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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning St. Paul Lutheran Church. It's Pastor Wolf Muller and this is the Sunday drive to church for the 9th Sunday after Pentecost, July 21, 2024. If that's the day that it is today, when you're listening, you're listening to the right podcast. This is the we're working through these summer months and hearing about Jesus and the miracles he performs. And especially today we're in Mark and we hear of the feeding of the 5000 mark, chapter six, verses 30 to 44. And from that comes a lot of the themes of the glorious texts that we have today. It's really great. But one of the things that it reminds us is that while we know that the Lord's kingdom is a spiritual kingdom, Jesus says, my kingdom is not of this world. His is a spiritual kingdom. And yet he does also provide for all that we need for this life as well as the life to come, all of our bodily needs. And the prayer today, the collect captures that beautifully. So we'll pray that and then dive into the text. I'm looking by the way, at the front of the bulletin and we've been having these.
[00:01:07] Our stained glass is so beautiful. Jonathan's been putting the stained glass on the COVID It's the Isaiah window, the rose of Sharon that's on there today. Here's Christ coming up, rising up, the Cairo rising up out of a rose. It's beautiful. Well, here's the prayer. Heavenly Father, though we do not deserve your goodness, still you provide for all our needs of body and soul.
[00:01:31] Grant us your holy spirit that we may acknowledge your gifts, give thanks for all your benefits, and serve you in willing obedience through Jesus Christ, your son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
[00:01:49] I think that threefold gift of the Holy Spirit that this prayer asks for matches up really well with what I hope we'll get to in Sunday school today. From Hebrews, chapter ten. Let us continue, let us stand firm, let us encourage one another. It says, so give us your holy spirit so that one, we may acknowledge your gifts. Oh wow, that's a gift from God. Number two, give thanks for all your benefits. So acknowledge the gift, thank God for the gift. And then three, serve God in willing obedience. Out of thankfulness grows service.
[00:02:18] It's a beautiful prayer. Okay, I'm looking at the text on the inside. We have for the psalm, the unbeatable, best of all psalms.
[00:02:31] You guys think I'm going to say psalm 25, don't you? Or psalm 27? No, psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures. I think it's especially from Mark, chapter six because there's so many kind of illusions to Christ being the good shepherd.
[00:02:54] In fact, it says verse 34. He went ashore and saw a great crowd. He had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. He began to teach them.
[00:03:05] And then later, verse 39, he commanded them to sit down in groups on the green grass.
[00:03:12] I think that mark is the only one who says green grass. I better. I'm gonna check on that. Confirmed. All right, I'll read it to you. Did you know that the feeding of the 5000 is one of the very few miracles that's in all four gospels? There's a lot of miracles that are in Matthew, Mark, Luke. But most of those miracles are not in John. But the feeding of the 5000 is in John. Especially because in John it sets up the bread of life discourse so beautifully. Okay, so here, how about this? Matthew 1418, Jesus says, bring them here to me. And he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass.
[00:03:51] And then Luke 914 there were about 5000 men. And he said to his disciples make them sit down in companies. Each about 50. And they did so and they made them all sit down. And then in John it says, this is John, chapter six, verse 910. Jesus said, make the people sit down. Now there was much grass in the place so the men sat down in number about 5000. Just Mark who says he commanded them to sit down by companies upon the green grass. And that green grass is, mark is saying, he's like, don't forget psalm 23. So when we say psalm 23, the Lord is my shepherd. Who's that lord? It's Jesus. He's the one who leads us in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Now I noticed something about psalm 23 maybe a year ago.
[00:04:45] I don't know how many thousands and thousands of times I had prayed psalm 23 myself with people who are sick who are suffering at the deathbed, at funerals. It's so beautiful. But I missed this until about a year ago. Is that the who is talking to whom changes in the middle of the psalm. Remember that's one of the three main questions that we ask when we're, when we're studying and reading and praying the psalm.
