Thanksgiving Day I Chronicles 8:1-13 (2021)

Thanksgiving For Being Reconciled

I Chronicles 8:1-13

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

I Chronicles 8:13  Oh, give thanks to Yahweh!  Call upon His name; Make known His deeds among the peoples!

Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord; dear fellow Thanksgivers: Grace to you and peace from God our heavenly Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 

Today, of course, is the last service of the Church year.  Given that that is the case, what better time to come together once more for thanksgiving?  What better time to recognize God’s bountiful goodness over the past year?  It is always good to do this precisely because and especially since our sinful flesh is so naturally thankless and ungrateful and would gladly enjoy all of God’s benefits without stopping for even a moment to recognize and thank the Giver.

Therefore, the first thing we get to give thanks for today and every day is the very ability and the wonderful opportunity we have to give thanks.  The majority of the people in our world today have simply stopped giving thanks on Thanksgiving altogether, that is, if they ever did at all.  To them Thanksgiving Day is nothing more than a chance to eat some turkey, hang with family, and enjoy a long weekend.  This ignorance about Thanksgiving is because far too many people fail to recognize that all things – everything they have – all of it comes from God.  Thankfully, we know that all things come from God.  We know this not only because Holy Scripture declares it, but we also confess this marvelous truth in Luther’s Small Catechism.

In the meaning to the First Article of the Creed, we confess, “I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still takes care of them.  He also gives my clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and all I have.  He richly and daily provides me with all that I need to support this body and life.  He defends me against all danger, and guards and protects me from all evil.  All this He does out of fatherly, divine goodness and mercy without any merit or worthiness in me. For all this it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him. This is most certainly true.”

We also have this marvelous confession of God’s goodness and generosity in the Fourth Petition of the Our Father.  In Martin Luther’s meaning to the words, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we learned this: “God certainly gives daily bread to everyone without our prayers, even to all evil people.  But we pray in this petition that God would lead us to realize this and to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.” 

And when we ask, “What is meant by daily bread?”, we confess these words which are very similar to those in the First Article meaning: “Daily bread includes everything that has to do with the support and needs of the body, such as 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, good reputation, good friends, faithful neighbors, and the like.”  At the very least we thank God for this clear confession of His bounty and goodness toward us.

But in the world around us, as mentioned earlier, there are people who do not and never will understand that God is the giver of all things; they can’t begin to grasp the concept of being thankful for what they have.  And the sad reason for that is, because of their unbelief, they have no One to be thankful to; they have no object of their thanks.  Further, they actually think that they deserve all the good things they have.  Others, of course, do give thanks, but they give thanks to a false god who hasn’t done anything for them; they give thanks to a god who hasn’t given His only-begotten Son into death for their sins.  Theirs is a generic god, and that god is worthless.  Any god who is not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a worthless idol.  And all such misdirected thanksgiving amounts to nothing more than idolatry.

To thank God, you first have to know who the true God is.  Listen to how King David began his Psalm of thanksgiving in I Chronicles 8 as he brought the ark of the covenant into the tabernacle newly brought to Jerusalem; these are words from our Psalmody earlier in the service: “Oh, give thanks to Yahweh!  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 anyone give thanks to Yahweh, the great I AM, if they don’t even know His name?  How can anyone make known Yahweh’s deeds among the peoples if they don’t know His deeds?  How can anyone talk of all Yahweh’s wondrous works if they don’t know what those wonders 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, and how you can worship Him at all.  David sang, “Glory in His holy name; Let the hearts of those rejoice who seek Yahweh!  Seek the Yahweh and His strength; Seek His face evermore.”  How do you seek a God 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 Yahweh, 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.  His covenant was to be their God, to hear their prayers, to help them, to forgive them, and to save them.  That first covenant pointed ahead in time to Christ, who was the true Heir of the first covenant and the Author of the New Testament in His blood.

In Colossians 2:12-14, St. Paul describes how we have been given the ability to give thanks to God: “Giving thanks” he writes, “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, dear fellow redeemed, who once were alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, have now been qualified to be partakers of the inheritance; you have been reconciled in the body of Christ’s flesh through His death.  And He now presents you holy and blameless and above reproach in His sight to God the Father.

You, dear saints, you know this God, because you know and believe what is written about Him in Holy Scripture.  And you know how you can approach Him, because you have believed in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.  You have access to God through Christ so that He hears your prayers and accepts your thanksgiving.

You know better than to approach God by yourself, on your own merits, or clinging to your sins.  You know that you have no access to God except by one route and by one Way: through Jesus Christ.   He died to pay for all your sins and He rose again, and He 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 and by your God-given faith and trust in Him.  So, give thanks to the Lord, for He has given you your place in His family as His dearly beloved children who have been reconciled to Him through faith in Christ Jesus.

And then, just as David recounted many of the blessings God had given to His reconciled people of Israel, so it is 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 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 those materials 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.  Give thanks to the Lord 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 weaknesses will be changed into strength.

Give thanks to the Lord for the ministry of Word and Sacrament among us here in this place for so many years.  Give thanks to the Lord for your Baptism, for Christ’s body and blood offered here every Sunday and other services like today.  Give thanks for this congregation’s solid confession of the Christian faith.  Give thanks, as I do, for each and every member of Divine Savior Lutheran Church.

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.

“Oh, give thanks to Yahweh, call upon His name; make known His deeds among the people.”  He is our Savior and Lord. He has loved us with an everlasting love.  He has fed and nourished us through His Word and Sacraments and He will continue to do so while we live out our days.  And He will bring us to Himself to live with Him in glory forever. 

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