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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. It's Pastor Wolf Mueller here. All Saints Sunday drive to church. All Saints Day was November 1st. We're celebrating it today, November 3rd, year of our Lord 2024. Let's pray and then we'll talk about it. Almighty and everlasting God, you knit together your faithful people of all times and places in one holy communion, the mystical body of your Son Jesus Christ. Grant us so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that together with them we may come to the unspeakable joys you've prepared for those who love you through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
[00:00:43] That language, by the way, the mystical body of your son Jesus Christ is technical language.
[00:00:49] When we're looking at theology. There are three, at least three unions that we'll speak of that are very helpful theological categories for us to consider. The first and most important so we'll talk about the mystical union, which is number two. The first and most important union is the personal union. And when we're talking about the personal union, we're talking about the union of the two natures, divine and human in the singular person of Christ Jesus is 100% God, 100% man. Two natures united in one person, our Lord Jesus Christ. That's the personal union. And we have a lot to say and think about. That's the second great Christian mystery, the doctrine of the Incarnation. The second union that you'll hear discussed is the mystical union. And that is the union of the Christian with our Lord Jesus, being united in Christ's body, being one in him.
[00:01:50] And that's really a wonderful thing for us to think about on all saints because normally on the saints days we're thinking about this saint or that saint. But all saints is all the saints. And for us especially who know that to be a saint is not to have so many good works that our body becomes miracle working or something, but rather that to be a saint is to be baptized, is to have our sins forgiven, is to be washed clean of all the stain and corruption of original sin and all the guilt of our actual sin, all that is washed away in baptism, so that to be baptized is to be a saint. You this is why we start the sermons, Dear Saints. That's why we start to see a Sunday email, Dear Saints, it's to remind you and me and all of us that we are holy according to the forgiveness of all of our sins and we're all in this together, that's the mystical union. And the third union we talk about sometimes is the sacramental union, which is the way that the body and blood of Jesus is united to the bread and the wine, so that there is bread and there is wine and there is also body to eat and blood to drink in the Lord's Supper. We call it the sacramental union because it's like, well, let's just give this thing that we don't know what it is, a name so we can talk about it. Even though we can't understand it or comprehend it. It's a mystery that we confess and believe the sacramental union that's in the Lord's Supper specifically. Okay, so three unions. A mystical union is what this day is about. Our entrance Psalm is Psalm 149, the penultimate of the Psalter, second to last. Praise the Lord and the last. Oh, I don't know how many psalms are. There's all these alleluia psalms that come at the end. I'm just looking.
[00:03:41] Psalm 146. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. Psalm 147. Praise the Lord. It's good to sing praises to our God. Psalm 148. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord from the heavens. Psalm 149. Praise the Lord. Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of the godly. And then finally the last. So that in Hebrew Praise the Lord is hallelujah. So we have all these Hallelujah psalms and then we end with a great hallelujah. Psalm 150. Praise the Lord. Praise God in the sanctuary. Praise him for his mighty deeds. Praise him with trumpet sound. Praise him with the tambourine. Praise him with strings. Praise him with lute and harp. Praise him with sound. That's 150, the great hallelujah psalm. But here we're, we're still in this series of Hallelujah psalms at the end, these hymns of this call to praise the Lord.
[00:04:33] Praise the Lord. Let Israel be glad in his Maker. Let the children of Zion rejoice in their King. Let them praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre. For the Lord takes pleasure in his people.
[00:04:48] He adorns the humble with salvation. Let the godly exult in glory. Let them sing for joy on their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two edged swords in their hands to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment in the people. Can you imagine? This is the warrior poet that the Psalter is calling us to the hymns of God on our lips and sword in our hands. We're singing and fighting to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron to execute them on them the judgment written. This is honor for all the godly ones. So we're pursuing righteousness and justice in our lives, and we're praising the Lord with our lips and our hearts. It's great on this psalm to say, what is this psalm asking of me?
[00:05:36] What verbs is it giving me? And here's the first one. Praise, praise the Lord. Then sing, it's commanding you. Sing to the Lord in the praise and then be glad, rejoice, praise his name, dance, make melody, exalt, sing for joy. Let the high praises of God be in their throats. That this joyful praise of God is.
[00:06:02] It's what the psalm is commanding of us. It's what the psalm is creating in us. It's wonderful. I'm more and more convinced that one of the problems that we labor under is that is there's this big gulf between being right and being happy. So you look around like the Lutheran Church, you're like, well, those are the right ones over there, and then those are the happy ones over there. And you're happy and wrong, or you're right and grumpy. And we look, we just need to rejoice in the Lord's truth, to be joyful in the doctrine, to have a cheerful orthodoxy. I was looking with the pastors. I was up in Canada two weeks ago, I guess it seems like two weeks ago, up in Canada.
