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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. (Amen.)
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. (Amen.)
When we hear of conflict such as the latest conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran, we may think primarily of the people of those countries or the places where they live. We may remember that such conflict can go back almost to the beginning, when the people and the places had different names, even if we do not always remember what those different names were. So, when we hear, for example, in today’s Old Testament Reading, names of people such as the Canaanites and places such as Haran, it can be helpful for us to look both at genealogies to see how the people fit and at maps to locate the places today. Understanding the context of the Old Testament Reading is necessary for our understanding the Old Testament Reading itself: how God told Abram to go from his country, his kindred, and his father’s-house to the land that God would show him and how Abram went in faith that God gave him, and so how God gives us “Faith to go out with good courage” (confer Hebrews 11:8-10).
At the time of today’s Old Testament Reading, Abram and those with him were in Haran, in what we might think of as modern-day Syria, having already come from Ur, in modern‑day Iraq. Although not all Bible commentators agree on the precise details, Abram’s father Terah, a descendant of Noah’s son Shem, for some reason took his family from Ur, in order to go to the land of Canaan, the land of the descendants of Noah’s son Ham; but, some 600 miles later, the group settled along the way in Haran, where Terah died, either before or after Abram and his family, including his nephew Lot, whose father had died, left from there, in order to go the remaining 400 miles or so to finish the journey to Canaan, at God’s command and promise (Genesis 11:27‑32; confer Fickenscher, Looking Forward, 84; confer and compare Acts 7:2-4).
The seminaries of our church body hold special services both to place “vicars”, essentially “student pastors”, in congregations and to call pastoral candidates to congregations. At one of the first of such services that I attended, the preacher based his sermon on today’s Old Testament Reading, likening the Lord’s commanding Abram to go out in faith to Canaan to the Lord’s calling the pastoral candidates to go out in faith to wherever the Lord was calling them. Sometimes the pastoral candidate’s places were in some sense un‑known, and there were no smart phones back then in order to look up the place in the middle of the service. Other times the places were known, often for their remoteness, and their announcement could elicit an audible gasp! When my first call was announced to Trinity Lutheran Church in Fernie and Immanuel Lutheran Church in Elkford, British Columbia, I already knew a little about that dual‑parish, because a friend of mine was serving as the vicar there that year. My move from St. Catharines to Fernie was about 25‑hundred miles, two‑and‑one‑half times Abram’s distance from Ur to Canaan, and I had professional movers with a semi‑trailer full of bubble‑wrap, sheets of packing‑paper, and variously‑sized cardboard boxes, which Abram would not have had, though his nomadic life might have lent itself better to his move with its unique logistics.
You do not have to be a pastor, nor do you even have to move around between jobs, in order for you to struggle with “Faith to go out with good courage”. All the figurative journeys that are our lives have unforeseen twists and turns, such as unplanned children, the move of a classmate or friend, sudden changes at work, the uncertain path that Pilgrim is on, the illness or death of a spouse, and so forth. And, of course, before the Holy Spirit leads us to trust God for salvation and for everything else, by nature we are like Terah and Abram were before the Holy Spirit came to them, that is, idolaters, trusting and serving other gods (Joshua 24:1), and so deserving both death here and now and torment in hell for eternity. As we prayed in the Collect of the Day, of ourselves we have no strength; we are completely dependent on God (Fickenscher, Looking Forward, 83). As St. Paul writes elsewhere in Romans, the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 6:23).
Jesus Christ is the Offspring of Abram through Whom all the families of the earth are blessed. Jesus Christ is the promised Offspring of the woman, Who, as we heard last week, would irrecoverably bruise, or “crush” (NIV), the serpent’s head, though the serpent would recoverably bruise, or “strike” (NIV), the Offspring’s heel (Genesis 3:15). That promise was narrowed down first to Shem’s line (so Kretzmann, ad loc Genesis 12:2-3, p.27, presumably on the basis of Genesis 9:26-27) and then to Abram’s line, as we heard in today’s Old Testament Reading. Abram had to wait another 25 years for the birth of Isaac, and another 2,000 years would pass before the birth of Jesus (Fickenscher, Looking Forward, 84), but the promise was fulfilled! Jesus is the Son of God in human flesh descended from Abram, and Jesus lived a perfect life and died on the cross, for us, as our substitute, in our place. As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading (John 3:1-17), Jesus’s death on the cross for us is how God loved the world, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. Even though our “believing” sounds like something that we are doing, our faith is a gift of God (Ephesians 2:8-9), trust in Him that did not previously exist but now exists (confer Fickenscher, Looking Forward, 84). And, our “belief”, our “faith”, our “trust” in God is not generic “belief”, or “faith”, or “trust” in God but specific: belief that God has done, faith that God is doing, and trust that God will do specific things, such as Abram’s belief that we heard of in today’s Epistle Reading (Romans 4:1-8, 13‑17) that God would give Abram innumerable descendants (Genesis 15:5-6), such as our faith that God forgives our sins for Jesus’s sake, and our trust that God will bring us who share the faith of Abraham to an inheritance better than the Promised Land of Caanan. When we are sorry for our sins and trust God to forgive us, then God does forgive us: God forgives our lack of trust in Him and our trusting in and serving other gods; God forgives our sinful nature and all of our actual sin, whatever our actual sin might be. God forgives us through His Word and Sacraments, His Word attached to physical means, the very means by which we specifically believe that God forgives us.
