230305 Farewell Sermon on Genesis 12 (Lent 2) March 5, 2023

 Audio recording

Sermon manuscript:

I’d like to begin today by talking about how important our
Old Testament reading is for understanding the Bible. Then I’d like to relate
what we learn about Abraham to the relationship we have had as congregation and
pastor.

Our Old Testament reading is from Genesis chapter 12. That’s
not too far into the book. We meet a couple name Abram and Sarai who are later
given the names Abraham and Sarah. Since we know their latter names better than
their former names I’m just going to call them Abraham and Sarah. One day the
Lord said to Abraham, “Get out of your country and away from your relatives
and from your father’s house and go to the land that I will show you. I will
make you a great nation. I will bless you,” and so on.

What is going on here is that the Lord is making a promise to
Abraham and Sarah. Sometimes this promise is called a covenant or a testament.
The Lord is telling them that he will be their God and they will be his people.
Abraham and Sarah are going to leave the places with which they are familiar.
They are going to leave the safety and comfort of their homeland, but they are
going to be alright because God is for them and not against them.

Allow me to pause for a moment to point out to you how
important this is. God tells Abraham and Sarah that he is for them. He’s on
their side. If God is for you, who cares who or what might be against you! And
the fact that God tells them this is very good. They are not left wondering
about the inscrutable mysteries of God. Who can know the mind of God or who has
been his counselor? But a person can know the mind of God when God reveals his
mind and his will. Here in Genesis chapter 12 God reveals that he is for
Abraham and Sarah. He will bless them, and through them and their seed the
whole world will be blessed.

Realize that although God has chosen Abraham and Sarah,
although God has made a covenant with them to be their God and bless them, this
didn’t mean that their life would be painless and whatsoever they might desire
would come true. That is a false assumption. When someone hears that God is for
them, he or she might immediately think, “Oh good. Now everything is going to
go exactly how I want.” God, they imagine, is kind of like a genie in a bottle.
God’s going to do whatever I tell him. This is obviously not the case as anyone
knows who has even a passing familiarity with the stories of the Bible. This
wasn’t true with Abraham.

In the chapters that follow our reading from Genesis chapter
12 we hear about all kinds of difficulties that Abraham and Sarah encountered.
However, even though they went through painful, stressful, and harrowing
adventures God was nevertheless for them. His covenant remained true. I’ll just
mention one extreme test, which is horrifying to anyone who takes it
seriously—the time that God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. As
you know, God provided a ram as a substitute for Isaac, but that whole
experience was terribly trying and awful. If Moses hadn’t recorded it, I
wouldn’t think it would be possible that the Lord God would do that. But even
in the midst of that great struggle, God was for Abraham and not against him.

Abraham, for his part, believed God, and this was credited
to him as righteousness. You shouldn’t misunderstand that statement to mean
that Abraham’s faith was some great accomplishment on Abraham’s part. It wasn’t
like Abraham tried his hardest, never gave up, and voila! he believed. No, it
was the Holy Spirit in God’s Word of promise that caused him to believe. God
said, “I will be your God. I’m for you,” and Abraham believed that God was
telling him the truth and not lying. If God wouldn’t have told him what he told
him Abraham never would have believed. By God telling him, by God giving
Abraham the gift of faith, Abraham believed, and this was credited to him as
righteousness. He was justified by faith in God’s promise.

Now I mentioned at the beginning that our Old Testament
reading is important for understanding the rest of the Bible. It’s important
because it is the beginning of the story that is going to subsequently play out
over the course of thousands of years, even up to the present day. In our
reading you heard God’s promise that he would bless Abraham and Sarah. He would
make a great nation of them. All the families of the earth would be blessed in
them. And so it went. Abraham and Sarah had a son named Isaac. Isaac and his
wife Rebecca had a son named Jacob. Jacob, like his grandfather, would
eventually get a new name from God. He was given the name Israel. And Israel
had 12 sons. Those twelve sons would eventually become the 12 tribes of Israel.

The Old Testament, with all its history, with its dozens upon
dozens of generations, is about the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
whose God was the Lord God. All of this traces back to the reading we heard
this morning. It all starts with God talking to a man named Abram who was 75
years old at the time. He promised him that he would be his God, and that he
and his descendants would be his people. They believed this promise and their
faith was credited to them as righteousness.

This carries over also into the New Testament. In our
Epistle reading from Romans Paul is making a wonderful and persuasive argument
for why the real descendants of Abraham are not those who are descendants
according to the flesh, but are those who follow Abraham’s example. Abraham’s
descendants are those who believe God’s promise and are justified by faith.

This is how Genesis chapter 12 is important and applicable
also to us, all the way down to our current time and place. Unlike Genesis 12,
the Lord God has not appeared to us or spoken to us in the same way that he
spoke to Abraham, but that was never what was really important about what
happened. What was important was the content of God’s message to Abraham. What
was important was the promise God made to Abram and his descendants. Abraham
came to know the mind of the Lord towards him.