[00:06:53] And we were looking at a couple of these passages where Luther talks about how it's our cheerfulness that is our spiritual warfare.
[00:07:05] I'm going to pull it up. I'm going to read this quote here from Luther on how cheerfulness is spiritual warfare. Because it's so helpful. And so to see how the devil wants us to be sad and gloomy, here's Luther. We'll turn the tables on the devil, and we'll learn to mock the devil and the world. We'll laugh gleefully at them, and not they at us. The skill with which they want to make us sad, angry and impatient will fail them. And they will consume themselves together with their hatred and wrath. When they see us, they will suffer great agony. They will see that we remain cheerful through it all and scorn them when they attempt to vent their anger on us so vehemently. That's Luther on John 15 or later. This is Luther on Genesis 49. He says, in this way, the godly are filled with the Holy Spirit, so that they cannot keep from breaking forth into thanksgiving, confession, glorifying God, teaching and proclaiming the word of God. The apostles and martyrs were like this when they were drunk with the Holy Spirit. For a vine of this kind is very choice, and concerning it, wisdom, says Proverbs 9. Come, eat my bread and drink the wine I've mixed. Then you will drink and become drunk, but with spirit. Spiritual drunkenness. This I understand to mean that in Christ and in the time of Christ, we must become drunk on the abundance of his house.
[00:08:35] That is, we are to receive the Holy Spirit from the Word. And hearing this causes us to become other men, just as an inebriated man conducts himself far differently from one who is fasting and famished. The former laughs, rejoice, rejoices, exalts, sings, and shouts for joy, while the latter snarls and is sad and full of complaints. So that when we have this. This is me now, not Luther. When we have the Lord's Word, there's this abundance of it, and it creates this kind of spiritual drunkenness.
[00:09:08] We want to avoid drunken drunkenness of all kinds. We want to be sober. But the spiritual drunkenness is.
[00:09:16] You know, you've met a guy who's had a few too many drinks, and he's, like, picking fights with guys four times his size. He's just not afraid of anything. That's how we should be of the devil. Like, come on, bring it on. The Lord's on our side. What are we afraid of?
[00:09:30] Cheerfulness is our spiritual warfare. Okay, we better look at these texts or we'll never get you guys to church. We again have a New Testament reading. For our Old Testament text, we had one on Revelation, we had.
[00:09:44] We had Revelation 14 last week for the first lesson for Reformation Day, we have Revelation 7. Oh, the glorious Revelation 7 this week, the vision of the.
[00:09:57] Those coming out of the tribulation, having washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
[00:10:07] I think, you know, it's never. I never know what to preach on. For all saints, this is my favorite thing to preach on, but I think I've probably preached on this the last four years. So maybe I'll go for the Epistle or the Gospel, the Beatitudes. That probably needs to be preached on. So maybe on the Revelation, I'll say a few things. First is notice that we'll have this list of 144,000, and we wonder what's going on. 12,000 from the tribe of Judah were sealed, 12,000 from the tribe of Reuben, 12,000 from the tribe of Gad, and so forth and so on. And it lists all 12 tribes, 12,000 from each tribe, and it, it all adds up to 144,000. And then after John hears the number 144,000, he looks and he beholds something entirely different. Now, this is a little secret on how to read the Book of Revelation, because what the Revelation will do is it'll give us parallel visions. It'll give us the vision first through our ears. It'll describe something, and then John will see something.
[00:11:15] And the thing that he hears and the thing that he sees are very different, but the same. I'll give you an example. In Revelation 5, he says, I heard the lion of the tribe of Judah had conquered. And I looked and I saw a lamb as he had been slain.
[00:11:35] Now, you can hardly get two more opposite pictures. The lion conquering and the Lamb conquered. And yet they're both a description of Christ.
[00:11:47] He is the lion of the tribe of Judah who has conquered death and hell, and the devil. He is the Lamb of God who was slain from the foundation of the world to take away our sins. He is both of those things. So the lion and the Lamb are a way of describing the works of Christ?
