Living Through Word and Sacrament

Martin Luther wrote the Smalcald Articles to summarize the doctrines of the Christian church.  In it he wrote the following. “We must consistently maintain this point:  God does not want to deal with us in any other way than through the spoken Word and Sacraments.”  God summons us to gather around these words in worship through the proclamation of the Good News of the Gospel and the distribution of the Sacrament as the real presence of His grace. This He justifies through the forgiveness of sins. Sacraments confirm the Gospel as in truly I am your God and you are truly my people.

We do not make this happen; the real presence of God does.  In his lectures on preaching, given at the Confessing Church seminary at Finkenwalde (1935-1937,  Bonhoeffer rooted this presence in  the “incarnation of the Word.” This means that the ordinary words of the minister is the incarnate Christ Himself.  Furthermore, he emphasized the real presence of that same Word in the ordinary words of the preacher. In his own words:

“The proclaimed word is the incarnate Christ himself. As little as the incarnation is the outward shape of God, just so little does the proclaimed word present the outward form of a reality; rather, it is the thing itself. The preached Christ is both the Historical One and the Present One… Therefore, the proclaimed word is not a medium of expression for something else, something which lies behind it, but rather it is Christ himself walking through his congregation as the Word. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Worldly Preaching: Lectures on Homiletics (Clyde E. Fant, ed. and trans.; New York: Thomas Nelson, 1975) 126.

And it is one and the same Word: the Word of creation, the Word of the incarnation, the Word of the Holy Scriptures, the Word of the sermon. It is the creating, accepting, and reconciling Word of God, for whose sake the world exists. Ibid, 129.

In my struggles to write blogs that are true to God’s word, I find these words from Samuel Giere’s blog, Preaching as Sacrament of the Word, helpful.

Preaching and writing are not simply exercises in entertainment or self-help or self-disclosure. We are called to speak Christ.

We are to be careful listeners to both Scripture and the community. Our speaking Christ must be shaped both by Scripture and words that ordinary people can understand.

Writing and preaching are to be the work of Christ. Christ enters the congregation through those words proclaimed from Scripture.

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