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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. It's February 1, 2026, septuages, Sunday, third Sunday before Lent.
[00:00:09] We're going to have. I'm planning to have church this morning. Weather looks okay, so hope to see you soon. Here's the prayer and then a little bit about pre Lent and then a little bit about the texts. It's so good.
[00:00:19] Let's pray. Oh, Lord, graciously hear the prayers of your people that we who justly suffer the consequence of our sin may be mercifully delivered by your goodness to the glory of your name, through Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
[00:00:39] Amen.
[00:00:40] Septuagh is the beginning of this pre Lent season where we have three Sundays getting ready for Lent, working our way up there. Septuagizima means 70. It is not 70 days to Lent, though. It is.
[00:00:54] I don't actually know. Hold on. It is 63 days until Easter.
[00:01:00] So septuagizima. We could just casually translate it. 70 ish. Jonathan has a nice little service note, actually, because this is the Sunday within the 70 days. And next week is the Sunday within the 60th 60 days. And then 50 days, then we get to the 40 days of Lent. And remember, if you're counting the Lent, like starting in Ash Wednesday and going to Easter, you're like, wait a minute, it's 47 days. But because the Sundays don't count anyway, a lot of church math happening these three Sundays before the season of Lent really beautifully capture these Reformation themes of grace alone and scripture alone and faith alone. And this week especially is grace alone because we have the parable of the laborers in the vineyard where they go out. Remember some of the beginning and. Well, more about that later. But first, let's start with the psalm. Our psalmody is Psalm 95, which, you know, I tell people, hey, you know Psalm 95? And like, nah, no, I don't. I don't know it, Pastor. And I said, you. Do you have it memorized already? Because it's the venite from Matins. Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord. Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our.
[00:02:20] Oh, see, you know it.
[00:02:24] The rock of our salvation.
[00:02:26] That rock is going to be the theme really for the first three lessons. Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving and into his.
[00:02:36] Let us make a joyful noise to the Lord with songs of praise for the Lord's a great God and a great King above all gods.
[00:02:42] Here's something to Notice this took me a couple years to figure out. There's a distinction between the Lord's hand singular and the Lord's hands plural.
[00:02:55] And I remember sitting there saying, I wonder why that is.
[00:03:00] I noodle on that for a couple of years.
[00:03:02] And then it came to me. Maybe I don't want to tell you guys. Maybe I want you to think about it a little bit. Here's. Okay, so here's the first. There's two times that it mentions the Lord's hands plural, and one time, or maybe two times also that it mentions his hands and singular.
[00:03:18] We gotta see. It says verse 4. In his hand are the depths of the earth. The heights of the mountains are his. Also the sea is his, for he made it for his hands form the dry land.
[00:03:32] Oh, come, let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.
[00:03:40] Okay, so hand singular is twice and hands plural is once.
[00:03:48] Why do you think that is? What's the difference between the Lord's hands plural and the Lord hands singing? That's a good question for you to noodle on. But our intro today, opening psalm, goes past this to verse nine, and it's verse seven and eight and nine that is maybe the most important part of the psalm. We don't sing it in the venite, but it's quoted in Hebrews today.
[00:04:14] If you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah, in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
[00:04:30] Well, what's that about, you ask? Well, your question is answered almost immediately by the Old Testament text. Exodus, chapter 17, second book of Moses. This is written as the people were getting closer to Mount Sinai. So they're out of Egypt. They've crossed through the Dead Sea.
[00:04:48] The Red Sea. Excuse me. They've crossed through the Red Sea and they're headed back to Mount Sinai, where Moses had the burning bush. Now it's going to be the burning Mountain.
[00:04:58] They move from the wilderness of sin, which seems like there's something to preach on there. By stages, they camped at Rephidim, but there was no water. And the people were quarreling and Moses give us water.
[00:05:12] Moses said, why do you quarrel with me?
[00:05:14] Why do you test the Lord?
