February 8, 2026 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from February 8, 2026
READINGS AND SERMON
First Reading: Isaiah 58:1-12
1 Shout out; do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the ordinance of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgments;
they want God on their side.
3 “Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?”
Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day
and oppress all your workers.
4 You fast only to quarrel and to fight
and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today
will not make your voice heard on high.
5 Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?
6 Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
8 Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
9a Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, “Here I am.”
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.
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 2:1-12
1 When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the testimony of God to you with superior speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. 4 My speech and my proclamation were made not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
6 Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are being destroyed. 7 But we speak God’s wisdom, a hidden mystery, which God decreed before the ages for our glory 8 and which none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
10 God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For what human knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.
Gospel: Matthew 5:13-20
[Jesus said:] 13 “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled under foot.
14 “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15 People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Sermon: Pastor Erik Wilson-Weiberg
Will you pray with me?
(Singing)
Your little ones, dear Lord, are we,
and come your lowly bed to see.
Enlighten every soul and mind
that we the way to you may find.
With songs, we hasten you to greet a
and kiss the ground before your feet.
O blessed hour, O sweetest night
that gave you birth, our soul’s delight.
Amen.
That’s a really different way to start a sermon, isn’t it? I don’t normally start sermons that way, but I’m so captivated by the words, especially in the second verse of that hymn: “O blessed hour, O sweetest night that gave you birth, our soul’s delight.”
Such a contrast to our entrance hymn that was “banishing the darkness away;” we get this praise of the night in which the Christ was born. And I call your attention to it, because a lot of us Lutheran churches use that hymn on Christmas Eve, but we do it while the offerings being collected, and we maybe don’t catch those really beautiful, poetic words. Plus, Christmas kind of leaks into Epiphany, doesn’t it? And this is that last Sunday of Epiphany. So this year, so, you know, it’s important to call attention to the light, because really, that’s what Epiphany is, isn’t it?
When I used to teach Epiphany to the children of our church’s childcare center, I always told them what Epiphany meant. “Aha!” “Oho! “Hold on—now, I get it!” That’s the season, isn’t it? If you’re reading the Sunday funny pages, and you know, you see a character alone, trying to puzzle out how to solve a problem, when they finally figure out how to solve it, what symbol does the cartoonist put there in above the character’s head? Light bulb! That’s right, the light bulb, because, that’s the light bulb. That’s an epiphany. The character has an epiphany.
Light is awareness. Light is understanding. People go seeking enlightenment. Right in the middle of that word is the word “light.” And Jesus said to us today, “You are the light of the world” in that famous Sermon on the Mount.
But what does that even mean? To be light? Our songs do make it seem easy. From that first Sunday School ditty, “This Little Light of Mine” to “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light” to “Christ, Be Our Light.” And don’t forget that famous Bible verse I just read to you that we repeat, many of us, you know, every time we baptize someone: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” We get what it means to be light.
But do you know what most helps us see what it is to be the light of the world? It’s the darkness. In her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there.” And she’s right. Why do we drive out of the city to a remote place on a summer’s night? So that we can see the stars in their fullest glory. City lights, though, mute the star’s brilliance. It’s the backdrop of deep, deep darkness that allows starlight to do what it does best.
I regret to report that I don’t give darkness very much love. You know, as soon as that winter solstice hits, I’m rejoicing about getting a few additional moments of sunlight with each passing day. Don’t think I’m not paying attention to that hour when the sun goes down, day by day by day, each winter. I hope for a getaway to a place with palm trees and sunshine, where I can just bask in it all. But I don’t. I don’t find myself basking in darkness. I wish to overcome it.
In so doing, I neglect to appreciate the gifts found there.
Reflecting on a revelation that she had visiting Organ Cave National Monument. Barbara Brown Taylor puts it this way:
“I’ve learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light. I need darkness as much as I need light.
As many years as I’ve been listening to Easter sermons, I’ve never heard anyone talk about that part. Resurrection is always announced with Easter lilies, the sound of trumpets, bright, streaming light.
But it did not happen that way. It happened in a cave. It happened in complete silence, in absolute darkness, with the smell of damp stone and dug earth in the air. Sitting deep in the heart of Organ Cave, I let this sink in. New life starts in the dark, whether it is a seed in the ground, from which a plant eventually springs; a baby in the womb; or Jesus in the tomb; it starts in the dark.”
A lesson our hymns don’t always seem to share, Dr. Taylor’s sentiment. When the darkness is mentioned in our hymns, it’s usually getting banished, like we sang today, or evicted, or chased away, or vanquished or overcome, or obliterated by the light. There’s a hymn in our hymnal called, “Praise the One who Breaks the Darkness.” For example, take the hymn, “God, Whose Almighty Word” just listen: “God, whose Almighty word, chaos and darkness heard, and took their flight.” In other words, God’s word chases the dark right off. Or how about that famous and contemporary hymn we just sang, “Gather Us In,” the darkness is “banished away.”
Our hymns tend not to like darkness over much. “I want to walk as a child of the Light; I want to follow Jesus.“ “In Him, there’s no darkness at all.”
On the one hand, we have Jesus. On the other hand, we have darkness. And as our hymns tell it, they don’t seem to be compatible!
And so, I worry and wonder about darkness and light. I worry that our negative and hostile attitudes about darkness, in general, can subtly—and sometimes, not so subtly—and often subconsciously, prompt those of us with whiter skin to project similarly negative and hostile attitudes toward those of us with darker skin.
