Eve of the National Day of Thanksgiving

(Audio)

Luke 12:13-21; 2 Corinthians 9:6-15; Deuteronomy 8:1-10

 

In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.

And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. (Deuteronomy 8:10)

Eating and being full are rarely much of a problem for most people on our National Day of Thanksgiving. However, blessing the Lord our God for the good land he has given us is quite another matter. In the Hebrew way of speaking, to bless God is to thank Him, to acknowledge Him as the “Giver of the gifts” and the “Source of every blessing.” "Thank you" is one of the very first things we learned to say as children, and hopefully, one of the first things we teach our children to say. It is the language of “being given to,” the response to “gifts received.” Most of us still have that parental reminder ringing in our ears from our youngest days: "Now what do you say?" "Thank you."

God teaches us to say "thank you" to Him. The psalms are a veritable cornucopia of praise and thanksgiving: "It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to thy name, O Most High." "Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him, bless his name!" "O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his mercy endures forever." "I will give thanks to thee, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing praises to thee among the nations."

Tomorrow is our National Day of Thanksgiving, established by President Lincoln in 1863. Lincoln originally intended Thanksgiving Day as a day of national repentance and prayer because he feared that the ravages of the Civil War were God's punishment on the nation for our presumptuous sins and ingratitude. Lincoln wrote: "We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own."

Thanksgiving Day as we have come to observe it is more of a holiday than a holy day. From what I've been able to gather, most Lutherans in America did not participate much in national days of thanksgiving in any organized way until the turn of the last century. Harvest festivals were common among the rural churches, though these were “regional” days of thanksgiving not “national.” Our contemporary observance of Thanksgiving Day is much more an exercise in American civil religion with semi-apocryphal stories of Pilgrims and Indians, a ritual meal of turkey, dressing, cranberries and all the fixings, various expressions of gratitude to various gods, and a common liturgy supplied by the National Football League or Hallmark, depending on who's controlling the remote after dinner.

The Church hardly needs to be reminded by Caesar and the state to repent of our ingratitude and to render thanks and praise to God for His gifts. Each week in the Liturgy we acknowledge that it is "truly meet, right, and salutary that we should at all times and in all places give thanks...." One of the traditional names for the Lord's Supper is the "Eucharist," from the Greek word eucharisto, meaning "to give thanks." The life of the Christian is “eucharistic life” - a life lived in thanksgiving for the gifts received through Jesus Christ.

The Small Catechism teaches us to bracket the daily meal with thanksgiving and prayer. "The eyes of all look to you, O Lord, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing." “Lord, God, heavenly Father, bless us and these your gifts which we receive from your bountiful goodness, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” And then after the meal, "Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His love endures forever...." "We thank you, Lord God, heavenly Father, for all your benefits, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen." For the Christian, every day is a day of thanksgiving.

The act of thanksgiving acknowledges the Giver. When we give thanks to God, we are confessing that God is “the Giver” and that we are on “the receiving end” of all that He gives. God doesn't need our thanks; we need to thank Him. "Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagles." Thanksgiving is for our benefit, not God's. It is a reminder that God is our strength, and that it is by the power and might of His merciful hand, not our hands, that we receive all that we have.

At the time that Moses preached the sermon in Deuteronomy, Israel was standing on the threshold of the promised land. The rich land of Canaan was God's gift to His people, the fulfillment of His promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It was a land too good to be true, especially after 40 hard years of wandering in the wilderness. It was a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing forth in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which the people would eat bread without scarcity, in which they would lack nothing, a land whose stones were iron, and out of whose hills they would dig copper. "And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you."

God knew the fickle hearts of His people. He knew how self-centered they were by nature, how curved inward the human heart is unbuckled from God. He knew they would forget to say thank you. "Beware," Moses said, "lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth...."

