May 17, 2026 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from May 17, 2026
READINGS
First Reading: Acts 1:6-14
6 When [the apostles] had come together, they asked [Jesus], “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11 They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away. 13 When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. 14 All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
Second Reading: 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed. 14 If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.
5:6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time. 7 Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. 8 Discipline yourselves; keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. 9 Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. 10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. 11 To him be the power forever and ever. Amen.
Gospel: John 17:1-11
1 After Jesus had spoken these words [to his disciples,] he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, 2 since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. 4 I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5 So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
6 “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you, 8 for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you, and they have believed that you sent me. 9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10 All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them. 11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
SERMON—NW WA Synod Bishop Shelley Bryan Wee
“What Is Eternal Life?”
Before I begin, I just want to say a few words. How grateful I am, and what a joy and delight it is to be here with you all today. Thank you for the invitation, and for the opportunity to worship here at Queen Anne. I want to thank you all for your faithfulness, and for your ministry in this community, and for being part of a larger community where together we share and live into the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
For those of you who might not know me, I am Shelly Bryan Wee, and I serve as your bishop, the Bishop of the Northwest Washington Synod of the ELCA. The Northwest Washington Synod has about 100 congregations and faith communities. Our borders are from Des Moines, Kent up to Canada to the north, and then all the islands—I know I’m pointing incorrectly here, but anyway, the islands—and then on the east, the foothills of the Cascades.
You, Queen Anne, are one of the congregations in the Northwest Washington Synod, and it is my honor to serve as your Bishop and to journey with you in this life of faith. This is actually what the word “synod” means, to walk together, to journey together. syn-hodos, those two words together mean to journey together, and I’m delighted that we are walking together.
You might also wonder, well, what does the word “bishop” mean? Well, I’m the pastor of the synod, and bishop is the fancy word for overseer, so that’s just what it means—that I oversee; but I’m the pastor to all of the congregations and the rostered ministers of the synod, and so, along with Pastor Peterson, I am your pastor, and I’m so thankful for all of you. Thank you for the many ways that you demonstrate your faith. Thank you for your advocacy, for your welcoming of all people, for being a Reconciling in Christ congregation; for the many ways that your congregation shows love and grace here on Queen Anne, and in the wider community.
And I want to thank you also for your mission support to the Northwest Washington Synod. As you might know, a portion of the offering that you give, when the offering plate is passed around, or you do the QR code, or however it is that you give offering these days; a portion of what you give goes to the Northwest Washington Synod. And last year you gave $6,000 in mission support to the Northwest Washington Synod. And this year, so far, you’ve given $3,400 in mission support. And I want to thank you for that. Your mission support enables us to do the ministry in the wider Synod. Your offering helps with new starts, and with advocacy, with mobility, with lay ministry formation, with the LIVE project, with ministry to seafarers, helping congregations when there is a conflict or other issues, helping with Campus Ministry, with Camp Lutherwood and more.
And your mission support goes beyond the Synod and to the wider church. The Synod gives 47% of what is given to us to the wider church, so that ministry can happen with Lutheran Disaster Response, and with ELCA World Hunger, and supporting churches throughout the world, including the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, and our Companion in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in European Russia, and so much more.
So, I want to thank you. Thank you for your generosity. Thank you for your faithful giving, your generosity in so many ways; in the way that you stand up for things, the way that you go to things, the way that you are community for one another. Thank you so much. I am so glad that we are doing ministry together and partnering in ministry in the future. Thank you.
And now I’m going to move from here to over here, where I like to preach more...
Grace and peace to you from God our creator and from our Savior and Redeemer Jesus Christ. Amen.
[singing} Oh Lord, hear my prayer. Oh Lord, hear my prayer. When I call, answer me;
O Lord, hear my prayer. O Lord, hear my prayer. Come and listen to me.
Amen.
As a pastor for over 30 years, I have sat at bedsides of the dying more times than I can count. I’ve sat with so many who wanted me to promise that I would look after their spouse or their children or their parents, or whoever it is that they held close to their hearts. I’ve held hands of people who, in their dying breath, were worried that their children would never speak to one another, because they were the ones that helped navigate the complexities of sibling rivalry. I’ve prayed with those and sat with those who just desperately wanted more time on this earth, and I have celebrated with others who were so ready to enter into the communion of saints.
