Sermon for Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011
Village Lutheran Church, Ladue
Matthew C. Harrison, Assistant Pastor
Text: “Do not be afraid.” Matthew 28:1-10
Theme: Luther: “My death and sin are a minute drop, but my Lord’s death and resurrection is a vast ocean.” (Easter 1533; Klug House Postil, 2:15)
Christ is Risen!
I’m quite certain they were there again this Easter morning. I don’t recall the name of the little community somewhere outside of Klaipeda, Lithuania. But I vividly recall worshipping there, receiving the sacrament. Their community had a fantastic German Gothic building, larger than St. Paul, Des Peres. It was firebombed in WWII in the struggle between the Nazis and the Soviets. A decade later – in the 1950s – lest these Lutheran Christians have any illusions about restoring their once glorious 17th century church, the communists bull-dozed the remaining shell of the structure.
All that remains to this day is an empty plot – wrestled back from the Government. There is the outline of the former foundation where grass refuses to grow on hallowed ground, and where the high altar once stood, there is a black granite stone inscribed with Psalm 46, “Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott,” “A might fortress is our God.” A testimony to the veritable ocean of saints vouched-safe to eternal life through the centuries at that very spot.
After their church was destroyed, where do you think these Lutherans began to worship? In their cemetery. And even after the wall came down and the Soviets retreated, and they obtained a small church building, they’ve continued – especially on Easter Sunday, to worship at an altar midst the graves. A fulfillment of Revelation 6:9 ever there was one: “I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne… They were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete…”(Rev. 6:10f.). Far from squelching faith in the resurrected Christ, midst decaying bodies all around and tomb stones shouting “death!”, the faithful have prospered in the gospel.
“Stupid Christians” the communists said. “We’ll let them worship among the dead with their dead religion.” Now communism is dead, and the constant and well-deserved butt of a thousand jokes. “Under communism we pretended to work, and the state pretended to pay us.”
When I worshipped with them, there was a baptism and the Lord Supper was celebrated in that cemetery – followed by “Koffe und Kuchen” - with a profound joy and thankfulness I’ve rarely seen among Christians.
In the very midst of death, life! In what would appear to be but a drop, a spark of faith alive in an ocean of demonic force, life prevails – faith prevails – CHRIST prevails. So it is with the resurrection! And the tables are all turned. Says the Angel this day, “Don’t be afraid! For I know you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” (Mt. 28:5-6) Says Luther on the Easter text, Christ’s resurrection means, “My death and sin are minute drops, but my Lord’s death and resurrection is a vast ocean.”
Today I am here to tell you, “Don’t be afraid.” It may seem as though your sin and death are all about you, like a “vast ocean.” Don’t be afraid! This Jesus, who was crucified, put to death because of YOUR sins, is the Christ, prophesied by all the prophets of the Old Testament. This Jesus – the Son of God – was raised again in body and soul, just as Peter testifies in today’s reading from Acts 10, “But God raised him on the third day.” “And everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”
Don’t be afraid! There is an OCEAN of forgiveness in Christ! And your sins – black and horrid as they are – are but a tiny spark, snuffed in an instant. The evangelists tell us what happened – Jesus rose! The apostles tell us what this means for us. “Christ was put to death for our transgressions, and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). “For God so loved the WORD, that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16). “God was in Christ reconciling the WORD to himself.” (II Cor. 5:19)
Do you get it? In Christ the entire sin of the world, past, present and future was suffered to death. The deed is done! It is finished! There is nothing for you to do! There is no act you can do that will gain you God’s favor. Any thing you would do to earn points before God is a total damnable affront to HIM. You see, God makes us righteous in the same way he makes Christ a sinner (Ed. Preuss p. 13). In Christ’s death God placed upon him, charged him with the sins of the world – put to death for our transgressions! And in his resurrection, God absolved him and all of us with him – raised for our justification! “He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God.” Don’t be afraid! There is an OCEAN of forgiveness, and it’s all yours for the believing!
Don’t be afraid! In Baptism, your sin and death are tiny drops in the OCEAN of Christ’s sinless life. That’s what Paul means when he says, “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col. 3:3). Paul says in baptism you have “put on Christ” (Gal. 3:27). All your sins, all your fears, all your failures, all your deepest darkest thoughts and worries, all your failures with respect to your family, all those things you wish you could do over again, all the things you are most ashamed of, those things you could never tell another human being – ALL of it is “hidden with Christ in God.” It’s all covered. In fact, it’s gone as far as Christ is concerned. “He remembers your sin no more.”
