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[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. It's the Drive to Church podcast for the first Sunday in Lent. Today's March 9, the year of our Lord 2025, first Sunday in Lent, which means, how do we say the first Sunday in Lent? Because it's not a Sunday of Lent because the Sundays are exempted. I remember this old rule that Lent is 40 days, but if you add up all the days from Ash Wednesday to easter, it's like 47 days, because Sundays excluded. Who did the math? I don't know. Those old theologians I didn't think were that good at math, but they sorted this out, and as is traditional. Oh, there's a lot of exciting things, actually, just to think about, the change into the season of Lent and some exciting things here. The first is that we switched on Wednesday night already, and this will be the case going through Lent and Easter and then forward. I'll explain it to you a little bit. From divine service setting one to divine service setting three, what's sometimes called the common service. It's the old TLH, page 15, that has the canticles that we're so familiar with, the Kyrie and the Gloria and all these. Now, we won't be singing the Gloria because it's Lent. So we go straight from the Kyrie to the Salutation and Collect of the Day.
[00:01:16] We drop the Alleluia verse, and we have the Verse of the Day. So there's a number of Lenten exemptions. But Jonathan and I, together with the elders, were talking about, well, here's something I noticed. Let me take you two steps back here. Whenever I go to visit the members who are in the hospital or who are homebound or whatever, there's about a dozen hymns that we can sing with no hymnal at all. And one of those collections of hymns that we can almost always sing together is the hymns from Divine Service Setting three, the Common Service. Lord have mercy upon us.
[00:01:58] Glory to be to God on high. People can just jump right in, O Christ, thou Lamb of God or Lord, now let us thou thy servant. It's an amazing sort of thing. It's this corpus of hymnody that comes from the liturgy. And what I want to make sure is that we all have that. You have that.
[00:02:22] So that. Now, look, you might not be that old driving to church, you know, you're probably 27, all of you, and it's going to be a long time before you're homebound and a long time before you're on your deathbed, God granted. But I want all of us to be able to sing all of these hymns whenever we're homebound, whenever we're on the hospital bed, whenever we're.
[00:02:46] Whenever we're stuck in traffic because our car ran out of gas and we're stranded, or whenever we're. Whatever, whenever we're isolated and by ourselves. I want us to have all of these hymns.
[00:02:58] So you're going to notice that at least for the next few years, we're going to have Divine Service Setting three as our base liturgy. So it's going to be normally the service that we have all the way through. We'll have it through Easter, through the Common Service, all the way through the summer. We'll have maybe eight weeks where we'll go to Divine Service Setting four. During the end of the summer, we'll have some Divine Service Setting five. When it's at Reformation time in October, we're going to have Divine Service Setting one when we have feast days and special days. But it's basically going to be Divine Service Setting three. And my hope and prayer and challenge for all of you is that you can do these. You can do the whole service without even opening your hymnal. The only thing you should need your hymnal for is the psalm and the hymns and all of the other parts of the service you can do simply from memory. So take that as a challenge. Maybe today, don't put away the hymnal. You can use the hymnal today to get through it. But then as the weeks go forward, maybe put your ribbon in the hymnal and try to sing the parts of the service that we're singing without looking. And this is also true for things like the Nicene Creed, to try to confess the Nicene Creed without looking so that we can start to memorize these things and use the hymnal less and less because it becomes part of us, this deep on our hearts imprinted place. I heard one time that you can see the wagon ruts from the Western Trail, the Oregon Trail. You can see those wagon ruts from space. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's what the liturgy should be like on our heart.
[00:04:38] It should just be kind of carved deep into our hearts. I remember my friend, Pastor Ketchmayer. I've told you this story. He fell off a ladder a few years back, busted his elbow in a bunch of places. He said it was the worst pain that he ever had in his whole life. And he couldn't think of what else to do except for to sing the liturgy. And he sang the Common service over and over and over and over. He even was singing the words of institution and the Lord's Prayer all the way through, over and over and over again. And that was the way that he in some ways, cared for himself while he was in such fantastic pain. I want us to have those tools. Okay, enough of that. Okay. The collect is. It's interesting, the parallel that we have for the 40 days is we have the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, and we have the 40 days of Jesus tempted in the wilderness. We have the 40 days of rain for Noah's flood, and we have the 40 days of Lent. So there's a lot of 40 day time periods in the Bible, but those are the big 40. 40 years. 40 days. 40 days. This collect for today captures that idea that just like the people were in the wilderness for 40 years and Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days, we're now walking through our wilderness way and we're asking the Lord to be with us the midst of it. So let's pray.
