The Spirit calls and gathers us in worship. Everything comes from God. The Spirit sends us out into the world to witness to God's love. How can we ask for this? Luther adds the Lord's Prayer as the third part of his catechism. Jesus teaches how to ask for it in the Lord's Prayer. Again, it is not a personal prayer but a prayer shared by all as part of being a part of the community of faith. Therefore, we pray "Our" Father. We petition God to "Give" "Us". We pray that God will "save us from the time of trial" (when our faith is tested) and "deliver us from evil". Only God can do what we cannot. The Church is a communion of "saints" baptized by God to be grafted to the Risen Body of Christ "in" the world. Christ is the Church. Christ is the Word of God, The baptized are "in Christ" grafted to the vine which is Christ. The Baptized are the church. We gather in the Spirit of Truth awaiting the return of Christ when God's love will be seen by the world. We, therefore, are a sacramental church where God makes us holy in our baptism and continues to keep us holy in the Word and Sacrament of the Altar. The community Jesus desired was expressed to his disciples in the upper room. We continue to know his presence as we gather as such a community around the Word rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered. These basic concepts are a key to unlocking scripture. Within the Bible is a Bible (Luther). This Bible within the Bible is the Gospel by which all other scripture is measured. It is scripture that points to and proclaim Jesus as the Christ. This Gospel is ultimately expressed in Jesus Christ. In our Confessional faith, we lift up Jesus as the Christ. We are led by the Holy Spirit who teaches us how to follow the new commandment left by Jesus, that is, to "love one another as I have loved you". Being in Jesus as the church, we look to the Holy Spirit to teach us. The Bible, therefore, is not so much a moral manual as that which points us to the love and forgiveness of Christ and the teachings of the Holy Spirit who shows us how to live as the kingdom of God in the world. We do not dedicate children but we baptize as our Lord commanded us so that they too may be a part of the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit within the community of faith centered in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the center of this community. In accordane with Paul in Galatians, there is no distinction in the baptized. There is neither rich or poor, neither Jew or Greek, neither male or female. Baptism breaks down all distinctions. Christ ate with the outcast, the sinner, those excluded by the moral guidelines of the religious purists of his time. God chooses who belongs. Therefore, there are no barriers. Not only membership but leadership belongs to all the baptized. As pastor, I am called to keep this community of faith focused in Christ being at the Center of who we are called to be. Yet, the Holy Spirit empowers all the baptized to be called to serve the Lord of the Church who is Jesus Christ. Therefore, all decisions must be viewed with Christ standing between ourselves and those we are called to serve and witness. This holds true to all our relations as spouse in marriage, as parent in family, and all other relations. We love the other for Christ's sake. We do not love for our child's sake or our spouse's sake or anyone else's sake for these can still be colored by our wants and needs. To love one for Christ's sake is love them with the freedom of the Gospel; to love them as God created them to be. (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Christ at the Center")
Key to Luther's understanding is what he calls the "Theology of the Cross". This view is in contrast to what he called the "theology of glory". God as the Word was present in the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross. Therefore, the hidden God is revealed in weakness and failure. Yet, this God revealed in this way remains hidden to the unbeliever and even to those who desire a God of glory. Luther labels those who live in the theology of glory as those who use God as a status of privilege and even use that to run over other people. They use the law of God (even 10 commandments and Bible as a moral manual) to puff themselves up while dehumanizing and condemning other people. Luther believed that such people live with a knowledge that often leads to violence and death. When we are faced with the God who participates in the suffering of the neglected, the suffering, the diminished, through the cross of Jesus Christ, then we are changed, we are transformed into the likeness of God. This is what God is doing in baptism and the life in the community of faith. The accent is on how God is changing us rather than our using the power of glory to change others. The church is then a haven for those often labeled as "outcasts" and "sinner" for whom Jesus sat at their table and died on the cross. A church that lives in judgement and full of "no" or "you can't do this" is a community where Christ has probably already left.
Jesus is present within our congregation as both the crucified and risen Lord. The crucified Jesus is where God participates at the right hand of God. As a community, we identify with the powerless and weak as those living under the cross and we share in the promise of the future where Jesus calls us to join him in the feast to come while we share in a foretaste of that feast with the presence of Jesus with us today. Resurrection is our confession that God has and is creating from the future; not the past. God called creation into existence from the voice of the future and all became what it was to become. God continues to call creation forward from the future. They continue to become what God calls it to be. The resurrection is the promise of the new heaven and the new earth where God is summoning us out of death into his marvelous light and life. Suffering and death are markings of this life which carries with it a future life. Hope is therefore in what we do not see. If we see it, it is not longer hope. Faith is believing in what we do not see. Therefore Paul writes in Romans:
"And not only that, we boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that was given to us." Romans 5:3-5
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