[00:05:14] What's the structure? What's the picture? Who's talking to whom? And it starts out as a prayer. Sorry, it starts out as a sermon. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures you can see the who's talking to whom from the pronouns he, the Lord. He. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. All of a sudden, it turns from talking about God to talking to God. And that turn happens whenever David is in the valley of the shadow of death. That's something amazing. Amazing there that our suffering excites our prayers, our affliction turns our attention to God. Our as death draws near, our eyes are lifted up to the hills where our help comes from. So great, I will dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.
[00:06:16] This is this beauty of this psalm. Oh, wait, I was quoting psalm 27.
[00:06:24] I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. It says Olam, psalm 23.
[00:06:30] So this is absolutely beautiful psalm. And we know now that when we pray it, we're praying it to Jesus. Now, this shepherd theme is also tapped into by our Jeremiah text, Jeremiah 23, which is one of the most important chapters in the Old Testament. And in Jeremiah, it's that counsel of the Lord chapter where it's talking about how the false prophets have not stood in the counsel of the Lord. But this is the beginning of the chapter, which has really two sections, two paragraphs and two points. The first is Jeremiah's woeing the false prophets. And he says this, he calls the false prophets shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep. Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture. So the true shepherd gathers the sheep, protects the sheep, provides for the sheep. The false shepherd abuses the sheep, harms the sheep, hurts the sheep, afflicts the sheep, etcetera. And here the shepherds are the rulers of the people. When the Lord talks about the shepherds in the old Testament, he's talking about the prophets. Yes, but he's also, and most especially talking about the priests and the kings, those who rule and those who preach.
[00:07:50] And they should be caring for the people, protecting the people, but they're not. And the Lord is angry with that. There's a judgment that matches our responsibility.
[00:08:03] But then, and this reminds us of Ezekiel 34 and all these places where the Lord goes after the false shepherds.
[00:08:11] The Lord promises to provide himself as the good shepherd. And it switches pictures. It switches from the picture of the flock to the picture of the vine. But the idea is there. So verse five is a beautiful prophetic passage. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is his name. Now that picture of Israel as a tree or as a vine runs all throughout the prophetic preaching and the kind of astonishing preaching is that the Lord is going to cut down that tree to a stump. But out of the side of the stump there's going to be a shoot that'll come out of the side. You guys know this, like if you cut down a tree, you gotta dig out the stump or burn out the stump or whatever. Because if you don't, then out of the roots a little branch will grow and the tree will grow back. Well, that's the picture that the Lord has given. And it's a beautiful law, gospel picture, because the people were there in their pride saying, we can do whatever we want because God has promised that this tree, the Messiah, will come from this tree. Well, the Lord says the Messiah is going to come from the stump of the tree. So I'm going to cut you down and still keep my promise that the branch will be there.
[00:09:41] So that righteous branch promise, it's tapping into the shoot from the stump of Jesse that is preached already back in Isaiah, remembering that Isaiah was 150 years before Jeremiah. Now in Jeremiah, the Babylonians have come, the tree's been cut down, he's in exile, but the branch will come out of it. And then it says, this is the name that he will be called. The Lord is our righteousness.
[00:10:10] If you.
[00:10:12] I think that you can translate that text better.
[00:10:16] Not saying the Lord is our righteousness, but just saying the Lord our righteousness.
[00:10:24] So the name of the branch, the name of Jesus is the Lord of our righteousness, which again, is a beautiful picture. He leads us in the paths of righteousness. This righteousness that's there is not our righteousness. He is our righteousness. Christ is our righteousness. We are righteous not because of what we've done or accomplished, but because of all that Christ has done and accomplished in his life and his death and his resurrection.
[00:10:57] Just glorious. In fact, I can't think of a better thing to say right after that than what we'll say, oh, the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. This beautiful doxology from romans eleven. How unsearchable are his judgments, how inscrutable his ways. That's. I don't know if you guys know that Jonathan is the one who's arranged all these graduals.