[00:06:02] O Lord God, you led your ancient people through the wilderness and brought them to the promised land. Guide the people of your church that following our Savior, we may walk through the wilderness of this world toward the glory of the world to come, through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
[00:06:25] That prayer really captures this idea. And this has been kind of all the way through that.
[00:06:30] The wilderness wandering is a picture of this life. And you come into the saving work of the wilderness wandering through baptism. That's the miracle of passing through the Red Sea. And then you wander. And then when you cross the Jordan, that's when you go into the promised land. That's when you go into eternal life. Of course, in the biblical history, that's when their problems really got started. So it kind of breaks down, but it's a beautiful picture. We're in the wilderness, but the Lord is with us, wandering with us. Our entrance psalm, and I think this is always an interesting Choice. It's Psalm 91. And the reason it's so interesting is because the first Sunday of Lent, really, the first few weeks of Lent focus on spiritual warfare. And the first Sunday is so important because it's the Jesus temptation in the wilderness. So every year, the first Sunday of Lent is Temptation in the Wilderness Sunday. And we have it from Luke, these threefold temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. And one of those temptations is that the devil takes Jesus to the top of the temple and says, jump Off. And he quotes Psalm 91. Well, that's our psalm. And we're going to sing the words that the devil quotes to Jesus to try to tempt him to jump off the top of the temple. But it's a beautiful psalm. It was probably the psalm that we leaned on most during COVID times because it has to do with plague and protection. It's a beautiful one. It starts out, he who dwells in the shelter of the most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. That's beautiful. I will say to the Lord, my refuge and fortress, my God in whom I trust, he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He'll cover you with his pinions. That means wings. I know that because I looked it up. It's not. I didn't. I didn't naturally know what pinions was. That was a. What's a pinyon? I'm too. What am I? I'm too urban. Under his wings you'll find refuge. His faithfulness is a shield and buckler.
[00:08:29] The pestilence that stalks in darkness. You're not going to be afraid. You're not going to be afraid of this destruction that wastes at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, 10,000 by your right hand, but it won't come near you. Look with your eyes and see the recompense of the wicked. And then here's where it comes the verse that the devil uses, verse 11 and 12. For he will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. And then. And this is why I think the devil was so interested in this passage. It says, you will tread on the lion and the adder, the young lion and the serpent you will trample underfoot.
[00:09:10] That's a sermon from Genesis 3:15.
[00:09:13] The heel of the seed will crush the head of the serpent. And this is what it's talking about. So when it says lion and adder and lion and serpent, there we should be thinking that here's the. This is talking about the foot of the one who's going to crush the devil. And it says, he won't let your foot.
[00:09:31] How does it say it strike against a stone?
[00:09:34] Now here's the thing that we need to do. So here's this psalm, beautiful psalm of the Lord's promised protection and deliverance. We say, well, how is it that the devil knows this psalm so well and uses it to try to trick Jesus how does he misuse the psalm? And when we compare what the Psalm says with what the devil says, you'll notice that he leaves out one of the most important parts. So let me read you from. I'll go over to the Gospel lesson, Luke, chapter four, and I'll give you how the devil quotes it. And then I'll go back to the text and see if you can see what he leaves out. If you're the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. For it's written, he will command his angels concerning you, to guard you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
[00:10:23] Now let me read the text from the Psalm. For he will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone. Did you notice what was missing? The Psalm has. And in all your ways.
[00:10:40] And I remember reading Luther on this. The reason why Luther says this is such a deception is that the Lord has not promised to protect us in doing whatever we want to do. You know, bungee cord without a bungee, skydive without a parachute.
[00:10:59] Plunge into the water and you don't know how to swim.
[00:11:04] It's not in whatever ways you want to go, but in all your ways refers to the callings that the Lord has given to us in our vocation.
[00:11:12] When we do the work of our vocation. The Lord has promised to be with us and to protect us and to deliver us from death or through death, either way.
[00:11:23] And that's the promise. So the devil tries to get Jesus to misuse this promise of protection and do something crazy.
[00:11:32] Jump off the top of the tabernacle. Well, what good does that do? Jesus responds, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. That's not my calling. My calling is not to jump off of cliffs or towers. My calling is to die on the cross and save the world. So anyway, I think it's great that when we. So just think about this. When we get to church and after confession, absolution, you stand up and you're singing this Psalm 91. Not only are you rejoicing in the promises of this psalm, but you're saying to the devil, hey, you can't have it.