As we heard in today’s Old Testament Reading, the Lord initiated His relationship with Abram, appearing to Him, and then Abram responded in faith, building altars to the Lord and calling upon the Name of the Lord. In time, the Lord renamed him “Abraham” and gave him circumcision as an efficacious sign of their covenant relationship, which sign was applied to every male among them at the age of eight days (Genesis 17:1-14). In today’s Gospel Reading, Nicodemus, the teacher of Israel, should have understood the need for a second birth, a birth from above, by water and the Spirit, in order to see and enter the Kingdom of God (Fickenscher, Looking Forward, 85). And, whether or not the Gospel Reading uses a word from the “baptism” word‑group, baptism is what Jesus is talking about: what St. Paul elsewhere calls the washing of water with the word (Ephesians 5:26) and the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5). Under normal circumstances, baptism is necessary, because by it God saves us who receive baptism in faith (1 Peter 3:21). Whether we are eight days old, eight years old, or eight decades old, we all come to the font as helpless infants born of sinful flesh, and we leave born of the Holy Spirit. So baptized, we confess to our pastors the sins that we know and feel in our hearts; we confess the sins that particularly trouble us for the sake of Holy Absolution, forgiveness from the pastor as from God Himself. And, so absolved we are admitted to the Holy Supper of Christ’s Body and Blood, which, under normal circumstances, is also necessary for salvation (John 6:53).
To say that Abram leapt into the unknown is a bit of an overstatement, since, if nothing else, God promised to show Abram the land, and the land obviously was known to God, which arguably should have been, and appeared to have been, enough for Abram (confer Roehrs‑Franzmann, ad loc Genesis 12:1, p.29). We do not know exactly what our Promised Land of eternal life will be like, but we trust God to bless us both on our way and when at last we get to what our Hymn of the Day called “Abr’ham’s bosom” (Lutheran Service Book 708:1; confer Luke 16:22). There are no “turn by turn” directions as with GoogleMaps, Waze, or some other Global‑Positioning‑Service navigation, but, as we sang in today’s Psalm (Psalm 121; antiphon: v.8), the Lord preserves our going out from His presence and our coming into His presence. In that regard, we need and so encourage people to serve the Church and be willing to go where the Lord sends them. And, we know that the Lord preserves all of us through our lives’ unforeseen twists and turns, such as unplanned children, the move of a classmate or friend, sudden changes at work, the uncertain path that Pilgrim is on, the illness or death of a spouse, and so forth. The earth where we live is presently possessed by unbelievers, so we who believe wander as strangers and pilgrims here (confer The Lutheran Hymnal, p.13).
Even the latest conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran should not cause us to be afraid. In today’s Old Testament Reading, the Lord promised Abram that the Lord would bless those who blessed Abram and that him who dishonored Abram the Lord would curse. Not that we confuse the modern State of Israel, much less the United States, with Abraham’s spiritual descendants, but world powers such as Babylon, Greece, and Rome are said to have suffered defeat while God has upheld His promise to His people (TLSB, ad loc Genesis 12:3, p.34). The curse humankind brought upon the earth, followed by the confusion of languages and dispersal of the children of man over the face of all the earth (Genesis 11:1-9), is undone in Christ Jesus, followed by the unity of believers from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, in the Church (for example, Revelation 7:9; confer Keil-Delitzsch, ad loc Genesis 12:1-3, p.193). We trust God for salvation and all that goes along with it, as necessary praying for God to increase our faith (Luke 17:5), especially “Faith to go out with good courage”, as a Collect of the Church puts it, to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown, knowing that His hand is leading us and His love supporting us (Collect “For guidance in our calling”, LSB #193, p.311).
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. (Amen.)
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +