June 14, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS
First Reading: Exodus 19:2-8a
2 [The Israelites] journeyed from Rephidim, entered the wilderness of Sinai, and camped in the wilderness; Israel camped there in front of the mountain.3 Then Moses went up to God; the Lordcalled to him from the mountain, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob and tell the Israelites: 4 ’You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, 6 but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.”
7 So Moses went, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the Lord had commanded him. 8a The people all answered as one, “Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do.”
Second Reading: Romans 5:1-8
1 Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Gospel: Matthew 9:35—10:8
35 Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; 38 therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
10:1 Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness. 2 These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon, also known as Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee and his brother John; 3 Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus and Thaddaeus; 4 Simon the Cananaean and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed him.
5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not take a road leading to gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan town, 6 but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 7 As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ 8 Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.
SERMON—Pastor Dan Peterson
Grace to you, and peace, from God, the source of all life, and from Jesus, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
Each week, my attempt is to give you one phrase or idea to hold on to for the week to come, perhaps to ponder it. A couple weeks ago, we talked about the Trinity being the Christian way of saying God is love. Last week, we talked about how God is not the source of suffering and pain, at least according to the second and gospel readings.
Today, the phrase I want you to remember is this: The gospel of grace frees us to ask questions. Let me repeat that: The gospel of grace frees us to ask questions.
Forgive me now, as I share a story I shared once several years back, a story I remember like yesterday. I was an intern pastor in rural Minnesota, which, coming from California, I regarded as my cross-cultural experience. It was during that time that I learned a lot about what it means to be not only a leader of the faith, but a person of faith itself. One of the experiences that I had that left a deep impression on me was a Bible study for clergy as we prepared for the coming week’s sermon. During that Bible study, I remember asking several questions of the text that made one of my colleagues very upset. Near the end of the meeting, he responded as follows: Wrestling with the text, as I was, like Jacob, trying to make sense of it in the context of faith,—he took both his fists, slammed them down on the table, and said, “You will submit to everything in this book!” You will submit to everything in this book!
I want to pause here for a moment and take a poll. How many of you have ever been chastised for asking a question or questions about your faith? Raise your hand. Okay, a few of you—more than a few of you.
Now, the purpose of this poll is not to shame those who have done the chastising. Perhaps some of us have done that when we didn’t have the answer or answers. Maybe it seemed like the person we were chastising was arrogant. But most of us know what it’s like to be shut down, particularly when it comes to the raising of earnest and sincere questions about our faith. It doesn’t feel good; it doesn’t feel good.
So, what is faith? Well, according to the Apostle Paul, it’s an attitude of trust in God, based on the love God has shown for us in Jesus Christ. An attitude of trust in God, based on the love God has shown for us in Jesus Christ. Faith, or trust, moreover, according to Paul, is not an act of will, it is a gift of the Holy Spirit, so that no one can boast they did anything to make themselves right with God—not even “the hour they first believed,” as it says in the hymn, “Amazing Grace.”
Faith, again, is not an act of will. For Paul, at least; it is a gift of the Holy Spirit, that opens us to the reception of God’s grace.
This is why Paul says in Romans 12 that “God measures out faith to each person.” This is why Paul says in First Corinthians 12, “no one calls Jesus Lord but by the Holy Spirit,” and this is why Paul, according to Romans 5, our second reading for today, talks about, and this is a quote, how “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Faith, as others like Saint Augustine and Martin Luther would confirm, is a gift from God. It is not an act of the human will. It is not something we could turn on or off simply by volition. It’s something that happens to us, something that overtakes us. It’s something we experience when we find ourselves grasped by the spirit of trust, moved to love our neighbor, or open to the awe and wonder of the spiritual dimension in our lives.
That said, faith looks different, and expresses itself differently in each one of us, depending on our personality. So let’s talk about that for a moment. What does faith look like as it’s expressed among us, according to our different personalities?
Well, for some, faith is a spirit of quiet trust that God is present in their lives, and that wherever they go, God will be.
In the same token, faith can be the spirit of love that quietly compels people, like our quilt makers, for example, to look after or care for others in acts of service. In this regard, I’m reminded of Dorcas, who is also called Tabitha in the Book of Acts, chapter 9, whose quiet faith leads her to commit various acts of service—something significant, insofar as she is named the only disciple of Jesus who is a woman in the Bible.
For others, as the Lutheran philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would say, faith is not a quiet trust in the presence of God. It is an active, restless thing filled with questions. He compares it to a sinking boat, where people are constantly trying to buck it out—if that’s a word—the water. These questions are not asked for the sake of disproving the Bible cynically, but because we want to understand the faith we’ve been given.
Faith, in short, is an attitude of trust, but an attitude that manifests itself differently in different people. For some, it’s quiet, for others it raises questions, and wow, when it comes to questions, our readings for today are full of them. Let me offer you a few examples.