So, I do worry, and I wonder, and I know I’m not alone in my wondering about darkness and light. Let us again give Barbara Brown Taylor one more word on the topic—she says:
“I always wondered why it took three days for significant things to happen in the Bible. Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale. Jesus spent three days in the tomb. Paul spent three days, blind in Damascus.
And now I know. From earliest times, people learned: that was how long they had to wait in the dark, before that sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month, they practiced Resurrection.”
I love how she associates resurrection, not with light, but with dark. That darkness is a gift. It tests, and shapes, and makes demands of our faith in ways that cause us to be stronger people. Jesus calls the church to be “light for the world,” and I’m glad, but I have to believe that our faith shines brightest in the dark. In dark times.
Recently, a friend remarked to me how hard it is for her to live in what she called “such dark times.” I understood; but I’ve been thinking about it. Is that true?
I do not think that we suffer from too much darkness in the world. I believe the thing that ails us is too much artificial light. And here I’m influenced by the psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan. She was born in a displaced persons camp in southern Germany, shortly after World War Two. Her parents were Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, enduring imprisonment in a forced labor camp, with all those things that accompanied living in a forced labor camp—starvation, the destruction of family, and home, and community, and although her father and mother did not speak to her about these things as a young girl, not really until she’s about 13 years old, she sensed their grief from right off the hop. Dr. Greenspan herself has suffered the death of one of her children, and the disability of another. She’s come to believe that emotions such as grief, fear, and despair have gained a reputation as the so-called “dark emotions.”
But because Western culture keeps them shuttered in the dark, she believes that people have come to what she calls “a low tolerance for sadness,” and that’s why there’s so much depression. It’s the inability to bear our dark emotions, which are very real, that causes many of our most significant problems.
In other words, it’s not the emotions themselves, but it’s our inability to bear and express them. We have such little tolerance for the dark, and so we miss out on its benefits, and when we cannot tolerate the dark, she suggests, we try all kinds of “artificial lights,” such as drugs, alcohol, shopping, shallow sex, and hours in front of the television set, or computer, or phone.
The problem is not darkness, and it’s not bad emotions. The problem is that we have really unskillful ways of coping with emotions we cannot bear. But these so-called dark emotions—depression, sorrow, grief—they’re there to help us, and when we listen to them, we can understand that they want us to wake up, to tell us something we need to know; to break the ice around our hearts, to move us to act.
When we tolerate them, when we cease to be afraid of the dark, if you will, then we genuinely are the light of the world that Jesus talks about.
And here, I think, it is Super Bowl Sunday, after all, a football metaphor is apt: Eleven years ago, at this time, on this holiday, I was actually with your former pastor, Wayne Bacus, at the Super Bowl in New York City, when we actually won. And, if you recall, the Seahawks defense in those days had a nickname. Do you remember what it was? Of course, you remember! the Legion of Boom, that’s right.
And maybe you’ve been following the news of our current team, and how the Defense wanted to have their own nickname, so they’d be distinguished from the Legion of Boom. And so does anybody know what they picked? “The Dark Side,” that’s right— which only caused me to wonder what Pastor Dan, Star Wars afficionado that he is, would make of that theologically. But I have to say, when I heard they wanted it to be the Dark Side, I cringed. I thought, “Oh, come on, that’s Darth Vader. That’s like the villains, you know, why not be the Force?” But I think that’s more a reflection of me than anything else, and my discomfort with the dark.
But I repeat what I said. When we cease to be afraid of the dark, then we genuinely are the light of the world that Jesus talks about, because the light shines in and through the darkness. And we are the light of the world. That’s what Jesus said. He did not say that we can one day be the light of the world, in some future down the road, if we play our cards right. Nope. Jesus said, “You are the light of the world” today, in this moment, right now, as I speak to you, people of Queen Anne Lutheran Church, you are the light of the world. He wasn’t prescribing a future for us. He was describing our present reality. So, you can’t say, “Oh, Jesus, yes, I know light of the world. I do mean to get around to that project someday; I just have to push past this depression first.”
If we could not be the light of the world until we chased all of our shadows away, we would never be the light of the world.
But consider this. If, as Jesus said, we are indeed the light of the world right now, then light shines right through whatever darkness you brought to church with you today, whatever darkness our lives currently hold. It can shine through my OCD, or your bouts of anxiety, or our collective worries about the future into which our country is heading, and I count that, all of that, light shining through the darkness of our world, as good news.
As for our future? Well, later in Jesus’ same Sermon on the Mount, he’s going to tell us not to worry about the future. After all, that’s not where we live right now. And besides, Jesus says, it’s going to take care of itself anyway.
But at present—which is your current historical address—where you live today, you already are the light of the world. Perhaps you’re living with the darkness of a powerful grief, or maybe you’re in the grasp of a depression that just won’t let go. Or maybe a burden, you’re burdened by a secret, haunting you. Doesn’t matter. Jesus says you’re the light of the world anyway. That’s the heart of the gospel, I think. It’s not that the light of Christ obliterates or banishes the dark, rather, it shines right through the dark.
If the light of Christ can shine through what my friend has described as “such dark times as these,” then what a powerful and hopeful light it must be. If it can shine through the darkness that I have known, then why not through a death-contaminated tomb?
Remember that song, “Future so Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”? I dare say our mission is to reveal a present sufficiently bright to shine through our own fears and sufferings and shortcomings, not so that people have to reach for their Ray Bans, but rather, to help them to see that there’s no darkness so deep that the light of Christ cannot penetrate it. And therefore, darkness can be as much a gift as light.
Such is the witness of the One in whom the night and the day are both alike.
Amen.