Remember. That's the key word in Deuteronomy. Remember the God who remembers you. Remember that God is the giver of the gifts. Remember to thank God for His gifts. Jesus taught His disciples to pray daily for daily bread, but we often forget that daily bread comes from God. Most of us are fairly certain from whence our next loaf of daily bread is going to come. It isn't likely to drop like manna from the skies onto the middle of the dining room tables after we say the "Amen." No, daily bread comes through far more mundane channels than that. We must get up each day and go to work and earn a paycheck and use our hard-earned money to buy our bread which someone else has worked through the night to produce and put on the grocery shelves. Or, if we are resourceful, we might knead the dough with our own hands and bake the bread in our own ovens. However it comes, daily bread still comes with our work, by the sweat of our brows.

The sweat of our brow sometimes gets in our eyes and blinds us to the fact that daily bread remains God's gift. And God works through such everyday and mundane instrumentalities as a job, a paycheck, the baker, the grocer, and whomever else He might choose to provide us with daily bread. God has people at work right now supplying our daily bread. Our vision blurred by the sweat of our own labor, we start to see things in terms of rights instead of gifts. We begin to think that we've somehow earned what we have. We forget to say thank you. Who says thank you to the boss for the paycheck? Thanksgiving is a foreign word on the lips of those who feel that they have a right to be fed, to be prosperous, to be healthy. The "self-made" person has only himself or herself to thank.

Much the same attitude lurks just beneath the surface in American civil religion. It is the idea, often dredged up at Thanksgiving, that our nation somehow has favored nation status with God, that we are God's chosen people in a promised land singled out for special favors for our being the great guardians of democracy, freedom, capitalism, and Christianity. Such work deserves its wages. There isn't much room for thanksgiving when you figure that God pays out on a merit system.

Another reason some forget to say thank you is abundance. It's difficult to count your blessings when your blessings overflow into landfills. When bellies are full and bank accounts are brimming, the incense of thanksgiving tends to rise a bit thinly, or not at all. "Watch out," said Moses to the people of Israel, "lest you forget the Lord, your God. When you've eaten and are full, when you've built wonderful houses and live in them, when your silver and gold are multiplied and you are rich, then watch out, lest in your bounty you forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Israel was much more in tune with God's hand when He fed them by hand in the wilderness, than when they ate from the good of the land in Canaan. Abundance as a way of life tends to snuff out the flames of thanksgiving.

But the chief reason we forget to say thank you is that we attempt to live by bread alone, instead of living by every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We try to have daily bread without the Word, and so thanksgiving fails. The ultimate bread is not the bread we make by the sweat of our brow, but the Word of God through which all bread is made, Living Bread, Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, the Bread of Life come down from heaven. That's what God was trying to teach Israel in the wilderness, when he let them go hungry and then He fed them manna from heaven.

Thanksgiving, if it is to be thanksgiving to God, begins with our receiving Living Bread, Jesus, and the gifts He died to give us - Holy Baptism, Holy Absolution, the Holy Supper, God's Word, the Church and Holy Ministry, the forgiveness of sins, the promise of the resurrection of our bodies on the Last Day, eternal life. Without these, there can be no thanksgiving to God, for no one can come to the Father except through the Son by the Spirit whom He sends. Thanksgiving flows out of faith in Jesus Christ and His perfect life of thanksgiving lived in our place, His atoning death on the cross, His victorious resurrection that means our rising from the dead on the Last Day, our inheritance of eternal blessing.

At Jesus' feet is where true thanksgiving to God is rendered, for it is through Jesus' sacrifice, and not our own, that our thanksgiving is made holy and pleasing to God. At the feet of Jesus we receive our daily bread as a gift: food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, land, animals, money, goods, a devout husband or wife, devout children, devout workers, devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health, self-control, a good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors. The list is long. There is much more that you can add for yourself. The Lord is gracious and generous. There are more gifts to be received than can be acknowledged in a single day. There is more to be thankful for than can be contained in a single day of thanksgiving.

And so, we will give thanks to God, tonight and tomorrow and every day. We will do it on behalf of our nation, as priests to God that we all are, anointed in Baptism to pray on behalf of our neighbor. We will give thanks for every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God, for the Word made Flesh, our Savior Jesus Christ, for the good land he has given us, and for the greater land to come in the kingdom that is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord. Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God. It is good and right so to do.

In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.