As I look back on all of those beloved people, so many of their desires came from one place: that they wanted to make sure that their loved ones would be safe, that their loved ones would be connected, that their loved ones would remember that they are part of a larger communion, a larger community, even as this person was feeling death hovering around them.
I don’t think Jesus was much different than these people whose bedsides I sat at. In today’s gospel, Jesus is facing the reality of his imminent death. He’s gathered with his disciples on what we know as the Last Supper. So, we’re in the Gospel of John, and from chapter 13 to 17, Jesus has been talking and doing different actions with his disciples nonstop—chapter 13, chapter 14, chapter 15, chapter 16—all of that is the Last Supper, and the Last Supper continues with chapter 17 today. And if you look at these chapters, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, today, Jesus is worried about his followers. He’s concerned about their faith, their community, their communion, their belonging with one another, their sibling rivalry, their “what is going on with them,” the fighting that might come from within, the harm that he knows is without, and the knowledge that he’s not going to be with them in the same way that he has been. Jesus knows time is running out, where we are in John’s Gospel today.
And so, in these chapters of the Last Supper, Jesus does some things. He washes his disciples’ feet, he washes them, reminding them that they are to be servants. Now this isn’t in the Gospel of John, it’s in Matthew, Mark, and Luke; but we also know that he gives them wine and bread and says, "This is my body, this is my blood.” He reminds them that when they eat and drink, that he is there, that he is present, that he is, that he will always be there with them.
In chapter 13, Jesus gives them a new commandment. It’s not really a new commandment, it’s a commandment we’ve had for a long time, it’s why humans were created, but Jesus says, "A new command I give to you, just as I have loved you…” You know what the rest of it is? “love one another.” “Just as I have loved you, love one another.” It’s an echo of what we hear in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, where Jesus says – “this is the greatest commandment, and here’s another one like it, right? Love God, love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s all connected there. So Jesus says this in chapter 13, “a new command I give to you, as I just as I have loved you, love one another,” and he wants to make sure that they hear it, so in chapter 15 he repeats it again, he says it again, and so after all of these actions and all of these words—he talks for a very long time in John—we get to the gospel that we just read, in chapter 17.
So, after Jesus washes feet, after Jesus talks, after Jesus says,”Love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus begins to pray. And all of chapter 17 is a prayer. It’s a very long prayer. We only read the first 11 verses today. This prayer is often called The Farewell Prayer or The High Priestly Prayer. And so, the first 11 verses of chapter 17 are what we have today, but I encourage you, if you’re not going to the parade in Ballard today—even if you are, you can still do this—to read all of chapter 17 or read from chapter 13 to 17 and see what that whole Last Supper is about, because it’s so deep and rich and beautiful, and it really does lend itself to reflection. But for us today we’re going to look at these verses 1–11, and specifically we’re going to look at verse 3 in chapter 17, and this is what Jesus prays on verse 3:
“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
So, I guess the first question, when we hear this verse, the first question we might have is, “what does Jesus mean by eternal life?
“And this is eternal life,” he says.
I mean, pop-culture shows lots of cartoons, right, with people sitting on clouds, right, playing only one kind of musical instrument: harps; or there’s like a gate, and St. Peter’s minding the gate, and you go up and St. Peter asks you a question, and you get in, or you don’t, right? That’s kind of the pop-culture, cartoonish understanding.
Or, if you’ve ever been to an art gallery where there’s a lot of paintings from the Renaissance or before, there’s a lot of pictures about what eternal life might be. You have where the angels sweep down and they lift up the faithful, and they are going up into the sky. And then there’s the not-so-lucky ones whose demons come and either rip their souls out of their mouths, you see this in those paintings, or they carry them off to hell, right? We see all of those.
So, is this eternal life? Or does eternal life, like we hear in other Gospels, mean having a mansion in the sky? Or do you become just One with the universe? Or are you caught as a ghost, between two realms? There’s a lot of thoughts about what eternal life might be.
