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Two Quotes:
“Today Baptism and the proclamation of the Divine Word are not mine but God’s. When we hear this Word, we must bear in mind that it is God Himself Who is addressing us. When kings hear the Word and see the administration of the sacraments, they should place their crowns and scepters at His feet and say: ‘It is God who has His being here, who speaks here, and who is active here.’ You will perhaps be tempted to interpose: ‘Why, it is just a plain priest standing there and administering the Lord’s Supper!’ If that is your viewpoint, you are no Christian. If I were to hear none but you preach, I would not care a straw about it; but it is God who is speaking there. It is He who is baptizing; it is He who is active. He Himself is present here. Thus the preacher does not speak for himself; he is the spokesman of God, the heavenly Father. Therefore you ought to say: ‘I saw God Himself baptizing and administering the Sacrament of the Altar, and I heard God preaching the Word.’ When will we ever convince the people of this? But we do believe that God in His mercy deals with us through the agency of man.” (Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, Chapters 1–4, LW 22.505–506

“It should be noted further that in Luther’s writings this concrete preaching office embedded by Christ in the Church always has reference to the parish. It is a pastoral office, that is, an office with a parochial jurisdiction, a domain of pastoral care, to which it is assigned and within which it has responsibility. Already in 1520 in his treatise To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther maintains ‘that according to the institution by Christ and the apostles, each city is to have a pastor or bishop, as Paul clearly writes in Titus 1…For a bishop and pastor is the same thing in St. Paul.’ The ‘pastoral estate’ is that ‘which God has instituted, which must preside over a congregation with preaching and the Sacraments, dwell and keep house with them temporally…’ The concrete office possesses a concrete congregation, whose pastor is the office bearer, who is to govern it with the Word and Sacraments. Luther expresses this idea in the treatise Misuse of the Mass (1521). There, too, he finds explicit in Paul’s guidance to Titus to appoint presbyters in every city (Titus 1:5) the divine institution of the parochial pastoral office. Through Paul, the Spirit of Christ is speaking here, and whoever believes this would certainly recognize ‘that this is a divine institution and order, that in every city there should be several bishops, or at least one.’ The office founded by God is for Luther an office in a city, that is, in a specific, parochially defined congregation. Luther especially stresses the parochial character of the office in the treatise Infiltrating and Clandestine Preachers (1532). In the congregation, the pastor ‘has charge of the pulpit, Baptism, and the Sacrament, and all pastoral care is committed to him’ (i.e., in his parish). All Christians who live in the parish are obligated on pain of forfeiting salvation to hold to their pastor and to report infiltrators who turn the people away from their pastor. ‘For where they do not do this, they help the messengers of the devil and infiltrators secretly to steal from the pastor (yea, from God Himself) his preaching office, Baptism, the Sacrament, and pastoral care, as well as the parishioners, and so devastate and destroy the parish (which God ordained). The parish is a divine ordinance, and so the preaching office, too, is a parochial office by divine right. The call to the office places a pastor into a specific congregation. He is the minister of the Word there. According to Luther, the pastor’s direct responsibility does not extend beyond his parish. To the Christians in Strassburg, Luther writes: ‘So, my dearest friends, I am not your preacher, nor is anyone obliged to believe me.’ In defining the character of the pastor, Luther says, ‘Besides his being a Christian and a priest, he must also have an office and an ecclesial jurisdiction entrusted to him.’ It must be observed that this relation of the concrete office to the parish, being founded on Scripture, has for Luther the force of a divine right.” (Hellmut Lieberg, tr., M. Carver Office and Ordination in Lutheran and Melanchthon, 89).