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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Luther Church. It's a Sunday Drive to Church podcast for the first Sunday in Advent.
[00:00:05] Today's November 30th year of our Lord 2025.
[00:00:10] It's not only the beginning of a new season, it's the beginning of a new year.
[00:00:15] So happy New Year. May God grant that this church year would be filled with his goodness and mercy, his great love for us in Christ. God be praised for all of his gifts. Let's pray the collect and then we'll. We'll get you ready for the service today.
[00:00:33] Stir up your power, O Lord, and come and by your protection we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sins and saved by your mighty deliverance. For you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
[00:00:49] Amen.
[00:00:51] Amen.
[00:00:53] We've talked about this a few times, how there's five elements in a collect, those most ancient prayers that are marked at the beginning of the service and kind of gather together all the ideas of the service, the address, the rationale, the petition, the doxology and the Amen.
[00:01:15] I think those are the five parts. Anyhow, this very first collect of the church here skips the beginning, the address, and it skips the rationale and it just dives into the petition. It's one of the three. There's three of the. Of the four colics in the season of Advent are the stir up colics, Stir up your power, O Lord, and come. It just is right into it. So it's. And it's that idea of stirring something up, like, let's get it going, let's get it moving. Come, Lord, wake up, Come and save us is right there. If you. Interesting. I think I did some sort of grid at some point on the colics for the season of Advent, because I think only one of them follows the traditional form. So there's three start three of the four colics that we'll hear this week and for the next four Sundays. So this Sunday and the next three are stirrup colics, and three of the four are addressed to Jesus instead of to God the Father. This is really interesting, but they're not the three stirrup. There's one stir up collect addressed to the Father and there's one normal collect addressed to the Son. But we have a very high percentage of the prayers addressed directly to Jesus, whereas mostly, I'd bet 85% of the collects are addressed to God the Father. But during the season of Advent, we're especially praying to God the Son. And we hear and this is hinted already at the COVID of your bullets with the ancient painting of Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We hear this Sunday, on the first Sunday of Advent, about Jesus coming into Jerusalem.
[00:03:04] Now, this is an interesting thing because we'll hear the same story, the same text almost exactly on Palm Sunday.
[00:03:15] And to think that you just have a few readings that you're going to hear one reading twice.
[00:03:22] I want us to think of this reading of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem to suffer and die, not as the reading just for the first Sunday in Advent, or I suppose, even for just the first Sunday of the church year. Really, this is the chief gospel lesson for the liturgy.
[00:03:47] So we don't just hear it twice during the readings, but we in fact sing it every single Sunday when we sing Blessed is He, Blessed is He, Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest, the second half of the Sanctus, the same hymn that the people sang on the road into Jerusalem when Jesus triumphantly entered in that way. And here's the point is that week after week in the divine service, our Lord Jesus comes into our midst, not on a donkey, but on his word, riding on the word of God, riding on the preaching, riding on the bread and wine to come and save us.
[00:04:33] He comes in weakness, in meekness, not in power. He saves that for the last day, but he comes to be with us in this season of Advent. That the Lord Jesus comes to us is.
[00:04:46] Is teaching us that it's not just in one way.
[00:04:51] He came to us in fulfillment of the prophecy. We're especially going to get that on the last two Sundays in Advent when we're hearing John the Baptist prepare the way for Jesus. First Advent, he'll come again in glory.
[00:05:05] That's his second coming, the parousia.
[00:05:09] When he returned on the last day to judge the living and the dead and to call all the dead out of the grave.
[00:05:16] So he came, and he will come again.
[00:05:19] But especially today, we give thanks that he comes to us still, that he doesn't leave us or forsake us.
[00:05:31] I will behold. Jesus says, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age.
[00:05:38] And he who can't lie has told us this so that everything in the divine service is to remind us that Jesus is here for us and here for us. Not just to be like emotional support or something. He's here for us to be our Savior, to be the King of glory who forgives our sins.
[00:05:57] So that's really the idea, and this is Reflected in the other readings as well. So Psalm 24, which is an interesting psalm.
[00:06:07] There's a lot going on actually in this psalm. It's one of the.
[00:06:13] It's kind of a royal psalm. And talking about King Jesus here.
[00:06:18] The earth is the Lord's in all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein.
[00:06:23] And then it talks about who can ascend the hill of the Lord, the one who has clean hands and a pure heart. So this means that the ones who dwell with the Lord are those who have a clean conscience by the forgiveness of sins and who live according to their vocation.
[00:06:38] And then it ends with this repeated chorus.