And even more – your illness, your frailty, your weakness of the body, your death, is all hidden with Christ in God. For in Baptism you become one with Christ and where he goes you shall go, in fact, have already gone. Don’t be afraid. “Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” In baptism you are buried with Christ into his death, and raised with him to new life. You will have the same resurrection that Christ has. Don’t be afraid! The ocean of Christ has sloshed a Tsunami of grace your way!
“Don’t be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me!” What happened when he showed up in Galilee? “He came and stood among his disciples and said to them, “Peace be with you.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were glad… Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you….” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any it is withheld.” (John 20:20ff.) Today you have been cast in the ocean of Christ’s absolution! “If you forgive the sins of ANY, they are forgiven! “
Did you hear your spark sizzle and spit when it was cast into the ocean? Don’t be afraid to forgive! Your paltry two bit, run of the mill sin is a drop in the ocean of Christ!
Don’t be afraid! Peter preached, “We ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” (Acts 10:41) This and other texts like it are to teach us clearly that Jesus was no ghost after his resurrection. No “spirit body” like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and any number of heretics have taught for two millennia. Jesus’ very body rose. And it is that very risen body and blood given and shed for us that we receive in this sacrament today. “Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.” Everything that took place on a cross 2000 years ago, 8000 miles away, is served up to you this day! Obtained THERE. Dispensed HERE! “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood, I shall raise him up on the last day.” (John 6)
Now come to this table. Your sin and death is a droplet – a spark - in the ocean of Christ’s forgiveness, life and salvation! Don’t be afraid!
To hell with sin, death and devil. Christ is Risen! Let’s worship in the cemetery.
Amen
The preaching of the Gospel is basically always the same. When it is proper, it is exposition of Holy Scripture, pointing out its message, namely, the joyful message about Jesus Christ the Savior of sinners. He is the content of the entire Scripture, for “they are they, which testify of me.” For this reason there is no basic difference between the preaching of Moses, of the prophets, of our Lord Christ, of the apostles, and of the church. In one simple text like the protevangel of Genesis 3:15 the whole Gospel is present, as Luther shows in connection with the risen Lord’s exposition of Scripture in his sermon on the Gospel for Easter Monday in the Kirchenpostille (E2 11, 271; [1534, Pr. 1474; WA 21, 233,24]):
From this a whole New Testament now follows, all the sermons of St. Paul and the apostles, which do not relate much about the history and miracle-working of Christ, but wherever they are at all able make a whole green field out of one such saying; when, indeed, revelation is added and the Holy Ghost, too, who knows how to chew and ‘wine-press out’ the words properly, they have and yield strength and savor. . .
How is that limitation of Ancient Christianity and its theology to be explained? Certainly it must not be forgotten that the divine revelation given in Holy Scriptures is so rich that whole centuries are necessary to understand its content fully. It cannot be expected that the Church of the First Ecumenical Councils should already have solved the problems of the medieval Western World. But even the selection of problems to deal with was determined by the horizon of the Fathers’ life and thought. The Greek would have considered it bad taste to represent the scene of the crucifixion. Would you hang a painting showing a criminal on the gallows in your dining room? As to the meaning of redemption, the Greek Fathers could not get away from the idealistic conception of man. Even the great Athanasius [ca. 293-373] never considered, “quanti ponderis sit peccatum.” [“how great is the weight of sin”] They all are Pelagians. For them, as for Dostoevski [1821-1881] and the whole of Russian orthodoxy, the sinner is basically a poor sick person who is to be healed by patient love and heavenly medicine, not, as for the Romans, a criminal, an offender of the law who needed discipline and justification. But how can I understand the cross, if I do not know by whom and by what Christ was brought to the cross?
I caused Thy grief and trembling;
My sins, in sum resembling
The sand-grains by the sea,
Thy soul with sorrow cumbered,
And raised those woes unnumbered
Which press in dark array on Thee.
The lack of full understanding of the greatness of sin is the reason why the Ancient Church and the Church of the East never reached a theologia crucis.
