✠ One Message: Christ crucified and risen for you ✠
Genesis 12,1-4a 3812
5. Sonntag nach Trinitatis 050
Aquila and Priscilla, 52
Kilian, Bishop of Würzburg, Germany, Martyr 688/89
8. July 2012
1. O Heavenly Father, whose weakness is greater than man’s strength and whose foolishness is wiser than mankind’s wisdom, we gather here again this morning to worship and praise Your only Son our Savior and Redeemer. Make this church a house of prayer, a sanctuary of Your Word and a temple of Your Sacraments where the law and gospel are proclaimed in purity and the absolution is given out rightly for our eternal salvation and the blessings of our lives. Amen.
2. Now Yahweh said to Abram: „Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.“ So Abram went, as Yahweh had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
3. Yahweh made a covenant with, and a promise to, Abraham: I will bless you and make your name great. This covenant was fulfilled when Yahweh brought the people of Israel into Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, Moses’ successor. Thousands of years later, Jesus brought a greater fulfillment through His apostles when He promised that the fishermen-now-apostles will now be catching people (Luke 5,10).
4. Yahweh is a covenant-making God. He delights in making promises to mankind. He takes great joy in blessing His creation.
5. There is a problem with Yahweh’s covenant: it kept getting broke. This is not Yahweh’s fault, but rather it is solely our fault. We take His wonderful covenant and get our greedy fingers into it trying to make it better for us. Israel reasoned: if Yahweh has blessed us in Canaan, then worshipping all the gods in the land will exponentially increase our blessings. Israel’s greed lead to unforeseen implications. By worshipping the Canaanite gods, Israel began to accept the morals and values of the land. Canaanite morals had much to be desired. They would slander their neighbors, bribe judges for favorable judgments, ignore the widows and abandon the orphans.
6. Since Israel broke the covenant, God punished them. First the Assyrians, and then the Babylonians, conquered the Promised Land and exiled Israel. Israel was no worse than America or us. We take advantage of Yahweh’s blessings, seek to reap more gifts from our greed and will throw our neighbor under the bus if it means we can improve our lot in life.
7. Since sinful men and women have broken Yahweh’s covenant, our covenant God promised to make a new, unbreakable covenant. The Prophet Jeremiah proclaims: »Yahweh declares: „Behold, the days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant that they broke, though I was their husband But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days: I will put My law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And no longer will each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying: „Know Yahweh,“ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more“« (Jeremiah 31,31-34).
8. The new covenant that Yahweh foretells to Jeremiah was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ genealogy back to Abraham. The Patriarch Abraham’s name is great because of his descendant Jesus. Abraham is a blessing for all the families of the earth on account of Jesus. Thus the Apostle Paul explains Genesis 12: »Abraham’s faith was „counted to him as righteousness.“ But the words „it was counted to him“ were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification« (Romans 4,22-25). »In Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, and you are thus heirs according to the promise« (Galatians 3,14.27.29).
9. Christ Jesus Himself says at His institution of the Lord’s Supper: »The cup poured out is the new covenant in My blood« (Luke 22,20). In Christ the Abrahamic covenant is properly fulfilled, and it is a covenant of everlasting salvation and forgiveness. This is a covenant of grace based on Christ’s shed blood and it is a testament of Christ’s steadfast love toward all the families of the earth.
10. This new covenant in Christ is an unbreakable covenant, for it is not based on us or any action on our part. The new covenant is completely grounded upon Christ and His merit. »And by that new covenant we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all« (Hebrews 10,10). Christ institutes the Sacrament of the Altar to give out the blessings of His covenant. This is the greatness of Christ: His covenant is pure gift and pure grace. His covenant is all His merit and none of ours. His covenant is freely given to us out of love. Christ gives His Church the authority and the privilege to proclaim this covenant as the herald of the gospel of full forgiveness and eternal salvation. He gives you, His disciples, the task of sharing this gospel to your neighbors so that they may also experience the blessing of redemption that Christ pours upon all the families of the earth. Amen.
13. Let us pray. O Holy Spirit, You have revealed Your righteousness in the sight of the nations. Make known to us, through this church, the salvation merited only by Christ alone so that our hearts are strengthened and our lives blessed. Amen.
To God alone be the Glory
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All Scriptural quotations are translations done by The Rev. Peter A. Bauernfeind using the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, 4th Edition © 1990 by the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, and the Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27th Edition © 1993 by Deutsch Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart.
ELKB. Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern. www.bayern-evangelisch.de/www/index.php. Copyright © Evangelisch-Lutherische Kirche in Bayern.
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