[00:11:22] So that's Jonathan's arrangement. I think it's great. For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
[00:11:36] It's really good to the gospel skipping the epistle because it's off topic, but we'll come back to it. We are talking about the feeding of the 5000.
[00:11:45] This is. I always think this is a bit of a test, this text, because as a preacher I think I read the text and my instinct is to say how does this teach us how the Lord provides for us in eternal life? The feeding of the 5000 is a picture of we're also in the wilderness and the Lord has given us his word. We're in these difficult times and the Lord has provided his wisdom. In other words, there's a danger to move right away to the provision of spiritual gifts and eternal life.
[00:12:22] And I think that's wrong. I mean, it's not totally wrong. But the problem is that the Lord wants us to know that he also gives daily bread.
[00:12:34] That when we're in the wilderness he provides for us five loaves and two fish. It doesn't matter. He can give us what we need so that we trust in the Lord also for food and drink and clothing and shoes and house and home, land, animals and all these things, all the gifts of creation.
[00:12:57] There's this temptation to see Jesus as the one who provides all my spiritual gifts, but I'm the one that has to provide for all of my earthly gifts. Now it's true that the Lord himself has told us to work hard. And Paul says to the one who doesn't work, he shouldn't eat. So that there's a way that the Lord answers our prayer for daily bread by the alarm clock and the paycheck and all this other stuff. But it's from the hands of God. It's Jesus who gives us what we need. And if he wants us to be in the wilderness, then he'll make it rain bread.
[00:13:31] So before it's a.
[00:13:35] Before it's encouraging, before it's assuring us of the promises of eternal life, it's assuring us of the promises of this temporal life beautifully. That all these things come from the hand of Jesus. You open your hands and satisfy the desires of every living thing. That's Jesus who does that. And to him we pray. We sing, by the way, to kind of confirm this, the hymn of the week. The church is one foundation, Jesus Christ our Lord, that's also built on the epistle lesson, she is his new creation. By water and the word from heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride. With his own blood he bought her, and for her life he died. The last stanza, she on earth has union with God, the three in one, and mystic, sweet communion with those whose rest is one.
[00:14:30] That language of mystic, sweet communion, that's technical, theological language that gets into the hymn.
[00:14:39] In fact, when we talk about union in the church, there's three ways we can talk about it. We talk about personal union and sacramental union and mystical union.
[00:14:50] Personal union is the union of the two natures in Christ, the divine and the human nature, personally united in the person of Jesus. Personal union. Sacramental union is the language that the theologians use to talk about the union of the body of Christ with the bread and the blood of Christ with the wine. And it's just a term to reference that which we can't understand, that Jesus truly puts his body and his blood with the bread and wine. Sacramento Union, mystical union. If you've heard that language before, that's the way of referring to the union of Christ and his church. So we participate in that mystical union. All christians are united to Christ individually and as a congregation or as a church, so that Christ dwells in our heart by faith. We are in Christ. There's that union that's there. It's mystical, mystic, sweet communion that we have with Jesus.
[00:15:48] Okay? The last thing which we haven't covered is the epistle. We're continuing to read through Ephesians. And here's the problem. It's just. It's too much. Maybe this is one of the good reasons why we have the Sunday drive to church, because, like, every single phrase in this could be a sermon and a bible class. It's unbelievable how when Paul writes how. How thick the writing is, it's like my dad used to get this jerky from what was the jerky place called in Johnson City. And it was the toughest jerky. And you just have a little, and you chew on it and chew on it. That's how.
[00:16:33] That's how this, Paul's writings are. It's so thick.
[00:16:40] All right, so maybe just a couple of things.
[00:16:42] The basic idea, Ephesians 211 22, is Paul's telling them, hey, don't forget how it used to be. He calls them to remember how they were before they heard the gospel. Remember at one time, you gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what's called the circumcision, which is made of flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the Commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of the promise. And how was that life before you heard the gospel? He says, having no hope and without God in the world, but now. So remember how it used to be.
