The Words of Jesus Are the Power of the Divine Service
The whole power of the mass consists in the words of Christ, in which he testifies that…
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Every Divine Service Is Easter
A gem from Luther:
We have Easter as often as we celebrate the Mass, preach, and administer the holy Sacrament. With us Christians every day is Easter, except that for ancient memory’s sake we observe a special Easter once a year. And that is not wrong but good and laudable, to observe the time when Christ died and rose again, even though our remembrance of His suffering and resurrection is not restricted to such a time but may be done on any day. As He says: “As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of Me” (1 Cor. 11:25).
LW 13, pp355–356
Tenth Sunday after Trinity 2022
Our church stands in the line of the church catholic of the West. As the power of the papacy became tyrannical and heretical, and scholastic theology drifted further and further from Holy Scripture, a reformation was necessary. The temple needed to be cleansed. We are heirs of that reformation.
One of the major issues needing reform in the sixteenth century was the idea that Mass—what we call Divine Service—was a sacrifice. Go to any local Roman church and you will hear the priest invite the people to pray “that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” This idea—that the mass is our sacrifice to and for God—is the heart of why we still must remain separated from our friends in the Roman church….
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