A homily preached in Kramer Chapel by
the Rev. Prof. Robert V. Roethemeyer
on Thursday, March 18, 1999, for the Spring Invitational Campus Visit

Dateline 2091 B.C. Tigris . . . Euphrates . . . Ur . . . Haran . . . SALT (Sarah, Abram, Lot, Terah) . . . Terah dies. And the LORD said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land that I will show you." God’s call was pointed. It was radical. Abram’s response is recorded four verses later, "So Abram left." But what lay between the imperative "Leave" and the obedient "So Abram left" was an inner struggle that tested the steel of his faith to the core.

Obedience is always costly. It is never easy. Abram is ordered to turn his back on what had become familiar and friendly, to go out to the unwelcome and the unknown. He is to head for a land that God will show him, a promised land.

As in the time of Noah, oh how the neighbors must have snickered! There was Abram packing his gear, ready to head out to God-only-knows-where. He had been doing so well in Haran. His flocks and herds had excellent pasture. He was a rich man. "You’ve got all this," his neighbors must have taunted. "What do you want with a promised land? Silly fellow, following some will-o’-the-wisp when you might have it made. Forget about this business of a city without foundations whose Maker and Builder is God. Use your common sense, and keep both feet planted here on good old terra firma, in the land between the rivers, in the land of the people of the east."

But Abram went. He walked by faith. As the writer of the Hebrews declares, "By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as an inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going."

Dateline 1999 A.D. St. Joseph . . . St. Mary . . . Maumee . . . Fort Wayne. ICV. Invitational Campus Visit. Eighty prospective students, wives, fiancées, and girlfriends have come from all parts of the country to gain greater familiarity with Concordia Theological Seminary and the preparation that leads to service in the pastoral ministry. This invitational weekend affords them the opportunity to think about what it means to leave their homes and prepare to go to the land that the Lord will show them.

The decision to come to seminary is rarely easy. We, too, sense an inner struggle. The approximately one-third of each incoming class arriving from colleges know how other degrees and career paths can be so alluring! The other two-thirds of each incoming class, leaving one career and preparing for another, can relate well to Abram’s journey, even his neighbors!

But such is the journey of faith that has led most of us to the seminary. We leave behind the lives and towns that we know and come to prepare, not knowing what city the Lord will show us.

Indeed 60-some candidates and 40-some vicars await spring and summer assignment and placement to know the land that the Lord will show them for a time.

The call of Abram must have come as a surprise. There was no reason why Abram should have been the object of God’s call: he wasn’t better or more deserving than anyone else. So it is with us. If we look for the origin of the call of God in ourselves, we will be lost, we will not hear it at all. The origin of God’s call is in God’s mercy.

In our baptism, God in His mercy called us to faith and gave us the blessing promised to Abraham. "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."

At the heart of this seven-fold blessing is the promise that the whole of humanity would be blessed! The blessing would be the opposite of the curse that came upon humanity as a consequence of the Fall. The curse would be nullified. God promised Abraham that he would establish the line from which the seed of the woman would come.

The Bible witness to the call of Abram is a decisive event in God’s program of outreach. Seen in Biblical perspective (as in Psalm 105), it is one of an unfolding series of happenings leading to the supreme event. It is a chapter in the history of salvation whose goal is the coming of Abram’s seed, the Lord Jesus, into the world to redeem mankind.

In Jesus was God in the flesh, walking as a man among men, being the perfect obedient He was called to be, even though it led him down a road of sorrows He did not want to walk and to a death that He did not want to die. But willingly He obeyed, and because He obeyed, suffering and dying in our place, taking upon Himself the wrath and punishment of God that we deserved, forgiveness is available to every man, to all who have it by way of repentance and faith in Christ.

As Abram was called, so are we by the Gospel. As Abram was blessed so are we. And as in obedience he became the blessing he was called to be, so we have been blessed to be a blessing to others.

In a very real sense, the vocation of all Christians is to be that blessing to others. By God’s grace, through the means of other people and events in your lives, many of you who worship here are confronted with the challenge to consider preparing or are preparing for a call to the office of the Holy Ministry, to be a blessing in a very public way . . . so that it may be known among the nations what the God of Abraham has done!

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

From the Volume 3, Issue 4, Summer 1999