think about that. Over the course of the year, I’ve realized how many medicine bottles I have that could be recycled, how many pounds of plastic that I go through that could be recycled. That’s not going to change the problem of environmental degradation throughout the world, but it’s me, in one small way doing my part, with you, to make a difference. That’s this 50%.
Again, our little congregation isn’t going to solve the epidemic of loneliness and isolation in our culture, but over the last year and a half, thanks to the efforts of Lynn Hofsted, our program director, think about all the people that we have called out of isolation into fellowship through various community events! That huge Jazz on the Grass that we had earlier this year; the “Robot Apocalypse” that most of us “survived.” These are various events that call people out of isolation into fellowship. They’re not going to solve the epidemic of loneliness in question, but in this place and in our small way, they’re making a difference.
Or again, our congregation is not going to solve the problem of world famine. But when you look out in our narthex just before Thanksgiving, and saw over 30 bags of food going to folks who could not provide food for themselves. Or before that, when you saw all the bags of resources that we bought and provided for the refugees for whom Lutheran Community Services Pacific Northwest is caring. Or again, all the blankets, all the kits, all the hats—all of these things are not going to solve the problem of need and famine worldwide, but they do make a difference. They belong to what we can do.
Or again, think about our own lives. None of us can eliminate chronic pain; none of us can reverse the aging process; none of us can bring someone back that we’ve loved. Those all belong in the first bucket. But if we focus on the things we can do, we can take better care of ourselves, physically and spiritually. And in so doing, we can take better care of other people, physically and spiritually.
And for those of you, the couple of you who are thinking about college in the next year, you cannot control which colleges accept you; I hope that they all will. But what you can do right now, is your best. Keep up your grades. Listen to your parents. Do your best now and give the rest to God.
That’s life, fifty-fifty, and that is the teaching of Paul; that life can be divided into two parts; that we cast our anxieties into the first half, the 50% of things we can’t control, and let God be God; and then, with respect to the second, we focus on the things that we can control, the things we can change.
“Now wait a minute, Pastor,” you might be saying, “I know the teaching of Paul. I’ve read Paul’s letters, and I don’t recall anywhere, first, you ever mentioning Paul in your sermon, much less Paul saying anything about life being divided fifty-fifty, including in our Second Reading for today, Paul’s letter to the Romans. Honestly, Pastor, I never remember reading anything anywhere about Paul dividing life into two parts, fifty-fifty!”
Do you know what I’ll say in response? You’re right. I learned the philosophy of fifty-fifty, not from the Apostle Paul, but from Paul Abodeely, who normally sits up here toward the front of the church almost every Sunday, except the one sermon where I’m talking about him, this Sunday.
So we have the Apostle Paul, yes, and then the Abodeely Paul, and it is from him, when I was experiencing some difficulty in life a few years ago, that he told me about “the philosophy of fifty-fifty,” a philosophy that’s confirmed by the Serenity Prayer, and one, rest assured, that is implied throughout Scripture, in both Testaments, Paul’s teaching included. Jesus teaches it by implication. Peter teaches it by implication. And if you look at our Second Reading for today, you’ll find it there in Paul, too, by implication.
Fifty-fifty: my message for you today. Feeling helpless? Feeling hopeless? Feeling as if things are beyond your control? Then give what you can’t control to God, and focus on the things you can.
In Jesus’s name,
Amen.