[00:12:06] You can't take the scripture from us. We're not going to avoid singing and praying Psalm 91 because the devil tried to misuse it to tempt Jesus. No, we still have it. It's ours. Devil. So this is so good. Okay, Deuteronomy 26, 1:11 is our old Testament lesson. And it's this creed that the people are supposed to offer when they bring their tithes, their first fruits. The thing that I think, if you want to get a.
[00:12:34] I don't exactly have the through line for all of the texts. I do not know. I'll confess to you, I do not know how Deuteronomy 26 and Romans 10 and Luke 4 are related to one another.
[00:12:46] I thought about it a little bit. I haven't gotten there yet. Maybe I will by tomorrow. It doesn't necessarily matter. Each text sort of stands on its own and has this sense of God our protector. Maybe that's it. God is our Savior. We can't save ourselves, but our help comes from the Lord.
[00:13:03] But this Deuteronomy text is really important.
[00:13:07] Remember, Deuteronomy is a. There's this great long sermon by Moses to the second generation, to all the people who are going to go into the Promised Land. Now, big picture is that everybody who was of military age, who was an adult basically, who came out of Egypt, died in the wilderness. So that everybody who's going into the Promised Land are people who were either children during the crossing of the Red Sea and the ten plagues in Egypt and the giving of the law at Mount Sinai. They were either children or they weren't even born yet. So the whole generation has switched over. And now Moses is preaching to this second generation about all the things that the Lord has done and all the things the Lord has instituted. And it's his last sermon. Because Moses is not going to go into the Promised Land with them. He's also going to die in the wilderness. We had that last week that Moses had to die and be buried by the Lord himself on the other side of the Jordan. He didn't cross over. It was just Caleb and especially Joshua who are going to lead the people into the Promised Land and give them all that God promised. But there's this second generation now that Moses is preaching to.
[00:14:17] And so he's kind of going through all of the things that he went through before Mount Sinai. But that was 40 years ago. And it's a totally different set of people. That's why the text is called Deuteronomos. Deutero means second, and Nomos means law. And it's not a second law. It's just the second giving of the law. And Moses sermon on the law. Now in this text, he's talking about the giving of the tithe. So the Lord's going to give you the land and when he gives you the land, he's going to pick a place to live. He's going to put the tabernacle in a place, and that's Shiloh and Gibeah and finally Jerusalem. So the Lord's going to pick a place. You got to go to that place with your first fruits, and you're going to gather up your first part of your harvest in a basket. Whatever it is, does it list it here? It's like wheat or fruit or anything that when you have your first fruits, you gather it up in a basket and you bring it to the Levites, the priests who are at the altar. And then you make this confession. It's an amazing thing. Starting at verse five. A wandering Aramean was my father.
[00:15:26] This is the creed that they're supposed to recite when they're offering the first fruits of the land.
[00:15:34] It's amazing to think of all the Israelites coming together to do this. We are there and we confess the Nicene Creed. I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. We confess this that the Jewish people would have brought these baskets of fruit into the altar and they would have confessed this. And here the confession is a. Is a recitation of all that the Lord has done. A wandering Aramean was my father. That could refer to Abraham or Isaac, but probably to Jacob, to Israel. He went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number. Jacob Joseph. There he became a nation great, mighty and populous. The Egyptians treated us harshly. So it went from them to us, treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers. And the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil and our oppression. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground which you obey, Lord, have given me.
[00:16:52] That's the confession. Notice how it's.
[00:16:56] It's a beautiful thing. Actually. There's so much here that the people are to say, hey, that sojourn into Egypt, that was my sojourn. That affliction that was on the fathers, that was my affliction. That prayer of my parents and grandparents, that was my prayer. And that deliverance that the Lord did in the previous generation, that also belongs to me. And now the promise has been fulfilled. And here I Am giving thanks.
[00:17:21] You shut down the basket before the Lord. Worship before the Lord. Rejoice in all the good that the Lord your God has given you and your house, you and the Levite and the sojourner who is among you. Amazing. Now, if you want, for parents while we're reading the scripture, you can have the kids circle all the times it talks about what God is giving or given or give. I count six times in this text that it talks about what God has given. So that's a good thing to listen for, because this is what it's all about. The Lord is the one who's done this. He's given us release. He's given us deliverance. He's given us the land. He's given us the first fruits. Everything that we have is given from God.
