Nov. 30, 2025 | Word Out!
Download the Bulletin from November 30, 2025
Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
Some New (Church) Year Resolutions
November 30, 2025
READINGS
First Reading: Isaiah 2:1-5
1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2 In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised above the hills;
all the nations shall stream to it.
3 Many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
4 He shall judge between the nations
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more.
5 O house of Jacob,
come, let us walk
in the light of the Lord!
Second Reading: Romans 13:11-14
11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is already the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; 12 the night is far gone; the day is near. Let us then throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; 13 let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. 14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Gospel: Matthew 24:36-44
[Jesus said to the disciples,] 36 “About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 37 For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For as in the days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, 39 and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so, too, will be the coming of the Son of Man. 40 Then two will be in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left. 41 Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken, and one will be left. 42 Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. 43 But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
Sermon:
Grace to you, and peace, from God, the source of life, and from Jesus, the Christ, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
I was in a great mood on Friday afternoon. I was at a coffee shop, and I had the chance to get a head start on today’s sermon. Working with another minister, I was informed by him what the readings would be for this Sunday. On the plane ride home (I was in California at the time, where I’m from), I refined the ideas I had started developing earlier in the coffee shop, and by the time I landed, I had my core message ready to go. The title of the sermon would be “A Messiah Who Makes Mistakes,” and my focus would be, of course, Mark:13. Well, as you might have noticed, our gospel reading for today was not from Mark, it was from Matthew, which I discovered late yesterday afternoon. Not only that, but the minister in question gave me the wrong first and second readings! They, too, were different. Because of that, I realized I was in a predicament, and I learned that the minister, again in question, gave me the right readings, but the wrong year of the lectionary. He told me the readings for Advent I, 2026.
Some of you know me pretty well. You know that over the past year, I have made a concerted effort, not only to be on time, but to be early. But a year early? That’s a bit ridiculous!
So I had to think quickly. I couldn’t change the readings. It was too late to do that. Nor could I use the sermon I had prepared. (I’ll have it ready for next year.) Instead, I decided to start over and go with something, something simple. It was 10 pm.
Here’s what I realized. Since today is the first Sunday of Advent, we are just on the other side of Thanksgiving, of course, and we are at the beginning of the new church year. We are poised, in other words, to look back in a spirit of gratitude over the previous year, and in light of Advent I, to look forward in the spirit of hope for the coming year.
Now some of you, of course, know that we recently celebrated All Saints Day, which can be very difficult for those of us who have experienced loss. So, when we look back over the previous year, that might be hard. We may have lost somebody close to us, a parent, a spouse, a friend, a co-worker. We might regret a decision that we made over the past year. Maybe we treated somebody in our lives the way we didn’t want to treat them, or maybe we were treated by somebody in our lives the way we didn’t want to be treated. We may have experienced profound grief, or perhaps, suffered from pain due to all kinds of illnesses or otherwise-physical problems.
But hopefully, in the midst of all that, there’s a little light, something for which you and I, irrespective of the problems we’ve had over the previous year, can be grateful. And that’s how the Apostle Paul begins our Second Reading for today, a year from now, which I am going to borrow. He writes at the beginning of First Corinthians,
“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Jesus Christ.”
Now, Paul often does this in his readings. I’ll repeat it again. He starts with the word of gratitude. “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that
has been given you in Jesus Christ.” This is Paul’s thanksgiving. This is him looking back on the ministry of in this case, the church in Corinth.
Likewise, when I, Pastor Dan, look at you, Queen Anne Lutheran as a congregation, I want to say the same thing. Looking back, I want to thank you for being part of this ministry, for being part of this faith community, for joining us, either at the 8 am service or the 10:30 service. I want to thank our volunteers, the quilters, the counters, the choir, the council members, the committees, the committee chairs. I want to thank those of you who have been with us for a long time, people over the course of my ministry that I had a chance to get to know and appreciate and learn about. And I especially want to thank those of you who are newcomers, those of you who have been with us for a year or two or three, those of you who have returned to be with us, if you’ve been absent for a time.
I want to thank all of you for the various ways that you contribute to our community of fellowship. You see, being here is not simply about what’s in it for you—although I hope that you feel recharged and inspired by the Gospel each Sunday—being here is also about your presence for others and what you do for them. So to each of you, whether you are in high school, whether you are a middle aged or in your later years, thank you, for going against the odds of our culture and coming to church on Sunday. The reason I left my career as a professor of 11 years is that I wanted to experience genuine fellowship amidst the Seattle freeze—and you are it.
And so with Paul, I say, “I give thanks to my God always for you.”
Now, I’d like to invite you to do the same. I’d like you to take a moment silently to yourself, and think about something for which you have been thankful over the previous year. Maybe it’s something related to this congregation, maybe it’s something else; but either way, in a spirit of gratitude, on the other side of Thanksgiving, I’d like to invite you to look back and think about one thing for which you were grateful.
Now we’ve looked back. Given that today is the first Sunday of the church year, let’s look forward.
In our readings for today, you’ll notice two themes. The first, as we heard about last Sunday, was about being ready. It’s about cultivating a spirit of expectation. Last Sunday, I used the example of the Nicene Creed, which invites us not simply to “look forward to the resurrection,” that is, to something that happens after we die, but to look for the resurrection, in, with, and under our daily lives.
