"A HARVEST FOR GOD"
Thanksgiving Eve
November 23, 2016
Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church
Glenshaw, Pennsylvania
TEXT:
For as the earth brings forth its sprouts, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to sprout up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to sprout up before all nations.
Isaiah 61:11 (ESV)
I'm sure that it's no mere coincidence that Thanksgiving Day comes at the time of the year when the crops have just been harvested. These two occasions seem to go hand-in-hand. Our ancestors had it all figured out: We gather in the fruit of our labor and then we thank God, the ultimate Giver of all good gifts, for blessing the labors of our hands. What is perhaps the most amazing thing of all is that the people who first established a festival of Thanksgiving in this country were people who had just endured enough hardship and crop failure to make the average person (in our day, at least) feel as if he had little or nothing for which to give thanks.
It may be no coincidence either that our national Day of Thanksgiving comes at time of the year when the Christian Church (or the liturgical churches, at least) center their attention on the end times, when the Lord of Glory will return to the earth, this time not as a humble Baby recognized by hardly anyone, but as the King and Judge of all, whose glory will have to be acknowledged by friend and foe alike, as we read in the apostle Paul's letter to the church at Philippi: "At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Philippians 2:10, 11). Bearing in mind both the secular and the liturgical themes of this season, it is fitting that we should consider this evening Isaiah's words about a harvest for God, focusing on the spiritual things that we have to be thankful for not only at Thanksgiving, but always: the seed that God has sown and the sprout that He causes to grow from it.
We know (or at least we ought to know) from Jesus' parable of the sower that the seed that the Holy Spirit plants in us is the Word of God. This would include the Sacraments as well, since the Sacraments are, in fact, the Word of God--only given to us more tangible terms. We Lutherans talk a lot about the means of grace, but I'm not all that sure that we really appreciate how important and how valuable they are to us. The fact that God speaks to us through Word and Sacrament protects us from the deceptions of the evil one. If you rely on these means of grace (and only on these means) for a message from God, you can be certain that the message that you receive truly is from God. If you start to rely on your feelings or your thoughts or on anything else, you can never really be sure because, since we are all sinners, every part of our being is touched and affected by sin (including our emotions and our reasoning abilities), but it is God alone who speaks through the means of grace. He has told us that if we want to find Him, this is where He is to be found.
It's also significant that we call these the means of grace. The seed of the Word that God has planted in our hearts is specifically the Gospel of His Son Jesus Christ. This is the fullest and final and clearest revelation of His grace--grace that has reached down from heaven to touch and redeem the likes of you and me. This Word of the Gospel delivers to us the forgiveness of our sins and the sure hope of everlasting life. It brings New Life to the spiritually dead and hope to the hopeless. Of all of the things that we have received from our God, this is by far the greatest Gift, for this is the only thing we have that we will always have unless we choose to cast it aside or neglect it--the only thing we have that will always matter--the only thing we have that will make a difference not only in life, but also (and especially) when we close our eyes in death.
What kind of results can the Lord expect from all of His labor at planting the seed of His Word--the Gospel of His Son--into our hearts? What is it that can and should sprout from this seed? The text before us names two things in particular: "righteousness and praise". The Lord expects us in whom the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been planted to bear the fruit of righteousness to His glory. This presents an enormous difficulty for us. The Scriptures make it very clear that the righteousness that God requires of us is perfect righteousness, and they make it equally clear that no human being is capable of that kind of righteousness. How, then, are we to bear the fruit of righteousness? What we need to understand in this regard is that the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ is credited to those who believe in Him, just as surely as Abraham's faith in ancient times was "counted . . . to him as righteousness" (Genesis 15:6). The Scriptures describe the righteousness of our Savior as being like a spotless garment that we put on through faith and wear before God the perfect Judge, covering the ugly nakedness of our sin.
The praise that God expects from you and me is our heartfelt response to everything that He has given us and done for us in Christ. Above all, whatever we do in an effort to praise Him and please Him is to be done in gratitude for what we have received through the Gospel of Christ. Any attempt to buy or earn God's favor with our good works makes those works utterly useless--even detrimental--for if our confidence in the face of judgment is in our own works, then those works become for us a false god--a false savior. Indeed, when we try to accomplish our own salvation we are at the same time rejecting the benefits of the Gospel, which are given to us freely. But whenever and however we honestly seek to do things to thank God for His grace in Christ, He accepts those efforts as if they were perfect for the sake of His perfect Son, no matter how imperfect they may in fact be. What He desires more than anything from us is that our entire life become "a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God" (Romans 12:1)--used to the glory of the One who has redeemed all sinners and desires all sinners to benefit from what He has done by hearing about it and believing it. We do this by serving our neighbor in the Savior's name.
Notice that what we are talking about here is totally and completely the work of God Himself. It is He who has created us in His own image and has given to us, as Luther puts it, "all that [we] need to support this body and life" (Small Catechism, explanation of the First Article of the Creed). It is He who in love became human in His Son Jesus Christ to accomplish everything that was required for us to be justified in His sight. And it is He who by the power of His Holy Spirit has sown the seed of the Gospel in our hearts and caused that seed to grow and bear the fruit of righteousness and praise. That knowledge gives us all the confidence that we need to go on praising Him, despite all of our sins and shortcomings, knowing that He will cause us to be, in our lives and in our works, a harvest for God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Amen.
May the Lord bless your hearing of His Word, using it to accomplish in you those things for which He gave it. May you be enriched and strengthened in faith that you may leave here today to go out into our world armed with the whole armor of God, prepared to be able ambassadors of your Savior Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful, and He will do it. Amen.