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SERMONS:
Pastor Peg posts her sermons from our most recent sermon series on this page. If you are interested in reading more of her sermons you can go to pastorpeg.wordpress.com. Our current series is called BESIDES JESUS and will examine some of the people who walked besides Jesus and helped him, or opposed him, in his ministry of Grace. Enjoy.
Peter
March 1, 2026 2nd Sunday of Lent Communion
Mark 8:31-38 Matthew 14:22-33
When Jesus goes into the desert he is tempted by the devil in three ways. The first is with bread and water, which represents physical comfort. The second is when the devil tells him to throw himself off the top of the Temple of Jerusalem, and that the angels of God will keep him from breaking himself. This represents his physical safety and complete control over the events in his life. The third is when he offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world to rule, which would give him complete political power. The catch is that Jesus will worship the devil and not God. Jesus rejects these temptations and the devil leaves him. But the end of the story says that the devil leaves him to tempt him at another time.
In today’s first scripture Jesus is telling his disciples what's going to happen to him once he reaches Jerusalem. He declares that he's going to be rejected by the chief priests and the scribes, and then he's going to be arrested and executed, but on the third day he's going to rise again. Jesus isn’t talking to the general public, just the inner group who have been with him since the beginning. These are the people who have spent the most time with him. He has taught them his philosophy and showed them how to access the power of God for themselves. He has sent them out on preaching and healing missions. He has spent late nights debating with them. These are the people that have lived with him, and worked with him, and have really gotten to know him. Jesus is being honest with them and not sugar coating anything. He's not saying: Oh, we might have some problems when we get to Jerusalem. He’s telling it like it is.
But the disciples have a hard time accepting this, and Peter is the one who speaks up, and voices his concerns. Throughout the Gospels you see Peter being the spokesperson for the other disciples. Peter is the disciple who first recognizes that Jesus is the Messiah. He’s the one who Jesus says will inherit the keys of heaven. Peter in many ways has become Jesus’ right-hand man. So, I think after this very startling revelation from Jesus, Peter feels compelled to speak the thought that many of the other disciples have: No way! No way this is going to be how Jesus ends his ministry and his life.
Remember that Jesus has already confided in his disciples that he’s the Messiah, but the disciples grew up with very definite ideas in their minds of what the Messiah was going to be. There were several points of view about this. For some people the Messiah was going to be a great warrior, like King David, who would liberate the Jewish nation from Rome and reestablish Israel as a sovereign nation. For others he would be a great holy man who would rid the Temple of its corruption and restore it to being a place of right worship for God. This Messiah would become the high priest and because Israel would be restored to holiness, all the nations would acknowledge that Israel should be sovereign. And some people thought that the Messiah would be part warrior and part high priest. But in every scenario Israel would be restored to a nation unto itself.
But none of that happens if the Messiah dies. I think the disciples are pretty shocked by Jesus’ statement and they look to Peter to say something. But instead of assuring Peter and the disciples Jesus says: Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things. That seems harsh, but I think that Jesus is recognizing that Satan has returned and is tempting him, through Peter’s fear, to abandon his mission to bring redemption to the world. Satan is working through Jesus’ love of his disciples. When we love someone, we don’t want to see them hurt. And sometimes we do make the mistake of not being truthful or sugar-coating bad things to spare those we love from pain. But Jesus doesn’t. He faces the truth and he gives his disciples, his friends, the truth so that they can begin to face it.
There is dignity and respect there. Jesus has faith in them. He has faith that they can drop their cultural misconceptions of the Messiah and live with the reality of what he must do. I think he knows that this is hard for them, which is why he tells them quite a distance from Jerusalem. Humans don’t always suddenly re-wire in our brains our preconceptions of things. Jesus was giving them time to think about what he said and allowing them space to realign their conceptions into something new.
Peter’s story is that of the disciple who shows us how someone gets realigned and changed into someone new.
Do you remember where Peter starts out? Jesus sits in his boat and preaches to the crowd and then tells Peter to lower his nets. Peter does and pulls in a huge haul and then falls to his knees and tells Jesus to get away from him because he’s a sinful man. We don’t know what Peter did that made him so sinful. Did he gamble his money away, get into bar fights, or cheat on his wife? It doesn’t matter – when Peter meets Jesus, he believes that he is not worthy to be loved by God. But Jesus sees the good in him and tells him to follow and become his disciple.
During the gospel story we see Peter grow. He learns from Jesus and realizes that Jesus is the Messiah and is strong enough in that conviction to say it out loud. Peter sees Jesus transfigured on the mountain. Peter learns how to preach and to heal others with the power of God’s Spirit. Peter grows so much in his faith that he’s able to get out of the boat and walk to Jesus on water. Yes, he gets freaked out and Jesus has to pull him up, but he walks on water.
