“O Lord, have mercy!”
That’s the proper attitude with which we should come to the
Sacrament of the Altar. The proud, the self-righteous, the
complacent, those who don’t recognize the damning guilt of their
sin, those who see no need of repentance, would be better off
staying away entirely. Christ’s Body and Blood are powerful
medicine. Partake wrongly and it can be to your harm and not
your healing.
Any medicine can
backfire on you and hurt you if you take it incorrectly. It’s
that way with the Sacrament of the Altar too. But if you need
medication because of some disease you have and you neglect to
take that medication, it can hurt you also -- perhaps even kill
you. You and I need what God graciously provides in the
Sacrament. We need Christ. We need His forgiveness. We need His
salvation. We need the Sacrament of the Altar.
O Lord, have mercy!
Have mercy on me, a poor miserable sinner. It’s easy to forget
that’s what we really are – sinners deserving God’s condemnation.
The concept of sin as an offense against God and a failure of love
for our neighbor has little place in our society. You don’t see
much about it on television, radio, in magazines and movies.
Instead, from an early age, we’re taught to feel good about
ourselves. We’ve learned to take a psychological approach to
wrong, hurtful behavior. It’s my mother’s fault I’m the way I
am. It’s my father’s fault I’m so messed up. I didn’t receive
the love and nurturing I needed as a child. No one understood
me. My human worth wasn’t affirmed. Even the family dog rejected
me. No wonder I’m selfish, harsh, cruel, and egotistical.
But the Law of God takes
the opposite approach. According to God’s Law, the fault is
two-fold. I’m the sinner. And I inherited my sinful condition
from Adam. So it’s not my parents’ fault that I act like such a
jerk toward my family within the four walls of our home where no
one can see me. It’s not because my human worth wasn’t affirmed
when I was a child that I curse other drivers on the Interstate,
or gossip about other people, or covet my neighbor’s house or wife
or anything that belongs to my neighbor. It’s not because my
childhood was lacking in love and nurture that I fail to honor the
Lord’s Name, and that I so easily let my worship and prayers go by
the wayside.
I can’t blame anyone
else. I have met the enemy and he is me. Thou art the man, the
Law of God says as it points out the guilt of my sin. I’m the one
who has failed miserably at fearing, loving, and trusting in God
above all things. I’m the one who’s made a total flop of loving
my neighbor as I love myself.
O Lord, have mercy! The
wages of sin is death, the Scripture says, and the check is in the
mail. The older I get the more frequently I’m reminded of my
mortal condition. Every ache and pain I feel in the morning
whispers to me, Are your affairs in order? Every time my
eyeglass prescription needs to be updated, that’s a reminder that
my final earthly home is going to be a coffin. Who can
rescue me from this body of death? Who can save me from
the condemnation I deserve? O Lord, have mercy!
And as if sin and death
weren’t bad enough, I’ve also got the devil out to drag me down.
He hates Christ, he hates Christians. Scripture says that
the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to
devour. In his hymn “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” Martin
Luther say this about the devil: The old satanic foe has sworn
to work us woe. With craft and dreadful might he arms himself to
fight. On earth he has no equal.
The devil is my foe and
your foe. He hates me. He hates you. He’d love nothing better
that to deceive us and mislead us into false belief, despair, and
other great shame and vice. The devil sees this world as a big
cocktail party and our faith in Christ as a tasty hors d’oerve. If
he can gobble up our faith in Jesus, he’ll gobble us up too.
Sin, death and the
devil. That’s the infernal army arrayed against you and me.
Their mission is to drag us down to hell. They want you to take
your sin lightly. They want you to neglect your need for
repentance. They want you to be complacent about the price Jesus
paid with His own holy blood to save you from the condemnation
your sin deserves. They want you to devalue the Gospel by which
you are saved, and God’s Word and Sacraments through which the
Gospel is applied to you, through which God gives you the
forgiveness of sin and builds up your faith in Christ Jesus as
your only Savior.
And they especially want
you to take the Sacrament of the Altar lightly, as something
unimportant, a take-it-or-leave-it kind of thing. They want you to
forget your great need, and that Christ graciously meets that need
through His Body and Blood given and shed on the Cross for your
forgiveness, life and salvation.
Martin Luther wrote that
the Sacrament of the Altar is the Gospel. What did Luther mean by
that? Let me put it like this: Last week we had a showing at Mt.
Olive of the movie “The Passion of the Christ.” It was a powerful
movie, a graphic reminder of everything our Lord Jesus Christ
suffered and endured for our redemption. It showed the heartless
brutality of His torturers and executioners and how they delighted
in making Him suffer. But as powerful and unforgettable as this
movie was, it was not the Gospel. Watching it did not convey the
forgiveness of sins. Celluloid is not one of God’s appointed
Means of Grace. Simply put, the movie “The Passion of the Christ”
was not the real thing.
But the real thing is
there for you in Holy Communion. It’s there for you in the gift
of Christ’s Body and Blood in the bread and wine. How do we know
this? Jesus tells us so: Take, eat; this is My Body, which
is given for you. Drink of it, all of you; this cup is the New
Testament in My Blood, which is shed for you for the forgiveness
of sins. The real, saving benefits of Christ’s Cross are
there for you as our Lord’s Body is placed into your mouth with
the Bread and you drink His Blood in the wine. Why do you eat?
Why do you drink? For the forgiveness of your sins. And as the
Catechism teaches us, if we’d only listen: For where there is
forgiveness of sins, there is also life and salvation.
Do this,
Jesus said.
Not neglect it. Not ignore it. Not despise it. Not omit it. Not
take it for granted or see it as something optional. No. Do
this, He said. Luther writes in the preface to the Small
Catechism:
[Christ] most certainly wants it done and does not
want it left undone and despised. “This do,” He says.
And why does our Savior command us to do this?
Because we are sinners who need His forgiveness. We would be lost
apart from Jesus and need His salvation. We are weak and helpless
and need His strength. We need Him to defend us from our enemies,
sin, death and the devil. Remember, we daily sin much and surely
deserve nothing but punishment. Remember, the devil prowls around
like a roaring lion looking for a midnight snack, and he thinks we
look pretty tasty. Remember, death and the grave are waiting just
over the horizon for each one of us. Is there anyone here who can
face these fierce enemies in their own strength, their own
righteousness? How ridiculous! No one can overcome death and the
devil by themselves. We need Christ to do it for us.
Since we are Lutherans,
let me quote again from the preface to the Small Catechism. There
Luther writes:
For a person not
to prize highly the Sacrament is tantamount to saying that he has
no sin, no flesh, no devil, no world, no death, no danger, no
hell. That is to say, he believes in none of these although he is
overwhelmed by them and is the devil’s possession twice over. On
the other hand, he needs no grace, life, paradise, kingdom of
heaven, Christ, God, or any good thing. Surely, if he recognized
how much evil is in him and how much he needs all the good things
he lacks, he would not neglect the Sacrament, which gives help
against such evil and bestows so much goodness. He will not need
to be forced by law to the Sacrament but will himself come running
in a hurry to the Lord’s Table, constrained within himself and
pressing you to give him the Sacrament.
You can’t “come running in a
hurry” to the Cross of Christ where forgiveness of all your sins
was won. That was 2,000 years ago. But you can come running in a
hurry to the Sacrament of the Altar where Christ’s forgiveness is
distributed in the gift of His Body and Blood. Neither can you
beat the devil through any might of your own. But you can eat and
drink your Lord’s Body and Blood with which He crushed and
defeated the devil when He died on the Cross. Death is too fierce
an enemy for you to face on your own. But in giving you His Body
and Blood to eat and drink, Jesus gives you the medicine of
immortality. He promises, in this foretaste of the heavenly feast
to come, that He will call you out of the grave on the Last Day.
He promises that He has reserved for you a place at the Great
Wedding Banquet of the Lamb.
And so we heed our Lord’s
words, and we eat and drink because we are in truth poor miserable
sinners who need His mercy. We eat and drink believing His
promise, This is My Body, given for you. This is My Blood,
shed for the remission of all your sins. These words,
along with the bodily eating and drinking, are the main thing in
the Sacrament. Whoever believes these words has exactly what they
say: “forgiveness of sins.”
We Christians can’t overcome
the world, the flesh, death and the devil in our strength. But
Christ our Savior can and does. So we cry out to Him, “O Lord,
have mercy!” Which is exactly what our crucified and risen Savior
does. And He gives us that mercy in the Sacrament of the Altar.
In Nomine Patris. . .
