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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Good morning, St. Paul Lutheran Church. Pastor Wolf Mueller here. This is the Sunday drive to Church for August 24, the year of our Lord 2025, St. Bartholomew's Day. Let's pray. Almighty God, your son, Jesus Christ chose Bartholomew to be an apostle to preach the blessed gospel.
[00:00:17] Grant that your church may love what he believed and preach what he taught through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
[00:00:27] Amen.
[00:00:29] I'll tell you a little story.
[00:00:31] Last week I jumped in the car with Kerry to drive down to JDLC after St. Paul Deaf Church. And on the radio was my own voice, this particular podcast.
[00:00:44] And I said, you're still listening to this guy. And Kerry said in loving, very gentle, kind tones, you talk too much. Okay, so here's what I want to try. I want to try the Sunday drive home brief.
[00:00:56] I want to cover everything really quick. Well, okay. As really quick as I can manage. And then the deep dive for you guys driving in from the hinterlands.
[00:01:08] Let's try it this year. By the way, I don't know exactly what year it is. Well, in the. No, it's year. I think it's year E in the church cycle. But I can't tell if it's the leap year E or whatever, how this goes. But it just so happens that this year is one of those years where we're going to have a lot of saints days that are going to fall on Sundays. So there's going to be a lot of swapping over to red for the rest of the year. Really? I think that happens in September a couple of times and then in November a couple of times.
[00:01:44] These saints days are fixed feasts. And so it's every seven years that you'll get them on a Sunday. But for whatever reason, this year is a bunch of them, the way that they're spaced. So St. Bartholomew's Day is the first, and Bartholomew is also known as Nathanael. That's from comparing the list of disciples from the Gospel of John and the other Gospels. And so we have the Gospel lesson John, chapter one, where Philip finds Nathanael.
[00:02:15] So Philip was from Bethsaida, where Andrew and Peter were from. And Philip also goes and finds Nathanael, who seemed to be a student of the Scripture. He's sitting under his fig tree studying the Scriptures and says, hey, we found Jesus, son of Joseph, the one that Moses and the law and the Prophets taught. This is the coming Messiah.
[00:02:39] And Nathanael says, can anything good come from Nazareth? He was from Cana. And it seems Like Cana and Nazareth were kind of like Ut and A and M. They're kind of rival cities.
[00:02:49] Anyway, Philip says, come and see. Which is great. Come and see.
[00:02:53] And then Nathanael is coming towards Jesus. And Jesus responds, behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there's no deceit.
[00:03:01] And Nathanael, how do you know me? And he says, before Philip called you, you were under the fig tree. I saw you. Nathanael answered, rabbi, you're the Son of God. You're the King of Israel.
[00:03:11] And then Jesus beautifully responds, because I said this to you. I saw you under the fig tree. You believe you'll see greater things than these. You'll see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. I don't wonder if what Nathanael was doing under the fig tree was reading the story of Joseph of Jacob, who slept on the rock at Bethel and had the vision, the dream of the ladder that extended to heaven and the angels going up and down. And now Jesus says, that's. That's happening right now. I am. By my incarnation, I am the Son of God come down to earth. And by my redemptive work, I'm lifting humanity back up into heaven.
[00:03:56] So good. Anyway, that's what we're. That's the main point of this Sunday, St. Bartholomew's Day. We get to hear about that story of Nathaniel becoming a disciple. We also will hear from Psalm 121, I lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?
[00:04:14] What a psalm. My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.
[00:04:20] This is this great psalm of trust in the Lord. Great. It's a great psalm of confidence in the Lord's care for us. We have Proverbs 3:1:8 for our old Testament lesson. This has one of my very most favorite verses in all of Proverbs, verse 5.
[00:04:38] Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
[00:04:41] Do not lean on your own understanding.
[00:04:45] In all your ways, acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.
[00:04:52] So when we're called to trust the. Here's what this passage is saying. When we're called to trust the Lord, that's also a call to not trust ourselves, to not lean on our own understanding, but to look to him for all wisdom, as the Lord promises in James, chapter one. If you lack wisdom, ask me and I'll give it to you.
[00:05:18] So good. The epistle lesson is Second Corinthians, chapter 4, verses 7 to 10, which was the text that Pastor Graff preached on my ordination some, I guess, 20 years ago.
[00:05:32] And this Is so good because Paul says we have this treasure, talking about the glory of God and the face of Christ.
[00:05:38] We have this treasure in jars of clay.
