Sermon: Wittenberg Academy – Nov 29, 2022

29 Nov 2022 - St. Noah

Text: 1 Pet 2:1-12

In the name of + Jesus.  Amen.

St. Peter begins by calling us to repent of all “malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander.”  But the apostle doesn’t tell us to use our willpower to do so.  In fact, he teaches us how to repent “like newborn infants” who crave their mother’s milk.  For us Christians, we “grow up into salvation” not by willpower, but rather by “long[ing] for the pure spiritual milk.”  And he adds that we can do this if we “have tasted that the Lord is good.”

So Peter teaches us that repentance is a gift to be received, just as a newborn rejoices in being fed by his mother, not having earned it, and not having understood it.  He simply opens his mouth and receives the gift.

For each believer is, like his Lord, “a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious.”  And what’s more, we Christians are gathered together into a “spiritual house,” that is, the Church.  And Jesus is the “stone that the builders rejected” who “has become the cornerstone” and the “stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense.”

And so we are Israel: God’s chosen people.  We come from every worldly nation, but in Him we are one “holy nation, a people for His own possession.”  He has called us out of the nations of this fallen world, laid a foundation upon the apostles, and built us together upon the Cornerstone, who is our Lord Jesus Christ.  For indeed, in the Old Covenant, we were “not a people.”  We were outside of salvation.  For the Old Covenant was an inheritance of blood: descendants of Abraham who were part of God’s chosen people by circumcision, but more importantly by faith: faith in the promise of the Christ to come.  And now that He has come, dear friends, we who do not share either the blood of Abraham or the blood of circumcision share in the blood of Christ, also by faith.  And now, dear friends, in the New Covenant, we are “God’s people.”

And this is how it is that St. Peter urges us to repent.  Our strength is not of ourselves and of our own goodness.  Indeed, our strength is only by the gift of faith, by being pressed into a powerful stone edifice by the mortar of Word and Sacrament, being built on the Rock of St. Peter’s confession and the apostolic foundation – which itself is made secure by being made true to our Cornerstone, Jesus Christ our Lord!

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.