[00:18:02] Our gradual is Hebrews 12:2, a beautiful text which we'll sing throughout Lent. It's one of these settings that Jonathan did. It's beautiful. Oh, come, let's. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising its shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. So that after Hebrews goes through all the great cloud of witnesses which we're surrounded by all the great fathers of faith who are cheering us on, we have above all else, Jesus, the founder and perfecter, the author and the finisher, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the completion of our faith, who, because of the joy that was in front of him, endured the cross. This is. It's an amazing thing that it talks about how Jesus despised the shame of the cross.
[00:18:51] Jesus did not like the cross. He, the cross, especially the shame of it, the mockery, the spit on the face, the beard tearing, the jeering of the crowds wagging their heads. He trusted in God, let God deliver him. He saved others, save himself. All that kind of shame of the cross.
[00:19:11] He despised it, but he endured it for the joy set before him. And that joy is you, your salvation.
[00:19:19] Romans 10 is a beautiful passage. We're going to hear 8 through 13. In fact, it says 8B. You'll notice in your bulletin, Romans 10, 8B to 13. That means we start halfway through verse 8. So if you see that like 8B or 8C or 8D or 8 whatever, that means that we've divided the verse up into so many parts and we've started at the first part or second part or third part or whatever. So 8B 13, 8B to 13. The word is near to you. This is after Paul says, hey, don't try to say, where's the Word? I got to go up to heaven to find it. I got to go down to the grave to bring it up from the dead. No, the Word is near you.
[00:20:01] The words in your mouth and your heart, the word of faith that we proclaim. Because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified. Beautiful. With the mouth one confesses and is saved. For Scripture says everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame. There's no distinction between Jew and Greek. The same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call upon him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. That's Joel, chapter two, quoted by Peter in his Pentecost sermon. All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. And that becomes a theme of the Book of Acts. And now I've got the thing that's running through all these texts. I see it because I wonder if this is what the lectionary guys had the idea, because in the temptation of Jesus, the devil's going to show him all the nations. It's one of the unique things about some of the details that Luke gives us about the temptation. The devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to you, I will give all this authority and their glory, for it's been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then worship me, it will be yours. So, and this has to do with the nations, not just the Jews, but also the Gentiles. And that's the same thing that Paul is emphasizing in Romans, chapter 10. There's no distinction between Jew and Greek. And it's the same thing that's highlighted by Moses in the very last words of what he said. It's to you and the Levite and the Sojourner who's among you. In other words, it's not just for the children of Abraham, but even the stranger who's not of Jacob can say, a wandering Aramean was my father.
[00:21:49] That is the through line of these texts. It's kind of a sub point of each of the texts, but it's what connects them all. I'm guessing that's what it is. All right, so the Romans text goes on to say, how will they call on him who they have not heard and how will they hear of him if they haven't been preached to? And how will they preach unless they are sent?
[00:22:12] And so it is written, how beautiful are the feet of him who proclaims good news. And then he goes on to say, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, so that the Word near to us in our hearts and on our lips is brought to us by the Holy Spirit. And faith comes from hearing that word and believing that word. This whole text is absolutely beautiful.
[00:22:38] Okay, the verse of the day. Oh, here's an interesting thing to note. Normally we have the alleluia verse between the Epistle and the Gospel. But because we've kind of hibernating our alleluias, we've put them in the basement for a little while.
[00:22:58] We've kind of put them away until Easter. We don't have the alleluia verse. We just have the verse. Sometimes the old hymnal called it the tract to indicate that it wasn't the Hallelujah verse. Just a verse, but it's a Beautiful one. Ephesians 6:11. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.
[00:23:25] So that's tying into this idea of spiritual warfare. And speaking of spiritual warfare, that's what happens in Luke chapter four. Now, I've mentioned it probably ten times already, but it's the temptation of Jesus in the will wilderness that is our focus today. Just a couple of things, because I'll preach on this. You have to preach on this. But a couple of things that might not get mentioned in the sermon to help us. Number one, it's straight after the baptism that the Holy Spirit is driven into the wilderness for 40 days. In fact, Luke says it, he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. He ate nothing, so he fasted. He was hungry because he's. He's a man. And the devil connects his temptation to his baptism. In baptism, the Lord said, you are my beloved Son. Here the devil says, if you are the Son of God, that's verse three. Eat this stone. Make this stone become bread. If you are the Son of God, worship me. If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here.
