March 15, 2026 | Word Out!
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READINGS AND SERMON
First Reading: 1 Samuel 16:1-13
1 The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.” 2 Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.” And the Lord said, “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.’ 3 Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do, and you shall anoint for me the one whom I name to you.” 4 Samuel did what the Lord commanded and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling and said, “Do you come peaceably?” 5 He said, “Peaceably. I have come to sacrifice to the Lord; sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.” And he sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.
6 When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely his anointed is now before the Lord.” 7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him, for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” 8 Then Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel. He said, “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.” 9 Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.” 10 Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, “The Lord has not chosen any of these.” 11 Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and bring him, for we will not sit down until he comes here.” 12 He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. The Lord said, “Rise and anoint him, for this is the one.” 13 Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the presence of his brothers, and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.
Second Reading: Ephesians 5:8-14
8 Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light, 9 for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. 10 Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly, 13 but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, 14 for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,
“Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”
Gospel: John 9:1-41
1 As [Jesus] walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. 4 We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” 6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, 7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” 10 But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”
13 They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14 Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” 16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. 17 So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”
18 The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight 19 and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20 His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind, 21 but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” 22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. 23 Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”
24 So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27 He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” 28 Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.
35 Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” 38 He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. 39 Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?” 41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”
Sermon: Let’s Figure It Out Together
So the sermon I want to share with you today is called “Let’s Figure It Out Together.” And I’m really excited about this sermon because of the brevity with which I have to share it.
I’m going to, I guess you could say, shave off nuances, just to give you a general idea of how different people approach discrepancies in the Bible, and how we at Queen and Lutheran might be invited to do something, I think, in this world, rather unique.
So what do you make of the following? Listen closely from Numbers 23: 19 in the Old Testament: “God is not a human being that he should lie or a mortal that he should change his mind.”
Now listen to Jonah 3:10, also, in this case, one of the prophets of the Old Testament. This is regarding the Ninevites, an enemy of Israel: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.”
So which is it, does God never change God’s mind? Or in some cases, does God indeed change God’s mind?
Or again. Luke 23:49, regarding the crucifixion of Christ; he writes, “But all Jesus’s acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things.”
Fast forward to John 19:25, he says regarding the crucifixion: “Meanwhile, standing near the Cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister Mary, the wife of Cleopas and Mary Magdalene.”
So which is it? Were the women at a distance when Jesus was crucified? Or, according to John, were they at the foot of the cross?
Or, once more, Leviticus 26:14, in the Old Testament, God says to the Israelites: “But if you will not obey me and do not observe all these commandments, I will turn and do this to you. I will bring terror on you, consumption and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away.”
Fast forward now to the New Testament, the Gospel of John, our Gospel reading for today, chapter 9:1-3. “As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned. He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”
So which is it? Does God reward people for being good and punish people who are sinful? Or is it the case, as Jesus says in this chapter of John’s gospel, that this man was blind, but not because of his sin, much less his parents’ sin?
What do we make of these discrepancies? How do we deal with contradictions in the Bible—or what at minimum, evangelical Christian theologians call “irresolvable tensions.” There are plenty of answers, obviously, in the Christian tradition over the years. Let me just sketch briefly a couple for you, to give you a sense of how different prominent figures of the Christian faith have tried to resolve the problem of discrepancies, a few of which I’ve shared with you.
One is John Calvin. Calvin was a reformer of the second generation of the Protestant Reformation after Luther. He was trained as a lawyer. So, watch out! Calvin used a kind of ruthlessly consistent logic to resolve the tensions that we find in Scripture. At the same time, however, Calvin acknowledged the existence of “minor errors,” which would explain, for example, the discrepancy in Luke and John regarding the women at the foot of the cross.
Now here’s where Calvin’s interesting. We talk about God not changing God’s mind. And then we hear about how God changed God’s mind. Calvin might ask us to raise the question, “Well, what do we mean by change? Is God, in one sense, always the same, for example, always suffering love. And is it the case that this suffering love never changes? So you can see how for Calvin, one needs to apply logic to render consistent otherwise supposedly irresolvable tensions in scripture. But again, at the same time, and most of Calvin’s followers forget this, the reformer acknowledged the presence at least of minor errors in Scripture.
Go back a generation to Martin Luther. He said, regarding the Old Testament, that it’s not enough to say that this is God’s word, and obey it, but we have to determine whether it fits us, and to whom it was written. This is the birth of what’s called, subsequently, the modern historical critical method. Luther here is acknowledging that context and audience play a role when it comes to interpreting biblical texts. The vast majority of modern biblical scholars in Germany, and subsequently, here, are German. They follow a particular method that they would trace back to Luther himself in this essay regarding the Old Testament.
And not only that, in the same essay, Luther also dismissed some of Moses’s laws, he says, as absurd and ridiculous. They don’t apply to us. So, thanks be to God. Exodus, chapter 30 says, if you work on the Sabbath, you are to be executed. Martin Luther might say, “I don’t think that pertains to us.” That was written in a particular locale, in a particular set of circumstances. As Christians, we have to determine to whom it was written and whether it fits us. And he writes that in 1525, and it’s really a profound way of looking at Scripture.