And let me just pause here, because I want to say: I truly do believe in life beyond the grave. I do believe that there is something beyond life as we know it now. I’ve been with too many people, and had too many experiences to discount something beyond a person’s last breath. I do believe that death does not have the final word, and that beyond death there is life with God forever in the communion of the saints, however we describe that; a big table with food, or…I don’t think it’s a cloud with a harp, but I think it’s communion somehow…
I do believe this, and I think that this is part of eternal life that we can trust. But in Jesus’s prayer today, as he’s approaching his own death, as he’s approaching this, he expands far beyond what happens after you expire. He expands far beyond the longevity of eternity, and he isn’t just talking about “time that never ends.”
Instead, if you listen to this prayer, if you hear this prayer, if you enter into this prayer that Jesus prays, he’s inviting us into something different. Listen to these words again from verse 3 that Jesus prays:
“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
So, how is Jesus defining eternal life? Knowing God through Jesus Christ. It’s nothing less than living in relationship with the One who calls us, loves us, and draws us into abundant life. It’s nothing less than continuing life in His name, through learning and praying and loving in community, all in this world that God loves. So eternal life doesn’t mean that we just live life and go on, and then after we take our last breath, then we enter into eternal life. That’s just part of it.
The truth of eternal life is entering into eternal life—now.
Now.
Maybe it’s helpful to think about eternal life less as a distant reward, and more as God abiding and dwelling within us; that God lives and moves and breathes in us as we live and move and breathe in God.
Jesus is praying that the disciples, and all of us, would live this intensely-relational life of love now, with God and with one another, throughout our lives and beyond death itself.
That’s one of the great things about baptism. That’s what baptism promises, is that we die and we are raised again into eternal life—now. Now. That’s one of the gifts of being baptized as a baby, and going through life knowing always that we are living this eternal life, but anytime you’re baptized, it’s a true gift to understand that that’s what we are living in now.
And it’s so essential to hear this, and to know this, because in today’s world, whoa, right? There’s so much that can have us fall into despair, away from others, away from love, away from this love that Jesus prays for, and instead we go towards hatred and fear and anxiety and violence and cruelty, the dehumanizing of others, whoever the other is, the scapegoating of others, and the greed, and the corruption, and the war, and the glorification of wealth and power, whooh. It’s so easy to follow that, and to fall into that, or just say “I’m out!” and just escape what is around us through willful ignorance or mindless entertainment—although mindless entertainment is okay sometimes—or blaming others, or just doomscrolling on your phone, story after story, that’s just, maybe that’s just me… But there’s all of this that’s happening in our own lives that that can lead us that way, and then all the other stuff, the personal stuff that’s going on, illnesses and and disconnection and regret about what we did or didn’t do, you know, when you wake up at 3am and think, you know, when I was 22 years old, why did I make that decision? All those anxieties and worries, all of that stuff that we can fall into, this abyss of loneliness and apartness and separation from God and from one another.
And it’s so easy to settle for this half-alive existence, instead of hearing this prayer that Jesus prays today, to truly live in eternal life today. Today. To abide and dwell in God’s love with God and with one another, to live in God’s eternal life, eternity now, today.
And I know, I get it. I can fall down that abyss myself. I can be in that despair. It’s a lot. And yet we hold this promise, we clutch and we grasp, and we say no to that, and we say yes, that we have already been called, we have already been chosen, we have already been claimed.
If you go beyond chapter 13, go all the way back to John chapter 1: We are promised “all who received him, Jesus, all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” Through Jesus, we are, right now, children of God. We are already bound up in eternal life with God: today. We already abide in Jesus, and Jesus already abides in us. We already have a new identity and a profound intimacy of relationship with God.
Yes, we can get distracted and dismayed, we can feel ourselves falling, we can do our darnedest to wrench towards all that kills our souls; but the truth, the truth is: God’s eternal life is everywhere around us and within us, and we are living in it in God.
This last week, I wrote a letter to the first church that I ever served, Jocko Valley Lutheran Church in Arlee, Montana. It’s a really tiny little church, and I love this church. The church wasn’t very old when I was there. It had only been around for about five years when I came, and what they had done is they had taken a Forest Service portable building, like an office building, you know, and then they just built a steeple on it, and painted it all white. And then when I was there, we bought a bell for the steeple. It was very exciting.
