June 7, 2026 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from June 7, 2026
READINGS
First Reading: Hosea 5:15—6:6
15 I will return again to my place
until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face.
In their distress they will beg my favor:
6:1 “Come, let us return to the Lord,
for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
2 After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.
3 Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;
his appearing is as sure as the dawn;
he will come to us like the showers,
like the spring rains that water the earth.”
4 What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes away early.
5 Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets;
I have killed them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
6 For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
Second Reading: Romans 4:13-25
13 The promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, neither is there transgression.
16 For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us, 17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”), in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So shall your descendants be.” 19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. 20 No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 Therefore “it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” 23 Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone 24 but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, 25 who was handed over for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.
Gospel: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
9 As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
10 And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with Jesus and his disciples. 11 When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” 12 But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”
18 While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” 19 And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. 20 Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, 21 for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” 22 Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. 23 When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, 24 he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. 25 But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. 26 And the report of this spread through all of that district.
SERMON—Pastor Dan Peterson
Grace to you, and peace, from God the Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
In a couple of weeks, June 23 to be exact, I will be celebrating, hopefully with you, my 10-year anniversary as your pastor at Queen Anne Lutheran Church.
Along the way, as many of you know, I have preached hundreds and hundreds of sermons. I have wrestled with innumerable texts from both Testaments, the Old and the New, ranging from Jeremiah, Jonah, and Job to Matthew, Mark, and Revelation.
Out of it all, there is one thing about God when I began, and one thing about God as I stand before you now, that I cannot accept:
I cannot accept that pain, that suffering, that grief, that disease, and death come from God.
Let me repeat that.
I cannot accept that pain, suffering, disease, and death come from God.
Now I know there are a lot of Christians out there who disagree with me, perhaps even a few of us here in this room. To be fair, their view is not arbitrary; it’s there in the Bible. Take a look, if you will, at Hosea 6:1, our first reading for today.
The prophet writes,
6:1 “Come, let us return to the Lord,
for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
God, the prophet is saying, punished his people, the Israelites, for being ungrateful, for turning away from God.
Take a look at verse 4:
4 What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
God here asks rhetorically these questions.
Your love, God says, is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes away easily.
In other words, after all these things I’ve done for you, God seems to be saying, your love for me has dried up.
Now, therefore, I will punish you,
I will strike you down and destroy you,
so that I can heal you, bind you, and raise you up.
Now I get the need for God to rebuke God’s people, to judge them for turning away as they often do, even to abandon them for their vices, their iniquities, their violation of the covenant or contract God made with them through Moses at Mount Sinai, but to strike them down? Maybe I’m just too soft. But you see, I come at this from a different perspective than some, or at least a few of you.
When I was a little boy, a child, I almost died multiple times, and if it wasn’t for advances in modern medicine, I certainly would not be here today preaching to you. Now, beginning at the age of three, I was diagnosed with asthma so severe that I spent countless hours in hospitals and emergency rooms, because my life depended on it.
That is one of the reasons why, as a pastor, hospitals don’t bother me. I know their ins and outs. I know what it’s like, not only to stand at someone’s bedside, but to be in that bed next to which someone is standing.
One time after having an asthma attack at school, I came home on the bus, and my parents, my dad in particular, who would normally take me to the emergency room when asthma attacks happened, weren’t there. I remember going into the house, lying in my dad’s recliner, barely able to breathe, as tears streamed down my face, asking “Why, God, why?”
Now, I shared this deeply personal story with you only one other time from the pulpit these last 10 years. I did so then, and I do so now, not to elicit your sympathy, your pity, and certainly not to call attention to myself. Rest assured, thanks to medicine, the loving care of my two parents, and increasing lung capacity over the years, I could eventually not only swim, but, as you hear each Sunday, sing.
I share it with you because I want you to see how my experience has shaped and colored the way I think about God.
I mean, what would you say to that little boy who, who kept asking God, “Why, God, why?” Would you tell him that God was punishing him for his sins, or would you blame his parents and their wrongdoing, the way the Pharisees blame a blind man’s parents for his illness, according to the Gospel of John, chapter 9? And what about the 26-to-28,000, children, who perhaps in some cases are asking the question as they die each day across the globe due to malnutrition? What do we say to them? Is God punishing them for their sins; or are the sins of their parents—or grandparents or great grandparents or great-great grandparents—so great that God must visit God’s wrath upon the child?
You get the idea, right?
There is a view in the Bible, on the part of prophets like Hosea, that God harms, and even destroys people, including hHis own people, for their wrongdoing.