[00:12:06] Well, the same thing happens. And normally the way it goes is you hear something, it's very Jewish, and you see something, and it's kind of hear the Old Testament and you see the New Testament. That parallel is also in this text. He hears 144,000, the perfect number, 12,000 from each tribe. Amazing. And then he looks and he sees a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes, peoples, languages, standing before the throne. And the Lamb. So in his ear is the perfect 144,000, 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes, Jewish people. And then he looks and he sees a multitude that can't be counted from every tribe. Tongue. This is the same, it's opposite pictures of the same thing, which is the church. And probably this is, I think what's going on is the 12,000 from each tribe is God's perfect election. The Lord is. The church is just perfect. There's not a single person missing according to the Lord's will. And yet it's this great gathering of people from every place, tongue, tribe, people, nation, from everywhere. And they're all singing, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne. And the Lamb. There's the Lamb. The central vision of Revelation is the Lamb on the Throne. Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power, and might be to our God forever and ever. And the angel says to John, who are these? And he says, you know, and he says, these are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They've washed their robe and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. So you have to imagine now that you're born in a robe and every time you sin or break God's law or do something wrong, it's like a stain or a spot on your robe and you're lined up to go into heaven wearing this filthy, tattered, nasty looking thing. And yet there's this big vat of blood, lamb's blood, and your robe goes into this and comes out perfect, brilliant, shining, clean, patched in every way, radiant.
[00:14:14] This is the forgiveness of sins. This is the salvation accomplished by the death of Jesus. This is what it means. And this is what it means to be holy. I mean, not to have like a robe that was never stained, that you're wearing, that you have achieved some sort of perfection on your own. By no means. None of us are holy, but you have a washed robe made white in the blood of the Lamb. Just beautiful.
[00:14:44] The Epistle, First John, chapter three, verses one to three.
[00:14:48] First John is such a beautiful book. I think it was. You know, Luther one time said, if you just needed three or four books of the Bible, he would have first John, first Peter, Galatians and Gospel of John, maybe see what kind of love the Father has been given to us, that we should be called the children of God.
[00:15:11] And so we are.
[00:15:15] This is beautiful. Maybe I'll preach on this. Because there's so many things that we.
[00:15:21] That the devil wants to think that we're called the enemies of God, strangers of God, opponents of God, even our sinful flesh, the servants of God.
[00:15:34] And the Lord looks at us, remember the prodigal son. I'm not worthy to be your son. Make me as one of your hired slaves. And he says, son, son.
[00:15:46] And then the older son out in the field, all these years I've slaved away for you. And he says, son, God doesn't want slaves. He wants sons. Children. Behold what manner of love.
[00:16:00] Children he calls us. And we are his children. He's adopted us.
[00:16:05] Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is. Pure. Absolutely, absolutely beautiful. Maybe instead of. Well, I have to preach, dear saints, this Sunday, but maybe I should start to say, dear children of God, how would things change if we really thought of ourselves that way?
[00:16:23] I am a child of God.
[00:16:26] Who's your dad? Well, God. I'm his child. He's adopted me, called me his own.
[00:16:32] Beautiful.
[00:16:35] Matthew 5. This is the Gospel lesson, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, these nine statements that Jesus begins.
[00:16:45] It's a paradigmatic sermon that Matthew gives to us. That Jesus, it's kind of his announcement of the kingdom of God. And it's interesting that it's up on the mountain. So here we're going to think both of Mount Sinai, where Moses receives the law, and also of Mount Eber in Gerizim. We were talking about this in Joshua, this really interesting phenomenon. Deuteronomy 27. The Lord says, when you go into the land, I want you to build an altar on Eber, Mount Eber, and put half the tribes on Mount Eber and then half the tribes on the other side of the valley, Mount Gerizim. And you're going to have blessings and curses, and you're going to read these lessons. The ark is going to be in the middle, which is where Shechem is. And you're going to read the law and the Gospel, the curses and the blessings on these two mountains. So these two mountains, Eber and Gerizim, are like law and Gospel. But now the Lord Jesus is on a different mountain. And it's going to be the mountain of the kingdom of God. He goes up there to preach, and he's going to give these blessings, these nine blessings.
[00:17:51] And he's going to give the blessings to people who think that they are not blessed, or to conditions that we do not see as blessed conditions.
[00:17:59] Poor in spirit, mourning meek hunger and thirsting for righteousness. Merciful. That's okay. Pure in heart. That's fine. Peacemakers. We like those persecuted. Oh, boy.
[00:18:10] Reviled and persecuted and uttered evil against falsely Rejoice and be glad. So the Lord Jesus is going to put forth these conditions that are either bad or less than ideal or difficult. And he's going to say all of these are blessed. And he's going to give promises that are different than the Old Testament promises.