[00:05:17] But they're thirsty and they're grumbling. And Moses said in his prayers, why did you bring us out of Egypt? To kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst. So he cried to the Lord, what shall I do with this people? They're ready to stone me. And the Lord said to Moses, pass on before the people, taking with you some of the elders of Israel, and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go, behold, I'll stand before you there on the rock at Horeb. And you shall strike the rock and water shall come out of it, and the people will drink.
[00:05:48] Now notice. So here Moses is going to kapow this rock, and then it's going to split, and there's going to be a river, and there's all these. You can see these documentaries. They seem like they always pop up in my YouTube feed about these, that they think they found the place. There's a couple of mountains that are like, split open and show evidence of water flowing out of them.
[00:06:11] Who knows if we found the right one, but we know that it happened. But don't miss this little detail.
[00:06:16] It says, I will stand before you on the rock at Horeb, and you will strike the rock.
[00:06:23] So the Lord says, I'm going to stand right there on that rock, and then you're going to hit that rock, which means you're going to hit me.
[00:06:31] And when Psalm 95 tells us, I am that rock.
[00:06:39] And the epistle, which we're going to hear in a couple of minutes, is going to be even more explicit. Christ is that rock.
[00:06:45] That Moses was supposed to demonstrate this in front of all of the people. The Lord himself being struck in order to provide this river of living water.
[00:07:00] So it's a pretty profound picture to see Moses swinging his staff at Jesus, who's standing on the rock, and he. I don't know, maybe he moves out of the way, or maybe he disappears, or maybe the staff goes through him like it's a vision or something, and hits the rock and boom, splits open. And it's amazing. Don't miss that little detail. And especially because we're going to. It's going to. Paul's going to lean into it. In The Epistle Lesson 1 Corinthians, 9, 10, he first starts talking about discipline. And in a way, I think this epistle lesson is getting us ready for Lent, because it's almost like saying, hey, you got a couple of weeks.
[00:07:44] Lent's on the way.
[00:07:46] This big season of fasting is approaching, and it's good for us to fast.
[00:07:52] It's good for us to remind our belly that it's not in charge.
[00:07:56] It's good for us to know that all of these groans that we have because of the fallen sinful condition that we're in do not need to be addressed, at least not over the word of God.
[00:08:10] Don't you know that all who run in a race, all the runners compete, but only one receives a prize so run that you can obtain it.
[00:08:17] Every athlete exercises self control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath. You know, a little. If you won the race in ancient Greece, you just get this little laurel head wreath, you know, sits there for a little bit and then it fades. I mean, you could pin it up on your wall, I guess. But we're running. Paul says, you see all these people working so hard so that they can get just a little wrapper of leaves that's going to fade.
[00:08:48] And we are laboring for a.
[00:08:50] For an imperishable wreath, for a halo.
[00:08:56] So we ought to also discipline our bodies and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others, I myself should be disqualified.
[00:09:04] And then switch over to chapter 10. Paul says, I want you to know, brothers, our fathers were all under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them. And the rock was Christ.
[00:09:33] So we know from Exodus that Christ was on the rock. And now Paul says that was Christ being struck and split in two. And this probably accounts for the harshness of the Lord in not letting Moses go into the promised land after he struck the rock the second time, Remember the second time the people were thirsty and Moses had the instructions to speak to the rock. And instead of speaking to it, he struck it.
[00:09:59] And I think that's probably the reason why Moses has to be so severely punished for that. Second striking is that the Lord wanted to indicate that Christ is only struck once.
[00:10:14] And Moses messed it up. He messed up the picture.
[00:10:17] He destroyed the type, the image that the Lord was painting before the people.
[00:10:24] And he has now Christ struck twice. He becomes a false. I don't know if false prophets the right way, but the Lord, remember, through Moses was painting all these pictures of Christ.
[00:10:36] That's why he was so zealous to defend them. Like when they offer the false incense and the flame comes out and burns them. And there was such severity for resisting Moses, or such severity on Moses for resisting the Lord, because the Lord was using Moses to paint the picture of Christ who was on the way.
