Holy Communion (Part 9, The Augsburg Confession)

[This was shared during both worship services with the people and guests of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

This morning, we continue to consider what it means to be a Lutheran Christian. Our topic today is what we Lutherans believe about Holy Communion. To understand what Lutherans confess about Communion, it helps to consider how we have historically read the Bible.

The entire Lutheran movement is rooted in taking the Bible’s witness about God, including both the Old and New Testaments, seriously. Martin Luther, the Roman Catholic priest and scholar whose work with the Bible led him to discover anew the truth that human beings are saved from inevitable sin and death by God's grace through their faith in Jesus Christ alone and to the Reformation and the Lutheran movement wrote:

No violence is to be done to the words of God, whether by man or angel; but [the Scriptures] are to be retained in their simplest meaning wherever possible, and to be understood in their grammatical and literal sense unless the context plainly forbids it. 

More than one Lutheran pastor and theologian through the centuries has said that Lutheran Christians take the Bible as it comes, seeking to avoid imposing the preferences, prejudices, and prevailing philosophies of their own times on God’s eternal word.

So, for example, when a Lutheran views passages that say, “The mountains skipped like rams,” or “Let the hills sing for joy,” Lutherans don’t believe that mountains skipped or hills sang. Clearly, the Biblical writers in these instances were speaking metaphorically.

And the Bible “comes at us” with many forms of literary expression: history, poetry, song, wise adages, prophecy, and strange apocalyptic literature, to name a few.

There are passages of Scripture that are clear works of fiction, as in Jesus’ parables, stories Jesus made up to make important points. That’s why a Lutheran traveling in the Holy Land would never fall for the advertising of a hotel between Jerusalem and Jericho claiming to the be the inn at which the good Samaritan deposited the wounded man from Jesus’ parable about what it means to love one’s neighbor.

But Lutheran Christians have also historically believed that when the Bible witnesses to events with seriousness and consistency in places that don’t purport to be metaphor or parable, the plain sense of a passage is always to be preferred. This is why Lutheran Christians have historically never shied away from confessing that Jesus was born, miraculously, of a virgin’s womb; that He performed miracles as signs of His being God, with dominion over life and death; that He died on a cross for our sins; that He actually physically rose from the dead; and that faith in this Lord of heaven and earth is, as Jesus insisted repeatedly during His earthly ministry, the only way to forgiveness of sin and eternal life with God.

The documents we Lutherans have always said express our understanding of what it means to be Christians--from the Apostles’ Creed to The Augsburg Confession, from the Small Catechism to the Smalcald Articles--have always insisted that those facts about God and salvation that Scripture insists to be absolutely true are facts and truths we absolutely believe. While today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has never repudiated this Lutheran understanding of Biblical truth, you will find that many of our pastors, theologians, bishops, and others do repudiate things like things like the virgin birth, the physical resurrection from the dead, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation, expressed in conferences, assemblies, official papers, and publications by our own publishing house and no one in the hierarchy of our denomination steps in to say, “No, actually, this is what Lutheran Christians confess.”

All of which leads us to Holy Communion and a simple verb, is.

Please pull out a Bible and turn to Mark 14:22. Three of the gospel writers and Paul write about Jesus’ institution of Holy Communion. And while John doesn't mention the institution of either Baptism or Communion, the two sacraments of the Church, He starts His account of Jesus’ ministry with the miracle of turning water into wine, symbolic of Baptism and and Communion, and describes how, within moments of Jesus’ death, a sword was driven through His side and out came water and blood. So, we can conclude that both sacraments are important. Look at what we’re told by Mark about the night when Jesus instituted Holy Communion: “And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.” Then, look at verse 24, where Jesus says, “This is My blood of the new covenant, which is shared for many.”

Our Roman Catholic friends read this passage and, employing the Aristotelian philosophy favored by Saint Thomas Aquinas who was influenced by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, say that in Communion, bread and wine become Jesus’ body and blood and remain so beyond a congregation’s time of worship. This is why the bread is stored in a box called a tabernacle next to the altars of Roman Catholic sanctuaries.

Our Protestant friends say that the bread and the wine represent Christ’s body and blood and that Communion is a time, not to be re-membered to Christ and His Church of every time and place, as we believe, but only to recall what Jesus has done for us, a ceremonial memorial.

Lutherans have historically said, in effect, “It all depends on what your definition of is is.”

We believe that the bread is Christ’s body because Jesus says it is His body.

We believe that the wine is Christ’s blood because Jesus says it is His blood.

We believe that Christ’s body and blood are in, with, and under the bread and the wine of Holy Communion.

We have no way of understanding or explaining it. If we could explain it, we ourselves would be God...and we're not!

We only have Christ’s promise that when His words of promise, what we call the Words of Institution, are said again over the bread and the wine as His people worship, He comes to us again.

