Church Write-Up: Planted by Streams

Here are some items from the LCMS service and Sunday School class:

A. The visiting pastor preached about Luke 6:17-26, which are the beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel. Jesus promises blessing to those who are poor, hungry, weeping, and hated on account of their belief in Jesus, and woe to those who are rich, full, laughing, and popular. The latter, according to the pastor, are people who gloat in their power and wealth and see themselves as self-sufficient, without need of God.

B. The Sunday School class that I attended was about the lectionary.

I will go through the presentation. Some of what was said may be speculative or debatable, but I am preserving this for future reference rather than fact-checking.

The use of lectionaries in churches began in the first century. Christians inherited the practice from the synagogues, which read from the Torah and the prophets and had a homily on the reading. Christians met on Sunday rather than Saturday since the first Easter, and they supplemented the Old Testament readings with readings from the writings of the apostles. But the specific readings for each week differed from church to church, as there was not a standard lectionary.

Starting in the fourth century, the church’s calendar, with the readings that accompanied it, was developing. There were readings for the time from Advent to Pentecost. In the twelfth century, there emerged the celebration of the Trinity. The Reformation was divided on what to do with the church calendar. Many Reformers chose to abandon it and to do their own thing, but Luther kept it because it neither taught false doctrine nor altered what the church knows about Christ.

The LCMS has a choice between a one year calendar and a three year calendar. The one year calendar uses fewer passages, they are repeated from year to year, and it is good for memory, since people will hear the same texts every year. The three year calendar uses more passages. The three year calendar started as late as 1969, with Vatican II. The Lutheran Church in America began using it in 1973. The three year series has three options: A, B, and C. A uses Matthew for the Gospel reading, B uses Mark, and C uses Luke. The church that I attend is currently in C, and it will continue the three year series until the first Sunday in Lent, then it will diverge from that for a while.

The Old Testament lessons are selected according to how they relate to the Gospel lesson. One of the teachers said he was unsure how the epistle readings are chosen, and the visiting pastor then shared that the church often chooses to continue through an epistle even if it does not tie directly into the Old Testament and Gospel lessons. For example, the New Testament reading over the last several weeks has been from I Corinthians.

We then dived into the passages for today (Sunday, as I write this). The Old Testament reading was from Jeremiah 17:5-8: it curses those who rely on their flesh for strength and whose hearts are turned away from the LORD, while blessing those who trust in the LORD. The former are like shrubs in the desert, whereas the latter are like trees planted by water, which bear fruit even during drought. The Epistle reading was from I Corinthians 15:12, 16-20: if affirms that, if Christ has not risen, then our faith is futile, we are still in our sins, and those who have died in Christ have perished, without hope of resurrection. The Gospel reading, of course, is Luke 6:17-26: Luke’s beatitudes and woes.

One student drew a contrast between Jeremiah 17:5-8 and Luke 6:17-26. Jeremiah says what to do to improve your circumstance, namely, trust in God. Jesus, however, offers a different way to look at one’s circumstances: to remember that God will make the circumstances better. It is about what Jesus does. If it is about what you do—through accumulating, exulting, and trusting in wealth, power, and comfort—then you will get your reward.

The teacher said that, apart from God, we have no expectation that good will come, nothing to which we can hold on. The plant’s fruit in Jeremiah 17:5-8 is not from what it has done but from the living water that comes from God. Through heat and drought, Christ sustains and nurtures us. Psalm 1, which is also part of the lectionary for today (but which we did not read), also has the theme of a plant being beside waters. Rich people may feel inclined to trust in themselves and that they did everything right. The problem with trusting in the strength of human beings is that, with age, strength fades. In the Gospel reading, people come for miles to touch Jesus’s garment so that Jesus’s life can flow from him to them. In the Old Testament reading, Jeremiah predicts ugly things that will happen and wants the Israelites to make sure that they are planted in the right place. The Epistle reading from I Corinthians explains why we can trust in God: Christ’s resurrection is why we can trust God to be the living water for us.