LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 2023, Page 104

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Without the institution of the Lord’s Supper the
Gospel could be misunderstood as a teaching about the
redemption and Jesus Himself as the greatest of the
prophets of the coming Kingdom. This
misunderstanding is now no longer possible. ...
Wherever the Words of Institution resound anew,
there redemption is something more than the object of
the promise. It is actually given to whoever receives the
Sacrament in faith. … The Lord’s Supper confirms the
sacrificial meaning of the death of Christ. … The
Passover of the new covenant is really the organization
of the new people of God. 3
We preach Christ crucified when we gather to receive His true
body and blood, as Paul writes: “For as often as you eat this
bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he
comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). When we gather in remembrance of Him,
that is, when we receive His true body and blood as gifts so that
our God remembers us graciously, we gather as the Church. To
gather around the Lord’s table means living as the Church. St.
Paul starts the section on the Supper, saying when you gather
“as a church” (v. 18). Preaching Christ crucified is not only
sharing information and teaching. It is not something that we
can only follow online and from a distance. Christ crucified is
always bodily and concrete, sacramental and communal, that
is, liturgical and ecclesial.
My late teacher Kurt Marquart reminds us that in the
transmitted Gospel traditions the Supper (1 Cor. 11:23f.) and
Resurrection (1 Cor. 15) are the special points of our Lutheran
teaching. The perfection of the objective justification and the
true presence of the Lord’s body and blood are also the
demarcation line between the Lutheran teaching and both
Rome and the Geneva Reformed tradition. Prof. Marquart
writes: “The two constitutive foci of the Church of the Augsburg
Confession are justification and the Holy Supper. These stand
at the center of her confession, and without them she ceases to
be.” 4
How do we then pass on this heritage to the next generation
and new people? We asked this over twenty years ago in the
midst of spiritual ruins in Finland. There are many mission
models. What would be ours? We fixed our eye to this profound
truth: All the life of the Church flows out of the altar and the
pulpit. What builds the Church is the purely preached Gospel
and the rightly administered Sacraments as our fathers
confessed at the Diet of Augsburg (AC VII). We gather weekly
to hear Christ speaking to us and to receive his body and blood
for the forgiveness of sins.
This way of the cross has both a vertical and a horizontal aspect
for building up new congregations. We need both substance
and contact, faith and love. Theological substance means the
vertical gifts given freely by Christ through the service of his
ordained servants in the divine service. The horizontal aspect is
the contact with people, showing hospitality, sharing life
together as the family of God amidst individualistic society and
Herman Sasse, “The Lord’s Supper in the New Testament,” We
Confess The Sacraments, trans. Norman Nagel (St. Louis: Concordia
Publishing House, 1985), 88–89, 94.
4
Kurt Marquart, “The Church in the Twenty-First Century: Will
There be a Lutheran One?” All Theology is Christology: Essays in Honor of
3

104 | PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2023 (68TH) LCMS CONVENTION

broken culture. This means that the mission is shared together
with pastors and the royal priesthood, each according to one’s
vocation. This means that in a postmodern world it is not
enough to theoretically explain crucifixion and teach how the
congregation is a body of Christ, but rather to call people to live
and experience the sacramental and communal life together. If
the younger generation is skeptical of the big words and cynical
about solemn statements and they look for concrete answers,
we have a great opportunity to invite them to an embodied
liturgical and congregational life. Christ’s mission is His
Church. The motto of my church is simply: “Divine service for
life, congregation as home.” Nothing new but old truth
rediscovered in a different cultural context—and we are still in
the learning process!
St. Paul shows us this sacramental and communal aspect in his
letter to the Corinthians. The Church is the wandering people
of God (ecclesia migrans). Christ is the new Moses, who leads the
new exodus though the waters of Baptism, for both Jews and
Gentiles to a new promised land: heaven. “... Our fathers were
all under the cloud ... and all were baptized into Moses in the
cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all
drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the
spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (1
Cor. 10:1–4).
The Church is one body with many members: “For in one Spirit
we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or
free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:13).
Often we suffer from the tyranny of numbers, the idea of being
big—at least if you have a state church background. However,
the house congregations gathered in Roman-style homes, in
which the inner courtyard (atrium) had a capacity only for a
few dozen people. No wonder St. Paul describes the
congregation as being small and as a place of caring and
genuine relations: “If one member suffers, all suffer together ...”
(1 Cor. 12:26). This should not only be a noble ideal but an
everyday reality. From this angle, being a small congregation is
not necessarily a threat but can be also a gift and a possibility.
And for a larger congregation, it poses questions like: How can
we maintain a close family-like atmosphere? Should we be
open in prayer to start a new daughter congregation?
To preach Christ crucified, to receive the water and blood from
the side of the Crucified, and to live a communal life as
members of the Crucified call us in the Holy Spirit to share the
redemption of the world to the whole world.
3. The cruciform witness of salvation
When a Christian mother walks down her home street and sees
a red-painted fence, she may well think that the public space is
getting smaller for Christians. How long do we maintain our
basic freedoms? Do I dare to speak up in the school board or
keep my opinions to myself? How do I keep my children close to

David P. Scaer, ed. by Dean O. Wenthe et al (Fort Wayne: Concordia
Theological Seminary Press, 2000), 195–196.

Convention Essays