Sept. 28, 2025 | Word Out!
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Sermon – Pastor Dan Peterson
Missing the Point
September 28, 2025
Amos 6:1a, 4-7
1a Woe to those who are at ease in Zion
and for those who feel secure on Mount Samaria.
4 Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory
and lounge on their couches
and eat lambs from the flock
and calves from the stall,
5 who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp
and like David improvise on instruments of music,
6 who drink wine from bowls
and anoint themselves with the finest oils
but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!
7 Therefore they shall now be the first to go into exile,
and the revelry of the loungers shall pass away.
1 Timothy 6:6-19
11 But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. 13 In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you 14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 which he will bring about at the right time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords. 16 It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
17 As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches but rather on God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. 18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share, 19 thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
Luke 16:19-31
[Jesus said:] 19 “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. 20 And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, 21 who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. 22 The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was being tormented, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. 24 He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.’ 25 But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. 26 Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’ 27 He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house 28 for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’ 29 Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’ 30 He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”
Sermon: “Missing the Point”
Grace to you, and peace, from God, the giver of life, and from Jesus, who is that light and life in the world. Amen.
Over the last few weeks, when I preach, I’ve gotten a bit stuck in the weeds. I want to explain briefly why, and then take a different route today. As you know, a momentous change occurred several weeks ago where the world was shocked by the fact that we moved from a one-service 10 am worship service to a two-service, 8 am then 10:30 am worship schedule, and that completely threw me for a loop! So now that I have adjusted, now that I have recalibrated, I’d like this morning to shift gears and make more accessible the message I have for you this morning, and I want to do that by starting with a riddle.
As I explain several passages from the Bible, several stories that we’ll shortly follow here, I want you to think to yourself, “What do they have in common? What do they share in common, in the way they are often read or interpreted?” Let me repeat that, because it’s really important: What do the following stories I’m about to share, have in common when it comes to the way they’re often read?
I need you to listen closely to the way I present them, and then I’ll give you an opportunity to solve the riddle, with several clues planted strategically in your bulletin to make that a possibility. So, here we go.
The first story with which I want to begin comes from Genesis 2-3. This, as most, if not all of you know, is the story of Adam and Eve, and here’s the evidence we have for why they existed. We know that Adam and Eve took place in a specific location in a garden near the Tiberius and Euphrates rivers in what is now present-day Iraq. We know the date at which they walked the garden, according to an Irish Bishop of the 17th century. It was approximately 4004 BC. We know that because of a little book called the Annals of the Old Testament, where this bishop, a man named James Usher, traced the genealogy of the Old Testament all the way back to its beginning. The garden was a specific place in Iraq. The event of Adam and Eve took place roughly 4000 years before Jesus. The fruit of the tree from which they ate was not an apple, it was probably an apricot, which is indigenous to that region. And we know that they rode dinosaurs in the garden with saddles… And if you doubt what I have to say, you can go to the Creation Science Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, where thousands of people each year come to observe the historical facts of Adam and Eve. We also know that they would talk with animals in the beginning, and they had an incredible longevity. Both lived to be over 900 years old. (I feel the pain at 53—they lived to be 900-plus!) That’s our first story.
Remember, I’m asking you how the story is commonly read.
Our next story concerns the resurrection of Jesus Christ. According to the Gospel of John, chapter 20, Jesus tells Thomas, who sees him in person, physically, with wounds in his hands, side and feet, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”
From this story, it is clear that the resurrection involves the bodily resuscitation of Jesus’s corpse, a reanimation of his physical body, whereby he walked the earth for an additional 40 days and then, according to another gospel, from the place of Bethany, shot up to return to his Father in heaven.
To deny this version of the resurrection is to deny the Christian faith. The Apostle’s Creed says, “We believe in the resurrection of the body,” and the third of the five fundamentals of Christianity is to believe in Jesus’s bodily, physical resuscitation.
Notice the details I’m emphasizing there, when it comes to the way we’re reading this text.