[00:17:25] Paul is reminding us that if we are without God, without the gospel, we are without hope. That means, can you? This is such an amazing, because we as christians have so much hope that we forget that we are the only ones with hope.
[00:17:42] If you're not a Christian, you are hopeless. By definition, hopeless. You do not have hope. Maybe you have hope for tomorrow, like maybe the weather will be nice tomorrow, or maybe my favorite team will win something, or maybe I'll get rich or whatever. You might have hope for tomorrow, but not really, because you don't know if you have tomorrow, but your horizon of hope extends only until your last breath, and then it's gone.
[00:18:06] What's next? There is no hope.
[00:18:11] We really need to remember that because we are sent into the world as purveyors of hope, into a dark and hopeless world. The Lord sends us with the hope of forgiveness and open heaven and the resurrection of the body and the new heaven and the new earth, where the righteous will dwell forever before the Lord in his glory. And that hope lifts us up, and that hope is the anchor of our soul. That hope is what wraps us to the heavenly throne. That hope pulls us forward. And that hope is how the Lord Jesus is. That's the net that he's using to gather up all people. So he says, remember how it was before you knew the gospel? You didn't have any hope. And it's good for us to remember that our neighbors and friends who do not know Christ also have no hope. And he says, but now in Christ Jesus, you are far off, you're near.
[00:19:00] He's our peace. He's made both of us one. He's talking about how in Christ the Jew and the Gentile are brought together in the church.
[00:19:12] This is against dispensationalism, which wants God to have two different people, Israel and the church. No, the two are brought together.
[00:19:21] He broke down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility. He abolished the law of commandments and ordinances that he might create in himself one new man out of the two. So making peace, reconciling us both to God and one body through the cross, through him you have we both, Jew and Gentile, have access in one spirit to the Father that will also come into our Bible class, this gift of access that we have, access to God, that we can stand before him in glory. So amazing. And your fellow citizens with the saints, members of the household of God, so that God is the king and we are his people. God is the father, and we are his children. God is the foundation, and we are the temple.
[00:20:00] God is the vine, and we are the branches. God is the shepherd and we are the sheep. All of these, we are bound together, he says, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself is the chief cornerstone in whom the whole structure, joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.
[00:20:18] So in him, you are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit, so that through the preaching of the gospel and the giving out of the hope, the forgiveness of sins, the Lord is calling people into his church. And each person in his church, you and I, and all the people, we're like the bricks that he's building for his house on earth, so that the spirit dwells in the church.
[00:20:44] Whew. What a text. The church is one foundation. That's what we sing.
[00:20:49] All right. Maybe it's also to notice when Paul's calling us to remember how it was and think of how it is now. He's calling us to remember that being a Christian is being changed. We are not born christians. I've heard people say this, I was born a Lutheran, or I remember someone told me I was a Lutheran in the womb.
[00:21:09] I guess it's possible, like John the Baptist. But we want us to remember that we're born sinners and we're reborn as Christian, so that the life that we know, even if it was given to us when we were babies by the gift of baptism, it is a new life.
[00:21:24] And even if we can't remember the old life, we remember it in some ways by faith. We remember how it is to be in the flesh with a no hope, and that recollection is healthy for us. It also is exciting to see people who are coming to church becoming christians, being called out of darkness into light. And they don't have to remember that much. They just think back to, like, yesterday or how it was two weeks ago. And it's good for the rest of us to have these new christians all around us in church, because it reminds us that being a Christian is. Is being a new creation, a new creature, that the Lord has remade us and given us a new birth from heaven.
[00:22:05] So that is all at work here in this text. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. All right, Bible class is Hebrews chapter ten, we're in this. Paul is finishing his teaching about how Christ is our liturgist and the high priest, and now he's the high priest in the heavenly tabernacle. And now the exhortations are coming to us in there at the end of Hebrews chapter ten. So if you can join us for that, that'd be really wonderful. I think that's all. We'll see you in just a couple of minutes.
[00:22:37] Safe driving. God's peace be with.