Holy Communion is a way that the risen Jesus, now ascended into heaven, can come to us and assure us of the truth of His promise that He is with us always, that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

It’s though Jesus is telling us, “I know that it’s hard to believe in Me or My promises when you can’t see me. But here’s My body. Here’s My blood. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord. See my wounds, touch my body. I am with you.”

Someone has said that Holy Communion is like “the hat on the invisible man.” If a man were invisible, you might not know he was around unless he put on a hat. We can’t see Jesus. But when we invoke His words of promise over bread and wine, He really is with us.

But Holy Communion is more than just an assurance of Christ’s presence with us, wonderful though that is. For those who trust in Christ when He says that He is in the bread and is in the wine, there is also assurance that His forgiveness of our sins--sins which would otherwise send us to eternal separation from God in hell--is ours.

Turn, please, to John 1:29. Early in Jesus’ ministry, John the Baptist catches sight of Jesus and says: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”

Before Jesus came into the world, God’s people would annually sacrifice unblemished lambs on the altar in Jerusalem. The lambs were stand-ins for themselves. The lambs died to take the punishment for sin that every human being deserves. The ancient Hebrews understood that blood had power. It contained the very power for life. Loss of too much blood brings loss of life. Blood is life.

That’s why, after Cain, a son of Adam and Eve, killed his brother Abel, God said that Abel’s blood was crying out to Him.

Many millenia later, when God’s people were slaves in Egypt, God delivered them from slavery through an action that, to this day, Jews celebrate at Passover. They smeared the blood of lambs on the doorposts of their dwellings and while the angel of death brought the deaths of firstborns all across Egypt, the angel passed over the homes of the Jews.

In a sense, as we receive Christ’s blood in Holy Communion, we are covered by the sacrifice of Himself that Christ made when He willingly went to the cross for us. The blood of Jesus cries out for us to say to God the Father, “This man belongs to Me. This woman is one of My own. This child is My child.”

This is why we should never receive the Sacrament flippantly or with anything other than the joy and reverence it deserves. I’m not saying here that you must affect a particular emotion in order to receive the bread and the wine. Fortunately, the power of Holy Communion doesn’t depend on how we’re feeling on any given day. Whether you’re sad or happy has no bearing on Christ’s promises, “This is my body”; “This is my blood.” But the Sacrament must be received with faith, even if that faith is only the size of a mustard seed. We must be willing to trust Christ when He promises that He is with us and that He brings us forgiveness of sin when He comes to us in the Sacrament.

This is what Paul is talking about when he says in 1 Corinthians: “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (1 Corinthians 11:27-29).

Please open the buff and brown edition of The Augsburg Confession and turn to Article 10, "The Lord’s Supper":

Our [Lutheran] churches teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and distributed to those who eat the Lord’s Supper...They reject those who teach otherwise. 

Holy Communion is one of the greatest gifts a Christian can receive, which is why the people in the early Church received it every single time they worshiped.

It’s why Martin Luther and the early Lutherans received Holy Communion every single Sunday they worshiped. Luther also offered it every single Wednesday of every week and on other occasions as well.

It was only in America, where there was a shortage of pastors, that every Sunday celebration of Holy Communion fell into disuse.

If a church has a regularly called minister of a Word and Sacrament and Holy Communion isn’t being celebrated every single week, that church is a bit like a motorcycle with one wheel, trying to move along with only one of the blessings God intends to give His people every time they gather to worship Him.

But no matter how often the Sacrament is shared, if those who receive Holy Communion don’t believe in Jesus, believe in the Word of God in the Bible, or believe in Christ’s promises regarding Holy Communion, the elements are only bread and wine.

As Luther says in the Small Catechism, we must believe in Christ’s promise, “Given and shed for you.”

When we do, we are blessed beyond all telling!

For Everyone

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, earlier today.]

1 Timothy 2:1-7
For a moment this morning, I want you to do a little thought experiment. Imagine that you live in a country ruled by a brutal dictator. Thousands are jailed or killed each year because of his paranoid whims. He has a special hatred for Christians. While this ruler long ago gave up on requiring Jews to pray to him each day, allowing them to pray for him to their God, no such special dispensation has been given to Christians. The dictator is offended (and truth be known, threatened) by this small, but growing fellowship of believers who insist that a Judean carpenter named Jesus, Who died and rose from the dead, is Lord and King of all, not the dictator. As a Christian yourself, you live in fear each day of the secret police coming to take you and your family to imprisonment and public execution because of your allegiance to Jesus.

