Sermon for Thanksgiving
1 Chronicles 16:7-36 + Colossians 1:9-23
This is the last service of the year—of the Church year. So what better time to come together once more for thanksgiving, to recognize the Lord’s bountiful goodness over the past year, especially since our sinful flesh is so thankless and ungrateful and would gladly enjoy all of God’s benefits without stopping for even a moment to recognize the Giver?
The first thing we should give thanks for is the ability and the opportunity to give thanks. A lot of people have stopped giving thanks on Thanksgiving altogether, because they fail to recognize that all things come from God. They can’t begin to grasp the concept of being thankful for what they have, because they have no One to be thankful to, or they actually think that they deserve all the good things they have. Others do give thanks, but they give thanks to a false god who hasn’t done anything for them, to a god who hasn’t given His only-begotten Son into death for their sins. A generic god is worthless. A god who is not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is an idol. So all such misdirected thanksgiving amounts to nothing more than idolatry.
To thank God, you first have to know who God is. Listen to how King David began his Psalm of thanksgiving as he brought the ark of the covenant into the tabernacle newly brought to Jerusalem: Oh, give thanks to the LORD! Call upon His name; make known His deeds among the peoples! Sing to Him, sing psalms to Him; Talk of all His wondrous works! How can you give thanks to the LORD—Jehovah, Yahweh, the great I AM—if you don’t know His name? How can you make known His deeds among the peoples if you don’t know His deeds? How can you talk of all His wondrous works if you don’t know what they are?
And after you know that, then you have to know how you, a poor, miserable sinner, can approach Him, how you can call upon Him, how you can worship Him at all. David sang, Glory in His holy name; Let the hearts of those rejoice who seek the LORD! Seek the LORD and His strength; Seek His face evermore! How do you seek the LORD, who is invisible? Where do you go? On what basis will He receive you or listen to you or accept you? David gives the answer: Remember His covenant forever, The word which He commanded, for a thousand generations, The covenant which He made with Abraham, And His oath to Isaac, And confirmed it to Jacob for a statute, To Israel for an everlasting covenant…Sing to the LORD, all the earth; Proclaim the good news of His salvation from day to day. Out of all the nations of the earth, Israel had the right to approach God and the knowledge of how to approach Him, because God had made a covenant with them: to be their God, to hear their prayers, to help them, to forgive them, and to save them. That first covenant pointed ahead to Christ, who was the true Heir of the first covenant and the Author of the New Testament in His blood.
St. Paul, in our Second Lesson, described how we have been given the ability to give thanks to God: Giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins…You, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight.
You, dear saints—you do know God, because you know and believe what’s written about Him in Holy Scripture. And you do know how you can approach Him, because you have believed in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, through whom we have access to God, so that He hears our prayers and accepts our thanksgiving. You know better than to approach God by yourself, on your own merits, or clinging to your sins. You know you have no access to God, except by one route, by one Way: through Jesus Christ, who died for you and rose again and now stands at the right hand of God to intercede for you at all times. You can give thanks to God, because you have been reconciled to God through the death of Christ as the cause and through faith in Christ as the means. So give thanks to the Lord for that above all, for your place in His family as His dearly loved children who have been reconciled to Him through faith in Christ Jesus.
Then, just as David recounted many of the blessings God had given to His reconciled people of Israel, so it’s fitting for us, for those who have been reconciled through Christ by faith, to recount some of His blessings. I say “some,” because every moment, every breath, every molecule, every opportunity comes from God.
Give thanks to the Lord for the heavens and the earth, for good and bad weather, for the harvests that feed all the creatures of the world and that superabundantly fill the shelves in our grocery stores and in our pantries. Give thanks for wood and stone, metal and plastic, cement and asphalt, and for the skill of those who put them together to build our houses and our cars and our stores and our roads.
Give thanks to the Lord for your fellow man, for those who provide useful services to our society, for kind neighbors who make our lives pleasant and for difficult neighbors who help us appreciate how patient God has been with us. Give thanks to the Lord for your family and for daily opportunities to show them love. And give thanks for faithful friends. Give thanks to the Lord for your body, with all its warts and wrinkles and weaknesses, and for the promise of the resurrection of the body, when all its weaknesses will be changed into strength.
Give thanks to the Lord for the ministry of Word and Sacrament, for your Baptism, for Christ’s body and blood offered here every Sunday. Give thanks for our diocese, for its solid confession of the Christian religion, and for all its pastors and parishes. Give thanks, as I do, for each and every member at Emmanuel, both near and far, all 38 of them.
Give thanks for this beautiful church building, and let me give you an extra reason why. For the past seven years, since Thanksgiving, 2012, against all human odds, the Lord has provided our church with daily bread to such a degree that we have so far paid $26,000 in a down payment toward our mortgage, plus $233,000 toward the principal of our mortgage, plus $83,000 in interest. That’s $342,000! Now, $72,000 of that came from God’s providence through the sale of our adjacent property. The rest has come from God’s providence of daily bread to our families here at Emmanuel who have given regular offerings and substantial special offerings, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars He has dropped in our lap from elsewhere, from other Christians around the country, some of whom we have never even met. We still owe about $16,000. Now, some of you know this, but others may not, and I’ve now been given permission to tell you. As of this January, about six weeks from now, the remainder of that debt, however much is left, will be paid off, and our church will be debt free, thanks to God’s providence through our brother Chuck, in memory of Jan.
In summary, give thanks to the Lord for His promise to provide our daily bread, and for faithfully providing it year after year after year. As we close out another Church year today, it is meet, right, and salutary that we, the ones who have been reconciled to God through Christ, that we, the ones who have received such great benefits from the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, should come together to give Him thanks. And so we do! Amen.
