Harvest Thanksgiving [Deuteronomy 8:7-18]

This sermon was preached at St. John's Lutheran, Karoonda (9am).  

Intro: Ever heard the quote “Why do we have two ears but only one mouth? So that we would listen more than we talk”? Well you can do the same thing with Little Red Riding Hood: “Grandma, what big teeth you have.” “All the better to eat you with”. Well, Moses gives us two questions with even better answers: Why do you have a good harvest and a full belly? To bless the Lord (because v 10 says “And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the LORD your God for the good land he has given you.”). Why do you have an empty belly? To trust in him (because v 16 says “[the Lord] fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end.”).

So Moses is preparing the children of Israel to cross the Jordan River and enter the Promised Land. He's preparing them that when they have a good harvest there, God has a purpose for that. But he's also reminding them of the hardships they experienced in the wilderness, that God had a purpose for that too.

But that purpose was never to forget him. Moses says, “Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, ¹² lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, . . . then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery”. Moses says that the Lord would give good harvests, but not so that the people would forget him and turn to other gods.

A full belly is actually a very common false god. It you have a full belly then you say that there are no other needs in the whole world. So on Harvest Thanksgiving, one thing that should be talked about is hunger, because hunger shows you that there is more to life than the good gift of the harvest.

When Moses writes that the people are not to lift up their hearts, that's because he's describing an act of faith. But it's not an act of faith in God. It's an act of faith in yourself. Lifting up your heart to yourself is to trust in yourself, anything you have or can do, because it's the opposite of bowing before the Lord, for he is your God and he is your maker.

Lifting up your heart is to be full, but not just a full belly. To be so full as to reject the gifts of God's Word, the forgiveness of sins, and all the gifts and promises of the Lord is an especially nasty idolatry. It is the lie that is the death of faith for the Church. Lifting up your heart means not believing God's promises. And not believing God's promises also breaks the first commandment. You may say, “I haven't found any other gods”, but you have been too sluggish to care one little bit about God's promises that are found nowhere else than his Word!)

The purpose of a full belly is to bless the Lord, as Moses said. And the purpose of an empty belly is to trust in the Lord, as Moses also said. To bless the Lord is to confess that he is the source of all blessing. Sometimes you put in all the hard work and the harvest is good. Sometimes your neighbor comes to you and says “I've just got too many sheep. Please just take 50 of them off of my hands.” Maybe that never happens, but sometimes things just fall in your lap that you haven't worked for at all. Dr. Luther talked about this when he said, “these [good things] are simply blessings of God sometimes through our efforts, sometimes without our efforts, but never from our efforts and always given out of His free mercy.” See whether you worked for it or it fell in your lap, God gave it to you equally in both scenarios. The vocation of farmer means a lot of hard work, but it's only done in its fullness by bringing in the harvest with rejoicing, by blessing the Lord. And it's funny how we do this at the end of service, not just for food but for everything when we say responsively, “Let us bless the Lord.” “Thanks be to God.” There's a purpose to that. This ties us to the OT people of God and makes Moses' words apply to us, for they are words of thanks and trust in all of God's promises.

The purpose of an empty belly is to trust in the Lord. This means that you do lift up your heart, but you lift it up to the Lord, and not yourself. And that's why we say it responsively before Holy Communion, “Lift up your hearts.” “We lift them up unto the Lord.” Because of texts like Deuteronomy 8, this part of the Communion liturgy is something you just can't get rid of. It should be there every time.

Lifting up your hearts to the Lord is an act of faith. It says that, just like for the children of Israel, even if there is nothing, God will make bread come from heaven and water come from a rock. So the Christian says, “Even if I starve, I have received some water that is a miracle (Holy Baptism), and bread from heaven (the Lord's Supper).”

That's because after the sermon and before the Lord's Supper you should be hungry. You should hunger and thirst for righteousness – the forgiveness of sins generously given through bread and wine. To trust in God is to trust in him whether full or hungry. Dr. Luther said about the children of Israel, “In abundance they are to recall how once in the midst of want they were nourished by the Word with manna; they are to ponder this example and teaching again, and learn to trust in God for some other reason than that they have enough, are satisfied, and their belly is well provided for. Trust based on that is not a trust in God but rather in wealth and gifts which have been received. Because of such trust they forget both true trust and the Word of God, and never learn to have faith in God when they are in want. As I have said, it is a great thing and the work of a rich spirit not to forget God when affairs prosper, and to conduct yourself, with Paul, as if you had nothing, to use the world as if you did not use it (1 Cor. 7:30–31), to know how to endure want and to abound, to know how to be low and to be high (Phil. 4:12), and, with the prophet, not to attach the heart to wealth when it abounds, and not to become vain (Ps. 62:10) but to cling to God alone.”