In the midst of all this, your pastor receives a letter from an older pastor who you and your fellow Christians know, love, and respect. This pastor has risked life and limb many times just to share the Good News of Jesus Christ, that all who turn from sin and trust in Jesus have a new life that begins here and will continue in eternity with God. You certainly trust Jesus in ways and at depths you could never trust the dictator. But more than that, you even trust Jesus more than you trust your own family members, your own friends, your own common sense, or the prevailing opinions of those around you. You know that such trust—or, at least the desire for such trust that you lay at the feet of God every day—is what being a follower of Jesus is all about. Each day, you turn to the Lord again for strength to believe in Jesus.

But when your pastor shares the content of the letter he just received from this respected evangelist, you and the members of your congregation are stunned! In it he says that as Christians, you should pray for the dictator. He says that you should do so because it’s God’s wish that everyone should be saved and that the dictator has a part to play in moving your homeland toward that goal. There is dead silence as those words sink in—words exhorting you to pray for the monster who persecutes you, to pray for the one who denies the truth of the Gospel message that has changed your life, to pray for the one whose thugs make every knock on the door a living terror.

Except for the fact that in the first century Roman world, the dictator was called emperor, all of the elements of this little thought experiment precisely describe the circumstances in which our second Bible lesson for today was written. There is some dispute among scholars as to whether the book of First Timothy was actually written by the apostle Paul to the young pastor, Timothy. This isn’t a terrible thought since, in the ancient world, there were no copyright laws and it was considered perfectly acceptable for people who represented the thought world of respected teachers to write in their names. But I accept that this letter really was from the apostle Paul, written in about 64AD. It’s one of several books in the New Testament, collectively called the Pastoral Epistles, which we’ll be looking at over the next several weeks.

Please pull out the Celebrate insert and read along silently with me as I read aloud the first four stunning verses:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. 

If you have a pencil or a pen, you might want to circle the words “everyone,” in the places it appears in those four verses. We are to pray for everyone, including leaders who may be hostile to Christians and our message about Jesus. And we are to do so because it’s God’s desire that everyone be saved from sin and death.

At least two ideas in these verses need to be unpacked this morning.

The first is this. Governments, however imperfect and however unjust they may sometimes be, exist to enforce God’s Law, the Mosaic Law, the Ten Commandments. This is so because not everybody voluntarily submits to the Lordship of Jesus or commits themselves to lives of daily repentance and renewal in His Name. Not all people live with the Holy Spirit guiding them each day, prompting them to repent for wrong or to choose the right. And even Christians forget or forego calling on God to help them live rightly.

Whether knowingly or not, every time a government acts justly, it does so in conformity with God's Law, that sense of right and wrong God has written on all hearts.

Every time a government acts unjustly, it nonetheless seeks to justify its actions on the bases of what we all know is right and wrong.

And every time someone opposes an action of a government, she or he does so by appealing to what everyone knows to be right or wrong.

Of course, as I’ve said, not all people in our world have surrendered their wills to Jesus as Lord. They don’t want to agree with God about what’s right and wrong. (Truth be known, none of us wants to agree with God about what's right and wrong all of the time!)

Some might want to steal in order to feed a drug habit, or extort in order to get rich at the expense of others, or drive their cars while under the influence of alcohol, or play trumpets in their front yards at 3:00 in the morning as neighbors are trying to sleep, or cheat on the college entrance exam. God gives the Law, governments, and designated authorities so that all who refuse to submit to His will by faith in Christ will still be curbed and so that—and this is key--so that a peaceable order in which it will be easier for you and me to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ can be established in our nations and our neighborhoods.

We pray for leaders, even dictators, so that, as Paul puts it in our lesson, “we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.”

In the late-1940s, Frank Laubach, a Methodist missionary, wrote a fantastic book called Prayer, The Mightiest Force in the World. Laubach thought that the most important thing Christians could do, apart from sharing the good news of Jesus with others, was to pray for world leaders. When we pray for leaders, Laubach said, God’s Spirit flows through our prayers and speaks directly to leaders, whether they believe in God or not.

Laubach writes, “We can do far more for the world with prayer than if we could [tell the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, or the President of Russia] what to do—far more!” “If they listened to our suggestions,” he says, “we would probably be more or less wrong. But what God tells them, when they listen to Him, must be right. It is infinitely better for world leaders to listen to God than for them to listen to us.”

We are to pray for leaders—of governments, of organizations, of towns, counties, and townships, and of churches—so that peace and stability can displace violence and uncertainty and make it easier for we Christians, who have been commissioned to make disciples of all nations--even this nation--to share the Good News of new life for all who repent and believe in Jesus Christ!

This brings us to the second idea we need to unpack, this one found in verse 4. It says that the God revealed in Jesus “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” The truth, of course, is what Jesus referred to in a conversation one day with Thomas: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” It’s the truth Jesus told that old teacher of the law, Nicodemus, that while those who refuse to believe in Him condemn themselves, He came not to condemn, but to save, to bring new, everlasting life to all who trust in Him. God’s desire is that all will be saved.

