New Lutheran Quote of the Day

We have already stressed that the Sacrament of the Altar is a making present again of God's act in Christ, His nativity, His baptism, fasting, and temptations, His perfect life of obedience, His rejection, His last supper, His agony and blood sweat, His betrayal, His arrest, His cross and execution, His precious death and burial, His glorious resurrection and ascension, and in anticipation and hope His self-disclosure to vindicate and liberate His church and His creation at the great palingennesia (regeneration). All this is made present before God and before us. This sacrifice, this oblation, this offering is for the world. It is retroactive to the first human being, and it thrusts forward in its saving effect to the end of the age. Although the essential historical moment of His once-and-for-all sacrifice is chronologically in the past, the one priest is Christ and the one victim is Christ. -- A. C. Piepkorn, The Church, pp. 191,2.