[00:10:55] So he's only struck once. And his second coming is not to suffer. But he comes in glory anyway. That rock is Christ.
[00:11:04] It's great.
[00:11:06] We have. You'll notice this, that for the season of pre Lent and Lent, that we don't have a verse for the gospel like we normally do, the alleluia verse, but rather we have the tract, which is like a verse without the alleluia.
[00:11:26] So we have the tract from Psalm 130.
[00:11:29] From depths of woe I cry to you, O Lord. O Lord, hear my voice.
[00:11:34] Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy.
[00:11:41] Beautiful.
[00:11:42] Then we get to the gospel. This is a great story. This is not Jesus telling us how to run a farm. Oh, boy.
[00:11:50] If you were to try to run a farm this way, you might have one day of success. And then I spent some time with an Australian this week. You'd get the Australian? Yeah. Nah, you try to hire some guys, hey, come and pick the grapes. Come and harvest the crops. And they'd be like, yeah, nah, we'll come at dinner time. Because what happens? Remember the guy Jesus says, the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard.
[00:12:21] And when he agreed with the laborers for a denarius, a day denarius, by the way, is a day's wage.
[00:12:28] We can think of denarius as a day's wage and talent as a year's wage.
[00:12:36] It gives us the scale of things. And this is. So this is fair. You work for a day, you get a denarius.
[00:12:42] I always.
[00:12:44] Was I thinking about denarius earlier? Is.
[00:12:48] Sounds like a type of bread or.
[00:12:51] I don't know. Anyway, you get a denarius.
[00:12:55] And he sent him into the vineyard. And then going back at the third hour, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace. It was like nine in the morning. And he said to them, hey, go to the vineyard. Whatever's right, I'll give you. They went. Then he goes out about the sixth hour, lunchtime, ninth hour, mid afternoon, and then the 11th hour, there's 12 hours of work in the day.
[00:13:13] This is before unions, I suppose, or whatever work limitations are put. You got 12 hours, you're going to work in the vineyard.
[00:13:22] But he goes and hires some people the 11th hour, and they go and work for an hour, and then it's all done. And he lines them all up.
[00:13:34] What are you doing here? No one hired us. Go into the vineyard. Okay. So the evening came. The owner of the vineyard says, as a foreman, call the laborers, pay them their wages, beginning with the last up to the first. So the people that came at the 11th hour are first in line and then in the afternoon, and then at lunchtime and then mid morning and then the guys that worked all day, they're probably sitting cross legged, covered in thorns and sweat dirt at the end of the day, whew.
[00:13:57] And when those who came at the 11th hour, each of them received a denarius. Now you have to think, oh boy. If you're just in that line and you're watching the guys up front who just got there, they don't even, they're closed, they don't even have any grape juice on them yet.
[00:14:11] And they get paid a denarius. You're on the cell phone calling your wife and like we're going to Texas Roadhouse tonight because you're counting up your hours. They got one dinarius for one hour. We're 12. That's two weeks worth worth of work. This guy who.
[00:14:26] And they're getting excited. But then what happens is the, the three o' clock people come, they get a denarii, the lunchtime people get a denarius, the mid morning get a denarius. The people who work all day get a get a denarius.
[00:14:38] And they do what anybody would do on receiving it. They grumbled at the master of the house saying, these last worked only one hour. And you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day in the scorching heat. It's not, this is what this is. Kids who are all prepping to be lawyers and judges who know already at age three, it's not fair. And it's not fair.
[00:15:08] It's not fair that a guy works for 12 hours and gets paid as a guy who works one hour.
[00:15:13] This is why Jesus is not teaching us how to run a farm. He's teaching us about the kingdom of heaven, not about the kingdom of earth and how things run in his economy, which is different than ours.
[00:15:24] And listen to this response. There's six things in this response. He replied to one of them, friend, I'm doing you no wrong.
[00:15:31] One, I'm not doing you wrong. Two, didn't you agree with me for a denarius? This was the deal. I didn't lie. I gave you what I told you what. 3. Take what belongs to you.