Do not think that I here charge the sectarian ministers with something of which they are not guilty. Alas! It is only too true. Do they not declare without reserve: “Whoever confides in the mere word has a dead faith. The letter kills, the Spirit, the Spirit must do it, the Spirit gives life!” [2 Corinthians 3:6]? do they not speak of Holy Baptism in the same blasphemous manner? do they not say, “What shall the washing with water help you? That is an ineffectual ceremony. The Spirit, the Spirit must do it!”? And lastly, do they not speak of the Lord’s Supper also in the same disdainful manner? do they not say, “Of what use can the eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ be to you? You just partake of His Spirit. That is the true nourishment for your soul”? Therefore, do not believe that in rejecting absolution, the matter in question is only whether a minister of the Gospel has the privilege to say the words “I, in the stead of Christ, forgive you your sins.” No, this rejection has a deeper cause. For the matter in question is this: whether the Word of God is not a mere instruction to true Christianity, and whether the Holy Sacraments are not mere ineffectual ceremonies; but whether both the Word and Sacraments are really the means, the instruments, the hands by which God offers, communicates, and seals to us grace and forgiveness of sins. The matter in question is whether man can really confide in the word of the Gospel and the promises connected with the Holy Sacraments as in the voice of God Himself, even when our own heart and conscience within us speak differently, when they say no to the promise of God and condemn us. In short, the matter in question is really the most important and necessary consolation of us sinful men.
Therefore, may the sects of our day reject this consolation. Let us adhere to it the more firmly. May falsely spiritual men despise us for this reason. Let us therefore not despise God who has given us these means of communicating and sealing to us His grace. May fanatical sprits confide in that which they do and suffer and experience in their prayers, in their struggles and exertions, in their self-denials, in their visions or apparitions, in their feelings and sensations, in their repentance and sanctification. We will confide in that which God has done for us and which He communicates to us by means of His Holy Sacraments: Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
Undoubtedly there are also among the sects a great many beloved children of God who have favor with Him and will be saved. But they will not be saved by their own exertions, not by there many works, not by their prayers, toils, and endeavors, but only by this, that they find no rest in all this and at last strip themselves naked and bare before God and confide only in the Word of grace.
Therefore let us not wait until perhaps in our last hour we must cast away all our own doings, all our own works, and all our own righteousness and worthiness, and cling only to the Word and the Holy Sacraments. Let us already now begin with casting this ballast from the ship of our heart, that our little ship may not sink and perish in the storms of temptation and death. Let us confide in the Word, which, in being preached, proclaims grace to all and which, in Holy Absolution, announces it to us in particular. Let us confide in our Baptism, by which already long ago we were received into God’s covenant of grace. For this covenant remains unbroken to all eternity. Lastly, let us confide in the consolation of the Lord’s Supper as often as we partake of it. There Christ gives us His body and His blood as incontrovertible pledges that we also participate in His redemption.
That first consolation remains even then, when our own heart condemns us. It affords consolation even in the hour of death, when our whole life accuses us, and the world and Satan bear witness against us. It affords consolation even for the day of Judgment; for what God Himself has promised, that He will and He must keep. Amen.
C.F.W. Walther, in At Home in the House of My Fathers pp. 209-210
First, Luther’s theology of the cross can help us to get rid of that theologia gloriae by which many of us have lived and which is not theology at all, but rather, as all theologia gloriae in the history of the Church, the revived natural religion of fallen mankind. Let us take one example. On the 23rd of June, 1910, John Mott[1] delivered the closing address of the World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh, that great meeting which marks the beginning of the ecumenical movement of our age. His words were a powerful appeal to missionary action, inspired by the hope that the final aim of all Christian missions would be reached soon. He began with the words: “The end of the Conference is the beginning of the conquest. The end of the planning is the beginning of the doing.” He concluded by saying:
God grant that we all of us may in these next moments solemnly resolve henceforth so to plan and so to act, so to live and so to sacrifice, that our spirit of reality may become contagious among those to whom we go: and it may be that the words of the Archbishop (he refers to some saying of Archbishop Davidson of Canterbury) shall prove to be a splendid prophecy, and that before many of us taste death we shall see the Kingdom of God come with power.
Four years later the First World War broke out. Seven years after that Conference Bolshevism started the greatest persecution which ever has threatened the existence of the church. Forty years later China was conquered by Bolshevism, and the Christian missionaries were forced to leave the greatest mission field of the world.
Lead on, O King Eternal,
The day of march has come.
Henceforth in fields of conquest
Thy tents shall be our home.