[00:24:23] So the devil's trying to cause him to doubt the promise.
[00:24:27] But the devil is resisted by Jesus. From Deuteronomy.
[00:24:34] You shall not live by bread alone. Deuteronomy 8. You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. Deuteronomy 6:13. Also Deuteronomy 10:20. And then you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Deuteronomy 6:16.
[00:24:50] Now, it's not at all obvious that Jesus would use simply the book of Deuteronomy to repel the devil in the wilderness.
[00:25:03] Thinking about this, maybe this will end up in the sermon. I mean, because Jesus could have used Genesis or Exodus or any of the Psalms or Isaiah or any of the prophets. There's a lot of places that the Lord could have drawn instruction and strength for repelling the devil, but he chose Deuteronomy.
[00:25:25] And maybe it's this what we talked about before, how Moses is here preaching for the people who are getting ready to leave the wilderness and go into the promised land.
[00:25:37] And it could be that when we say that Jesus was led into the wilderness, we assume that he was in the wilderness of Judea, if you look at the promised land. So here's. If you imagine the Dead Sea kind of right in the middle, and the Jordan river flows north and south, up and down, straight into the Dead Sea, and right where the Jordan river flows into the Dead Sea, if you go north, if you go up and left, so north and west, probably 30 miles or 20 miles, you get to Jericho on the plains, and then straight west of Jericho is this mountainous wilderness that eventually gets you to Jerusalem. There's this big wilderness that's there. And we assume that that's where Jesus was led by the devil to be tempted. But it could just as well have been, I'm thinking about this right now, that the Holy Spirit led him east over towards Mount Nebo where Moses was preaching this thing.
[00:26:36] So Jesus is not far from where Deuteronomy was originally preached.
[00:26:41] And he's leaning into this text as his strength to resist the devil. Now a couple of things occur to us then, and the sermon will have to be about this is that, number one, Jesus is showing us how to repel the devil. And that is not with our own strength, but with the wisdom of the Lord's word. But if this were just the main thing, if Jesus were just showing us how to resist the devil, this would not be comforting because we fail. And so it's. The main thing is that Jesus is standing now in the wilderness where Adam and Eve fell in the garden. So where Adam and Eve could not resist the devil, Jesus does. There's a parallel. I remember reading this. I had a Milton class. Can you guys believe it? I had a whole class on John Milton. And his major big, huge epic poem is Paradise Lost, which is an epic 12 book poem about the temptation of Adam and Eve and how they failed. It's beautiful, wonderful. Some of the theology is a little bit questionable, but not that bad. It's reformed, but it's an amazing piece of work. Well, Milton also wrote a little poem. It's a third, it's three or four books called Paradise Regained about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.
[00:28:00] So what Adam and Eve lost when they fell in the garden was regained when Jesus stood in the wilderness. At least the regaining of paradise was begun and was completed when he died at last on the cross.
[00:28:15] There's one other thing that is good for us to note about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, and that is that he does not use his divine strength so that he is in this temptation, becoming sympathetic with us.
[00:28:37] He's enduring all that we endure. Hebrews talks about how he was tempted like us in all things, except without sin, and that being tempted makes him able to sympathize with us in our weakness. That's the conclusion that Hebrews is going to draw also. And I think maybe this is nice to think about how Jesus just has the book of Deuteronomy. It's like he has a little pocket Bible that just has Deuteronomy and he uses it. And that's this idea that one little word will fell him. And that, dear friends, is our hymn of the day. A mighty fortress Always lent one has a mighty fortress in it. And it's because that's our great spiritual warfare. Him. A mighty fortress is our God. And it's the picture of Psalm 46 where we're standing in the city where God dwells with us and he fights for us. And he leaves and he's fighting on the plane. He says, you just stand there and watch me, and I'm going to fight for you. And he overthrows the devil. One little word can fell him. Whew.
[00:29:45] It's beautiful. So we'll stand and sing A Mighty Fortress together and rejoice that it's not our job to overthrow the devil. Jesus has done it already, and we simply rejoice in that great victory.
[00:30:00] I haven't looked at how long this is. Oh, my goodness. 30 minutes again.
[00:30:05] Yeesh. I should probably watch my time when I do these things. Sorry it took so long. Hopefully you guys are at church. We'll see you in a few minutes. God's peace be with.