July 12, 2026 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from July 12, 2026
READINGS
First Reading: Isaiah 55:10-13
10 For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
11 so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
12 For you shall go out in joy
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
13 Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle,
and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.
Second Reading: Romans 8:1-11
1 Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. 5 For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. 6 To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For this reason the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed, it cannot, 8 and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, then the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you.
Gospel: Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23
1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on a path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched, and since they had no root, they withered away. 7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 If you have ears, hear!”
18 “Hear, then, the parable of the sower. 19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, 21 yet such a person has no root but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of this age and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
SERMON— Pastor Dan Peterson
An Invitation to Life
Grace to you, and peace, from God the Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
If you ask most Christians what the essential teaching of the Christian faith is, you are most likely to hear “that Jesus died for our sins” is the most important teaching of the Christian faith. Something reflected, you may have noticed, in our Gathering Hymn.
Unfortunately, in so doing, most Christians, and perhaps some of us, reduce the point of Jesus’s life to his death, and when it comes to his death, those Christians, perhaps some of us, can’t even agree on the significance of that. Is it that Jesus died, as the medieval monk Abelard argued, to show us a way of life, a life of self-sacrificial love? That Jesus was the chief example of what that love looked like in the world, and that we too are invited to live the same kind of life He did?
Or is it, as another medieval theologian, Saint Anselm, argued, that Jesus died to pay a debt for our sins; that God was angry at the ways we conduct ourselves; that because we cannot pay off those ways to God, that debt we owe to God because of sin, God intercedes in the person of Jesus Christ, receives the beating we deserve, and therefore satisfies God and sets us free?
Or is it that Jesus died in his loving search for what the theologian Douglas John Paul calls “a lost and alienated humanity,” battling death and overcoming it in the resurrection—something our guy Martin Luther typically argued, when it came to his view of what the cross signified?
Now we can debate these all as much as anyone would want, and for me personally, it’s the view of Luther that is the most attractive, as well as the view of Abelard. After 10 years, you should probably know that I am not a fan of Anselm, and that it’s hard for me to believe in a God who would require the butchering of his Son in order to free us from his wrath.
Having debated all of these, however, I think there is something we miss in the process. Can you guess? Well, when it comes to today’s Gospel: we miss the first 27 chapters of Matthew. Let me repeat that: In focusing on the death of Christ, however we interpret it, we miss or overlook the first 27 chapters of Matthew’s Gospel, our Gospel reading for today. We overlook, in other words, the significance not only of Jesus’s birth, but also his life and teaching.
So, what did Jesus teach, and how might what he taught be good news for each one of us this morning? Now, that’s a hard question to answer. Something I enjoy when I put together sermons: crafting hard questions that nobody in this pulpit can answer briefly.
But one clue I think we have for an answer appears in today’s Gospel reading. Not only a clue concerning what he taught, but what he did. Jesus offered his followers, and by implication each one of us, an “invitation to life” through his preaching. That’s the message I want you to hear today. That it’s not simply about what the significance was of Jesus’s death. That is an important debate, and it’s one that we, as I said earlier, could debate for many days and years. But rather, it’s that Jesus offered his followers in his life and teaching an invitation to life. An invitation to life.
And what’s more interesting is that our lectionary editors selected two other texts that do the same thing: the Book of Isaiah, Romans 8 by Paul, and our Gospel reading by Matthew, all in various ways offer each one of us, irrespective of our station in life, irrespective of our age, an invitation to a more abundant life, as Jesus says in John 10:10. So let’s turn to the first of these briefly, the selection from Isaiah, and consider how it offers an invitation to life.
Now, when I read a text like Isaiah, and I just did this, I think of it as a window through which we can see what was happening in the context of the time that would inform or shape this author’s perspective. Believe it or not, historically in Christian interpretation, that move is very controversial, and in some ways it separates the ELCA and its appeal to what’s called here the historical critical method from other more fundamentalistic denominations.
So, if we look through Isaiah as a window through which to see what was happening at the time, we notice a people who have been brutally treated for roughly 50 years. As one commentator puts it, here in Isaiah, the sovereign God who spoke the world into existence in Genesis 1 is the same God who now speaks of the exile’s celebratory return to their homeland.
So this text was written toward the end of what’s called the Babylonian exile, 586 to 536 B.C.E. It was during this time that many of the Jews were violently taken from their homeland. Their temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, and they were marched off into exile into captivity for roughly 50 years. Among them may have been the author of Job, who writes a stunning narrative about what it means to be faithful to God, but to suffer as those exiles were at the time.