[00:06:44] Lift up your heads, O you gates, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors. The King of glory shall come in. Who is this king of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty. The Lord mighty in battle. So the idea is that, well, if you picture Jerusalem, the Lord's church, and you say, well, who's going to live there? Well, the righteous dwell there. But the one who.
[00:07:09] Who is celebrated in that place, the one who's the king in that place, it's not David, it's not Solomon, it's not whatever, you know, Jeroboam or any.
[00:07:21] The king in that place is the Lord himself.
[00:07:26] And it repeats it. You'll notice those last two verses are just perfectly repeated. Lift up your heads, oh you gates.
[00:07:34] Lift up you everlasting doors. The King of glory shall come in. Who is the King of glory?
[00:07:39] The Lord of hosts. He's the King of glory.
[00:07:42] This psalm is normally used on Ascension Day. If I remember right, it's one of the Ascension Day psalms. And the idea is that the Lord is received into heaven, the gates of heaven are thrown open, and the Lord comes into his own and sits on the throne and rules and reigns all things.
[00:08:05] But here it's taken in the context of our service to be talking about Jerusalem and the Lord entering into Jerusalem, where He becomes the King of glory.
[00:08:18] Now, his own didn't recognize him or receive him, but in their rejection of Jesus, he becomes the exact king that he wants to be.
[00:08:26] So he's not, you know, they don't take Jesus and take him into the room of Pilate and overthrow him and put him on the throne there.
[00:08:34] They exalt him on the cross, they crown him with thorns, which is exactly what Jesus came for.
[00:08:41] They put the sign over his head, the King of the Jews, mockingly by Pilate, but signaling to the world exactly what's going on. The King of glory has come in.
[00:08:53] Jeremiah text is A beautiful one. I won't preach on it, but take note of it when we're in the service. There's really two parts, two little paragraphs. The first two, verses five and six is a direct messianic prophecy of Jesus, who will be the righteous branch. I will raise up for David a righteous branch. So remember, Jeremiah is preaching at the time of the exile.
[00:09:16] Jeremiah, there's two. Remember the two great dates of the sort of between King David who was 1010, and Jesus who was about 2 B.C. born 2 B.C. so that thousand year time, the two big dates in between in that big era are 722, which is the destruction of the north when the Assyrians come in and they wipe out the northern kingdom Israel.
[00:09:45] And then 586 B.C.
[00:09:48] when the Babylonians come in and destroy Jerusalem in the south.
[00:09:52] And Jeremiah is a prophet during the time of destruction. He was warning him, warning him, warning him. He flees to Egypt. Then like right before that destruction, he knows that it's coming.
[00:10:07] He knows that the king is going to be. The lineage of King David is coming now to an end. Or sorry, the dynasty of King David is coming to an end, but the lineage is not.
[00:10:22] David's children will live on. And this is one of the reasons why Matthew, for example, and Luke start with these genealogies to show that Jesus is of David and Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Judah.
[00:10:34] And David has that promise. I'll raise up for you a king who will sit on the throne forever.
[00:10:42] But just as that tree of David is being cut down, the throne is being destroyed in Jerusalem. Jeremiah says, the day is coming when I will raise up for David a righteous branch and he shall reign as king.
[00:10:57] So the people are looking at all this destruction and Jeremiah saying, nope, the Lord is still going to keep his promise.
[00:11:02] And beautifully, this is the name by which he will be called. The Lord is our righteousness.
[00:11:10] In Hebrew it's simply the Lord our righteousness, which is a beautiful preaching of the Gospel.
[00:11:18] Our righteousness is not of our own.
[00:11:21] The Lord himself is our righteousness. He's the one who forgives our sins and makes us holy.
[00:11:27] And in the second paragraph, verses 7 to 8 is, it's pretty astonishing.
[00:11:37] The prophecy goes on to say, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they will no longer say, as the Lord lives, who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt, but as the Lord lives, who brought us up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country.
[00:11:59] So the exodus from Egypt, if you're Doing the Bible in a year plan, or you're reading big chunks of the Scripture or going through the Psalms, you know that the Exodus is the definitive act of salvation of God all through the Old Testament. And so many psalms sing of the Lord's power and mercy in rescuing the people from bondage and slavery in Egypt.
[00:12:30] And this is where the Lord gathered up his people. He brought them to Mount Sinai and he gave them the covenant that Moses did all of his work.
[00:12:40] This is the origin story of the Lord's people.
[00:12:43] But here Jeremiah prophesies and says, the day is coming when the people are no longer going to say, just like Exodus, just like the Exodus, but rather just like the return from captivity.
