MY TREASURED POSSESSION

Exodus 19:2-8a
June 18, 2023

While children were waiting for the school bus, their conversation
turned to the money they had in their pockets. The first child bragged as
he held out his change,

"I have 20 cents." The second could top that: "I
have 30 cents." One boy claimed he had 50 cents but wouldn't show the
sum. So the groups teased,

"You don't have 50 cents. If you do, show it to

us." The boy was firm as he said,

"My daddy said that when I get home
from school today he is going to give me 50 cents. It is already mine since
my daddy said so."
That is the way it is with God's promises. When he speaks, the
promise is as sure as if it had already happened. In this text the Lord tells
Israel,

"You will be my treasured possession... you will be for me a

kingdom of priests and a holy nation."
God chose Israel out of all nations. God chose Abraham and called
him to the promised land in order to develop and shape his own people.
But when Abraham died his people did not possess the promised land.
Abraham however believed the promise of God and it was reckoned to
him as righteousness. The descendants of Abraham went down to Egypt
where they were enslaved. But God rescued his people from slavery in
Egypt with an awesome display of miraculous power: the plagues, the
Passover, the Red Sea divided. He carried them "on eagles' wings" and
brought them to himself.
Israel is at Mt Sinai, soon to receive the ten commandments and all
the arrangements of the covenant that God would make with his people.
God promises that they would be his treasured possession. While they
might not have felt they were God's treasured people in the hot sun of the
desert, God had promised it and they believed him.

God chose his church to be the new Israel. God did not abandon or
reject his Old Testament Israel. Rather, he now incorporates both Jewish
and Gentile believer in Christ into the new Israel. Jesus rescued the Israel
of God from the slavery of sin.
In the 1993 movie "In the Line of Fire, Clint Eastwood played Secret
Service Agent Frank Horrigan, who protected the lives of presidents for
more than three decades. But he was haunted by the memory of what
happened 30 years before. Horrigan was a young agent assigned to
President Kennedy in Dallas on the fateful day of November 22, 1963.
When the assassin fired, Horrigan froze in shock. For 30 years afterward,
he wrestled with the ultimate question for a Secret Service agent: Can I
take a bullet for the President? In the course of the movie, Horrigan does
what he had been unable to do earlier. He throws himself into the path of
an assassin's bullet to save the president. At Calvary the situation was
reversed. The "President/King" of the universe actually took the bullet for
each of us. He died in our place. He paid for our sin.
All believers in Jesus comprise his chosen/elect generation, his
kingdom of priests, his holy nation, his people who are his treasured
possession. He carries us on the wings of his Word and Sacrament, to
sustain us through the wilderness of this world.
How do we respond to this fact that we are chosen by God. God has
told us how we are to respond. If you obey me fully and keep my
covenant, we will be showered with blessing after blessing. The covenant
that is described is the Ten Commandments. These give direction and
shape to the life of the believer. Through these God has taught us how to
be a part of the Kingdom of priests. Israel was to be a light to the Gentiles
so that the nations of the world would hear about the one true God.
Throughout the Old Testament the prophets continued to sound the clarion
call to the people to be what they had been called to be.

They were to be a holy nation. Israel was to show God's holiness by
her example of devotion to the Lord; her worship of one God instead of
many, and her moral life in contrast to the immorality of other nations.
Election, being chosen by God is a calling. Maybe if Israel had
known what it involved, the people wouldn't have stood there so devoutly
saying,

"All this we will do." Rather they might have tried to keep God at

a safe distance by denying their election altogether.
To this point in the exodus, God's relationship has been promising.
Speaking to Moses from the mountaintop, God can refer to a dramatic
deliverance: The Egyptians have been left behind, swamped in blood and
seawater; the children of Abraham have been carried out of bondage on
eagles’ wings.
But the word desert, twice repeated in our text, has an ominous ring.
For the people are now going to learn that there is another dimension to
God's choice. "...The whole earth is mine...,

" God says,

"But you shall be

for me a priestly people and a holy nation.”
Reiterating the Creator's claim to the whole creation, God strips out
any basis for turning election into a national endorsement. Egypt's blood
may be on the floor; the Canaanites' property rights may be in jeopardy,
but God's claim on these foreigners by creation still holds, even as Israel
benefits from the dispossession. God's choice may imply but certainly
doesn't require the rejection of other nations.
Rather, election brings with it a vocation. Israel is chosen precisely
for the others, to serve as God's witnesses, bearing the word to the
nations. This is their holiness, their holiness is encased in their calling, not
in personal or national moral character, but in their conformity to the
purpose for which God has set them apart.
Hearing such a word in the wilderness, Israel will learn even more of
what is involved in being chosen by God. God will lead them through the
desert for the sake of the nations of the earth and will turn out to be pretty
tough to deal with.
God insists on acting like God. So, a nation of slaves just beginning
to taste liberty, is selected to bring salvation to the world, by the time they
get done repeating the word desert, wilderness they will have had forty
years of it. It perhaps is enough to make any people rebellious. But the
God who calls will not be denied. He wants them, He created them, he
called them, they are his.
Augustine lived a wild life as a youth. But after he was converted, he
became one of the great fathers of the church and is today known as St.
Augustine. One day he was walking through a part of the town he had
frequented in his younger days, a woman called out to him,

"Augustine!
Augustine!" He recognized her and remembered his dealings with her in
his wilder years. Turning neither to the right nor the left, Augustine
looked straight ahead and walked on. "But Augustine,

" the lady pleaded,

"it is I!" Augustine replied,

"But it is not I!" The old Augustine, the Old I,

had died, and now Christ lived in him. The result was a new life.
This is our calling. The Lord of the Universe has elected us to be his
people in baptism. Our old self must die, and we are given new life in
these baptismal waters. He sends us to a world that does not know him.
While it is great that we are God's treasured possession, we dare not see it
as honor or privilege. God has called us for a purpose, so we might
declare his wonderful deeds, his salvation to a lost world. It changes our
life.

Sermon By Pastor Mark Griesse