[00:05:42] Not jars of porcelain or jars of fine, whatever nice stuff you would have. Clay jars. That's the, you know, you make the bed pots out of the clay jar.
[00:05:55] Clay jars.
[00:05:56] So we have a treasure in clay jars. So that the, the outside is basically useless, but the inside is glorious. So it is for us. This is especially Paul talking about preachers and teachers.
[00:06:11] It says that, that we're nothing, we're just rough tools. We're just the, we're just out of this clay, like Adam formed out of the dirt. But the treasure inside of us, the wisdom of God, the Word of God, the Spirit of God, is absolutely beyond measure, valuable.
[00:06:32] So he goes on to say that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. And because of this, we're afflicted in every way, but not crushed. So it's really beautiful. It's a very short passage, but it's really important to see the parallels in this passage. So you could almost draw two columns and there's enough space on your bulletin, by the way, short readings. There's some white space on the page. You could draw these two columns and put on one side afflicted and on the other side, not crushed.
[00:07:06] So yes and no. Yes. Afflicted, no. Crushed, yes. Perplexed, no. Driven to despair.
[00:07:15] Yes. Persecuted, not forsaken, yes. Struck down, but not destroyed.
[00:07:25] So we always carry in the body the death of Jesus. That's the affliction, perplexity, forsakeness, persecution, being struck down, caring about in the body the death of Jesus. But the life of Jesus is also manifest in our bodies.
[00:07:48] Now that's a bit of a mystery what that text means. And you could just ask Paul, how is the life of Jesus manifest in our bodies? And it's probably through all the scars we become a little picture of the resurrection as the Lord brings us through all these persecutions, waiting for the resurrection that is to come.
[00:08:06] So good.
[00:08:09] A couple of the hymns to make note of. The first is the opening hymn, 5:18, by all your saints in warfare.
[00:08:16] This is one of those movable feast or fixed feast day hymns where we sing stanza one and then X and then three.
[00:08:25] So the X where we go for St. Bartholomew's Day is 23:1, 23:3, which is really great. And then the hymn of the day is God has spoken by his prophets. That's hymn 5, 83. God has spoken by his prophets, spoke in his unchanging word, each from age to age proclaiming God the one, the righteous Lord.
[00:08:52] In the world's despair and turmoil, one firm anchor holds us fast. God is king, his throne eternal God the first God the last.
[00:09:05] It's a God is spoken by Christ Jesus. God is speaking by a spirit speaking to our hearts again in the ageless word, declaring his own message now and then. So the Lord has spoken and now he speaks. And he speaks from Christ through the Spirit in the Word, the Lord is speaking to us through the rise and fall of nations. One sure faith standing fast.
[00:09:32] God abides his word unchanging God the first God the last.
[00:09:39] Really good.
[00:09:40] Now, maybe a couple quick things about St. Bartholomew that we don't know very much at all from the Scriptures. Just that little hint of Nathanael.
[00:09:51] Nathanael means gift of God. Bartholomew means son of Ptolemy.
[00:09:56] So we think that this is the two names of this one character.
[00:09:59] He is only mentioned one other time in the Scriptures and then in the list of the disciples.
[00:10:05] The tradition was that after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the persecution that scattered the apostles, Bartholomew traveled over to India first and that he brought with him the copy of the Gospel of Matthew in the original Hebrew. This is an interesting thing. I think it goes back to Eusebius, the early church historian, who, who taught that Matthew first wrote his gospel in Hebrew and then Matthew himself translated the gospel into Greek. And then that Greek copy spread everywhere. But there was an original which has been lost. We don't have any evidence or manuscript evidence of it. It just comes to us from tradition that there was an original Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew and that Bartholomew carried that original Hebrew Gospel of Matthew into India and, and then back into Armenia, where he was killed. And he was killed, tradition says by being skinned alive.
[00:11:10] So that Bartholomew has become really quite a feature of art because whenever you see a guy holding his own skin, I think, you know, some of the medieval painters were looking for stuff like that, so. So they would paint Bartholomew a lot. That's the picture. But we even have it in our own stained glass windows. He's right at the top. So if you're looking at the center window of the Christ window, right in the middle above the altar, it has those 12 orange almonds or footballs around the edge of the window. Those are the symbols of the twelve apostles.
[00:11:47] Judas not being there, Matthias being there. And then right down at the bottom, Paul the P with the sword going through the word. There's Paul at the bottom. But if you look at the top.
[00:11:58] Right, right Second from the top. So the very top right, is a chalice with a snake that comes from the legend that John the Apostle was poisoned, but he survived.
