Sasse on the Word of God, the Church, & the Sacraments

What is the relationship between the Word of God and the Bible? Between the Word of God and the Church? Hermann Sasse provides some excellent and necessary insight:

For the church of the Reformation, both belong inseparably together: the written and the proclaimed Word, the Bible and the "preaching office or oral Word" [Predigtamt oder mundlich Wort], as Luther said in Schwabach Article VII, the forerunner of Augustana V. This homogeneity explains how the church sank roots among hitherto pagan peoples. If the Word of God were identical with the Bible, it would suffice to send the Bible in their own language to the people concerned. But because the Bible and the Word of God are not identical, there is sent to every people one or more preachers of the Word.

But neither would it suffice were these preachers to come without the Holy Scriptures, bearing the Word of God only in their heads and hearts. The Scriptures and the preaching office, the written and the proclaimed Word, belong together. The content of the Scriptures must be preached, and not only read in private. And the preaching office should expound the Scriptures, as the content of its sermon is bound throughout to the Scriptures. But because every form of the Word of God is truly the Word of God, the church of necessity can never be deprived of one of these two forms....

The Word of God, the written and proclaimed Word, creates and builds the church. There is no other means to build the church of Christ. For the Word of God alone creates faith. Certainly the Sacraments belong to the Word, and it is the experience of church history that wherever the significance of the Sacraments is misunderstood or neglected, the Word will also be despised or falsified. But the Sacraments ever exist only together with the Word, with the Word of the institution and the Word of promise. Thus the Augustana says that through the Word and the Sacraments the Holy Spirit is given, who works faith, "where and when it pleases God" [AC V 2]. This means we cannot prescribe the effectual power of Word and Sacrament. It is God's free grace, should he bring a person to faith through them. But we have the promise that the Word of God "shall not return void" (Isa 55:11). Thus the church will exist everywhere the Gospel is rightly preached, but only there. And it must be the continual prayer of the church that it be and remain the true church of Christ, as we pray in Luther's hymn in the worship service: "Lord, keep us steadfast in your Word." Herein as we pray we also admit that we cannot keep ourselves steadfast in this Word, nor can the church by itself do so. (Hermann Sasse, "The Church and the Word of God," in The Lonely Way: Selected Essays and Letters, Volume I (1927-1939), 156-157.