I loved being in this church. I helped with sheep-shearing. I was terrible at it, but I was small enough that I could get into the bags of wool and stomp it down. And I taught confirmation. I would have to go to the school and get the kids and bring them from confirmation to the church. I had to tell them—I’m just going to tell the story. I had to tell them that they couldn’t relieve themselves on the way from the school to the church, because they would just “go” as we were going, and I was like, no, no, we need to get to the church.
And I wrote in here, I even loved the parsonage, but that isn’t true. I really did not love the parsonage. It was a trailer, and you could see gaps between the wall and the floor, and so it’d be really hot in the summer and really cold in the winter. But I still loved being there, and I’m so thankful that they helped form me as pastor in my first years.
I had my first child there, and I was pregnant with my second child when we left and moved to Spokane, so my then-husband could start law school. So, both Katie and Daniel have roots in Montana.
So you might wonder, why are you telling us this story in the middle of your sermon? Well, I wrote them this letter, and I wrote it because today they are closing. Today is their last worship service, and I couldn’t go there. In the first service, I said I can’t go there “because of other obligations,” and I made it sound like this was the only obligation I had. So, I don’t want you to feel guilty; I couldn’t go because yesterday some of you might know we had synod assembly, and so I couldn’t go because I had synod assembly, and I was coming here, but it was... I had other obligations, I couldn’t get over there.
But I am so sad that this community is no more, and I feel sort of like I sat at that bedside, held hands, and now, and now they’re going to…beyond, right? And even though it’s been, I have been here, it’s been over 25 years. It’s been, how old is my son? Yeah, it’s been 28 years since I, since I served there, and I’m feeling it today.
But this is what I know, and that’s that this is beyond the message of Jocko Valley Lutheran Church. This is what I know: God shaped, and formed the people at Jocko Valley Lutheran Church, and continues to shape them, and the people who heard and experienced God’s love when I was there, before I was there, after I was there, and beyond, even as that property is sold, and that little portable office is destroyed; they’re still connected. They’re connected with all of you; they’re connected with Queen Anne Lutheran Church; they’re connected with the whole church on earth. We’re connected, we are connected in this eternal life that God promises is happening even right now.
God’s eternal life forms the connective tissues in our lives. It might be invisible sometimes. I mean, we see it sometimes; we see it when we deliver meals, or when we hug someone, or or when we’re receiving communion together, all of those ways we see it, but then there are all those ways that we don’t even see it, that you’re connected to this little church in Montana, or all of those. But it’s like the ligaments in our bones that keep our bones from flying apart. That’s how we are connected, as the body of Christ. Eternal life with God started when Jesus came into this world as a baby, continued as He taught, and as He healed, and as He welcomed all those that others did not welcome; all of that formed this connective tissue, and it continued as He prayed for His disciples in chapter 17 of John today, “that all people may be one, as He and the Father are one,” and this eternal life that started then and has continued in the 2000 years through all of the different ways that the church has been the church to today, and eternal life continues with us, around us, within us today; eternal life that forms this body of Christ.
And so when we hear Jesus’s prayer today, when we hear that we are children of God, and that this is eternal life, that you may know God through Jesus Christ; that we hold, that we cling to it, we trust that, and we remember that we are held together, not by our own grit, or our own strength, or our own, ”Okay, I guess I gotta go do that”— That’s not how we are held together. We are held together by the love of God that comes to us and is shared amongst us and beyond us through Jesus our Savior. And we trust God’s eternal life, which is wide and broad, beyond our wildest imaginations, embracing this whole world.
For God takes what we think is gone, or unredeemable, or simply just awful; God takes that and refashions it into a web of grace that keeps us tethered to God and to one another, even when we despair, even when we don’t notice.
And so in the way that Jesus ends his prayer in chapter 17, I end it for you as well. Jesus prayed, “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me, may be in them, and I in them.”
My beloveds, in all things, may you live in this love. May you know and live in God’s eternity, receiving God’s love in abundance, and sharing God’s love without end: this eternal life.
And we sing, “O Lord, hear my prayer. Oh Lord, hear my prayer. When I call, answer me. O Lord, hear my prayer. O Lord, hear my prayer. Come and listen to me.”
Amen.