What We Believe
We would be happy to meet you or to phone you to explain what we believe, teach, and confess about Jesus and the Lord’s Supper. You can also find information about Lutherans’ understanding of the Supper in these confessional documents:
Luther’s Large Catechism http://www.bookofconcord.org/lc-7-sacrament.php
the Defense of the Augsburg Confession http://www.bookofconcord.org/defense_8_holysupper.php
the Formula of Concord http://www.bookofconcord.org/sd-supper.php
The Lord’s Supper may be referred to by other names like Communion, the Eucharist, or the Sacrament of the Altar. It is a rite Jesus established to distribute the forgiveness He earned for us in His death on the cross. We believe, teach, and confess that this holy Supper is much more than a mere ceremony or memorial. It is a foretaste of the heavenly feast to come, intended for those baptized into Christ and His Church. In joyful obedience we accept Jesus’ words that His true physical body and blood are mysteriously present in and with the elements of bread and wine, and that He grants forgiveness here to those who believe His words. Since Holy Communion is also public evidence of a unity in the faith confessed at this altar, we ask those who disagree with our confession, or have not yet been instructed as to the LCMS understanding of Christ’s words, to not commune with us.
On the night before Jesus was arrested and crucified, He ate a meal with His disciples to celebrate the Jewish Passover. But Jesus gave this Supper new meaning. By His very words He mysteriously adds His true body and blood in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine that His disciples would eat and drink for the forgiveness of sins.
To remember Christ is not merely to re-enact a ritual like people rehearsing a play. It is rather to remember Christ’s benefits and to receive them by faith so that we are made alive through them” (This remembering involves both the Gospel and faith in the Gospel. In a narrow sense, remembering refers specifically to the Lord Jesus’ gifts given and received (not to a ritual action). Thus, the first remembering in the Lord’s Supper is our Lord’s remembrance of us in His speaking of His Word and his giving of his body and blood to us. Our Lord’s remembrance of us in his gifts leads us to remember him by faith through hearing and receiving his Word and his gifts. For example, in the Lord’s Supper Jesus says He is giving His body and blood with the words “given and shed for you.” So we are to eat and drink these precious gifts while trusting in his Word.
Our Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper is grounded in St. Paul’s record of our Lord’s institution of his Holy Supper (1 Cor. 11:23–26). He includes the words of Jesus “This do in remembrance (anamnesis) of me,” both with the consecration of the bread and of the cup. (St. Luke reports the anamnesismandate only with the bread. [Lk. 22:19]). Immediately following the words of our Lord, St Paul states: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26). In order to confess the remembrance itself, the overwhelming majority of early eucharistic rites include this acclamation after the Words of our Lord. In The Lutheran Hymnal provision was made to speak these words following the distribution of the Holy Communion. However, both the scriptural text and the example of the early eucharistic rites suggest a closer connection between the Words of Our Lord and these words of Paul, the latter flowing out of the former.