[00:12:12] And below him, you see a knife with what looks like a towel, but this is kind of spoiler alert. It's not a towel. It's skin. There's Bartholomew, who suffered all. And this is why those guys are there. Why, in fact, they're helpful for us because they remind us that Christ claims us in life and in death, and that there's even a willingness to suffer and a willingness to die rather than fall away from the faith. And so these apostles, all except for John, who died of old age, all the other apostles were killed for preaching Christ.
[00:12:54] And they gladly went about this because for them, to live was Christ, to die is gain. In fact, it's one of the greatest apologetic. All right, now we're in the bonus section. Okay, so we covered everything. So ready for the bonus section.
[00:13:08] If you think that, hey, you. You know, Pastor, you can talk a little bit. You know, you can kind of just go on and on, and just a little bit is good. You know, you need appetizers. We don't eat. It's breakfast. We don't. We don't need a full meal.
[00:13:21] Well, now you can kind of push back from the table.
[00:13:24] You can check the music, have conversations with the, with the family, etc. Etc. But if you want the bonus, that's where we are. We're going into the bonus. And now I forgot what I was talking about. Oh, this is an apologetic argument that the apostles.
[00:13:43] Here comes the skeptic who says that the apostles are just faking the resurrection.
[00:13:47] They're just pretending like they saw Jesus.
[00:13:50] They're just, you know, it's a big plot to benefit themselves. Well, what's the benefit? You know, like, he's like, hey, guys, let's, you know, Bartholomew, let's make up this story about the resurrection of Jesus. That way I get to get skinned alive, you know, that is a terrible plot, Peter. Hey, let's make this thing up. And none of us are going to break. We're all going to say that Jesus was really raised from the dead, and then I'll be crucified upside down. That sounds like fun.
[00:14:25] I mean, what.
[00:14:28] So that the willingness of the apostles to suffer and to die for their confession of the resurrection of Jesus is a strong part of our apologetic argument. Now, this is also a good time to review the blessings or the benefit that we get that we draw from the saints. And remember, there's A threefold honoring of the saints.
[00:14:58] I'll read to you guys since we're in the bonus. I'll read. This is from Apology of the augsburg Confession, Article 21, Invocation to the Saints. This whole thing is very helpful, and this is a very helpful conversation to have with our Roman Catholic family and friends because it lets us get at one of the or a number of the big differences between our evangelical approach to theology and doctrine and life and the Roman approach to the same.
[00:15:29] So the Catholic Church would teach the invocation of the saints, and they do it in America in this kind of way. I think it's different in America than it is anywhere else, because in America, our Catholic friends try to say, well, look, you're not praying to the saints. It's more like you have friends on earth and you ask them to pray for you. And that's the same. We have friends in heaven and we ask them to pray for us. We have to say, well, look, the Bible does say things about talking to the dead, like ta not to do it. Also, we don't have a word from God that says we should do it.
[00:16:03] Also, there's no help that ever comes from it.
[00:16:07] Also, it diminishes the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ and the comfort that he promises to give to us. It's true that we help each other by prayer. I wrote this down this morning. I'm recording on Saturday, the Treasury of daily prayer had 2 Corinthians, 1:11. You also must help us by prayer. So we do help each other by prayer, it's true. But we don't need to go to the. To the dead already to ask them to intercede for us.
[00:16:38] But again, in America, the Catholic Church is kind of like, hey, we're not praying to the saints. But if you go other places, like to Italy or other very native Catholic places, and you see what's going on, you're like, yeah, they're praying to the saints. So it's kind of soft in the US but in other places it's not. But it's not. Like, because we don't pray to the saints, we have nothing to say about the saints. In fact, we have a lot.
[00:17:02] And here's the threefold honor that our Confessions not only suggest, but really define. Here's our Lutheran way of honoring the Saints. Again, Article 21 of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, paragraph 4. Our confession approves honoring the saints in three ways.
[00:17:22] The first is Thanksgiving.
[00:17:24] We should thank God because he has shown examples of mercy, because he wishes to save people. Because he's given teachers and other gifts to the church. These gifts, since they're the greatest, should be amplified. The saints themselves, who have faithfully used these gifts, should be praised, just as Christ praised the faithful businessman.
[00:17:41] So we thank God for St. Bartholomew. We thank him for following Christ.
[00:17:47] We thank him for confessing Christ. We thank him for bringing the gospel to India and to Armenia.
