# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 08 30_S4
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

4

Often a jest works more than the most dreadful earnest. Now I will not spare it either. Let me then recall the tales in which black dogs guard buried treasures. Such a guardian is your avarice; therefore a ban lies upon your money and goods, so that you have no remaining pieces.—Yes, I will not shrink from going to school to Till Eulenspiegel, who has in general more wisdom than his folly lets fools notice. Whoever is innocent, said he, must admire this painting, and pointed with his staff to the empty wall; only impure eyes see nothing of it, to say nothing of finding it beautiful. So I say, and I without guile: Whoever is free from avarice has remaining pieces and sees them then too; to the servant of Mammon alone the devil covers them. A touchstone into the bargain. Hold your heart to it. Ask yourself: Does avarice rule over me, which I have inherited with the sin from Adam, or does it only struggle, because I am not under the law, but under grace (Rom. 5, 14.) and I therefore no more render obedience to sin in its lusts (Rom. 5, 12.), though it also stirs as a member of the old man under the foot of the new, who is Christ, and dwells in me through faith? And would God that, before His unerring ear, this place might ring with one joyful Yes, it struggles; the daily crucifixion of my flesh holds it under the foot so loudly that the angels above our heads might wave the banner of victory! But if you must at the end all cast down your eyes, then have this for comfort, if you answer honestly: "Alas, it rules, the abominable brothel-keeper, who now with a holy, now with a respectable, now with an enticing satanic grimace procures my soul for the evil enemy"—if only you hang no veil before your face, the open confession of the defeat suffered can be the first step to the future victory.

That only, that you may be the more ashamed. Otherwise my proposition was already proved. I only wanted to press a palpable seal upon the proof.

Let us then part from the first part: The remaining pieces must be there, and begin in God's name the second
2. The Remaining Pieces Belong
to the Lord.

One thing, however, I have forgotten. That is yet a mighty ground for the above proposition. The remaining pieces fall, namely, all out of Christ's hand. It is the fountain. The pieces are all single drops. Who should not have remaining pieces who has Christ? A cursed faithless child of man it would have to be that did not have them. Will he too say that he has no more water, who indeed has not a drop in the bucket, but has the fountain before the door? Just as little are the remaining pieces taken from us because Christ once closes His hand and we do not see it lying open for the moment, while we yet have them just as surely.—This leads us at the same time over to our second part. So no harm that I make it up. If somewhere in an oppressed heart a sigh has remained behind, it will serve that it die away in a consoling "I have Christ still!"

Of this, now, that the remaining pieces belong to Christ, the natural man will know as little as of this, that he has remaining pieces. What is over is mine, says everyone and testifies by the tenacity with which he holds it that he is in earnest. The sweat which he shed when he earned it makes it stick fast to his hands and feet. The heart itself cannot defend itself against it, that the refuse of temporal possessions remains hanging in it, or rather the heart in it. The remaining pieces then become, for the deceived child of man, what the lime-twig is for a trusting little bird.

Do not wonder, dear soul, that you so little consent to prove your new birth in defiance of such heathen mind. Sin goes deeper than the philosophers think. It seems to a man indeed folly to be what God wants to have of us, who yet, when He commands, seeks not Himself, but only our salvation. And especially when we have to do with the dust, our eyes are at once dim and see no longer clearly, so that the heaven above us seems like a gray sack. It cannot be otherwise; when one stirs the dust, it makes dust, and what can not a single speck of dust do in the tender eye?

When I preach I have always to do with it, but today the Gospel brings it especially with it. I must wash the dust out of your eyes. You know indeed, I do not do it, but the LORD and His Word. Hold your eyes, then, hither. For the eye must be clear, then is the whole body full of light. A clean hand is good in civil life and let everyone hold it in honor in its place. But we are in the Church. There faith is awakened, set right, strengthened, increased, exercised, and God looks to it alone (Jeremi. 5, 3.), as one friend looks into the other's eye. It is the eye. And what is the eye if it has no object upon which it rests? But upon whom does this eye rest otherwise than on him whom David, when his blessed gaze found him, called the fairest among the children of men (Ps. 45, 3.)? And now I come again to my proposition: For from this very thing I prove it, that the remaining pieces belong to Christ. Faith clings to Him, even when it takes the daily bread and with it all kinds of earthly good. What it has of fields and houses, of corn and wine, of dollars and farthings, that Christ apportions to it and lets something remain over from it.

a. as steward. For you, dear child of man, are even as steward at most only a finger of your Savior. Learn that from our Gospel, if you do not yet know it. The 4000 who had followed the LORD thought at first as you do. Christ should only preach to them. The hours, days, months which they spent outside the divine service which He held for them, they thought to keep for themselves. In that the LORD was not meddled in. But He shows it to them. The matter takes here in the wilderness such an issue that everyone holds his tongue who has hitherto boasted that he could plow well, that he could beat others at the mill, and had never made a mistake in receipts and expenditures. Even the women, whose heart laughed secretly when the elder in the school came to the story which is described in Gen. 18, because they thought their husbands would not have needed to call first: "Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth," if the honor had befallen them to bake a loaf for the dear God—forgot for the moment that they could cook and bake well.

"Yes, that was something different," you say. "No wonder that they left Him the remaining pieces. One had seen it with eyes that His blessing multiplied the seven loaves under the hands and on the tongue." But where have I ever experienced the like? Does not every Lutheran pastor teach that the time of miracles is past, that they are reserved only to Antichrist? Now, 2 Thess. 2, 9, with all respect; but no one will have told you that the hands of the LORD Christ are now bound. Besides, we need neither the manna from heaven nor that widow's cruse of oil, to recognize that our Savior feeds us. Every harvest testifies of it. Luther in a sermon on this Gospel cannot sufficiently wonder that sand and stones bear such rich interest and the little grains which are entrusted to them each year give back thirty-, forty-, yes a hundredfold. And now consider, who then must be concerned when you have put the morsels in your mouth and they vanish from your hand, yes from your eyes, blood-drops, nerve-sap, tears, yes flesh and blood come of them, out of one so many sorts that you cannot reckon it? And if He once drew back His hand, what, think you, would whole heaps of flesh and bread help a child of man? And if one stuffed him full to the neck, he could not digest a crumb. Hint enough that kitchen and cellar belong to the LORD and all the channels that run into them. But if He is steward, one must not withhold the remaining pieces from Him. That would be as much as to give Him the cow and not the hoof with it.

Whatever one has of earthly goods, Christ apportions it to him and lets something also remain over.

b. as physician. For because He is that, it does not snow bread and everything that belongs to it: for the LORD that would be a small thing; one has seen it in the wilderness. But with the children of Israel it was a different matter; they were