This applies also to the whole Christian Church – that you would not act as if you had nothing when you have something (when you have the Word and promises of God), and that you would not act as if you had something when you have nothing (that you would not forget the Gospel of Christ crucified for you, for you don't trust in God because you have enough money to keep the doors open but because the Lord has spoken by his Word).

Transition: For remember your great need. You have forgotten God (for you have sinned)! And your eyes have been lifted up (and away from his promises)! Moses says it best, “Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' ”. But,

The God who gives you the harvest (or not) is the God who gave his Son to die on the cross for you (not a maybe – for sure!). The harvest exists to point to God's covenant, “x”. God's covenant is all of his promises, and all of his promises are in Christ Jesus. The blessing of the produce of the land is given so that you may see that God confirms his covenant (given to Adam and all the patriarchs) – which is Christ crucified for you. So that when you look at the cross of Christ, you see all of his promises for you: “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove your transgressions from you.”

God hasn't forgotten you. God is and promises to be your God (he's a better God than your belly). For Jesus to die on the cross is for him to say that you have done nothing good but he will do your good and everyone else's so that he might give you all good things and the good thing: forgiveness of all your sins.

Christ has raised you from the dead in holy Baptism. Christ fulfills his covenant by justifying you by the means through which the Holy Spirit works. You have been sluggish with the Word but God keeps speaking his promises.

Conclusion:

The harvest may be good or bad, but we give thanks that the cross of Christ is good.

Most of the time at Harvest Thanksgiving we don't talk about bad harvests because we don't want to think that they could happen. But God's Word through Moses is not to forget him in good or bad for he won't forget you, for the cross of Christ is where you can trust in all his promises and bless him for all his good gifts: the forgiveness of all your sins. Amen.

Epiphany 3 [Matthew 4:12-23] (26 January 2014)

This sermon was preached at Trinity Lutheran (Tailem Bend) at 9 am.

 Intro: In the Gospel of Matthew, God spends almost four chapters doing prep work. That's easy to understand, because out in the fields you need to do a lot of prep work: sowing and fertilizing and everything that goes a long with that. The prep work goes before the big work of the harvest, but both are needed. Well, from chapter 1 to chapter 4:16, Matthew does a lot of work to answer the question of who Jesus is – a genealogy, his birth, the work of John the Baptist, Jesus' baptism in the Jordan, his temptation by the devil in the wilderness, and the first part of today's reading. So after that, you see Jesus getting down to work, but because of the prep work you clearly see that his work is to bring you from death to life.

Jesus does the prep work, and this is revealed in God's Word. Part of the prep work is how Matthew shows Jesus fulfilling the words of the Old Testament. In today's reading we hear that when Jesus moves from Nazareth to Capernaum in Galilee, this fulfills the words of the prophet Isaiah. But he also fulfilled the Scripture in moving to Nazareth, as we heard a few weeks back.

Jesus brings his promises to pass, proves them to be true. And the one he fulfills today is very good. We hear, “ "The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles-- ¹⁶ the people dwelling in darkness have seen a great light, and for those dwelling in the region and shadow of death, on them a light has dawned." ”. This prophecy was given through the prophet Isaiah because the land of the tribes of Zebulun and Napthali were in the north of Israel, so when the Assyrians invaded from the north, guess who got hit first? The people in the north. And what's worse, when they had conquered those lands, they deported the landowners and brought in very many people from other nations who hated the worship of the one true God. So it's very easy to call that part of the land a place where the people dwell in darkness – of sorrow and also unbelief, and the sorrow of being surrounded by unbelief.

The Lutheran Confessions show how deep the darkness of unbelief that dwells in your heart is when they say that the Law, the 10 Commandments, that you have those so that you as Christians may not start self-created forms of worship. That's amazing. Without the Law, you would create a worship to try and make yourself righteous before God. This is exactly what the Israelites did in the Old Testament, only it ended up being exactly what all the other nations were doing – bowing down to idols! And even today, you can watch videos of people speaking in tongues that look like videos of Hindus in ecstatic trances. Or you can look at videos of liturgies that look like music festivals.

