2026 — Lectionary primer

The Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity

Whose Image Do You Bear? · The Church Militant and the Coming Kingdom

One-year lectionary · Proverbs 8:11–22 · Philippians 3:17–21 · Matthew 22:15–22

The long green season after Trinity is not an undifferentiated stretch of ordinary Sundays; its final weeks form a distinct unit. Trinity 19 through Trinity 25 fall in the shadow of the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels (29 September), and the historic propers appointed for these weeks turn the Church’s attention to the spiritual warfare of the Church Militant on earth. The readings grow sharper, the enemies of the Gospel grow bolder, and the whole cycle leans forward toward the end of the Church Year and the consummation of the kingdom. The vestments remain green and the Common Preface is sung, yet today’s propers carry a distinct note of consolation under pressure. Comfort and conflict stand side by side, which is exactly where the Christian lives.

Lectionary Primer PDF

The shape of the service

Introit. Psalm 85:1, 7 with an antiphon from Jeremiah 29, “I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for wholeness and not for evil.” The Psalm answers, “Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation.”

Gradual and Verse. The Gradual takes up Psalm 44:7–8, giving thanks to God’s name forever; the Verse then breaks into Alleluia with Psalm 115:11, “You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord! He is their help and their shield.”

The Hymnody. The hymnal appoints “Who Trusts in God a Strong Abode” (LSB 714) as a historic Hymn of the Day for Trinity 23, answering the Verse’s call to trust the Lord who is our shield; our congregation’s Hymn of the Day, “My Soul, Now Praise Your Maker” (LSB 820), sounds that same confession from Psalm 103.

Color and Preface. The paraments are green and the Common Proper Preface is used, as on every Sunday of Trinitytide.

The readings at a glance

Old Testament

Proverbs 8:11–22

Wisdom here is no poetic personification but a divine person speaking in the first person, the pre-existent Son. She claims understanding (binah), counsel (’etzah), sound judgment (tushiyah), and strength (gevurah), the attributes of the Spirit resting on the Messiah in Isaiah 11:2. “I love those who love me” doubles the pronoun for emphasis, ’ani ’ohabay ’oheb, “I myself love those who love me,” a love kindled in us only because He loved us first. He offers everlasting wealth (hon ’ateq) and walks the path of righteousness (’orach tzedaqah) to give an inheritance: lehanchil, a Hiphil infinitive meaning “to cause someone to inherit.” Salvation is caused by God, not earned by us.

Then comes verse 22, the battleground of the fourth-century Arian controversy. The Arians leaned on the Septuagint’s “the Lord created me” (ektisen me). The Hebrew reads qanani, “possessed me,” and adds miqedem, “from eternity past.” The Son was not made but begotten of the Father before all worlds.

Epistle

Philippians 3:17–21

Paul coins a word: symmimetai, “joint imitators.” He asks not for scattered imitation but for a whole congregation walking after one pattern (typon). He then weeps over those who walk as enemies of the cross, whose god is their belly (koilia) and whose minds are set (phroneo) on earthly things, the opposite of the mind of Christ in chapter 2. Philippi was a proud Roman colony whose citizens boasted of Roman rights from far away. Paul overturns that civic pride: our commonwealth (politeuma) is in heaven, a colonial outpost awaiting its King with necks craned (apekdechomai).

The titles Paul gives Him, Savior (Soter) and Lord (Kyrios), were claimed by Caesar himself. At His coming He will transform (metaschematisei) the body of our humiliation to be conformed (symmorphon) to His glorious body, by the working (energeian) that subjects all things to Himself. The One who took our lowliness will not leave us in it.

Holy Gospel

Matthew 22:15–22

Matthew signals murder before a word is spoken: the Pharisees “took counsel” (sumboulion elabon), a phrase he reserves for plots against Jesus. Their aim is to entrap Him (pagideusosin), a verb found nowhere else in the New Testament, drawn from bird-snaring. They arrive with the Herodians, partisans of the Rome-backed dynasty they despised, united only by hatred of Jesus. They call Him “Teacher” (Didaskale), in Matthew always the mark of an outsider, then spring the poll tax (kenson): say yes and He loses the crowds, say no and Rome arrests Him.

Jesus sees their malice (ponerian), names them hypocrites, and makes them produce the denarius, stamped with Tiberius and the words “son of the divine Augustus,” carried by them into the temple. “Render” (Apodote) means to pay back a debt. Caesar’s image (eikon) is on the coin, so give him his metal. The question left hanging convicts: whose image do you bear (Genesis 1:27)? Caesar owns the coinage. God owns you. What God requires of these men is the one thing they will not render, repentance and faith in His Son; they marvel (ethaumasan), in Matthew the stunned silence of defeat rather than faith, and go away.

The hymns and their stories

Opening Hymn

“O Worship the King” · LSB 804

The man who wrote these words governed Bombay. Sir Robert Grant (1780–1838) was a barrister, a Tory member of Parliament, a member of the king’s privy council, and finally colonial governor of Bombay, and he was also a fine poet. This paraphrase of Psalm 104 first appeared in 1833 in Edward Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody; the year after Grant died, his brother gathered this hymn with eleven others into a volume called Sacred Poems. By the fourth stanza the overwhelming imagery of mountains and thunderstorms has softened into breezes, light, dew, and rain, the gentle signs of “bountiful care.” The tune, HANOVER, was named in 1722, presumably for King George I; its composer is unknown, though William Croft long received the credit.

Hymn of the Day

“My Soul, Now Praise Your Maker” · LSB 820

This hymn has been called the oldest Lutheran hymn of praise. Johann Gramann (1487–1541) wrote it as Nun lob, mein Seel, den Herren, and its significance lies partly in what it does not do. Most of Luther’s early hymns teach doctrine; Gramann instead wrote a close paraphrase of Psalm 103:1–6, following the psalm’s own movement, summoning the singer’s own soul to praise the Creator for His mercies and ending by calling all who hear His Word to bless the Lord. The tune was most likely composed by Johann Kugelmann, who came to Königsberg in 1524, a year before Gramann arrived, first setting it inside an eight-voice polyphonic work as a canon at the fifth. Catherine Winkworth gave us the English text in her Chorale Book for England of 1863.

Preparation Hymn

“Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” · LSB 621

We are singing something close to sixteen hundred years old. This text is the Cherubic Hymn from the Liturgy of St. James, attributed to James the Less, the first bishop of Jerusalem, and the liturgy in its present form dates to roughly AD 400; in Eastern worship it is sung at the Great Entrance, the moment when the bread and wine are carried into the sanctuary. Its images come from the throne room visions of Isaiah 6 and Revelation, and its command to “ponder nothing earthly-minded” puts us where Moses stood at the burning bush, on holy ground, before a presence hidden in ordinary things. Gerard Moultrie made the English version in 1864, drawing on John Mason Neale’s 1859 translation of the whole liturgy.

Closing Hymn

“O God, Our Help in Ages Past” · LSB 733

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) wrote this hymn while England waited for a queen to die. Anne was gravely ill, none of her children had survived to adulthood, and a struggle for the throne looked certain; Watts, a dissenting Protestant, had reason to dread the accession of Anne’s half-brother James, the Catholic Stuart claimant. Into that anxiety Watts wrote a paraphrase of Psalm 90:1–5 and headed it “Man Frail and God Eternal,” reminding a nervous Protestant minority that thrones change hands while God remains their home. He began it “Our God, our help in ages past.” John Wesley altered the opening word to “O” in 1738, and Missouri Synod hymnals stubbornly kept Watts’s “Our God” for centuries, yielding only with the Lutheran Service Book.