Of course, Peter isn’t perfect. He stumbles a lot, and during Jesus’ trial he denies him. But that’s all of us. Personal and spiritual growth is not linear; it’s sometimes three steps forward and then one step back, and sometimes we can get sidetracked, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t growing closer to God.
Sometimes following Jesus is hard. We do have to deny things in life that might give us physical comfort or status, like a fancy car or the temptation of addiction that might pull us away from love into selfishness. We have to conquer our fear of personal safety sometimes to stand up to oppression – I’m thinking of people who’ve had dogs or firehoses of water set upon them while they were peacefully protesting. And we need to be careful of gaining social and political power. Having power can be a great thing when you can use it to help others, but we need to guard ourselves from the trap of collecting power for the sake of having power.
When Jesus says: For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it, he is talking about giving up the life of selfish gain that the world asks us to be a part of and to see the world differently. The world asks us to think about only our needs in this material space within our limited time. But Jesus asks us to see ourselves as interconnected souls who are working together to support each other during our time, in this space. And then Jesus asks us to see that this time and space isn’t the only one. Jesus wants us to see that there is an eternity beyond this one that we can access if we believe that it’s there and get ourselves ready to cross over to it by learning how to love each other. Love is the ticket to ride that train.
Peter lost his life of fear and hatred of himself by following Jesus and then learned how to be a better person who lived with Grace. Think of what Peter did after Jesus was resurrected.
Peter managed the new church and led the disciples in a godly life. He preached on Pentecost and helped to convert thousands of followers who took Jesus’ message to the ends of the known world. He opened his mind beyond just being Jewish and accepted people from other cultures, like the Roman Centurion. This man from a fishing village in Galilee traveled all over the middle east and into Europe. He started the church in Rome, and yes, he was arrested several times and eventually died a martyr at the possible age of 67 defending his faith. But he lived a long, full life of adventure as a disciple of Christ working on building the church we know today.
Unlike Peter, who did live with the fear of prosecution, we can be thankful that we live in a time and a place where we can develop and live out our faith peacefully. But are we taking advantage of that? What practices are we doing to grow our faith? How are we connecting to others in love? And how can we do more and be better?
Peter is us. We sometimes don’t think we are worthy of God’s love, but Jesus thinks differently. We sometimes have revelations of our purpose and certainty that we can do anything. But we also sometimes get overwhelmed and start to doubt and sink, but Jesus is there to pull us back. We sometimes get pulled into the selfishness of the world, but our hearts can be open to when Jesus says: You’re going the wrong way, let’s get back on the right track. We can keep growing and keep learning and keep doing God’s work. And when we are done, God and Jesus will say: Well, done good and faithful servant. Come on home and rest with me.
So be like Peter and open your mind and heart to Jesus’ love. And you will have a life of adventure in Christ.
John the Baptist
February 26, 2026 1st Sunday in Lent
Matthew 3:1-12 Matthew 14:1-13a
Today we're going to begin a new sermon series for Lent called Besides Jesus. Besides has two meanings. First of all, because the people we will talk about, at some point in the Gospel story, walked beside Jesus. Second is that these people, other than Jesus, are examples or reflections of Jesus’ ministry of Grace.
The first person we're going to talk about is John the Baptist. Usually, we tell the story of John the Baptist at the beginning of Epiphany on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord. The first Sunday of Lent we usually examine Jesus’ 40 day fast in the wilderness and his temptation by the devil. But John the Baptist is often mentioned as a second scripture because Jesus is baptized right before he goes into the wilderness.
Let's start out by saying that John the Baptist didn't invent baptism. Washing your sins away is a standard ritual in the Jewish religion to become pure before God. The practice is mentioned in Leviticus, so we know that centuries before Jesus was born, people were purifying themselves for holy days or because they had done something unclean like touch a dead body.
In Jesus's day we know that there were specific pools built into the Temple and local synagogues to fulfill this purity obligation. But before that, it was traditional to immerse yourself in a natural water course. So, you see, John is harkening back to an older time and tradition by having people come to the river Jordan to be baptized there.
Besides the regular routine of becoming ritually pure, in the ancient Jewish culture, someone who wanted to do a holy discipline would often go and get cleansed at the Temple or their local synagogue before they started a period of fasting and praying. You could fast and pray in the Temple or synagogue, or pick a spot in the wilderness. The forty days reflected the forty years of the Israelis wandering in the wilderness until they entered the promised land by crossing the River Jordon. To fast for 40 days and nights was a standard rite of passage, and someone wouldn't be considered to be a holy man unless they had done this ritual.