[00:15:42] I choose to give this last workers I give to you.
[00:15:46] This is not something earned. This is something given. We're talking about gifts.
[00:15:52] 4. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?
[00:15:58] This isn't your Choice. This is my choice. I don't act according to your own expectations. 5. Do you begrudge my generosity?
[00:16:06] And the answer is yes. And this is the problem with the Pharisees, when they're adding everything. When you have this kind of legalistic mind that adds everything up, you begrudge the Lord's generosity. It's all kind of calculated and you got to make the spreadsheet match. It's kind of like Septuagesima is on the 63rd day or whatever. It doesn't all match up. And the. This is maybe the point. Jesus says, the last are going to be first and the first, last.
[00:16:30] It works different in my kingdom. It's a kingdom not of earning and not of deserving, but of grace and mercy and gift.
[00:16:40] So the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. And this is the switch that Jesus is teaching. So we have to look at the cross of Jesus and we have to look at our own baptism, and we have to look at the mercy of God and we say, hey, not fair. I don't know where our bitterness would be.
[00:17:01] Now, the way this is normally preached is some people become Christians early in life and other people become right at the end of their lives and they think it's not fair. But if we're Christians, what's not fair about that?
[00:17:12] That person got to live their whole life in despair without any hope and doing what they want, living a life in darkness and death until at last the Lord Jesus calls them.
[00:17:23] That's not a fair parallel, but it is probably this, that some people are trying hard to be good and others are not. And Jesus will call both.
[00:17:33] He'll call the moral and the immoral, the trying and the not trying. He will have mercy on who he wants to have mercy and grace who he wants to have grace. And we might be tempted to look at that and say, it's not fair. And Jesus says, right, who told you to look for fairness? This is my kingdom and my choice and my generosity do not begrudge it. This is the danger that he's warning us about, that we would begrudge his generosity and start to measure things up.
[00:18:03] The hymn Salvation unto Us Has Come is this beautiful ballad of the gospel. We'll sing the first six stanzas for the Sermon hymn and then the last to get to 10, last four for the first distribution hymn. It was written by Paul Spiratus.
[00:18:24] That's how I say it. I heard someone say Spiritus. I better ask Jonathan how you're supposed to say it.
[00:18:31] When the Lutherans published their very first hymnal in Wittenberg, it had eight hymns in it. Four from Luther, two from, two from Paul Spiratus. This one was in there. One from Elizabeth Krusinger, one from Can't Remember.
[00:18:46] And it's probably the engine of the Reformation, these hymns. It tells the whole story of the Gospel. So pay attention to the words of this hymn, how it in ballad form takes us beginning to end. Salvation unto us has come by God's free grace and favor. This is the setup. Good works cannot avert our doom. They help and save us. Never faith looks to Jesus Christ alone, who did for all the world atone. He's our one Redeemer.
[00:19:14] Then to the law. What God did in his law to man and none to him could render caught us wrath and woe on every hand from man the vile offender.
[00:19:25] Our flesh has not those pure desires the spirit of the law requires. And lost is our condition.
[00:19:30] It was a false, misleading dream that God his law had given, that sinners could themselves redeem and by their works gain heaven. That's a little bit of a complicated sentence, but it's a really important one. The false, misleading dream is that God gave his law so that we could redeem ourselves and get heaven by our works. That's false. That's misleading. That's not why God gave his law. The law is but a mirror bright to bring the inbred sin to light that lurks within our nature. The purpose of the law is not to save us, but to show us how desperately we need saving from sin. Our flesh could not abstain. Sin held its sway unceasing.
[00:20:14] The task was useless and in vain. Our guilt was ever increasing.
[00:20:19] None can remove sin, poisons, dart or purify our guileful heart, so deep is our corruption. But the law must be fulfilled or we die despairing. Therefore Christ came. And has God's anger stilled our human nature sharing he has for us. The law obeyed and thus the Father's vengeance stayed, which over us impended.