The other theme that is present in our readings today, of course, is hope, and that is especially clear in our first reading, taken from Isaiah 2. Now, this text was written in the eighth century BCE, by a prophet who was living in Jerusalem and conveying the Word of God to the Jewish people in the face of a threat coming from the Assyrians. Now, the Assyrians of the time were equivalent to something like ICE in our context today. They were known for, among other things, beheading their captives in war. And so because of that, Isaiah has a big challenge before him. He must articulate a word of hope in the face of Assyrian invasion. And so he says, “In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills, above all the nations. All the nations shall stream to it.
These words of hope became so contagious that when the Israelites, several centuries later, were held in captive by the Babylonians, they repeated the same thing, a message of hope in the midst of adversity, a message of encouragement in the face of fear.
So when you look at verse 4, when he says, “He shall judge between the nations and shall arbitrate for many peoples. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” you have something that arced across several centuries, and I would argue arcs across all centuries, including ours, namely, a message of hope for a kingdom of peace. A message of hope for a kingdom of peace, a timeless message written in the context of a group who had very little to hope for, and yet who persevered and survived.
And so as we begin our church year this Sunday, I would like to invite you to do the same, in a spirit of hope. What would be your new church year resolution? What do you hope to become? Or what do you hope for, in the weeks and months to follow from today?
To help you out, I will give you three things I hope for with respect to my faith. First, I would like to be more grateful over the course of the coming church here. I think that’s something that I can always be more of.
Do you realize the odds that you and I even exist as these collections of molecules in a universe that is 13.8 billion years old on a dusty, well, watery rock, that is 4 to 6 billion years old, that is orbiting what some call a third-rate sun, maybe in a fourth-rate solar system, in a fifth-rate galaxy? Do you realize how incredible this life is, and how each breath, every moment, should be met with gratitude? I want to have that spirit more over the coming year.
Now I know somebody in my life, who struggles with gratitude quite a bit. He is an expert at complaining—and I won’t hide it from you; it’s my dad. And so, on Thanksgiving, after hearing a litany of complaints all week, I asked my dad, “Can you think of anything you’re grateful for today?” And he said, “You and your brother.”
I invite you to do the same. If my dad can do it, the greatest complainer who ever lived, then surely each of you, aided by the work of the Holy Spirit, can do the same. So the first of my three resolutions for the coming church here is to be more grateful.
The second is to be more charitable. Listen to these words of Martin Luther. “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations. Instead, we are to come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.”
Let me repeat that last phrase: “interpret everything they do in the best possible light.” Now let’s go back to that minister I mentioned at the beginning of today’s message. That person gave me the wrong readings for Sunday. That person forced me to write not one, but two sermons over the course of one week. And that is an impossible feat that only few pastors can achieve (thanks to the work of the Holy Spirit). I did it, and when I was doing it, for a while, I felt very judgmental for that pastor. But then I realized, and this is my second hope, that I’m called here to be more charitable than that. This pastor may have had a lot of other things happening in his life. He may have been quite busy. (In fact, I know he is.) And so, instead of judging him or condemning him, I tried to see it from his perspective. He did the best he could, knowing what he did. He made a mistake, and I was able to correct it.
So over the coming year, I would like to be more charitable. I would like to read and interpret people and their actions in the best possible light. Do I do that? Not always, but by the Spirit of grace, I am invited to live into that more fully. And so that is my second resolution, to be more charitable.
My third is this: to be more hopeful. I don’t know about you, but it is so easy to get depressed when you read the news; when you learn after spending years of working on your writing and communication, that AI can do it just as well as you do. Or when you read about conflicts that are happening in places like the Sudan or that continue in places like the Ukraine, or what’s happening now in Venezuela, or what’s happening in terms of our own country, and the constant infighting between people, probably on both sides of the political aisle during a holiday like Thanksgiving…it is so easy to be cynical, to get depressed and to be down.
And that’s why, for my third resolution, I hope to be more hopeful. I hope to find myself asking more to be inspired by the spirit of hope, the Holy Spirit of hope, and to remember, in these dark days of Advent, that there is light, that the light of God will once again shine in the world. It’ll appear on a dark horizon. Its name will be Jesus Christ. Its promise is that God in Christ will never leave us; that God in Christ will never forsake us; that God in Christ loves us from beginning to the end.
So those are my three resolutions for the coming church year. To be more grateful, to be more charitable, to read things or rather actions and intentions of other people in their best light, and to be more hopeful, against the grain of all the things that are overwhelming and uncertain in our lives, that somehow and in some way, the light and love of God will prevail.
Let’s pray. God of loving kindness, we invite your spirit to be present among us, to inspire us in a spirit of gratitude, as we look back over the previous year, not ignoring the pain and difficulties we might have experienced, but also finding your presence in, with, and under those things. And we ask, looking forward, that you give us a spirit of hope, that this season of Advent that you open our eyes to new life, to new beginnings, to see that light appear amidst a dark horizon, and to give us the spirit of moving forward in spite of all the dangers and uncertainties we face.
For all these things we pray, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.