[00:17:54] We thank him for the faithful example that he sets to all Christians. So the first is we thank God for them.
[00:18:03] The second, honoring, or the second service, is the strengthening of our faith.
[00:18:09] And this is, Melanchthon says, when we see Peter's denial forgiven, we're also encouraged to believe all the more that grace truly superabounds over sin.
[00:18:22] So that in the example of the saints, we see examples of God's mercy.
[00:18:27] Now, notice here that the sort of Roman instinct is to lean into the perfection of the saints.
[00:18:36] The Lutheran instinct is to lean into the mercy of God.
[00:18:41] So when we see, for example, Moses, the murderer called by God, or David, the murderous adulterer, restored by God, or Peter, the denier of Christ, restored by Jesus, or Paul, the persecutor and approver of Stephen's death and terror of Christians called by God, then we see that God is truly a God of mercy and kindness, that he forgives sins. So also with Nathanael, who's sitting there and says, in fact, he mocks Jesus. What good can come out of Nazareth? I don't think, you know, he's kind of didn't know what he was doing, but still he mocks Jesus. And Jesus calls him and he says, look, here's an Israelite without guile. And he calls him to be his own disciple. He forgives his sins and brings them into the fellowship of the Church. So the second honor of the saints is that we see how the Lord is merciful to them.
[00:19:29] And we know that if he's merciful to them, he desires also to be merciful to us.
[00:19:35] The third honor, back to Melanchthon, the third honor is imitation. And this has A and B. So three A, first of faith, then B of other virtues.
[00:19:45] So that we try to imitate the saints that went before us according to our calling. First, that we believe like they believed. And second, for example, here's Nathaniel Bartholomew, who was willing to have his skin to be undressed from his skin.
[00:20:04] He was willing to endure that for the sake of Christ. Now, if we're ever called to such a terror that he now stands before us as an example, God be praised.
[00:20:13] And then, so faith do we trust in God and then according to the calling. So that we also, like the apostles, are trying to get the word of God into every corner, to shine the light of the Gospel into every place, to get the wisdom of God's word out there, all over.
[00:20:29] So the third honor is imitation. First of faith, then of other virtues. Everyone should imitate the saints according to his calling.
[00:20:35] The adversaries don't require these true honors.
[00:20:39] They argue only about invocation, which, even if it were not dangerous, is still not necessary.
[00:20:45] And then it goes on. In fact, the whole thing is great. If you're interested in that section, you should read that whole section of Apology 21. So here comes Bartholomew to us. And it becomes an occasion for us of thanksgiving, of strengthening our faith by seeing the Lord's mercy to others.
[00:21:07] And then as an example to us, first of believing all the way to the end and receiving the crown of life, and then of the works that he did according to his own vocation.
[00:21:17] And not only do we think of the saints that way, but we can think of everybody that way. We can think of one another that way. This is how we should think of all of our Christian brothers and sisters. I thank the Lord for each one of you. This is how Paul says, I thank the Lord for you. And I.
[00:21:32] And I'm strengthened when I see that the Lord calls all these sinners into his mercy.
[00:21:42] I hope that's the case when you all consider my own life and how the Lord took this desperate sinner and called him to be a Christian. It's an amazing thing that the Lord looks upon sinners and says, hey, I want you to be mine, my child. Behold what manner of love the Father has given to us, that we should be the children of God.
[00:21:59] And then we can also imitate each other. The faith that we display, the fervor of our prayers, the patient endurance in the midst of suffering.
[00:22:11] It's an amazing thing to be a pastor. I'll tell you this.
[00:22:15] To be able to rub shoulders with all of you dear saints and to see your example of prayer, of diligent study of the Lord's word, of your desire to live a Christian life and to serve the neighbor and to live according to the word of God, even though it's difficult and even though the world mocks it and looks at you like you're crazy.
[00:22:40] It's a marvelous thing. And I thank the Lord for you and this idea, this example is wonderful that we put forth there.
[00:22:49] So God we praise for St Bartholomew, for Nathaniel, and for calling him to be an apostle. And God we praise that we get to remember him today and thank the Lord for him and remember God's mercy and to chase after these things. Beginning to love and serve even while we wait for the Lord to return in glory. All right. There's a Sunday draft of church. We will see. Oh, back to it in the Augsburg Confession. In Sunday School today, we barely even started. I think Vicar had class one and then everything was crazy. So we're really, in some ways going to restart our Augsburg Confession study today. So I hope you're able to make it to that. We will see you soon. God's peace be with you.