That had been the battle song of the American missionaries in the time of Edinburgh. Now when the last members of that great Conference who are still alive look over these forty years, they will understand better why Jesus never promised to His apostles glorious victories but the cross of martyrdom. They will understand the wisdom of the cross, the comfort of the theologia crucis: occidendo vivificat [by killing he makes alive]. The Kingdom of God is in this world always tectum cruce, hidden under the cross. If we look through all those great statements and proclamations of the Christian churches and the ecumenical conferences regarding war and peace, church and state, disarmaments and rearmaments, League of Nations and United Nations, we shall understand why Christian theology today needs a rebirth of the theologia crucis. How many secular illusions have entered our thinking about the church and the World! Among all the illusions which have taken the place of religion in the souls of modern men, there is also the theologia gloriae of the last decades. It is not only Nationalism and Pacifism, Liberalism and Socialism, Fascism and Communism, Militarism and Antimilitarism which today are deprived of the glory which they used to have in the eyes of their adherents. It is also the Christianity, which in all denominations prevailed in the last centuries, Christianity dreaming of a Christian nation or a Christian world, a Christian faith which had been secularized by the theologia gloriae. Now the time has come for the theology of the cross. When the Church of today asks: “What shall I preach?” the only answer can be: Unum praedica, sapientiam crucis! [One thing is to be preached! The Wisdom of the Cross!]
[1] John Raleigh Mott 1865-1955, American Methodist. 1901 assistant general secretary for the YMCA. Know for his watchword, “The evangelization of the world in our generation.” Took part in the Faith and Order conference at Lausanne 1927. ODCC p. 1120. Sasse was present at Lausanne and produced the official German report. In the report Sasse provided what was called “the first comprehensive historiography of this ara of the modern ecumenical movement.” Feuerhahn op. cit. p. 26. MH
Hermann Sasse, Letter to Lutheran Pastors 18
To preach the Gospel as the wisdom of the Cross (this second remark is necessary) presupposes that we understand that the theologia crucis can never be a philosophy. The theologia gloriae is always a philosophy, a Christian philosophy, of course, reconciling reason and revelation. But I cannot face the Crucified, as a philosopher faces the object of his research, passing his judgment on this object. Before I can pass a judgment on Christ, stating who He is, He will have judged me. This is the reason why the theologia crucis has that practical aspect which makes it a vital affair for the theologian. A theologian of the cross cannot be without faith in the Crucified. And how can I believe in the cross of Christ if I am not prepared to take up the cross and follow Him? It is not by accident that Jesus, whenever He speaks to His disciples about His cross, mentions also the cross which they are to take up (cf. Matthew 16:21–24). According to Luther it is one of the marks by which the true church of Christ on earth is recognized, that she has to go through persecution and suffering. The theologia crucis includes the Yes of faith to the cross, which Christ wants us to take up.
This aspect of the theology of the cross is expressed by Luther in an explanation of Romans 12:1ff.:
Sicut itaque Dei sapientia abscondita est sub specie stultitiae et veritas sub forma mendacii (ita enim verbum Dei, quoties venit, venit in specie contraria menti nostrae . . . ) ita et voluntas Dei, cum sit vere et naturaliter “bona, beneplacens, perfecta,” sed ita abscondita sub specie mali, displicentis et desperati, ut nostrae voluntati et bonae, ut dicitur, intentioni non nisi pessima, desperatissima et nullo modo Dei, sed diaboli voluntas videatur.
In other words:
As the wisdom of God appears under the guise of foolishness, the truth of God under the form of a lie—for that is the way the word of God comes, whenever it comes, in a form contrary to reason—so the will of God, which is truly and naturally a “good and well-pleasing and perfect” will, is so hidden under the form of evil, displeasure, and dread, that it appears to our will and our so-called “good intention” as wholly bad, as wholly leading to despair, as in no way the will of God, but the will of the devil.
Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors 18
Faith always deals with hidden realities. Also the faith of the apostles and the apostolic Church in Jesus Christ, the LORD, was faith in His secret glory, in God hidden in the flesh, in the true divinity within the true humanity. This secrecy finds its deepest expression in the cross: Cruce tectum, “hidden under the cross”: that is Luther’s formula for this character of the divine revelation. Hidden under the cross is Christ’s divine majesty before His resurrection and exaltation. Hidden under the cross is His royal office, His regnum (“That is always the kingdom which He quickens by His Spirit, whether it be revealed or be covered by the cross,” “. . . sive sit revelatum, sive sit tectum cruce,” Apology VII & VIII, 18); likewise the church: “Abscondita est ecclesia, latent sancti,” “Hidden is the church, concealed are the saints” (De Servo Arbitrio; WA 18, 652, 23; LW 33.89; Aland no. 38). That cannot be otherwise. For “opus est, ut omnia, quae creduntur, abscondantur,” “Necessarily all objects of faith are hidden” (WA 18, 653; Aland no. 38). Hidden is the Word of God in the letters and words of the Bible, in the human word of the preacher. Hidden are the true body and blood of Christ in the earthly elements of the bread and the wine at the Lords Supper. Faith and the cross belong together. The cross demands faith against the evidence.
Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors 18
The church had to go a long way until in Luther’s theologia crucis she gained the full understanding of the cross of Christ. It has often been observed how small a role the cross plays in the theology of the Ancient Church. To be sure, the church of the first centuries as well as the church throughout the ages has lived by the death of Christ and has known that. Every Lord’s Day, every celebration of the Eucharist, made the death of the Lord a present reality. There has never been another Eucharist. Hardly another passage of the Old Testament is quoted by the Fathers as often as Isaiah 53. The sign of the cross was already in the second century an established Christian custom. Christian art of the time, however, represents our redemption by showing the types of the Old Testament, not the scenes of the passion of Christ. Not till the fourth century, and then only hesitantly, does Christian sculpture begin to represent the narrative of the passion as one of the many gospel stories. And theology is not able to say very much of the death of Christ either. As soon as the great question is put: Cur Deus homo? [Why did God become man?] it is understood as a question for the rationale of the incarnation rather than of the death of Christ. The doctrine of the cross (not yet understood as a doctrine in its own right) is contained in the doctrine of incarnation. It is also contained in the mystery of the resurrection, since what we call Good Friday and Easter were celebrated by the oldest church simultaneously in the festival of “pascha.” The actual event of our salvation is the incarnation: “On account of His infinite love He became what we are, in order that we might become what He is” (Irenaeus, adv. haer, V praef). And the beginning of our redemption, of our rising from the dead, is His resurrection.
Thus for the Ancient Church, as even today for the Eastern Church, the cross is hidden in the miracle of Christmas and in the miracle of Easter. The darkness of Good Friday vanishes in the splendour of these festivals. The cross is outshone by the divine glory of Christ Incarnate and the Risen Lord. Even for a long time after the church begins to represent Christ Crucified in its art, the glory outshines the cross. When at the end of the Ancient World and in the early Middle Ages Christ Crucified takes the place of Christos Pantokrator, in the triumphal arch of the church above the altar. He is still shown as king triumphant. The Christ of the Ancient Church and the Christ of the Romanesque churches of the Middle Ages does not suffer. He remains triumphant, even on the cross. And the cross, too, appears always as a sign of victory rather than of suffering and death: “In hoc signo vinces,” “Vexilla regis prodeunt fulget crucis mysterium.” [“By this sign you will conquer.” “The royal banners forward go [and] the mystery of the cross shines forth.”]
Why is that so? How is that limitation of Ancient Christianity and its theology to be explained? Certainly it must not be forgotten that the divine revelation given in Holy Scriptures is so rich that whole centuries are necessary to understand its content fully. It cannot be expected that the Church of the First Ecumenical Councils should already have solved the problems of the medieval Western World. But even the selection of problems to deal with was determined by the horizon of the Fathers’ life and thought. The Greek would have considered it bad taste to represent the scene of the crucifixion. Would you hang a painting showing a criminal on the gallows in your dining room? As to the meaning of redemption, the Greek Fathers could not get away from the idealistic conception of man. Even the great Athanasius [ca. 293-373] never considered, “quanti ponderis sit peccatum.” [“how great is the weight of sin”] They all are Pelagians. For them, as for Dostoevski [1821-1881] and the whole of Russian orthodoxy, the sinner is basically a poor sick person who is to be healed by patient love and heavenly medicine, not, as for the Romans, a criminal, an offender of the law who needed discipline and justification. But how can I understand the cross, if I do not know by whom and by what Christ was brought to the cross?
I caused Thy grief and trembling;
My sins, in sum resembling
The sand-grains by the sea,
Thy soul with sorrow cumbered,
And raised those woes unnumbered
Which press in dark array on Thee.
The lack of full understanding of the greatness of sin is the reason why the Ancient Church and the Church of the East never reached a theologia crucis.
Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors 18
“Unum praedica, sapientiam crucis!” [There is one thing to preach, the wisdom of the cross!] That is the answer (in a sermon-fragment of 1515; WA 1, 52) which Luther gives to the vital question of the ministry [Predigtamt] of all ages: “What shall I preach?” The wisdom of the cross, the word of the cross, a great stumbling block to the world, is the proper content of Christian preaching, is the Gospel itself. So thinks Luther and the Lutheran Church with him. The Christian world regards that as a great onesidedness. The cross is just one part, among others, of the Christian message. The Second Article is not the whole Creed, and even in the Second Article the cross stands in the midst of other facts of salvation. What a narrowing of the Christian truth Luther is guilty of (so we are told by some Lutherans today) by his limiting real Christian theology to the theology of the cross. Is not there also a theology of incarnation and a theology of resurrection? Must not the theology of the Second Article be supplemented by a theology of the Third Article, a theology of the Holy Ghost and His activity in the church? Luther had, indeed, very much to say about these things also, e.g., in his doctrine on incarnation and in his theology of the sacraments. Besides, he had a more profound understanding of the article of creation than most theologians who preceded him.
My lowest point – one of my lowest – was a collapse which I experienced after the war at the destroyed Main Train Station in Munich after a very heavy day of work full of agitation by the [Allied] military government - I was at that time Pro-rektor [of Erlangen University] – without eating and without having slept the previous night. I woke up in the sanitarium and spent quiet weeks there. When I was released at Easter the most reliable [doctors] told me I would never again be capable of work. This prophesy has proven false. So I wish you new courage as a result of your stay in the hospital. The condition of your health is part and parcel of the deep distress you have had at the [negative] development of your faculty which you could not overcome. I myself have indeed experienced the demise of a Lutheran faculty before my very eyes. But precisely in this situation your witness is necessary just as for the sake of the great and the insignificant the witness of the prophets of the Old Testament was necessary and has had its effect to our own time. You could not have prevented the pluralism, which today destroys the church and attacks the precious heritage of your fathers. You must also counter the forcing of women into the office of the ministry, which is according to God’s Word, illegal, with the loud protest of a genuine confessor… In this great loneliness in which you now find yourself, you must consider that you are not alone…[1]
Is not the great crisis of modern Christianity, of which we spoke in our first letter, perhaps connected with this prayer crisis? The Ancient Church entered a world in which prayer was taken for granted among Jews and Gentiles. If the ninefold Kyrie eleison of the Roman mass was really taken over from the cult of the Sol Invictus, as a Catholic scholar, the late Odo Casel, supposed, then it is an example of the fact that the ancient pagan world was in her way a world of prayer. The church of the present day lives in a word which no longer prays and which can no longer pray. One has only to recall Kant’s famous dictum that the more a person progresses in the good, the less he prays. Has the lack of prayer in the modern world influenced the church more deeply than we are inclined to believe; just as the incapability of modern man to understand sin has influenced Christendom so deeply?
When the synod had gathered at Jerusalem, they immediately began to deal with the matter of doctrine. The doctrine of Christian freedom was a burning question. The debate was very lively. Not merely a few spoke, but many did so, including congregation members. Peter, Paul, Barnabas, and James gave longer speeches. From God’s Word they convincingly demonstrated that one must not continue to lay the yoke of Moses upon the necks of the disciples. Salvation comes only through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. All would be convinced, and they confessed the right doctrine by resolution. We, too, have long dealt chiefly with doctrine at synods. We have not decided doctrinal questions according to majority or in respect of persons, but according to God’s Word. At this synod, we will again deal chiefly with doctrine [Lehre trieben], and indeed together [we will] treat the Sixth Commandment. It will be the most earnest matter we deal with. We will acknowledge the deep corruption of original sin of all human nature and God’s abhorrence and horrible anger over all sins of impurity. Precisely because of the sins against the Sixth Commandment, God drowned the first world and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah by fire. Precisely on account of these sins, the wrath of God will soon come upon the child of unbelief on the Last Day. Oh, how we should then faithfully warn church and school against the horrible sins of the Sixth Commandment. How we should keep body and soul chaste and unblemished and be blameless midst perverse generations of this world!
