[AI translation] Let me say in advance that I do not want to explain the primary meaning of this verb, i.e. not its salvation-historical aspect. Not how God chooses one man to make a whole people, a chosen nation, in order to prepare the way for the fulfilment of the promise, the coming of the Messiah. So I do not want to talk about that now, but about the symbolic meaning of this promise. For Abram (later Abraham) is not only a man called Abraham, who lived a very long time ago, thousands of years ago, but also an eternal type of the believer and of the Church. In him every man called of God can know himself. The way in which he is treated by God, the way in which he relates to his Lord, the way in which he obeys or falls, the way in which he is tempted and blessed, are all examples by which we can see, step by step, that it is about us. The story of his calling that I have just read from the Bible is so modern, so contemporary, that it almost contains the most topical problem of the children of God - or shall we say the Church of Christ, that is, the community of followers of Christ - that is raised by the present age. It is in the light of this passage that the way in which God leads His people becomes very clear: the way of the Church, today's way. This is what I want to talk about now.This is how the story begins: "And the Lord said to Abram" (Genesis 12:1a). The journey of the believer's life always begins there: "said the Lord". So God speaks. God intervenes in the life of man. This is how it all began for Abraham, that God spoke to him. Abraham lived before that, and we know from the story that he lived a long time. He had lived seventy-five years when the Lord spoke to him. But Abraham's background was of little importance, except as a preparation for the moment when God would intervene with full power in this life. His real life, his journey of faith, began when the Lord said to Abram. And, brethren, it is the same in our lives! The life that has meaning, purpose, destiny for eternity, always begins with "the Lord said" - that is, with God speaking, intervening in our lives. This is what man cannot force himself to do: to be spoken to by God. Because you cannot get to this experience of God through any spiritual practice or meditation. It is not a question of a man immersing himself in the search for divinity, but of a man being shaken to realize that he has been addressed by God, directly by his person. Somebody from above has reached into his heart, taken hold of his being, possessed his whole being. This is where faith in God begins.
Therefore, there can be no argument about the existence of God, because, behold, only he whom he has addressed knows about him. He himself, personally. God is not the subject of conversation, but the interlocutor. He is not someone to speculate about whether He is or not. God is Someone who addresses you, who puts you before Himself with His word. Somehow this happens in such a way that a word of God, which we have read many times in the Bible or heard in a sermon, suddenly becomes so vivid, so powerful, that one realizes: God is here, speaking directly to him! This divine word that man hears becomes a real experience of God for him, and in this experience God reveals himself.
For me, God's word became such a divine experience when he made it known to me that, for the merit of Jesus, he had forgiven all my sins, that he had written the inheritance of his holy Son, eternal life, as a gift in my name. It was this word of God's grace with which he took hold of me, with which he called me, like Abraham. By which he has set me on a path that, even through failures, through setbacks, through a thousand troubles and miseries, I know leads me home. For me too, this is where the journey of the believer's life begins. And the church, the congregation, is a community of people whom God has called personally, whom he has spoken to and touched by his word. And it will become increasingly clear that this is the only criterion for membership of the Church: this divine call. In no way is it the fact that one is born into one or other church, or that one is baptised or pays a subscription, but only that one has heard God's call, that this has become an experience and a decisive reality that dominates one's life. After that, it was the 'saying of the Lord' that set the course of his life. In essence, this is already the criterion for church membership today, and will be the only criterion in the future.
Let me ask you this: have you ever heard, are you used to hearing, this intervention of God in your life? Do you know the feeling when His word becomes a life-gripping power in you? Would that we all truly belonged to Him, to His church, to His people! To Him, to the Lord Himself! To Jesus Christ!
And what does God say to Abraham? He says: "Come out of your land, out of your kindred, and out of your father's house, into the land which I will show you" (verse 1). From his old, familiar frame of life, from the security in which he was already well settled. No less than God had told him to leave everything that had grown on his heart, his life, his thinking over 75 years. To start a whole new life, to dare to go on following God's guidance alone, following step by step His leading, His direction.
This is almost literally what is happening today to the Church, to the children of God, to believers. God is calling them out of the old, familiar framework into a completely new and unknown way. Yes, this is the main message of God today: 'Come out of your land, out of your kindred, and out of your father's house, into the land that I will show you.' So what is the old from which we are challenged, and what is the new towards which our lives are directed? The old is the civic way of life in which the Church was an authoritative public authority for everyone up to the age of 18. It was taken for granted that everyone belonged to a church of some kind, and so religion, even if in a stale and stereotyped form, was a part of almost everyone's life. The churches were a powerful cultural, moral and even economic factor in public life, with their institutions, their possessions, their authority and their traditions. It is the old from which God challenges His Church.
And the new, towards which the Lord is leading us today, is not exactly an easy task: the man addressed must find and walk the path of Christian faith and life in a social system that professes a Marxist ideology, that is, that regards the Church as an outmoded institution that hinders progress, as a relic of a bygone social system. It regards religion as anti-progressive thinking, and preaches and propagates atheism as opposed to faith. It is therefore in a spiritual climate that we must today find the way of Christian faithful life, a way in which the Church has never lived in its two thousand years of existence. This is the brand new! For us, this also means that God is calling us out of the old popular church framework of centuries past and leading us to a whole new, faith-filled church life.