Now, let’s turn to Luke 16, our Gospel reading for today. This is the story of Lazarus. Not the Lazarus in the Gospel of John who Jesus brings back to life, but the poor man who begs for crumbs from the master’s table. In Luke 16, we have a blueprint for what happens after we die. Depending on the kind of life you live, you will go to one of two places, either the abode of the righteous, to join Abraham and the fathers of faith, or to Hades, to join what John Calvin would call the reprobate, the sinners, the people who did not live godly lives. Between these two places lies an inseparable chasm. The abode of the righteous is a place where people who did not receive the sustenance of daily living in this life so that they can now experience joy; and Hades, or as we call it now, Hell, is a place of torment and agony, where you are tortured in flames without reprieve. This all comes by the way you live. It’s based on your deeds. It’s inclusive of those before Christ and after, and it’s a reminder that you need to listen to prophets like Amos from our first reading, because if you don’t, you will burn forever after you die.
Now, all of these readings that I just gave you share one thing in common: I submit they are answering the wrong question.
They are—and here’s the clue. It’s in your bulletin. It’s in the Prayer of the Day. It’s in our Prayers, which we’ll hear momentarily—doing what? They’re missing the point. They’re answering the wrong question. Answering the wrong question.
How do I know that? Because the question they’re asking is “whether these things happened,” not “how they might be true.” So instead of asking whether something happened, a more adequate way, I would submit, to reading the Bible when it comes to stories like these, is to ask how they are true.
How are they speaking to us? What do they have to say when it comes to life before the grave, rather than simply life after death?
So, if we change the question, I’m going to give you an alternative way of reading the stories I just interpreted. Let’s run through each briefly.
If you ask with regard to Genesis 2-3, whether Adam and Eve is a true story, that is, whether it happened, you are bound to come up with various claims that end up becoming difficult to affirm. On the other side of the European Enlightenment, that is to say, the Age of Science, you have to affirm, for example, that the world is 6000 years old and began in what is now present-day Iraq.
But if you change the question and ask not whether it happened, but how it’s true, then a whole different alternative appears. The story of Adam and Eve is offering us, in narrative form, a basic insight or truth about the human condition: that we are fallen; that as their expulsion from the garden illustrates, we are separated from God; that we need healing. And if you want proof for that, you don’t need to go to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio. You need to read the newspaper, or scroll through the news on your phone, look at the world around you. It’s no wonder that the late Stephen Hawking said, “The question we should be asking is whether the human species will survive another 100 years.” The prospect of nuclear holocaust; the prospect of AI out of control; the reality of global warming; all of these illustrate problems human beings have created because of their fallen condition.
We are separated from God, and you get that answer if you ask a different question about the Creation story. A Jesuit I knew when I used to teach at Seattle University, said “the Fall is not something that happened once upon a time, it’s something happening all the time, when we make choices that benefit ourselves, rather than choices that benefit those around us and the world.”
If you look next at the Resurrection, you ask the question whether the resurrection is true or whether it happened, you often come up with answers where people tell you, of course, Jesus was resuscitated. He walked around for 40 days, then he ascended to His Father in heaven.
But if you change the question and ask not whether the resurrection happened, but how it is true, or what it would look like to live the resurrection, you have a totally different set of opportunities.
The resurrection stories are pointing to a new way of life, and we see tons of evidence for this in Scripture. Colossians 3, attributed to the Apostle Paul, says, “If you have been raised”— it doesn’t think of resurrection as the bodily resuscitation of a corpse. It thinks of the resurrection as a state of being, a way of living, a new way of life.
If you consider not the Apostles Creed, but the Nicene Creed, it says not simply that “we believe in the resurrection of the body,” but notice this, “we look for the resurrection.”
It’s all around us, in the leaves of spring, in the transfiguration of seasons, in the new life to which each of us are called. Paul says in Galatians 2, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.” That is Resurrection! But we can’t get there if we don’t ask the right question. A new way of life.