[00:18:31] Instead of an earthly kingdom, he's going to promise the kingdom of heaven. Instead of being agitated, he's going to promise comfort. Instead of inheriting the promised land, we're going to inherit the earth. Instead of longing, there's satisfaction. Instead of an eye for an eye, there's mercy. Instead of the vision of the angels, there's the vision of God. Instead of being sons of Abraham, we're called sons of God.
[00:18:56] Instead of an earthly kingdom. Again, it's the kingdom of Heaven. It's an amazing thing. Notice this. In the nine Beatitudes, there's kind of. There's eight of them that follow a really similar pattern. And then the ninth one, where Jesus kind of, well, so the first eight are Blessed are the.
[00:19:11] Talking about the condition. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek. But then the ninth one is Blessed are you, second person. You also notice that the first and the eighth are the only one in the present tense.
[00:19:29] The rest are future. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
[00:19:34] Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. The meek shall inherit the earth. But at the end, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. There is the kingdom of heaven.
[00:19:46] So the kingdom of heaven is present. But comfort and earth and righteousness, these are on the way.
[00:19:52] And then the most important of all the Beatitudes, which is the most overlooked, is this ninth one, where Jesus is teaching us how to suffer. This is how to bear the cross.
[00:20:08] The doctrine of Christianity is probably something like this.
[00:20:12] Jesus bears the cross for you, and you bear the cross with him.
[00:20:18] So Jesus bears the cross for us to forgive our sins and take away all that, all that we've done wrong, so that God's wrath would be spent on him. He bears the cross for you, and then you bear the cross with him. So you take up your cross, but he doesn't abandon you or leave you. He's with you the whole time. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven. So they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
[00:20:55] Beautiful for all the saints is the hymn. I'll tell you what so about. I can make it through this hymn about 50% of the time. I don't know if you guys are the same way. It's just such a touching hymn. But here's the line that gets me almost every time.
[00:21:16] It's the end or no, the fifth stanza in our version. And when the fight is fierce, the warfare long steals on the ear the distant triumph song and hearts are brave again and arms are strong.
[00:21:35] Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
[00:21:39] That's so beautiful. So here we're slogging through this life.
[00:21:44] Things are tough. We wonder if we're going to make it. I mean, how can we hold up? How can we keep going? It's just tough living in this fallen world and. And dragged down by this fallen flesh and attacked by the devil and the demons.
[00:22:04] We wonder if we can make it. And then the trumpet sound of victory, just barely faintly, you can hear it kind of echoing off the clouds.
[00:22:17] Here's the Lord's return in glory. Here's the shout at the end. Here's the resurrection. Here's the culmination of all these things. Here comes the new heaven and the new earth and.
[00:22:27] And the wedding feast of the lamb and the adornment of Jerusalem. And here comes eternal life with all the saints in glory, returning with the Lord. And you just get a tiny little. Did I. I think I heard it. And now all of a sudden, we're steeled for the battle.
[00:22:46] Our heads lifted up, our redemption is drawing near.
[00:22:50] Our courage is fortified, Arms are strong and hearts are brave.
[00:22:57] Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
[00:23:01] Wow.
[00:23:02] And then it ends. From earthwise bound from ocean's farthest coast through gates of Pearl Stream in the countless hosts singing to Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Alleluia, Alleluia.
[00:23:16] The saints have gone before us and they're cheering us on. And we'll be there soon.
[00:23:23] We will. In the service today for all Saints. Let's see what the liturgy is. I forgot to check.
[00:23:30] 151 Divine Service Setting 1. Okay, so we'll be Divine Service Setting 1. There we go. And we'll also, for all saints, ring the bell for all those who have died in the Lord's name in the last year.
[00:23:43] Members and close family of Bach, Dottie Johnson, Ted Zoc, Marjorie Heaton, Alsine Livingston, Deb's mom, Max Bernrutter, James Rosky, Hayden Abler, Betsy Stonebr, William Winthe old member.
[00:24:04] We will ring the bell for them and include them in the prayers as well. So and in that prayer, pray for the families who continue to mourn and rejoice that the Lord is bringing us through this veil of tears to be with himself in heaven. That'll be great.
[00:24:21] In Bible class, we're going to continue on Hebrews 12, so this will be really wonderful. We were going to hear from Puerto Rico, but I think we're going to push that off to next week. We'll get a little report from LWML, a little report also from Pastor LeBlanc, who was in Roswell this last week. So that'll be great. And we'll then dig into Hebrews chapter 12. We'll see you in a few minutes. Safe drive. Sunday drive to church.