Does that mean that everyone will be saved? Please underline the word, desires, in verse 4. The word in the Greek, in which this letter and all the books of the New Testament were first written, is thelei. It means want, will, wish, or desire.

God wants or desires all to be saved. That’s why Jesus went to the cross. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son,” Jesus also told Nicodemus.

God’s desire, His wish, is that all will turn from sin and trust in Christ, even if their faith is the size of a mustard seed, as Jesus puts it. But this doesn’t mean that God saves anyone against their wills, their desires, their wants, or their wishes.

Jesus says in Matthew 10:32: “Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven.”

The older son in last week’s Gospel lesson, the parable of the Prodigal Son, chose to spurn the father’s invitation to come to the party, to join the celebration. He stands for all who refuse to surrender to Christ because they choose to rely on themselves, their own work ethic, their own chosen gods, or anything else but Christ.

Such people can even be found in our churches: They equate church membership with being a Christian, but never surrender a bit of their wills to Christ, never seek God’s wisdom for their decision making, never establish their priorities at God’s direction. In her book, The Hiding Place, Corrie ten-Boom recounts what her father said when the ten-Booms got word that their pastor had led the Nazi armies then occupying their homeland of the Netherlands to Jews who had been hiding. The ten-Booms, like many of their Christian friends were hiding their Jewish neighbors so that they could escape the Nazis. Why, Corrie asked her father, would their pastor have done such a horrible thing? How could any Christian church-goer? His answer was simple: "Just because the mouse is in the cookie jar, it doesn't mean that it's a cookie."

Warming the same church pew for decades doesn't necessarily make us Christians. It doesn't mean that we are saved from sin and death. Salvation is a matter, not of membership in a religious club, but of faith--trust--in Jesus Christ.

Jesus says that those who acknowledge Him as Lord and Savior are saved from sin and death. God wants all people to be saved, but God never forces faith in Christ or salvation on anyone.

That’s why Paul urges Christians to pray for leaders—and for everyone. We pray for a peaceable world in which people are ready to hear the Good News which Jesus has commissioned Christians to tell others: the Good News, the truth, that their sins can be covered over and they can live with God forever by turning from sin and trusting their lives to Jesus Christ.

So, the message of this week’s sermon is simple. It comes from Saint Paul and the pages of God’s Word: pray for everyone and tell everyone about Jesus. This is the job of every Christian no matter what their profession.

May God bless us as we do our jobs each day.

"Are we willing to keep coming back to God for help in getting the spiritual character enhancement we need?"

This should be a question that every Christian faces every single day, hard as it is. It appears in today's installment of Our Daily Bread.

Martin Luther said that the life style of a Christian grateful for the free gift of salvation in Christ, is "daily repentance and renewal." Pursuing this life style--a life of pursuing Jesus, really--requires a courage and an honesty that only God can provide to us. But each day, we need to be willing to pray with the psalmist, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).

But be warned that if you pray that prayer and mean it, and aren't just mouthing pious words you've been taught, God will show you your sins. God will show you your character deficiencies. God will show you the ways in which you need to align your heart, your will, and your actions with God. The simple fact of the matter is that if God and you disagree about whether you've sinned or even about what constitutes a sin, God is not the One Who needs to have a change of mind. God has made clear what is right and what is wrong, putting it all in black and white on the pages of Scripture, no matter how many fancy theological end runs we might try to pull to elude the truth.

But God will never show us our sins and deficiencies--as I experience God doing with me every day--out of malice or spite. God doesn't want you to feel like a worm.

When we ask God to tell us about the wicked ways that are in us, we really ask God to let us see our actual selves, stripped of the masks that we put on to fool other people, to fool God, and to fool even ourselves. It's only when God helps us get real with Him in this way that we understand how desperately we need Jesus Christ.

Vulnerability before God and confession of the sins of which God makes us aware when we are honest before God, will allow us not just to ask God for forgiveness, but also open the way for God to give us the power to combat our faults, to live in different ways, to be reconciled with those we may be hurting, to walk away from the sins that we, in our own power and under our own self-driven reasoning, find irresistible.

"Are we willing to keep coming back to God for help in getting the spiritual character enhancement we need?" If we can answer, "Yes," to that question, even if the size of our affirmation is that of a small mustard seed and no matter how incapable we are of resisting the sins to which we are oriented, we will be well on the road to wholeness, to life with God, to becoming the people God originally intended for us to be.

Jesus Christ, the only one given under heaven through which we can be saved from sin and death and ourselves, makes this possible for all who are willing to turn from the world's futile ways and trust in Him alone.

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Here's the New Testament verses on which today's Our Daily Bread devotional is based:

Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Ephesians 4:17-24)^{18192021222324}