But the first synod at Jerusalem dealt not only with doctrine, it also dealt with mission. It says: “And they declared all that God had done with them” [Acts 15:4]. “And all the assembly fell silent, and they listened to Barnabas and Paul as they related what signs and wonders God had done through them among the Gentiles” [Acts 15:12]. Also at our sessions, the mission [of the Church], after the treatment of doctrine, takes the most time. Our dear traveling preachers [Reiseprediger] have given their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Suffering great deprivation out on our often inhospitable prairies and in solitude in the wild mountains of Montana, without making much fuss, they have done the most difficult work. They recount to us how the Lord has opened doors for them every- where, and congregations have sprouted up like gardens of God. By reporting this to us, they bring great joy to all the brethren. In so doing, they move us to holy determination to take the Word of God ever further and to work ever more diligently. Indeed, last year, we unanimously decided to assist in taking the Word into the land of the heathen [the American Indians]. It was the reports of our traveling preachers that warmed our hearts and have given us courage to implore God that He give still more because He already has given us so much. To be sure, it is our chief task to preach the Word to brethren in the faith who live in scattered places. But we have now done that beyond what anyone would have thought possible. From Winnipeg to New Orleans, there is a string of one congregation after another. Our missionaries carry the message from the east to the setting of the sun, to the Rocky Mountains and back. To be sure, we always lack the necessary workers. Thus the prayer of the Lord “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, pray the Lord of the harvest that He send workers into his fields” is applicable for the Church of the entire [era of the] New Testament. And so the workers will remain few until the Last Day. If we had enough workers, we wouldn’t need to pray what the Lord asks us to pray. God desires our prayer that He may give us what is needed.
Our Confessions also testify that along with the advancement of understanding of the pure doctrine, the mission should be the chief matter of a synod. Luther writes in the Smalcald Articles:
But let us return to the subject. I should be very happy to see a true council assemble in order that many things and many people might derive benefit from it. Not that we ourselves need such a council . . . we see so many vacant and desolate parishes everywhere that our hearts would break with grief. Yet neither the bishops nor the canons care how the poor people live or die, although Christ died for them too. Those people cannot hear Christ speak to them as the true shepherd speaking to His sheep. This horrifies me and makes me fear that He may cause a council of angels to descend on Germany and destroy us utterly, like Sodom and Gomorrah, because we mock Him so shamefully with the council [SA Preface 9–11; Tappert, 290].
Walther remarked on this at the synod of the Iowa District: “Behold, dear brothers, we should be so minded also. We come here not for the sake of ourselves. We stand in the faith and with this faith we hope to be saved! But how many millions are there still who have no faith! We exist and have founded a synod in order, as much as possible, to bring men to sal- vation, and thereby to check the misery in Christendom and the number of the lost in the poor blind heathen world. If we do not do this, if we fail to seek the honor of Christ and the salvation of souls, Luther fears, as he says, ‘then may the dear God convene a synod, namely a “council of angels” in order to carry out his judgment.’ ” (Iowa Synodal-Bericht, 1:113)
Friedrich Pfotenhauer, At Home in the House of My Fathers, p. 697
Our American brethren in the faith will also learn this through painful experiences. Instead of setting up a church office in Washington, it would have been better had they equipped some place somewhere in the solitude of their immense country, where prayers would be offered day and night for their government and for the peace of the world. For the church of Christ is not a church that is always busy holding conferences, nor is she a church that does business with politicians and the press. She is ecclesia orans. And this is her main calling. Either she is ecclesia orans, as indeed she showed herself to be already in the catacombs,—or she is nothing.
Let no one say that prayer is self-evident. After all, we have services once or twice a Sunday. No, that prayer of the church which we find everywhere in the New Testament where the life of an ecclesia is spoken of, unfortunately, is not something self-evident. Who would maintain that prayer is offered in our Lutheran Churches today with a fervor, which even approaches that with which the church of the New Testament prayed “without ceasing?” (Acts 12:5.) Where today is Luther’s mighty praying with its visible answers? Where is the prayer of those pious people, of which Luther spoke in his explanation of the Lord’s Prayer in the Large Catechism, the prayer which in those days held the Devil back from destroying Germany in its own blood? Yea, despite all the criticism which the Reformation has directed at the mumblings of Catholic prayer and which the modern liturgical movement within the Catholic Church undertook (quite independently from an entirely different viewpoint) must we not finally ask where, in which church, prayer is being offered with more fervor and perhaps also with better training—for prayer too must be learned? Will the answer be the Catholic Church or the churches of the Reformation?
Pastor Matthew Harrison
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