# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1854 08 30_S5
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

5

on the journey. Were the LORD to spare us labor, that would mean to ruin us in body and soul. Let one but come once into a clime where it is so very easy to obtain daily food and necessities, or read what is written of it, whether the inhabitants of such regions enjoy it. Let one follow the family history of rich people down to the third and fourth generation. The exceptions are few; as a rule the sons and grandsons of those who heaped up treasures preach it, that it is no happiness for a child of Adam to take his daily bread without toil. There is not even so much pleasure in it when work is lacking: for the intoxication of lusts is no pleasure, to say nothing of the soul being able to thrive thereby. We should be still more of a burden to ourselves than we already are, if Adam's appetite for the apple were not damped by thorns and thistles, by toil and trouble. The labor which God lays upon fallen man, joining it with eating in remembrance of the shameful manner in which he fell, is only the chimney that carries off the smoke; the smoke itself comes from elsewhere, from sin, and stings rich gluttons on their silken cushions more in the eyes than a poor day-laborer. With labor the LORD cuts the morsels and apportions them, that we may not spoil our stomachs. Therefore He lets us often cry like a child that every quarter hour pulls its mother by the apron and begs for food, but acts as though He did not hear, just as such a mother also does. Thus He preserves us from the plague that ruins body and soul, from the love of perishable goods, and thereby from the punishment into which the rich man went, Luke 16:19, etc., etc. He keeps a kind of diet with us, when He thus hides the bread-crumbs that nourish us beneath the thorns of care and toil, and so shows Himself toward us as a physician. But when He sees in our eyes a deadly sickness already—and He can do that—when we still have red cheeks and would rather dance than creep into the hospital, then He takes particular cures in hand, stretches our limbs out upon a sick-bed, and we may not so much as look at bread. Everything that in days of health is put into our hands He locks away, and the tongue comes to taste quite strange things, of which it had no inkling in good days.

To make it short, then: No one disputes a mother's right over the crumbs which she keeps for the child in the pantry; no one contests a physician's authority to forbid the sick man kitchen and cellar, and to put on an air as though he were master in the house; and to the LORD, whose all our possessions are, whose we are, should the remaining crumbs not belong?

The remaining crumbs belong to the LORD.

3. The LORD takes them up.

That is, to be sure, a shame: for he who loves the LORD, who clings to Him with body and soul, to whom everything is loathsome after the manner of love wherein the beloved is not, to want still to prove to such a one that the LORD will not throw out into the rubbish what He claims as His own, or to presuppose it, such a one will only once ask what the Lord does with it, since to him everything is right that He wills and does, whether He give or take—he whom his soul loves—bids him put it in his eye; but I take it from my own flesh, that if we were to be painted as we look before God's eyes, with few exceptions, or even with a single one?, when the LORD takes the remaining crumbs from before our mouth, so that it is really no mere sham-fight, but marrow and bone know of it (Heb. 4:12), no other countenance could be put on than such as a child makes that squints after the cake which is denied it. Not without hanging lips and tears in the eyes will it have gone off, that the LORD has stricken the bushel so clean, which we would so gladly heap up even to heaven, as the people at Babel set about building a tower unto heaven, though with just the same gain as they. And I will not make myself and you stronger than the LORD lets His most approved disciples appear in the Gospel, nor can I do so, and what would the lie avail? As He expects nothing better of us than that we also cannot be brought to give a cup of cold water—let no one think I talk too much; there are cases in which unbelief cannot do much lesser things, and what it can do does not come into consideration, though it glitter, unless it sets a reward of grace upon it; so let the sighing of the unbelieving flesh also be taken into account now, from which the spirit never will out, especially when it is to bring the mammon along. For then the dollars, shillings and cents must be torn out of the bowels, in which the wretched love of money has buried them: otherwise the old Adam does not give them up. It was quite right what someone once whispered in my ear—I will therefore now preach it also upon the housetops—: The farmer is a good man, so long as he does not have to leave any hair. I am speaking to farmers; therefore I will let the word stand in this limitation. It is also true: as handicraftsmen, merchants, scholars, also pastors and schoolmasters all alike have their peculiar favorite sins, at least they easily fall into them when they do not watch over themselves; so the farmer has in avarice his mightiest foe. Strong people have great enemies, and strong is the farmer; he carries kings and emperors upon his shoulders, and whatever else lives must come to him, as all lands sent to Joseph when the famine set in, but he takes the bread from God's own hand. So much the more shameful is it that he, without whom no man can live, so easily becomes the prey of avarice, that it measures out to him every morsel, and that he who could be the freest allows himself to be made more of a slave than any other estate.—But I must return to what was whispered in my ear. I could not put it better. Just so painful is it to the flesh to leave all the remaining crumbs to Christ as it is to the body when a tuft of hair is pulled out of the head.

Therefore let us not bury in a napkin the comfort which the LORD gives us when it says in our Gospel: "and they took up the remaining crumbs"—the disciples, namely, at the command and in the name of the LORD. We may just as well say for it: the LORD Himself takes up the remaining crumbs.

Let us set that out well. On journeys one sees here and there in the offices of public officials great iron chests standing, which are fast locked. In the old fatherland, perhaps here also, they are placed over deep vaults, which have room in the earth for them. For one reckons thus. If the house should burn down, still these iron chests will not burn, and even if the planks on which they rest fly up in ashes, the chests will yet fall unharmed into the cellar, which the glow cannot reach. What is kept in them every one may guess; the Bible it will surely not be. But whatever it may be, it is certain that it is well kept. There are fine granaries too, on which one stores the grain with great care. One has cellars in which the wine keeps for centuries. That too is well kept. The ancient Egyptians understood the art of embalming corpses so well that they have been preserved to this present day. That I call well kept also. But the LORD Christ can do it still better. In general we have proof enough of it. For example: what else has kept the seed in the plants so long, that since the third day of creation the plant world has not died out, now nearly 6000 years, as the Word that was made flesh? Who keeps the gold in the mountains, in the sea the unfathomably deep flood, the water in the depths? But what is more: who lets the Gospel of peace, which was entrusted in Paradise to the ears of Adam, not be lost, although the infernal robber, as long as the world stands, strives to destroy the Word of the cross, to erase it from stone and parchment, to banish it from pulpits and from chambers, yea, to blot it out entirely from the memory of the children of men? And it has remained to this hour, in spite of the wise of this world, in spite of the principalities and authorities that rose up against it in the service of Satan, in spite of the mighty heads of countless heretical hosts, in spite of the bulls with which the Roman harlot gave credit to antichristian falsehood, and in spite of the devilish mockery with which at this moment unbelief spurns the eternal pearl. We have it still. We shall also keep it. And if we fell away from it, it would nevertheless remain standing, because Christ says: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. And what proofs of it shall we yet receive on the last day, that the LORD Christ can well keep, when the decayed and scattered bones come forth again unharmed, because His hand preserved them?

But now comes the application. So great a