Jesus said: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will have the light of life.”

This coming Sunday, February 9 — the fifth Sunday after the Epiphany — we’ll hear the word of God from

Isaiah 58:1–12,
1 Corinthians 2:1–16, and
Matthew 5:13–20.

We’ll sing Psalm 112, and other great music.

In our prayers, we’ll lift up San Roque Catholic Church on Argonne Circle (sanroqueparish.org). And we’ll pray for the people and churches of China (operationworld.org), which has been much in the news lately.

We’ve started again, this semester, reading and discussing Phillip Cary’s Good News for Anxious Christians. Our next lunchtime thinkfest will be this coming Sunday.

The church season named for the Epiphany is giving way, at the end of this month, to the season of Lent. As many of us know, Ash Wednesday, February 26, marks the beginning of Lent. As we did last year, Prince of Peace will observe Ash Wednesday in the morning by joining the Westmont College chapel service (10:30 a.m., Murchison Gymnasium), and in the evening at Cityview Community Church in Lompoc (5:30 p.m., 1600 Berkeley Drive). All are welcome at either or both.

I’ve been reflecting on selections from a trilogy of sermons on the Christian sacraments, published by Martin Luther in 1519. Having moved over the course of several months through “The Sacrament of Penance” and “The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism,” I turn now to the third in the series, “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ.”

Luther often called the Lord’s Supper the sacrament of the altar. Of course, it has been identified in a number of other ways through history: Communion, the Eucharist, the Mass, and so forth. As I summarize and evaluate Luther, I’ll use several of these synonymously.

The holy sacrament of the altar, or of the holy and true body of Christ, has three parts. First, the sacrament must be external and visible, having some material form or appearance. Second, the significance must be internal and spiritual, within the spirit of the person. Third, faith must make both of them together operative and useful. … The significance or effect of this sacrament is fellowship of all the saints. Christ and all saints are one spiritual body, as the inhabitants of a city are one community, each citizen being a member of the other and of the entire city. All the saints, therefore, are members of Christ and of the church, which is a spiritual and eternal city of God. And whoever is taken into this city is said to be received into the community of saints and to be incorporated into Christ’s spiritual body and made a member of him.

It’s fascinating that the first place Luther goes, expounding the significance of the Lord’s Supper, is God’s gathering and making of those participating (not, at this point in the sermon, the elements of bread and wine) into one body — Jesus’ body. We might respond, critically, that the Lord’s Supper signifies more than this. Yes. But it does not signify less. Luther’s claim about the sacrament — and he’s really only attempting to channel the apostle Paul: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:16–17) — is that the miscellaneous, mismatched, fractious, incongruous crowd around the table, doing what the Lord commanded them to do, is one and united in Jesus Christ. Invisibly united — but actually united.

If there’s a question about whether or not Lutherans (have to) believe that some kind of amazing miracle happens when the bread and wine are shared on a Sunday, the answer must be: “At least this!”

A voice from heaven said: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

This coming Sunday, January 12 — the first Sunday after the Epiphany, otherwise known as The Baptism of the Lord — we’ll hear the word of God from:

Isaiah 42:1–9,
Acts 10:34–43, and
Matthew 3:13–17.

We’ll sing Psalm 29 (“Ascribe to the Lord…”), and other great music.

In our prayers, we’ll lift up Oceanhills Covenant Church on Cota Street (oceanhills.org), a congregation of the Evangelical Covenant Church (a denomination with Lutheran roots!). We’ll also pray for the people of Chad (operationworld.org).

Some other items on our church agenda in January:

This is the month of our seventh anniversary as a congregation! We started meeting in January 2013 under the aegis of the Westmont Campus Pastor’s office, affiliating a few months later with the North American Lutheran Church. So on Sunday, January 12, we’ll celebrate gratefully with a Epiphany-style birthday cake.
Prince of Peace is a worshipping congregation. That’s the point of our life together. But we also (occasionally) meet for other purposes too. On Sunday, January 19, we’ll have a congregational meeting, to talk about such exciting matters as church membership, finances, communication, and so forth. There will, of course, be food!
This spring semester, starting on Sunday, January 26, and meeting (mostly) every other week after that, we’ll continue our series of after-church, over-lunch book discussions for all who are interested. We’re still (resolutely!) moving through Phillip Cary’s Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do (Brazos Press, 2010), with thoughtful appreciation and criticism.

Not every Sunday is devoted to commemorating the baptism of the Lord, but this Sunday is. So it’s fitting — even though he’s not including Jesus among the sinners of which he speaks here — to think about something else Martin Luther says in his 1519 sermon “The Holy and Blessed Sacrament of Baptism”:

The sin which remains after baptism makes it impossible for any good works to be pure before God. For this reason we must boldly and without fear hold fast to our baptism, and set it high against all sins and terrors of conscience. We must humbly admit, “I know full well that I cannot do a single thing that is pure. But I am baptized, and through my baptism God, who cannot lie, has bound himself in a covenant with me. He will not count my sin against me, but will slay it and blot it out.”

The editors’ introduction to a modern edition of this sermon, published in Germany, well summarizes the train of thought here: “Baptism is not the mere starting-point — indeed essential, but now long past — of Christian existence. Rather, it is the fundamental situation of the human being before God, determining the whole of Christian life.”* Or we might put it this way: In our baptism we are confronted with the — in our culture increasingly incomprehensible — truth that the most important thing about us, what really counts about our lives, is what God thinks of us, what God says about us. And what he says in baptism is: “You are my beloved child.” Remarkably, that may and must be set against not only the terror of our sin but also the apathy of our sin.

* Dietrich Korsch und Johannes Schilling (eds.), Martin Luther, Deutsch-Deutsche Studienausgabe, Band 2: Wort und Sakrament, moderneres Deutsch (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2015), 3.

February 9, 2020

January 12, 2020