So the Lord lays the prep work for you to hear of his big work on the cross. And he does this in three ways. This starts, as we heard, with John's arrest. John was there to prepare the way of the Lord, so when Jesus appears, John's work is done, so that when John is arrested, that's when Jesus gets to work. Secondly, Jesus goes to a place that the prophet Isaiah had already called dark, dark in such a way that Jesus is light. But Jesus has to go to that place. He has to go to where sin and unbelief is. In being born in this sinful, fallen world he has also done this. And thirdly, he goes to a place where both Jews and Gentiles live, to do the prep work of showing that his mission through the Church is to both Jew and Gentile, so that his Church is made up of both Jews and also Gentiles of every land and every tongue, together according to faith and not culture or nationality.

And this prep work is done so that you would not be misled about all that Jesus would do and say in the rest of the Gospel. In this beginning section Jesus is clearly shown to be the Son of God (the voice of the Father says it), and yet that is where the devil tempts, that Jesus would show himself to be the Son of God in any other way than humble obedience to his Father. Angels then attend him, and he moves to Galilee of the Gentiles. Well compare this to the end of the Gospel of Matthew – Jesus is arrested exactly because he claims to be the Son of God, and the crowds that mock him on the cross use the devil's own words “If you are the Son of God. . .”. But he remains the humble Son of God and wins the victory for you. And when he is risen from the dead, angels appear not to serve him but to announce that he is risen. And then he tells his disciples to meet him where? In Galilee, so that he may tell them to go and make disciples of all nations (meaning including the Gentiles). The prep work makes you ready for the big work of the cross, and keeps that before your eyes as you hear everything that Jesus goes and does.

And Matthew tells us what Jesus goes and does! “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." ” and “he went throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction among the people.” He gets to work!

And part of that work is calling four disciples who would be apostles: “While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. ¹⁹ And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." ²⁰ Immediately they left their nets and followed him. ²¹ And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. ²² Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.”. But their previous vocation was fishermen. So Jesus wants them to compare their old job to their new jobs when he sends them out as apostles. Fishermen know that when you go out on the water, you can do all the right things, but you might not get any fish. It's not up to you. And these fishermen used nets, which in a lot of ways is simpler than rods. You just throw out the net and bring it back in. The net does the work (of course that doesn't mean it's easy enough for you to just pick up and do, but you get my point). Otherwise, just keep the net in good shape. So as apostles, they knew that whether people became believers wasn't up to any person; it was up to God! He does the work by the net which is the Word!

But this text does show you that it is surely Jesus who calls disciples, calls Christians. That's the thing about disciples. All the rabbis had disciples, but the difference is that those disciples went and found the rabbi and asked to be disciples. This is like choosing and applying to a school, you have to make the choice. But not so for Jesus and his disciples. He chooses them. They don't choose him. They don't have anything in them that can do that. It's the same thing with self-chosen worship. You don't have any ability to improve on the gifts that God has given you in Word and Sacrement where he serves you. Only the Scriptures can give direction to the praise of the Church. This is Christ's work, just as he calls Christians to be Christians through his Holy Spirit. It's just like we learned in the Small Catechism: But the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith.

We don't have to guess what Jesus did: he preached, taught, and healed. When he does that, he beats back the devil meter by meter, by calling believers (preaching) and by rescuing from the fallout of the devil's lies (healing). Both of these point to the cross, point to heaven where this victory is clearly seen, but Jesus carries them out on earth because he must first win the victory which is your rescue from sin, death, and the devil.

So if Jesus does the work, that means he brings you from death to life. There's a goal and purpose to his prep work and his work, just as there is in the field and in any job: to bring you his kingdom and bring you into his kingdom and out of darkness. It's just like we confess in the Lord's Prayer in the Small Catechism: God's kingdom comes when our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit, so that by his grace we believe his holy Word and lead godly lives here in time and there in eternity. The explanation ends not with darkness, but with eternal life.

This life is the Lord's Supper (which is the center of everything because it is Christ's body and blood to eat and drink for the forgiveness of sins). This life is praise (not something you invent but something you receive that joins you to the Church of all times). This life is the Church (and what she believes on the basis of God's Word), so that your faith would be in Christ's righteousness alone, a steadfast and immovable faith that abides unto life everlasting. That's the life. What more do you want? Especially because that faith which the Lord brings about does make people sit up and take notice, that here's a lowly sinner that can only point to Christ for every good and needful thing. It's a faith that doesn't look at good works but at what the neighbor needs. It's a faith that walks the road that leads back to the altar for the Lord's Supper.

Conclusion: That's the life. That's the work. It is Christ's work, and it does you a lot of good.

Jesus lays the prep work for the work of bringing you from death to life (by giving you forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and salvation). Amen.