The Last Supper with Twelve Tribes by Hyatt Moore

 I found another blog that I am enjoying written by a women up in Canada.  You can find her at http://thoughtsbrigitte.blogspot.com/2010/06/christ-have-mercy-lords-supper.html. 

This blog is attempting to show how the Lutherans in North Dakota and Minnesota North are bound together in many ways not the least of these is our faith and the bond that unites us in the body of Christ.  What creates that bond and feeds it and animates it is the Lord’s Supper.  Brigitte is interested in Luther and the Lord’s Supper and put together a long string of quotations.  I believe this one comes from Luther’s Treatise of the Blessed Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood”.  If I am wrong please. someone correct me.  Whatever treatise it comes from this section takes my breath away.

This is also a reason, indeed the chief reason, why this sacrament is received many times, while baptism is received but once… There is the devil, the world, and our own flesh and conscience, as I have said. They never cease to hound us and oppress us. Therefore we need the strength, support and help of Christ and of his saints. These are pledged to us here, as in a sure sign, by which we are made one with them–incorporated into them–and all our woe is laid down in the midst of the community…

There are those, indeed, who would gladly share in the profits but not in the costs. That is, they like to hear that in this sacrament the help, fellowship, and support of all the saints are promised and given to them. But they are unwilling in their turn to belong also to this fellowship. They will not help the poor, put up with sinners, care for the sorrowing, suffer with the suffering, intercede for others, defend the truth, and at the risk of life, property, and honor seek the betterment of the church and of all Christians. They are unwilling because they fear the world…

For this reason slanderers and those who wickedly judge and despise others cannot but receive death in the sacrament, as St. Paul writes in I Corinthians 11 [:29]. for they do not do unto their neighbor what they seek from Christ, and what the sacrament indicates. They begrudge others anything good; they have no sympathy for them; they do not care for others as they themselves desire to be cared for by Christ. And then they fall into such blindness that they do not know what else to do in this sacrament except to fear and honor Christ there present with their own prayers and devotion….