[00:13:00] So the Lord is going to do a new work of deliverance and rescue and bring the people back to his city, Jerusalem. And that was accomplished under Ezra and Nehemiah. That was the whole thing that the Lord worked there. He brought the people back from Babylon and resettled them in Jerusalem. But the idea, it's an amazing thing to say. The people are no longer going to say, like Exodus, but rather like this rescue.
[00:13:32] That's a pretty bold promise because the people are always saying, like the Exodus, like the Exodus. So many of the psalms are like, lord, remember how you rescued us from Egypt? Could you rescue us again?
[00:13:43] And the Lord says, I will. And that's a foreshadowing or a pointing to the greatest deliverance of all, the best is yet to come. So that Jeremiah is pointing to the rescue from Babylon, which becomes a type of the rescue that the Lord will accomplish in his death and resurrection from all sins.
[00:14:06] So.
[00:14:09] So if you were there at Jeremiah's day, and I can't Remember in Jeremiah 23 if he's preaching from Jerusalem or if he's preaching from Egypt, I just can't remember the timing of it all. He's probably still in Jerusalem, but I'd have to go and look it up. But Jeremiah is preaching to the people and saying, in this time of great trouble and consternation, while they're watching their whole city fall, and he's saying the Lord is going to do an even greater work than he did under Moses.
[00:14:42] That's an astonishing promise.
[00:14:45] We live by these promises. I mean, this is how the Lord is. Our righteousness is that he gives us promises to trust in, and we trust those promises.
[00:14:53] The gradual, the Zechariah 9, 9, which is also quoted in the Gospel. Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion. Shout, daughter of Jerusalem. See your king comes to you righteous and having salvation Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. That's the promise of Jesus. Triumphal entry, the epistle is from Romans 13.
[00:15:20] There's a lot here, like there always is in Paul.
[00:15:23] But this is Paul's alarm bell section, alarm clock section beside this.
[00:15:33] You know the time, the hour has come for you to wake from sleep.
[00:15:40] So there's a call that runs through the New Testament for wakefulness and watchfulness.
[00:15:50] And this doesn't mean that we don't sleep at night. You just couldn't go that long without sleeping at night.
[00:15:58] The wakefulness that Jesus invites us to when he says, be ready, be awake.
[00:16:03] The thief comes in the middle of the night. And the wakefulness to which Paul calls us here is a watchful, alert, spiritually sober. Well, in every way, sober life.
[00:16:21] So that we're paying attention to the Lord's word and we're paying attention to the things that are happening around us.
[00:16:30] And we know that the Lord Jesus is coming in glory, so we're ready for that.
[00:16:36] Normally, wakefulness and watchfulness is tied to prayer, so that we're diligent in our prayers, begging the Lord for help and. And asking him for what we need. But here, the watchfulness is described as battling for the life of the spirit against the flesh.
[00:17:01] Salvation, Paul reminds us, is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night's far gone, the days at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.
[00:17:13] Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, making no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.
[00:17:32] So the picture from Paul is like.
[00:17:34] Is like your pagan life when you. He's writing to these Romans who started not as Christians, they weren't baptized in Christian families. They started out as pagans.
[00:17:44] And then the gospel came to them and they were baptized and they belonged to the Lord Jesus. And he says that first half of your life was the darkness part, it was the nighttime part, filled with all this lewdness and immorality.
[00:17:58] But the sons come up in your own life, and now you're living in the day. Wake up, you're living in the day.
[00:18:06] And Paul understands that our Christian life is this battle between flesh and spirit. He writes about this over and over. And it's one of the things to remember that we have inside of us, if you would, two natures. The new man created after the likeness of Christ given to us in our baptism that the Spirit, the Holy Spirit who enlivens our own spirit, that desires to do God's will and longs to keep his word and to serve the neighbor and is compelled to bless and love people, is. And then we also have our flesh, the old Adam that clings to us, that is filled with evil desires and wants to sin and rebel against God. And we have these two wills, these two wants that are battling it out.
[00:19:03] What Paul has here is some very practical advice. He says, make no provision for the flesh.
[00:19:10] In other words, don't feed the flesh, don't give the flesh what it wants, don't strengthen the flesh in this battle.
[00:19:17] Make provision for the spirit. In fact, when you come to church, when you do your devotions, when you read the Scriptures, when you do your prayers, you're making provision for the spirit, not for the flesh.
[00:19:29] So there's this old proverb. It's some old Eskimo proverbial, I guess they said there's two. The old Eskimo said to the young Eskimo, there's. There's two wolves living inside each heart, and there's the one that's the darkness and the other is the light.
[00:19:52] And they're fighting in the heart.
[00:19:55] And the little Eskimo says, well, which one wins? And the old man Eskimo says, the one that you feed.
[00:20:02] So.