We, too, have come to know of the Lord God’s promises to us.
We learn that God is for us and not against us when the good news of Jesus’s full
and complete redemption is made known to us. Whenever you hear the good news
that Jesus has died for your sins and that you are therefore forgiven, you are
hearing something very similar to what God told Abraham—except, if anything, the
message you hear is an even higher and better message.

And when you were baptized, God said to you essentially: “I
am yours and you are mine. I’m baptizing you into the death of my beloved Son.
You are now born again by the water and the Holy Spirit so that through the
forgiveness of sins you are welcome to enter the kingdom of God.” God most
assuredly has said this to you in your baptism, for that is the meaning of your
baptism. There’s no doubt about God having said this because we know that you
have been baptized. You might not believe it, but that doesn’t change what God
has said or done. Blessed are you if you do believe it. Blessed are you if you believe
that God is for you and not against you, come what may. You are his and he is
yours.

And we have been given another promise, another statement of
God’s loving care towards us, in the Lord’s Supper. Jesus says of the bread: “This
is my body which is given for you.” And of the wine he says: “This cup
is the new testament—that is, new covenant or promise, the very kind of
thing that God did with Abraham—this cup is the new testament in my blood,
which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sins. As often as you drink of
it, do so in remembrance of me.” The Lord’s Supper is nothing other than
Jesus saying to you that he is for you, God is for you, your sins are forgiven.
God is for you and not against you. Blessed are you if you believe this.
Through faith in this promise you are justified.

So now let’s move to the relationship that you and I have
had these past 12 years. God has given me the job of telling you what God has
promised. The Gospel, baptism, the Lord’s Supper—these are never-failing
promises from God about his forgiveness and loving care for sinners. When you
believe that God is for you and not against you because God has told this to
you, and you believe that he is not a liar, but speaking the truth, then you
are just like Abraham of old. He believed that God was for him and not against
him.

So my job as pastor has not been anything original or
anything that came from me—at least when it comes to anything that is truly
worthwhile. I only repeat to you what I myself have heard from others. The
Gospel and the Sacraments do what they do because God makes them work, because
God who says them is truthful.

The one thing I will say about a pastor’s effectiveness is
that a pastor needs to be faithful to what he has been given to do. A pastor
needs to baptize. A pastor needs to not mess around with the Lord’s Supper or
the Creed. A pastor needs to actually talk about these things and not waste
people’s time with any number of other things—even if those other things might
be more entertaining, more attractive to new-comers, or in some other way might
seem to promise success for himself or the congregation.

If a pastor does not faithfully give out what he is supposed
to, such a pastor would be like Abraham if Abraham were to squander God’s
promise by not telling others about it. Suppose that he didn’t tell his children
and grandchildren about God’s promise, but instead liked to entertain them with
jokes or stories. Or maybe even he liked to tell them about how to be good
citizens or some other serious things. If Abraham wouldn’t have told his
descendants about God’s promise, then God’s promise would not be known and
believed. Abraham needed to be faithful to what was given to him. How can
anyone know God’s will towards them unless it be told them?

And so the most essential thing about a pastor is that he be
faithful to what he has been commanded to give. What the pastor has been
commanded to give is what also already belongs to all of you. When I speak of
God’s promises, when I administer the sacraments—none of that comes from me,
none of that is secret, none of that comes from my genius. All of that is
common property in Christendom. You all know that just as well as I do.

And now this job that I have been doing is going to be
passed along to somebody else. You are going to have a vacancy pastor. And
then, God willing, God will give you another pastor to serve you full time.
These other pastors will inevitably be different from me. No two pastors are
ever the same. God gives different gifts to all his Christians, pastors
included. But although your pastors in the future will be different from me in
terms of their gifts and personality, they will be giving you the same things
I’ve been giving you— at least when it comes to the important things, the
saving things. These pastors have taken the same solemn oath that I’ve taken—to
do the job of preaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments. It is God’s
promise that is so essential and important. It is by faith in this
promise—faith that God is for me and not against me—that makes anyone a
Christian. It is by faith in Christ that we are justified.

So as my time with you draws to a close, what is good,
important, and saving about the work that I have done is going to continue on
among you. I am sure that you are going to continue to hear that you are
sinners. I am sure that you are going to continue to hear that you are sinners
who have been justified, made righteous, by God in Jesus.

God has worked these good things in this congregation before
I ever came, he has worked through my service, and he will continue to work in
this congregation after I have gone. If you hold to these promises that God has
spoken to you, then we will most certainly see each other again. We might not
see each other again in this life—although I’d like that very much—but we will
certainly see each other again at the marriage feast of the Lamb in his kingdom
which has no end. There we will be with a multitude that comes from the east
and the west to sit at the feast of salvation. With Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
the blessed obeying the Lord’s invitation. Have mercy upon us O Jesus!

I’m thankful for the time that we have spent together. May
God continue to bless us with faith in his love toward us for Jesus’s sake.
Amen!