181121 Sermon on Deuteronomy 26:1-11 (Thanksgiving), November 21, 2018

181121 Sermon on Deuteronomy 26:1-11 (Thanksgiving), November 21, 2018

The Thanksgiving Holiday is an important American tradition.  As it is with other national festivals, all people are gathered together no matter what their creed or race.  Along with the Holiday season and the Fourth of July, everybody celebrates this festival.  That’s why all the airports and highways are packed with people.

But as you know, we are not gathered here tonight because we are Americans or because we worship America.  We are Christians.  We worship Christ.  And so our Thanksgiving is different.  It’s directed someplace, namely, to our God—it is not just a general sense of gratitude.  Even atheists can understand the value of having a sense of gratitude.  It is expressed in proverbial sayings like, “Be grateful for what you have,” or “count your blessings.”  But it is something different to lift up your hearts unto the Lord, giving thanks for exactly what it is that you have at this moment, where you are in your life, no matter where you are or what is going on.

This is the kind of thankfulness that I’d like to learn a little more about tonight.  Consider our Old Testament reading.  This is from Deuteronomy at the time of Moses.  The Israelites are still in the wilderness, but God is speaking to them about what they should do when they enter into the land that God has promised for them.  They are to take some of the first fruits of their newly acquired land and sacrifice it to the Lord.  The words are especially important.  They are to say, “I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our fathers to give us.”  And a little later it says, “And [God] brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”  The focus, the attention, is on the Lord God.  In their new home they lift up their eyes to God and say, “You are the one who did this for us and to us.  We are here because of you.”

This “in your face” kind of interaction with God, this “we lift up our hearts unto the Lord” kind of thanksgiving is what makes it different from what comes naturally to us.  What would be perfectly natural for the Israelites to do when they entered the promised land is to look around them and say, “My goodness, what milk!  What honey!  Look at all this stuff that is mine!  Let’s count it!”  What comes perfectly naturally for all people is to look at the gifts and pay no mind to the One who gives the gifts.  Of course, everybody knows in some sense that God is back there somewhere as the supreme being or the grand architect, but what drives the gratitude—the real force behind it—is the goodness of the stuff.  So long as life is good and exactly how you might want it to be, then the gratitude might be there, but not God.  The goal is not to have God, but the stuff—the quality of life.

What makes the Israelite’s thanksgiving or the Christian’s thanksgiving different from what otherwise comes naturally to us is faith.  God’s people believe his promises.  God’s promise plays a large part in the thanksgiving that the Israelites are to offer in our reading.  At the very beginning of their thanksgiving they recall that God promised their fathers this land for them.  God kept his promise and brought them there.  More important than land or milk and honey is God’s promise that he would be their God and that they would be his people.  He promised them the Savior so that they could be together forever.  God’s promises is what gave them the confidence to raise their hearts to him.

God has also made his promises to you.  He has baptized you, and do you know what God’s Word says about that?  Jesus says in the last chapter of Mark: “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved, whoever does not believe shall be condemned.”  That baptism is God saying to you, “I am yours and you and mine.  Where I am you may remain.  The foe shall not divide us.”  It is because of this promise that you can and should call upon our Father in heaven with all boldness and confidence as he is your true Father and you are his dear child.

God with his promises is the thing that doesn’t change.  Other things in life might change a great deal.  There are some families tomorrow who don’t feel like giving thanks because of the things that are going on in their life.  These stories can be extremely sad, and if they either do not know or believe in the love of God to us in Christ then it is a total tragedy.  All that such people can see is clouds.  They cannot see the sun behind the clouds.  Even for those who know the love of God in Christ, sometimes the clouds are thick and stick around for a long time.  And let’s be honest: sometimes these clouds will stick around for the remainder of a person’s life.  But if that person has been baptized and believes, then he or she will have eternal life.

Take the Israelites as an example.  Because of their disobedience and rebellion against God they were punished by him and forced to live off of manna and nothing more than the bare necessities in the wilderness for forty years.  That was difficult to bear.  But those who remained faithful were not looking for their joy in this life or in the quality of it.  Their joy was in the God who had declared them as his own.  The first generation of Israelites all died in the wilderness, but now God wipes every tear from their eyes.  That’s how it is for God’s people at all times.  We are strangers and sojourners here. 

God is so abundantly good that there is much to give thanks for in just earthly benefits.  But because God has promised fellowship with him through the redemption that is in Jesus our talk and our thanksgiving rises above all these things.  God is the one who has brought you thus far in your life.  He has loaded you up with tremendous blessings both earthly and spiritual, temporal and eternal.  But there is more: God gives you even his very self.  That is the thing above all other things that God wishes to give and in whom we are to have our highest thanksgiving.  He has given his only begotten Son, whom he loves—his dearest treasure.  This is the constant in your life that cannot change.  Lies might be spoken about this constant to shake your faith in it, but Jesus is who he is.  He’s done what he’s done and nobody can change that.  He has purchased you with his holy precious blood and his bitter, innocent sufferings and death.

One time one of my parishioners with a terminal disease was suffering with some complications because of that disease.  She said to me, “things are going to get better.”  Now sometimes people will say that kind of thing as a philosophy or attitude towards life.  It’s like little orphan Annie saying, “the sun will come out tomorrow.”  Your luck is going to change—that sort of thing.  But that’s not what this woman meant.  She knew she had a terminal disease.  She knew what might happen in the future.  What she was talking about when she said that things are going to get better was that she knew that there was a sun behind the clouds in her life.  She knew God.  She knew his promises.  She knew that he was hers and she was his.  And so she was saying that maybe things will get worse for a little while, but in the end, things were going to get better.  She was going to die with Jesus and be raised with him.  She was going to the land of not just milk and honey, but where righteousness dwells.  Instead of just the gifts, she would get the Giver himself.

On this basis you may worship your God with a glad heart even if times are tough or if there are tears in your eyes.  Sing together with St. Mary, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”  This is a thanksgiving that is not dependent upon your quality of life.  It is not dependent upon the gifts you have or don’t have.  This is a thanksgiving that says, “I want you, God.  The gifts are not what are so important to me.  I want you.”