Luther also explicitly refused to reduce God’s word to the Bible, but spoke instead of “the Living Word,” which is to say, the Word comes alive in the preaching of the gospel. Now, of course, you see this with me and you all the time. The Word of God comes alive when I preach from the notes on my page. But an even better example of this, is to go to an African American church, where you can reallysee the dynamic interplay of word between pastor and congregation and pastor. We have one African [American] woman who’s been attending our midweek services, and I love it, because she will say at various points, “Amen.”
When I was in seminary, I took a pastoral care class at a Baptist seminary with a lot of African Americans in the class, and I remember giving a talk on a particular theologian, and I was really struggling, and there was a Black lady in the front who said, “Help him out, Jesus!” [Laughter]
That is the dynamism of the Word; the Word comes alive in the preaching of the Gospel. As Carl Barth, a 20th century theologian, says, “The Bible becomes the Word of God in the act of preaching.”
Now 17th-century Lutherans, following Luther, maintain, by contrast, that there are no errors in the original autographs or manuscripts, but that these errors appeared over time in translations. So it’s important to know that Lutheranism is not a single stream. There are different ways of approaching the text that we can trace back either to the 17th century and/or to Luther himself.
In America, the “father of fundamentalism,” Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary, insisted on conflating the Word of God with the words in the text itself. You probably remember that bumper sticker “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” That’s an outgrowth of his way of interpreting scripture. And like Calvin, he would do whatever he could to resolve the tensions in Scripture, and insisted that there are no contradictions. If, after trying to harmonize it with the pious imagination, the believer was to give up, in certain cases, to God, what one can’t resolve—as what Pastor Wayne, my predecessor, would call “a Holy Mystery.”
So you can see different ways of approaching the Bible and the discrepancies we encounter. Some Christian theologians try to harmonize the text and give over what they can’t harmonize to God. Others acknowledge the historicity of the text, that it was written to a certain people in a certain time and place, and still others, including Luther, who affirms both of these, will think about the word of God as more than the biblical text, as “the Living Word”, that comes to life in the preaching, especially of the gospel.
All of these methods, as you can see, developed as a way of reading the Bible in the midst of a dilemma or crisis. There are, all agree, at least apparent discrepancies in Scripture; the question is, how we address them? We can (1) deny them, apart from what we can’t harmonize. That is, that’s one path. Or, we might accept and even embrace them. We can recognize the differences and contradictions as a gift, as an illustration of how people were and are trying to grasp and understand God in different contexts, across different times, from multiple perspectives.
Now, I like the second of these personally, and I suggest that’s consistent with the Jewish approach to Scripture, and I have something to confess to you. If it wasn’t for Jesus and bacon, I would be Jewish. There’s just no way around the fact that their approach to Scripture is so appealing to me; the discrepancies and different types of interpretations are not something to be debated angrily, but something that is welcomed. “Consistencies are for pudding,” as my friend Beatrice Lawrence says; it’s not something we find or even want to find in Scripture. We should embrace the diversity of multiple perspectives.
This is reflective, one might say, of how the people, to follow the words of Paul, are working out their salvation in fear and trembling. It’s an illustration of what I call progressive revelation, where people grow in their understanding of “God as suffering love” over the course of many centuries, refining this, testing this against experience, all in a way of maturing as they develop their understanding of God—who I believe in the Old Testament is pure pathos, pure feeling, the one who accompanies us no matter what, as we heard when Jenna beautifully sang Psalm 23; so much so, that this God became incarnate and dwelt among us.
Now I’m not here this morning to tell you which of these options you should choose, or pretend that I’ve exhausted the various approaches to Scripture. By no means. I am, however, calling attention to the way people of faith have dealt with discrepancies in the Bible for many, many years.
But here’s the thing, I found a great way of approaching the discrepancies in the Bible. Right here at Queen Anne Lutheran Church, a couple months ago, we had a forum, and somehow, at the end of that forum, we all arrived at the consensus with regard to differing opinions, that the best attitude to have is “figuring it out together.”
That’s hard to do. I fail to do that, sometimes. We all do. But that attitude of “figuring it out together” really struck me in that forum, and I think it’s a wonderful way to approach the mysteries and tensions in scripture this morning.
Consistent with the theme of being on a journey for 40 days, I invite you to commit, or recommit, yourself to figuring out things together. Here at Queen Anne Lutheran Church, we live in very difficult times. The world is embroiled in conflict, as we see now in the Middle East; it’s nation versus nation. At home, it’s state versus state. On the internet, it’s ideology versus ideology.
In contrast to all of these, we can be an example to others, a beacon of light at the top of Queen Anne Hill. We can and will disagree, but more importantly, we are one in Christ, as Paul says in Galatians 3, which means that whatever the case is, we can figure it out together. We have the opportunity to do that at our forum next Sunday, where together, we will wrestle with the question of life after death.
This also applies to other aspects of church, life and ministry. When it comes to our budget, we can figure it out together. When it comes to our missional priorities, we can figure it out together. When it comes to the programming we offer, we can figure it out together. And when it comes to different ways of reading the Bible and dealing with its apparent discrepancies, we can figure it out together.
The message this morning is simple, let’s figure it out together.
And all God’s people said, Amen.