# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 08 30_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

3

earth, without whom nothing is that is made, as St. John writes in the 1st chapter. Whoever, then, wants to be a Christian must keep house with the LORD Christ also. Sowing and reaping, planing and forging, buying and selling, every bodily labor, every earthly gain and loss, wherever faith rules, is committed to the oversight of the LORD Jesus and receives from it a special luster. It would be too much at once, were I in this hour to paint all that further and, as it were, to depict the earth lit by the dawn of the Gospel, how it then has so wholly different a shape from that in the black night of unbelief. Let a hint suffice, and whoever wants to see wonders, let him step once with Christ's hand into daily life with its toil and its enjoyment. But one thing let me now lift out of our Gospel and, with the gracious assistance of God the Holy Ghost, carry further: namely, that the LORD Christ must not be divided also from the broken pieces that remain over.

Theme: The Broken Pieces that Remain Over.
1. They must be there.
2. They belong to the LORD.
3. He lays them up well.

1. They must be there.

I shall get head-shaking enough at this. Yes, where are my remaining pieces? I hear one and another say: since I have clung to the LORD, now there are none at all. It goes backward rather than forward. Want in every corner and place.

Do you know what? You are all heathen who speak so. They alone have no remaining pieces. That I will prove.

We are in the Church. We do not measure with the fist and do not judge by what is before the eyes. That first. Whoever grants me this, him I shall satisfy; he will not give me the lie. Therefore: [illegible]

a. Care alone has no remaining pieces. For it never has enough; where should the remaining pieces come from? It measures temporal things with the bushel of eternity, as it knows how to shut eternity up in a mouse-hole: for it sets everything on its head. NB. But it will turn out, as Isaiah writes 2, 20, that in its own time it would gladly slip with its idol Mammon into the mouse-hole, if that were still possible.— Now it is very easy to understand why Care has no remaining pieces. If one were to scoop out the ocean, if that were possible, and let bucket after bucket of water be poured into the wide empty deep, where would it stay? But what is the sea compared with eternity? What, then, are all sacks full of gold, when they are thrown in, yes, what are all mountains full of gold, what are all palaces, all cities, all kingdoms? The whole world with its treasures rolls in and vanishes in the yawning dark chasms. Not a corner of it will be filled.

Everyone has surely grasped that Care has no remaining pieces. Now it still has to be proved that everywhere else there must be remaining pieces.— I take my proof from the holy Our Father. How does the fourth petition read? "Give us this day our daily bread." I ask each one who is present here: Has there been a day in his life when he had no more flour in the bin, no more bread in the cupboard, no more money and goods than would suffice for twenty-four hours? Let no one come to me afterward and say that he makes an exception and make me a liar; I will let it be printed, for all I care, I have proved to my Frankenmuth people that each of you, all the days of his life, not one day excepted, has had remaining pieces. Let other congregations have their pastors prove it to them. That those do not believe it who have no pastor and do not want one and believe no pastor, counts for nothing. To Christendom alone will it be proved. Others are not worth so much understanding — for understanding of faith is also understanding — as to become richer than their Care has hitherto let them become. They may remain beggars. Why do they pour everything into so wide a sack, in which it must be lost? But we are rich — in earthly goods, and that is just as true as that we are poor in earthly goods. Whoever cannot find his way in such contradictions, let him go wherever he will.

But you there in the corner, you man and woman who will not look up, hear! It does not apply to you. You only did not know it until now, or not so exactly. Be ashamed, indeed: for it is a disgrace that a baptized child of man, yes any child of Adam, must first be told such things; it is because we have lost the image of God. But now rejoice also. Behold, you can become rich, and that you wanted, without getting a cent more. Yes, you are so already. All that you have more than for today, on your field, in your great barn, twice, yes three times as large as your house, in the cellar, in the bin, in trade and wherever else, that is surplus wealth. You have what you need, if you have enough for twenty-four hours. "That is fanaticism!" let the world say; abide you by Christ's word: "Take no thought for the morrow, etc. etc." Or does not reason also tell it to you? Is it not uncertain whether you will still be alive the next hour? Why do you take thought for it? Be quiet now, only quiet; your conscience has long since given me right: you have remaining pieces.

b. Avarice alone has no remaining pieces. It is indeed the father of cares. We have already taken it up with the whole nest. But even if one has taken the young of the eagle out of the eyrie, the old one yet circles about the orphaned place. We know also the word of the LORD about the seven devils that are worse than the first and come with him again into the empty dwelling. I mean really to say this much, and my predecessor will grant me right; I hit him so upon the dear Lord God — or does anyone else rule the world but Mammon? — never grimly enough in—: it was not yet sharp enough, you would not yet spew before the thing which I put first under the number Care at the pillory. Therefore I must make yet a second subdivision. It may be logically subordinated, what I have coordinated, and though I put it on its head; to such monsters that belongs. So brighter colors here and the thickest brush. Avarice! Avarice! Avarice! That is not ambiguous like Care. Avarice alone is to blame that you have no remaining pieces. You, to whom the house wants to fall in over your head when the steward knocks, or the pastor announces a collection, you who then seem to have eyes for nothing except for the fallen fences, you to whom small debts all at once burn on the conscience, hear it, it, Avarice disguises itself only in all such ragged excuses. For is it perhaps as bad as when your house falls in, that the house of God threatens to collapse? And for that a collection is taken, when one demands the pastor's salary — I say that not for my own sake —, when one begs for the schoolmaster, when it concerns the building of a church, or the Synod, or the Concordia College in St. Louis, or the Seminary in Fort Wayne, or the teachers' seminary in Iowa. Should not every Christian now rather hang his harp on the willows, as Israel did by the waters of Babylon, than, in the state of misery in which the Church finds herself, who as a mother must go begging among her children and — I say not too much — is often, often turned away with Avarice's devil keeping holiday, who boasts in the holy place that his grace has founded it! If the disgrace poured out upon Zion's fallen walls does not hide every other damage as deeply as the lofty mountain ridge hides the molehill, such a one measures likewise earthly things with eternal, eternal with temporal measure.

Enough! Let the devil paint on in hell. But know it, you whom scorn robs of this warning, that thither runs the wagon which your avarice will not leave. Even with the grinning that is your only answer to the cry of horror which God sends forth in his messengers when Satan's team thunders past, he binds you fast on the high straw seat — for it is nothing more, and will burn well — he who lured you up by the lie, that you might sit there well bedded. It helps nothing, I have tried it too; otherwise I would throw pot and brush after you.

It is a sad work, with the hand which is to paint Christ the Crucified before the eyes, and does so, to paint hellish flames. But Christ Himself has done it. Think of the first Sunday after Trin.