And another one among them may have been the author of the middle section of Isaiah, which is where our First Reading is taken from. Waiting on God, we learn, can be especially difficult amid life’s trials and tribulations. Therefore, it is no surprise that words meant to offer comfort and affirm God’s presence are hard to hear and receive when we are caught in the throes of our own personal tsunamis, the way the Israelites were caught in the midst of an exile.
Nevertheless, this prophet, who may have been a woman, (you’ll have to read the book that I wrote that’s coming out next March. Pre-orders available on Amazon in September). This author, who may have been a woman, on behalf of God, is about to speak a daring word of promise and hope to people who endured exile for nearly 50 years. God is about to do something the likes of which the Israelites once saw in their Exodus from Egypt. “The people will go out with joy; even the mountains will burst out singing.”
Just as the exiles relied on God in the midst of this uncertain time, the implication here is that we too can rely on God’s word, God’s promise in our own uncertain circumstances. Here, in short, we see the first of three “Invitations to Life” that God offers, an invitation that would have surprised and probably shocked some of the Israelites at the time, but one nevertheless that God fulfilled in their liberation, which took place, as I mentioned a few moments ago, in 536 B.C.E.
All Creation Sings, the title of one of our hymnals, is a reflection on this surprising move on the part of God, an invitation to life that God made good on by liberating the exiles and allowing them to return to their homeland, where they would rebuild the temple and live in relative peace for the next couple 100 years.
The same thing appears in Romans, our Second Reading for today. Now, Romans is a text I could spend all day preaching on, and I’m sure you would love that. But let me just say a few words about this message. For Paul, and some of you recognize the title of the hymn: “The world is about to turn.”
The world is about to turn. The world that groans in bondage to decay. The world where nature is red in tooth and claw. The world where Christians will soon see, or have seen already, persecution. The world where mortal flesh ultimately succumbs to death.
In the midst of all this, Paul says to his readers: the world is about to turn, and I, Paul, on behalf of God and Jesus Christ, am inviting you at this moment to Life, in the midst of what seems like death. This was where Paul says, “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through His Spirit that dwells in you.”
In other words, this isn’t a promise for which fulfillment lies in the future. This is a promise that God has begun to make real in the present. Paul is talking about how Christians, receiving and responding to this Invitation to Life, can already experience new life on this side of the grave. The world is about to turn. Nature is in bondage to decay. Roman authorities seem oppressive and will continue to persecute Christians. But in the midst of it all, Paul, like the author of Isaiah, offers the same invitation—an Invitation to Life—when he spoke to the Roman Christians 2000 years ago, and one, by implication, he speaks to each of us.
That invitation finds its fullest expression, finally, in our Gospel Reading for today. If you take a look at that text, you will see, according to one commentator, a rather fascinating parable about what it means to invite others to live into the kingdom. This commentator writes: “Seen in this context, the parable of the sower is Jesus’s commentary on the opposition to his ministry.”
So, remember what I said about that window through which we can see what was happening at the time? Well, most scholars believe that this text was written toward the end of the first century. Christians were experiencing increasing persecution because of their faith, in particular thanks to the evil Roman emperor Nero. And so, this author writes in that setting to encourage them through the words of Jesus.
So Jesus is seen as the Sower who sows the seed that is the proclamation of the kingdom. Although Matthew commonly describes the Kingdom as the “Kingdom of Heaven,” rather than the “Kingdom of God” used in Mark and Luke, both phrases refer to the reign of God that Jesus proclaims and partially enacts by healing the sick, the most common miracle of the New Testament; liberating the oppressed, the region for which he came, according to the Gospel of Luke; and ministering to the rejected, something we see throughout all four Gospels, when Jesus reintegrates into the community those, like lepers, who have been ostracized.
I want to say three quick points about our Gospel Reading for today.
Number one, here we find the same expectation as well as invitation to new life that we saw in Isaiah and Paul. Only this time, it’s to Life in the Kingdom, and this is something I’d like you to add to the complexity of what the cross might symbolize.
It’s not just that Jesus died for our sins, according to Anselm.
It’s not just that he died as a moral example, according to Abelard.
It’s not just that he died in the battle against sin and death, which he overcame in the resurrection.
It’s that he died as a witness to the Kingdom—and we never hear that. But that’s what occupies almost 27 chapters of Matthew’s gospel. What happened? 27 chapters of Jesus proclaiming and manifesting the Kingdom, a kingdom that is synonymous with healing, health, reconciliation. It seems to me that a great argument could be made that he died for witnessing to and manifesting the Kingdom, which the Roman authorities took as a political threat.