Take a look, if you’d like, at our first reading. God says, “Now, therefore, if you, (that is, the Israelites), obey my voice and keep my covenant…” (A covenant is simply a kind of contract, a legal agreement that binds the relationship of one person to the other.) “Now, therefore, if you, Israel, obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”
Now. Anyone who reads the Bible knows this didn’t happen. The Israelites repeatedly fail to keep the covenant between themselves and God. So, how can an all-knowing God not foresee these failures? Why, in other words, would God make an agreement with people God knows cannot hold up their end of the bargain?
Or again, we turn to our second reading for today. There, Paul says, we boast of our afflictions when it comes to sharing or living out our faith in God through Jesus Christ, “knowing,” he continues in verses 3-4, that “affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
But do we really know this? Does our experience as people of faith truly confirm Paul’s claim that affliction or suffering necessarily produces character, and that character necessarily produces endurance, and that endurance necessarily produces hope?
I mean, as a partial truth, sometimes it does. It obviously did for the Apostle Paul; but suffering and affliction can also destroy people, including, of course, people of faith. Sometimes our trials are too great to endure. Imagine being a Christian right now in Palestine or Ukraine, in Sudan or Iran. Imagine watching as your child or spouse die, or surviving a nearly mortal wound, no longer able to see or to walk. Does suffering in those experiences necessarily produce character, endurance, and hope?
Sometimes, I would like to think, it does, and those stories are remarkable. But let’s be honest, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, it destroys people of faith. Sometimes it crushes whatever spirits remain of their hope. Sometimes suffering is not redemptive. Sometimes it understandably leads to bitterness, exasperation, and indeed, loss of faith.
I mean, look what it did to Job in the Old Testament. By the end of the second chapter, he is sitting in ashes, licking his wounds. And what about our Gospel reading for today? Jesus gave the 12 disciples the ability to cure every disease and sickness, and then John’s Gospel says to his followers that they will do even greater works than he has done to them.
So, why don’t we have the power to cure every disease and sickness the way his disciples did? You don’t know how many times I have wished I had that power, or I wish there was a seminary class training me in that capacity at the bedside of somebody in our congregation who is dying.
Why don’t we have the power to cure every disease and sickness the way the disciples of Jesus did? Now, I don’t raise these questions simply to disprove the Bible. As a matter of fact, I think by raising them we encounter some plausible, even convincing answers to these questions that can expand and deepen our faith.
For example, I believe that healing from God through Christ comes to us in many forms. Can I get an “Amen” to that?
I believe that healing from God through Christ comes in many forms, and that even if one succumbs to sickness, disease, and death, God, through Christ and His gospel, can heal the spirit, and that is infinitely, eternally, more important than curing a disease.
Thank you. I raised these questions to illustrate something Paul says in his second reading. “For since we are justified, (that is accepted) by faith”, he writes, “we have peace with God through Jesus Christ,” —can I get another Amen?— “through whom we have obtained acceptance and access to this grace in which we stand.”
Now I want you to listen to those words carefully. Those are probably the most under-appreciated words in the entire Bible, if not the history of Western literature. You are accepted, Paul says, and there is nothing on earth or in heaven you can do about it.
God loves you, full stop. God loves you so much that God would become one of us, and die for us, to show us how much God loves us.
And because of that, Paul says, nothing can now separate us from God, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any thing else in creation, —and that includes, I dare submit, the questions we ask in Bible study or Sunday school!
Now let’s ponder that for a second. The Bible includes many examples of people who rightly question God. I mean, the prophets question God. Habakkuk declares, "Oh Lord, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen?’ The psalmist questions God, “Why,” we read in Psalm 44, “do you sleep, O Lord? For we sink down to the dust, our bodies cling to the ground!”
And even Jesus questions God. “My God, my God,” He asks from the cross, according to Matthew and Mark, “why have you forsaken me?” Why have you abandoned me
But here’s the good news, here’s the great news: God is big enough for their questions, and God is big enough for yours too.
Why? Because, as Paul says, God accepts you and me unconditionally in Jesus Christ, and that love frees us to ask questions if we feel so inclined. You see, God’s spirit awakens our faith in response to God’s love, but that response looks different in each one of us. For some of us, like me, that means raising questions in the attempt earnestly and sincerely to make sense of our faith, for others it means quietly trusting in the steady love and companionship God provides, without the need to ask questions, and perhaps for still others, their faith is a mixture of both, depending on the circumstance and or the season of life.
But once again, here’s the good news, here’s the best news, here is great news, here is amazing news: God accepts us all, no matter the disposition or personality type, even on the scale of the Myers-Briggs and otherwise-horrible “INTJ.”
No matter whether we feel compelled to ask questions or not, God’s grace is for everyone! You remember the pastor I mentioned at the beginning of this message, the one who slammed his fists on the table and demanded I submit to everything the Bible says, whatever that means?... God loves him, too.
God loves him too, not because of his anger ,or the way he treated me, but by grace, which is something we all need, and in the end, the only thing that matters.
Let’s pray. Gracious God, there are many days where your grace goes on or under appreciated. Give us the grace to be the persons you call us to be, whether by faith we raise hard questions, or by faith we quietly serve others, or if we find ourselves somewhere in between, grant us that experience each day of your grace, the grace that truly, truly sets us free. In Jesus’s name, Amen.