2026 — Lectionary primer

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity

Only Sleeping · Christ, Lord over Uncleanness and Death

One-year lectionary · Isaiah 51:9–16 · Colossians 1:9–14 · Matthew 9:18–26

Trinity 19 through Trinity 25, the final cluster of the season, fall in the shadow of St. Michael and All Angels, and their propers hold the Church Militant steady while turning her eyes toward the kingdom’s consummation. Green and the Common Preface remain, yet the Collect changes the temperature. Today’s prayer is one of the ancient Excita collects, which open in Latin with Excita, quaesumus, Domine: “Stir up, O Lord, the wills of Your faithful people.” A series of these petitions runs through the close of the Church Year and on into Advent. The custom left a mark on the kitchen: in England the Sunday next before Advent became “Stir-up Sunday,” the day for mixing the Christmas pudding, named for the collect just heard.

Lectionary Primer PDF

The shape of the service

Introit. Psalm 95 puts the congregation on its knees: “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!”

Gradual. Psalm 116:8 answers with a deliverance as physical as it is spiritual: “You have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.”

Collect of the Day. “Stir up, O Lord, the wills of Your faithful people that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may by You be plenteously rewarded.”

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

Isaiah 51:9–16

The exiles open with a lament: “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord.” The doubled imperative ’uri begins each panel of a triptych running from 51:9 to 52:12. They summon the arm (zeroa’) of the Lord to dress for battle as at the sea, when He hacked Rahab in pieces, pierced the sea monster (tannin), and dried up the great deep (tehom rabbah). Isaiah fuses the Red Sea crossing with older imagery of chaos conquered, lest anyone mistake the Exodus for a lucky wind. The ransomed will come to Zion with everlasting joy on their heads, the festive oil and garlands behind Paul’s imperishable crown.

God answers by turning the question around: why fear a man who dies like grass while forgetting the Maker who established the earth (the Polel of kuwn, to set up permanently) and stirs up (roga’) the roaring sea? Notice the irony: Israel shouts at God to wake up, though He neither slumbers nor sleeps, and a few verses later the command comes back on her, “Awake, awake, O Jerusalem.” Verse 16 blurs its pronouns on purpose. The words placed in the mouth and the shelter of the hand belonged to the Servant in 49:2; now they belong to Zion, closing with the Sinai covenant reversed: “You are my people.” Psalm 126 sings the same promise kept after the fact: mouths filled with laughter, sowers going out weeping and coming home with sheaves.

Epistle

Colossians 1:9–14

Paul writes to a congregation courted by teachers peddling secret enlightenment, and steals their vocabulary. He prays that they be filled with knowledge (epignosis, the prefix signaling full knowledge, not an inner circle’s hint), wisdom (sophia), and understanding (synesis, the Greek for the Hebrew binah, practical insight from the Spirit). Power follows: dynamis, kratos, and doxa, glory here a plain synonym for strength. Then come three aorist verbs, qualified, delivered, transferred, all pointing back to one finished event, Holy Baptism.

Transferred (metestesen) is what a conqueror did when he uprooted a defeated population and resettled it in his realm. The destination is the kingdom of the Son of His love, a phrase that with these baptismal verbs echoes the Jordan. There we have redemption (apolutrosis, release bought at a price) and the forgiveness of sins (aphesis), a noun so rare in Paul it appears only here and in Ephesians 1:7.

Holy Gospel

Matthew 9:18–26

Matthew’s nine miracles in chapters 8 and 9 fall into three triads, showing in deed the authority the Sermon showed in word; this one opens the third triad and folds one story inside another. A synagogue ruler kneels and says of a daughter already dead, “Lay your hand on her and she will live,” an imperative joined by kai to a future, a Semitic way of saying “so that she may live.” On the road a woman twelve years unclean reasons that if she “only” touches His garment she will be made well. Matthew inserts that monon deliberately, and her verb sozo means healed and saved at once. Under the Law a hemorrhage and a corpse both transmit uncleanness by touch. Here the current runs the other way. Nothing passes from her to Jesus; life and holiness pass from Jesus to her.

He turns, already knowing, calls her “daughter” (thygater), the word also used of the dead girl, and says tharsei, “take courage,” as to the paralytic earlier. At the house He dismisses the mourners because the girl is sleeping, and they laugh. He takes her by the hand and she rises, which is how He means to wake us all.

The hymns and their stories

Opening Hymn

“O Worship the King” · LSB 804

Sir Robert Grant (1780–1838) wrote this paraphrase of Psalm 104 while carrying a public career few poets have matched: barrister, member of Parliament, member of the king’s privy council, and colonial governor of Bombay. The text first appeared in 1833 in Edward Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody, and by the fourth stanza the imagery of mountains and thunderstorms has come down to breezes, light, dew, and rain, the gentle evidence of “bountiful care,” a descent that suits a day whose Gospel finds God’s power in a hand laid on a dead child. The tune HANOVER, named in 1722 for the royal house that took the throne in 1714, has no known composer; William Croft is credited in only three of some three hundred sources before 1800.

Hymn of the Day

“Lord, It Belongs Not to My Care” · LSB 757

Richard Baxter (1615–91) wrote this while grieving and gravely ill. An Anglican Puritan turned Nonconformist who had served as a chaplain in Cromwell’s army, he buried his wife on 7 June 1681 and published a book called Poetical Fragments, subtitled “The Concordant Discord of a Broken-healed Heart. Sorrowing-rejoycing, fearing-hoping, dying-living,” “Published for the use of the Afflicted.” Baxter added a note at the end in memory of his wife: “This Covenant my Dear Wife in her former Sickness subscribed with a cheerful will.” A long life means longer service; a short one means the endless day comes sooner. Either way the singer has already won.

Preparation Hymn

“Why Should Cross and Trial Grieve Me” · LSB 756

Paul Gerhardt (1607–76) wrote twelve stanzas out of a life that gave him every reason to write none. He lived through the ruin of the Thirty Years’ War, was surrounded by death for most of his years, and lost his call at the Nikolaikirche in Berlin rather than compromise his ordination vows. From under that weight he wrote, “Why should cross and trial grieve me? Christ is near with His cheer; never will He leave me.” The text works as a sung sermon in five questions with five answers, and it later served its own author: Gerhardt spoke its final stanza as his dying prayer, and at the cemetery in his hometown of Gräfenhainichen the Paul Gerhardt Memorial Chapel carries that line in stone, Kann uns doch kein Tod nicht töten, no death can kill us.

Closing Hymn

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

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) wrote this paraphrase of Psalm 90:1–5 while England waited for Queen Anne to die, with no surviving heir and a Catholic Stuart claimant across the water, and he headed it “Man Frail and God Eternal” to remind a nervous Protestant minority that thrones change hands while God does not. The text is cast in collect form, an extended prayer that expands the psalmist’s picture of God as shelter in this life and the next, fitting for a day whose own Collect asks God to stir us up. Watts began it “Our God, our help in ages past.” John Wesley changed the opening word to “O” in 1738, and Missouri Synod hymnals kept Watts’s original for centuries, yielding only with the Lutheran Service Book.