Jesus in this reading was a victim of state-sanctioned terrorism, because of the fact that he proclaimed a new way of life and invited people to participate in it. That’s point one. Jesus invites us, like Paul and Isaiah, not only to a new way of life, but also to live into the kingdom, a witness for which he died.
In the preaching of the kingdom and its embodiment, secondly, it’s going to resonate only for some. There are some people, Jesus says, who won’t get it, who won’t grasp this new way of life.
Too, there are some who will react enthusiastically, but who will fall away. And I can tell you, in my years at Queen Anne Lutheran, I’ve seen a lot of people react very enthusiastically to this invitation, only to fall away in a couple of months. It’s a cycle. I don’t blame them. I think that there are plenty of other things out in the world, out there in the world, that vie for our attention. But it happens, not just 2000 years ago, it happens today, in the life of the church. People who react enthusiastically but who fall away.
And then, he says, there are people who are permanently distracted, as it were, who are distracted by the cares of this age or by the lure of wealth. How much more true could that not be in the 21st century, than it was in the First Century, when they didn’t have an iPhone, when they didn’t have a personal computer at home, when they didn’t have the internet, or social media, or television, or radio? The distractions of the world—and we live in an Era of Distraction—are ones that consistently distract us from the Invitation to abundant life that is synonymous with the Kingdom.
But for those who resonate, Jesus says, for those who resonate, the call is unlike anything else in our community! It’s a call to life that distractions cannot provide. It’s a call to life that makes life better for other people, and it’s a call to life that God fulfills in the world to come. In the process, we, like Jesus, are entrusted, entrusted with the invitation, to share that message with others.
So, where do we experience in ourselves? Where might we receive this invitation to new life? Well, it took me a long time to think about where that might be, and I tell you: maybe it’s here. Maybe it’s the church where we’re actually supposed to be going—not simply to hear that He died for our sins or that He was raised to new life, but the Invitation to lean into the kingdom, the Invitation to participate in the new life that Paul says was already activated in our mortal bodies, the Invitation to celebrate with the exiles that a new age was upon us, or that the world was about to turn.
So, where do we receive this invitation? Well, I’d like to think, if the Spirit is working through me, which it does, hopefully, on occasion, through the preached word, but if I fail, it’s through the sung word, and when both together are activated by the Spirit, it is the Word in general, not simply the words in the Bible, but the proclaimed Word, the message, that you and I are accepted, irrespective of all of our faults, loved, irrespective of all our wrongdoings, claimed, irrespective of all our doubts, and set free, in the process, to be the people that God intended.
So, hopefully, it’s through the preached word, spoken, or sung.
Secondly, and I really can’t emphasize this enough, it’s in the Sharing of the Peace, which is supposed to prepare us for a communion, but also which enables us to practice the kind of reconciliation we’re called to live out in the world. Now, for my money, Queen Anne Lutheran does the Sharing of the Peace better than any other church I’ve ever seen, because we’re so good at it, because we literally walk across the aisle and shake one another’s hands, or ask one another how they’re doing. There’s something about new life in that practice, it’s something the world, as far as I know, doesn’t typically offer.
So: it’s through hearing the Word, spoken or sung; it’s through practicing the Sharing of the Peace, and of course, it’s through Holy Communion, which is not simply a memorial in the Lutheran tradition, but the real presence of God in Christ, meeting us where God in Christ has promised to be.
Each of these is an Invitation to new life, an Invitation to a new way of being, which is why, at the end of the service we should proclaim, not Thanks be to God., but THANKS BE TO GOD!, because now, having been invited, we are sent out into the world to invite others.
And this is why it’s so important that we have a Visitation Team, as well as other people in the church of goodwill who bring this message to our homebound, and frankly, who help us record these messages and services so that our homebound and others can hear them or read them.
Dear friends, the good news is that you and I have been called to a new way of life—one we practice every Sunday here at the church, one where we reconcile with one another and enjoy fellowship, one where we receive grace through the spoken and visible word, and bear that to others first, or hear that first in song, and finally in Holy Communion.
The Kingdom for which I believe Jesus died is an Invitation to share in this kind of life.
Let’s pray.
Gracious God, you are life itself, and in Jesus Christ, you call us, you invite us to that abundant life. Give us the Word, the ears to hear your word of life. Help us receive it, so that we may do so in a way that not only honors you, but helps us serve our neighbor. This invitation is the good news.
Help us hear it. Help us live it. Help us be it.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.