[00:20:03] And I wish it wasn't an old Eskimo proverb, but it. Oh, well, it probably is fine, because this is what Paul's talking about here. Make no provision for the flesh. Don't feed the flesh, feed the spirit.
[00:20:19] And now this is our whole lives. Remember, Romans, chapter seven talks about this. The good that I would. I don't. The good that I. I don't. I do. And who will deliver me from this body of flesh?
[00:20:31] So our whole lives are in this battle between flesh and spirit.
[00:20:36] And this is Paul calling us to diligence in that battle. We need to be aware of it.
[00:20:43] We need to be aware that each one of us, this is how Luther says it, each one of us is only part Christian, half Christian, and we still have the old Adam clinging to us. And that old sinful flesh will be part of our lives until the Lord rescues us by death and the resurrection and brings us into eternal life where the old man is completely put away.
[00:21:06] But in this battle, we make no provision for the flesh.
[00:21:10] All right. The hymn of the. How far are we here? Oh, the hymn of the day is this beautiful savior of the nations. Come.
[00:21:19] It's a. It's a theologically packed hymn. It's almost a confession. This hymn is creedal in its content.
[00:21:30] So this is your homework is to pay attention to this hymn all week.
[00:21:34] Savior of the nations Come. It was written originally.
[00:21:38] There's some really interesting notes on this one, but if you look down, you'll see it was written originally by Ambrose and then the German version, Martin Luther and then translated.
[00:21:50] A couple of guys here, including my classmate and now seminary professor Gifford Grobeen, worked on Stanza 7.
[00:22:00] So that the hymn was originally in Latin by Ambrose and then Luther translated into German.
[00:22:07] And Luther's translation was so good that the version that we have is mostly a translation of Luther's German more than Ambrose's Latin.
[00:22:17] It's not that common that a translation improves a text, but that's, you know, Luther.
[00:22:25] Anyhow, a couple of stanzas just to think about as you're getting closer. Savior the nations come Virgin son, make here your home Marvel now, O heaven and earth that the Lord chose such a birth not by human flesh and blood, by the spirit of our God was the Word made flesh.
[00:22:45] Woman's offspring pure and fresh.
[00:22:47] Here a maid. This is Virgin Mary was found with child, yet remained a virgin mild. That's the virgin birth.
[00:22:55] In her womb the truth was shown. God was there upon his throne.
[00:23:00] The picture of Jesus sitting on the throne, even in the womb of Mary.
[00:23:05] Then stepped forth the Lord of all from his pure and kingly hall, so that the birth of Jesus is pictured like a king stepping out of his throne room.
[00:23:15] God of God, yet fully man.
[00:23:20] His heroic course began.
[00:23:23] This is the. I was. I was thinking about this last Advent season or sometime in the last year, about how the old hymn. We normally think of the beginning of Jesus as his birth. That's kind of where things start. But even though we know he's eternal, he's God of God, Light of light, very God of very God, the second Person of the Holy Trinity who's always existed.
[00:23:52] But there's a lot in the hymns and in the church fathers too, about Jesus deciding to become incarnate, making that choice to step out of the glory of heaven and to step into our humanity and to enter into our flesh and blood and our mortality to be our Savior.
[00:24:22] And the hymn is capturing that God the Father was a source back to God. He ran his course.
[00:24:30] That's the idea from the manger. Newborn light shines in glory through the night darkness There no more resides in this light Faith now abides my church history one class with Dr. William Weinrich, the most difficult class I took at seminary.
[00:24:49] But part of that class was we had to memorize this hymn, Savior the Nations Come, the old TLH version.
[00:24:55] And we'd sing it every day in class.
[00:24:57] And I think his idea was, if you get this hymn, you get the battles, the theological battles of the first millennium of the Church.
[00:25:09] The battle over the doctrine of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The battle over the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus, and the right confession of these two things which marks Christendom, these two great mysteries, the Trinity and the. And the Incarnation.
[00:25:25] And it's all there in the psalm. Beautiful. Like a lot of the Latin hymns, it ends with the doxological stanza. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.
[00:25:36] All right, There's a Sunday drive to church for first Sunday of the church year, first Sunday in Advent ad Tel Avivi, that's the old Latin name that. In fact, those old Latin names hanging from the One Year Lectionary are hanging around for the Sundays in Lent and.
[00:25:55] And Easter and Advent. So you might see. I can't remember if we have it, but you might see some of those Latin things hanging around too.
[00:26:03] Those are taken from the first line of the Introit ad televo. So we have the entrance psalm. So we won't see it because we don't have the antiphon for the Introit. But that's where those names come from, from the ancient church. So there you go. God's peace be with you. We'll see you soon.