[00:20:41] So this is this beautiful this is. And look at the gospel that just unfolds here. Since Christ is full atonement made and brought to us salvation. Each Christian therefore may be glad and build on this foundation. Then it switches to a prayer. Your grace alone. Dear Lord, I plead your death is now my life indeed, for you have paid my ransom.
[00:21:03] Let me not doubt, but truly see. Your word cannot be broken. Your call rings out. Come unto me. No falsehood have you spoken, baptized into your precious name. My faith cannot be put to shame, and I shall never perish.
[00:21:16] And then it's the last two. Well, 8 and 9 are going to be kind of summary stanzas before the great doxology at the end. The law reveals the guilt of sin, makes us conscience stricken. Then the gospel enters in the sinful soul to quicken, come to the cross, trust Christ and live the law. No peace can ever give, no comfort, no blessing. Faith clings to Jesus cross alone, and rests in him unceasing. And by its fruits true faith is known with love and hope increasing.
[00:21:43] But faith alone can justify works, serve our neighbor, and supply the proof that faith is living. That's true, by the way. Now we don't often think about it because our assurance that our faith is living is. We point outside of ourselves, especially to the source of faith, to the word of God and to the sacraments. But when we have that confidence of the sacraments, then our good works are little mini indications that the Lord's got us.
[00:22:11] So when we're patient and suffering, or when we forgive the people who sin against us, or when we abide in the confidence of Christ even in times of affliction and other good works like this, then we are reminded that the Holy Spirit's at work in us because we're like, boy, I couldn't do that on my own.
[00:22:30] That must be the Spirit at work.
[00:22:32] And we end with this doxology. All blessing, honor, thanks and praise to Father, Son and Spirit.
[00:22:39] Ooh, this is the kind of.
[00:22:41] This was our Lutheran godly biblical propaganda.
[00:22:49] So good. All right, that's Septuagasima. A couple of announcements, including this which I saw in the bulletin. I didn't even know about this. On Tuesday, February 3rd, that's this Tuesday, the LWML is hosting a potluck dinner at 6:30. Everyone is invited. Pastor Smith is going to be the guest speaker and he's going to talk about his PhD work. Getting to know Pastor Smith, PhD studies and church translation work.
[00:23:13] That should be really good. So that's this Tuesday.
[00:23:17] I hope you all can make it. We've got a voters meeting coming up next Sunday, February 8, after the late service packets are available, they were emailed out, so you've got that. Also February 8th is going to be our deadline for nominations for the call committee.
[00:23:32] So that's there. The harpsichord is here. Now we have two instrument changes. Number one, the organ is getting a lung transplant. A couple of weeks ago the blower pump on the organ went kaput. So it's at the repair shop. So no organ this Sunday or next Sunday, but just in time. A harpsichord. I don't think we were doing the whole service on the harpsichord, but the harpsichord showed up. If you're in Church about 10 minutes early. We're going to dedicate this guy and then it'll be part of the pre service music and some of the other stuff. It's really pretty. I'll have to confess to you, as I confess to Jonathan, as he. Well, as he gave his gentle Jonathan scowl at me, that I'm not the biggest fan of the harpsichord. It sounds too to me, but boy, he got playing on this guy and it is beautiful in person. And not only does it sound beautiful, so I'm a convert now. I've changed my mind. It has been changed.
[00:24:36] Turn me O harpsichord, and I will be turned. To quote Psalm 80. I think this is exactly what it says.
[00:24:42] But it has a beautiful painting by Steve Schwoller, who painted this Rocky. Sorry, this. Well, it's a rocky outcrop cropping. It's a hill country landscape, which is beautiful.
[00:24:55] And then you can look on the soundboard and it has a Luther seal and a verse that goes along there. Jonathan thinks this is the only harpsichord with a Luther seal on it in existence. We can.
[00:25:08] That's pretty cool. So that's. So make sure to check that out. That's really great. And Sunday school's gonna. We're gonna jump back into the Augsburg Confession and. And keep plugging away at that this week as well. All right, we'll see you soon. Drive safe. God's peace be with you. That's Sunday drive to church.