What is the framework of the popular church? Let me make it a little more practical through a few examples. People come to the pastor's office to announce a funeral. Unknown people, I've never seen them in church. Turns out they don't even attend, except maybe at Christmas and Good Friday. We talk about the deceased. He wasn't "overly religious", as they say. I ask: why then do they want him buried in church? I explain that a church funeral is an occasion to confess our faith in the risen Christ. The answer is that it is still appropriate for a priest to bury him. Another similar case: a young couple applying for a wedding. In the course of the conversation, I explain the text of the vows to them. It turns out that they have long since passed beyond the belief in God the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. I ask them, why then do they insist on the church ceremony? The oath begins, "I swear by the living God, who is Father, Son, Holy Spirit..." They say: it's not they who insist, it's the parents, and what about the relatives? So, in practical terms, the folk church way of life means that church customs such as baptism of a child; confirmation at the age of 14; a wedding; a funeral; attending church services at Christmas, Easter; paying church taxes, all these ecclesiastical actions are not expressions of self-conscious faith, but are just respect for old customs, just an external form, a rattling machine, just a custom, a tradition, a tradition that is handed down from father to son through generations.
This is what God is really saying: get out of it! And start a whole new life! Abraham didn't know where the new path God was leading him was leading him. Only step by step did the new way of life unfold before him. We can only see the outlines of this new way ahead of us. God is now educating the believer, the Church, for something entirely new. For example, he is leading us into a whole new way of obedience to secular authority. He is calling us to a whole new loyalty and a new service. We, the followers of Christ, the Church, must today live our faith and live our ministry in the world in such a way that the Marxists see, are convinced, that Christianity is not an anti-progressive way of life, not the ideological standard-bearer of a capitalist social order. The Church is not the fifth column of capitalism, its members are not the secret pro-Western supporters of the West against the East, the Church is not the last refuge of liberal thought and life. The world needs to be convinced that intense Christian life is not an anachronism in a modern world. On the contrary, it is desirable. Good. It is useful. Yes, this is the new way, the new earth that God is showing us now. Towards which he is leading us. It is so new and different from what it has been that the only way to truly move forward is for God to lead. By following the Lord's leading, step by step. Only those who do not look back, but forward, whose ears and hearts are open to the Lord, can walk on it. Who, like Abraham, hears what the Lord says to him. Not what his own heart says, what his desires say, but what the Lord says. And behold, the Lord then also says, "And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will exalt your name, and you shall be a blessing." (Genesis 12:2)
God does not leave faithful obedience without reward. But what a reward is this promise: "I will make you a great nation." For in this promise it is also implied that the fruit of Abraham's obedience will not be enjoyed by himself, but by future centuries, for he will not live to see that he will become a great nation. We know from the biblical story that he did not live to see it. In his late old age his son Isaac was born, the child of promise. So Abraham really only had the promise of reward, and yet he believed that all that God had promised him would come to pass. He knew that he was no longer worthy of fulfillment, and yet he believed it was true because God said so. And even if he was no longer worth it, God would still fulfill what he had promised. Behold the far-reaching consequences of a believer's obedience to God's guidance. If you now, at the word of God, dare to undertake this new obedience, this new service, this new way, this new path of faithful life that leads through Marxism, you are not only choosing your own path, for God is building the obedience of your faith into the destiny of future centuries. "I will make you a great nation," says the Lord to Abraham. He is saying to us that Abraham's generation, the believing people of the earth, will multiply if we are truly obedient to God's leading now. This is our great Advent hope.
"And I will bless you," says the Lord. We get that so wrong too. God's blessing has little to do with earthly happiness, fortune, prosperity. God's blessing is not a means to the fulfillment of our desires. If God blesses a sick person, for example, it does not necessarily mean that the sick person will be healed. God can bless him in sickness too. God can also bless an unhappy marriage. If God blesses the community of believers, the obedient church, this promise does not mean that the church will then regain its former authority in the world, its estates, its schools, its former splendour and its former glory. No. Blessing means something quite different. Perhaps I could put it this way: to be divinely influenced, to be filled with heavenly power, to be so involved in communion with God that one becomes a blessing to others. He becomes capable of making his life, his suffering, his hope, his aspiration, even his death, bear fruit for the benefit of humanity. "I will bless you and... you will be a blessing" - the two go together. God's blessing on man or the Church means that man, the Church, can bring light, serenity, joy, goodness, peace into the life of the world. In other words, Christ's effects, Christ's powers.
And is there anything that this world needs as much as this? For it is precisely love, forgiveness, patience, understanding, humility that this world fundamentally needs in order not to destroy itself. A whole new basis of mutual trust is needed for the whole of humanity to be able to live in peace on this earth. And it will become a blessing, precisely to the extent that it hears God's word and obeys it: 'Come out of your land... to the land that I will show you." (Genesis 12:1)
This is why, for example, the believer and the Church must take every opportunity to make a statement of faith on the most pressing issue of the world today, the issue of war and peace. One thing Christians and the Church must know today is that they do not consider war to be compatible with their conscience and their faith in Christ, and that they are unambiguously in favour of peace. Today, almost the whole of Christendom is united in this, since at the Second Vatican Council, at the World Council of Churches General Assembly in New Delhi and at the All-Christian Peace Conference in Prague, the Church of Christ expressed the unconditional desire of humanity for peace.
Fathers! Now is the time to truly follow Christ, to belong to His army, to live under His leadership, to walk in His service!
Amen
Date: 2 December 1962.