And when it comes to the story of Lazarus, you can go on the Internet and find all kinds of theories regarding what the afterlife looks like based upon a parable, a parable that is meant, not to tell us about what life is like beyond the grave, but to tell us how we might change our lives before the grave, how we might live differently, how we might live into the new life to which God is calling us and God is inspiring us.
A friend of mine—I’ve mentioned this before—A professor was asked, once, “Professor, do you believe in the resurrection?” His reply? “Of course; I try to live it every day.”
So, how do you live this new life to which you and I are called in these stories: broken yet healed, sinful, closed yet opened; considerate only of oneself, mindful instead of others. What does this life look like?
Oh, my God, it’s everywhere in today’s readings. Let me summarize it in three ways.
The new life to which you are called is simply this: Be content. Be content with what you have. We’ve been hearing that in reading after reading over the last few Sundays. This reading says it again: be content with what you have.
There is freedom in that, the freedom from the need to acquire, to consume, or, as the theologian Paul Tillich puts it, “to cram the whole world into your mouth.” Be content with what you have.
I have to tell you, I’ve been a pastor now for eight, almost nine years. I have never been more content in my life, and it’s because, like you, I am living into these readings. Now, I can believe that Jesus rose from the dead, bodily resuscitated. That’s easy. But living into this new life, though initially hard, is now so rewarding, because I’m not constantly craving things that aren’t mine.
So the first rule for a godly life, or a risen life, is to be content with what you have. Do not worship the idol of money. For the love of money, as this letter says, famously, is the root of all evil. It’s the idol of our age.
Number two: Be charitable. This letter says, Be generous. Be ready to share with those who are less fortunate, as we see in the story of Lazarus—not a blueprint for what comes after we die, but a warning, which is to say, you are called to another way of life. Look beyond yourself, especially those who are less fortunate.
And then finally: Be grateful. This letter contains the words I used in my introduction, “Grace to you and peace from the God who gives life to all things.” You and I, our existence is a miracle! The odds of each one of us existing is trillions to one, and yet God has given us this beautiful, roughly 28,000 days, gift of life. Don’t spend it at the expense of others. Live for others. That is the Risen life, that is the Resurrection life, and in so doing, First Timothy promises you will take hold of eternal life here and now. Or, I love this phrase, you will take hold of “life that is really life.” Them’s Biblical words!
The second century theologian Tertullian (or Irenaeus, I can’t remember which one), says “the glory of God is the human being fully alive,” a person not who simply survives but flourishes in Christ, a person who lives what Christ calls “life abundant” in the Gospel of John.
Now I’m not here this morning to denigrate your beliefs. I’m simply saying that believing all these things historically is the easy way out. The harder way, but also the more rewarding way, is not simply to believe whether these things happen, but to ask the question “how they are true.”
And when you do so, a whole new life opens as a possibility. And my life today is a testimony to that. I’ve said many times before, quoting my mom, who passed away a couple years ago, she said to me once, “I’m so proud of you,” and I said, “Really?”
And she said, But I’m more proud of you as a pastor than as a professor.
And I said, “Why?”
And she said, “Because you’re nicer.”
That’s at the beginning of the life to which we’re called. So, I want to ask of each of you a favor. I don’t want you to return today’s bulletin, at least the readings. I want you to take home, especially, the second reading, and see that as a blueprint for the new life to which each of you are called, not only on this day, but every day in Jesus Christ.
It is easy—and this is the point of my message—to miss the point; to treat these stories as something we simply have to believe, rather than as stories that are inviting us to a whole new way of life. So keep that bulletin as a reminder of the new life to which you and I are called.
Let’s pray. God of loving kindness. You are the giver of life, the renewer of life, and the basis for eternal life. We ask this morning that you give us the power and strength to enter into the life you call us to: to be Christ to our neighbor, to seek out and serve the less fortunate, and to live for others as you, in Christ, live for us.
In Jesus’s name. Amen.