To get to the River Jordon you have to leave the fertile land and enter an area of desert wilderness. Most of the people who John was baptizing were ordinary people and probably wouldn't go out into the wilderness to do forty days of fasting afterward. Still, since they had to go into the wilderness to get to John and the Jordon, they were symbolically recreating the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness. And by being emersed in the Jordan for their baptism, they were connecting with the experience of the Israelis crossing into the promised land.
But why would Jesus go to John if he could just cleanse himself at the synagogue in Nazareth and then pick a local spot for his fasting? Forty days and nights is a long time to be fasting and praying outside; no one would have disputed that Jesus hadn’t done the ritual.
First of all, remember that John and Jesus were basically the same age although John was the older cousin. Jesus had been raised in a normal Jewish household; his father was a carpenter, and his mother was a housewife. But John's parents were members of the priesthood. His father had after all gotten the message from God that his son was going to be born while he was doing his rotation at the Temple in Jerusalem. His mother was also descendant from a family of priests. So John had been set aside from an early age to be a priest. And remember that you weren't considered qualified or of age to be a holy man until you turn thirty. By the time John turned thirty he had been prepared and probably already had a reputation for holiness. So he carried some legitimacy when he started to preach in the wilderness. And I think that since people were waiting for a Messiah, and believing the possibilities in the possibility that a Messiah could come, people would listen to John.
Of course, people are looking for a Messiah and they actually asked John: Are you the Messiah? But John knows that his younger cousin Jesus is on his way in a few months. So he prepares the way of the Lord, and he encourages people to think about their lives and tells them that they can change their hearts and minds to be ready for Jesus when he begins his ministry. The ordinary people would accept John’s holiness as an authority who could give Jesus’ a baptism, but also as someone who stood outside the corrupt system. Standing outside the system is something that Jesus did during his ministry.
But there's a hidden story in the Bible about John. It’s a story that's implied but not written out for us to read. The only interaction that we see between Jesus and John is when John baptizes Jesus. But think about who they are. Think about the fact that they grew up in the same family. They were cousins; they were the same age. Their parents knew what their destinies were, and although I don't think they burdened the two boys with their destinies when they were younger, I'm sure that they encourage friendship between the two boys.
This is pure supposition on my part, but I am sure that those two kids played together; ate meals together; stayed in each other's houses; learned stuff from their respective uncles together; wandered around the countryside together; and talked through a lot of stuff together. You know, just the general meaning-of-life conversations that friends have with each other when they're trying to figure out what's happening around them. I really believe that there was a bond between them and that they supported each other in their ministries. After all once Jesus appeared on the scene John didn't pack up and go home. He kept on baptizing people. He kept on preaching against injustice and a corrupt political system to the point where he was finally arrested by Herod Antipas. And eventually he was executed.
I can't imagine how John's death made Jesus feel. He had lost his childhood friend who knew him the best and who he probably considered to be his equal. John wasn’t his disciple; he was the one who could support Jesus and say: I got you and you can do this. It says in our scripture that when John died, Jesus retreated and went away to a deserted place by himself. Jesus was grieving. That little line is the proof positive that Jesus knows our griefs; that he has lost people he loved just as we have. Jesus knows that when we lose someone, we need to take time to grieve for them.
I think sometimes that Americans are a bit two independent. Independence after all is part of our heritage. We started our country with a Declaration of Independence. Our culture teaches us that we all need to develop our independence and stand on our own two feet. And I think on some levels that it’s a very important to be able to take care of yourself.
But on the other hand, as a species we are meant to be and work together. We cannot survive effectively and efficiently completely alone in the world. We are meant to be a family helping each other; we are meant to be a tribe or community helping each other; we are meant to be a village helping each other. We are meant to be a culture that supports each other and gives strength to a nation. And that support begins with one-on-one with friendship towards each other.
During Lent we often hear John's fiery rhetoric of repentance, and then we’re supposed to look at what is we're doing wrong in life and work on trying to make it right. That’s a good thing to do. But I think during this time we can also lift up John's support of Jesus by reconnecting with and lifting up our own friendships that maybe we've been neglecting. I can think of a few people that come to my mind that I haven't talked to or checked in with for a while. After all I've been busy. But thinking about it, I can take a little bit of time to reconnect with them and just see how they're doing. And I know that like Jesus, if I suddenly was to learn that they were gone from my life there would be a big hole in my heart and I would have to go retreat a little until I had acknowledged and come to terms with their passing. If I connect with them, I’ll probably avoid the regret of not connecting with them before it’s too late.
So, this week I'm going to challenge you to think about someone who you haven't talked to for a while and connect to them. Just see how they're doing; listen to what they're going through; and if they're in difficulty encourage them and help them out. Say to them: I've got you and you can do this. In that little act of friendship, you will be living the love that Jesus had for John. And any time we connect to someone we are living in the love of Christ. So, take some time to nurture your friendships and you’ll feel God’s love and some of the healing power of Lent.