No Ordinary Place

Every time I sit in church on Sunday for the Divine Service, I cannot help but think that this is no ordinary place.

It is like stepping into another world.  This is the place where God comes down to give us His gifts.  He does this through the spoken word, through water, and through bread and wine.  Seemingly ordinary things, but not ordinary at all when the word of the Almighty God is attached to them.

God comes down to us here, not through some inner experience, but in objective reality.  He speaks His Word of forgiveness, life and salvation to us through the voice of a man that He has called.  He gives new life and connects us with Christ's death through the washing of water with that same Word.  And by that same Word Christ gives us His body and blood to eat and drink for the forgiveness of our sins and for the strengthening of our faith.

In our fallen humanness, we do not understand how these things can be so.  We want to try to reason them away.  But the Word of God is living and active.  It accomplishes what it says it will.  It is the Word of the God of the universe, who brought everything that exists into being by that Word. 

Here, God is not close to me because I feel it to be so.  He is not close to me because I live such a righteous and holy life.  He is not close to me because of what He sees in my heart.  No, I am a desperately wicked sinner who does not deserve God to come near to me in love. 

But here in the Divine Service this is exactly what He does – He comes near to me in love, for the sake of Christ alone.  He comes to me despite my feelings, despite my sins, despite my distractions and fears and sadness.  He comes to me through that which is outside of me, because it is only from outside of me that there can come any hope – Christ dead on the cross for my sins, delivered to me through my baptism, through the Holy Supper, and through the Word of absolution.

This is why it absolutely baffles me – as a former evangelical – why there are some Lutherans out there who would trade all this to become more like the evangelicals, who largely seek assurance inside of themselves – whether it be through how close they feel to God, how sincere they were when they prayed a prayer to accept Jesus, or how much more sanctified they are becoming.  The worship of the evangelicals reflects their a-sacramental theology.  If God does not come down to us through objective means, then He must be sought in some other, more subjective way.

I may not feel anything when I receive the Lord's Supper any given Sunday.  There is not necessarily any thrill of emotion as I kneel there at the rail, not necessarily any sense of being in the very presence of God.  But there is objective reality – Christ giving His true body and blood to me for the forgiveness of my sins.  Who can meditate on that for any length of time and not find it profoundly shocking?  That the Lord of Heaven and Earth would love me so much as to condescend to me in this way, so that I might know that His death was really for me?

No, this is no ordinary place.  May we never forget this.