Indeed, then, and today, there are some who believe, following words of the theologian John Calvin, that everything that happens, every clap of thunder, every drop of rain comes from God, and that includes suffering and death. The purpose of faith, according to the Calvinist perspective, is to glorify God, no matter what.
But what if we read the Bible more carefully?
If so, we might notice that this way of thinking about God changes, and we have evidence for this in our second reading for today by the Apostle Paul. Paul makes it abundantly clear throughout his letters that suffering and death do not come from God. Let me repeat that. It’s the single most important phrase of today’s sermon:
Suffering and death do not come from God.
In 1 Corinthians 15:26 for example, he calls death “the enemy of God.”
In Romans 4, again our second reading for today, he says that God is not the author of death, but that God, and this is a quote, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”
God, in other words, is the source of life as the Creator of this world, and the source of new life as the Redeemer of this world.
So, where do suffering and death come from? According to the Apostle Paul, Paul answers this question in Romans 5:12. Adam—which in Hebrew means humanity—Adam, Paul says, rebelled against God, and in so doing unleashed the power of sin and death upon God’s otherwise good creation. Now, sin and death, at least momentarily, seem to have control. This is why Paul says elsewhere in Romans that creation, that nature groans in bondage to decay, the bondage of sin, which compels us, likewise, as Paul says in Romans 7, to do the things we do not want to do, to live out lives of addiction and idolatry, knowing that our greed, our consumption, etc. lead us away from God, the source of life, and into sin and its result of death.
This, as Charles Wesley confirms in our first hymn for the day, is why there is pain and suffering in the world, because, as Paul says, we live in a fallen world.
We live in a fallen world.
God doesn’t want these things, and so God has done something about it in Jesus Christ.
Take a look quickly now, at our Gospel reading for today, Matthew 9:12.
Who does Jesus compare himself to in this verse?
A physician; a doctor.
Now, do you know any kind of doctor who causes a disease in order to cure it? Of course not.
Jesus, and by extension, God, didn’t cause the sin of this world, its brokenness or its need for healing, but Jesus, as an expression of God’s will, came into this world to address this problem, and to heal “the sin-sick soul.”
He is the Physician, the Doctor. He knows our world is broken and fallen, that people need healing, which is why he says, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.”
Jesus didn’t come into the world and make people sick in order to heal them, break them down in order to raise them up. He doesn’t strike people, as Hosea says, to bind them. He came into a world that was already broken, already in need of healing, and that’s exactly what he did.
Whether people required healing in the body, by curing people of physical ailments, as he does twice later in our Gospel reading for today; or whether he came to heal the mind or mental illness, as in the case of the exorcisms he performs throughout the Gospels; or whether socially he came to bring those who had been estranged from their community—the outcast, the sick, the leper—by socially reintegrating and accepting them, as evident in the sinners with whom he and his disciples dined.
God, each of these things confirms, is not the source of disease, suffering, and death.
As Paul says, and Jesus confirms God is the source of healing, life, and wholeness.
I wish, I wish that when someone suffers or dies unexpectedly, that our first answer was not “everything happens for a reason” or “the Lord works in mysterious ways,” but simply “we live in a fallen world.” This is not the world God intended. But God has not abandoned us. God and Jesus Christ has come to us, and continues to dwell with us by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Just imagine that single shift, and how much that might ease the burden of someone who’s suffering or grieving. Again, not that everything happens for a reason, but that our world is fallen, and yet God, in Jesus Christ, has done something about it.
It’s hard to believe that it will be 10 years as your pastor later this month. But looking back on my experience as a boy, as well as our second and Gospel readings for today, it still is impossible for me, at least, to believe that the God of Jesus Christ is anything other than the source of life and strength and healing in my life and in yours.
I have walked with you over these many years in your own times of grief and despair, and I will continue to do that as your pastor. I pray that God do so as well, and that God join us not as the source of our suffering, but as the ground of our being, and the source of our healing. In Jesus, in Him, and in all things, God is indeed that power of healing in this world, that power of life in this world, that power of being in this world. He is “the healer of every ill,” as we’ll sing for our Hymn of the Day.
The True Balm, who came to us 2000 years ago in a region east of the Jordan River, called the Gilead. Let us pray:
God of loving kindness, you are the Source, Ground, and power of healing in this world. We ask that you look upon those who suffer among us, that you might accompany them in their suffering, and through us, that you might raise them up, as you raised up Christ, promising that you would never leave us as the source, not only of life, but also of new life in this life and in the world to come.