Thanksgiving Day Sermon

November 24, 2016

Home is where the heart is.  So the saying goes, and why so many people travel during Thanksgiving and the holiday seasons.  There’s the feeling of “home” that people are searching for, that they are going towards. Usually it revolves around either family, or a certain place.  This becomes very important for us. People with Alzheimer’s, memory problems often complain they want to go home. Sometimes they describe a home from many years ago, other times they can’t really describe it at all. They know where they are, isn’t home.  Home is the place of comfort, of familiarity, of peace and they don’t feel that at the time.  This adds such greater meaning to the idea that as Christians we pilgrims on our way to an eternal home, and as St. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5, “we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

Today, on a National Day of Thanksgiving, we often remember the history of pilgrims and Indians, and well we should.  As Christians, we also recognize that we too are pilgrims here on earth headed toward an eternal destination.  This is foreshadowed in our Old Testament reading from Deuteronomy 26 “When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance and have taken possession of it and live in it…” We give thanks to God for His gracious invitation into a home, for His deliverance to that home, and for the provision He gives on our way and when we arrive home.

That’s why one of the lepers, after being healing by Jesus, turns around on his way to the Temple, God’s home.  Since the time of Moses and the Exodus, God had located Himself in His mercy in the tabernacle, then in the temple.  If you wanted to know where God was, that’s where He had promised to meet His people.  So it often was called the “Lord’s house” because that is where the glory of the Lord dwelt among His people.  The one leper returns to Jesus because he believes, as St. John would later describe so clearly in his Gospel account, that the Word of God has become flesh and dwells, tabernacles/temples/is present with us. Where Jesus is, there is the true Temple, the place where God dwells.  This is also the meaning of Psalm 26:8, “Lord, I love the habitation of Your house and the place where Your glory dwells.”  In other words, Lord, I love Jesus and wherever Jesus is.

The Lord calls us home today. In other words, He calls us to Himself for this is where were we have our comfort, our familiarity, our peace.  It is with Christ.  And where has Christ promised to be, where has He promised to visit His people?  In His Word and in His Sacraments.  This is our home, this is our comfort and our peace. That is what we pilgrims are thankful for today, as we press on to the heavenly city, an eternal home with Christ. Scripture tells us that Jesus is the Thank Offering to God on behalf of the whole world, which the Greek-speaking Jews called “Eucharist.” That same word – “Eucharist,” thank-offering – has been handed down to us as a term for our Lord’s Supper. Here, eating God’s sacrifice, we give our thanks for the one Gift that surpasses all others: the gift of Christ Himself to us in His body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins.  And where there is forgiveness of sins, there is life and salvation.  So this is how we give thanks today: by receiving more of what we are thankful for.

There was a man named Martin Rinkart, and he was a pastor in a town called Eilenberg, Germany during mid-1600s. There was a terrible war going on called The Thirty Years War, which was one of the worst that Europe faced.  The war caused a great shortage of food, and people were starving to death. And those that didn’t starve to death were dying from a terrible disease called the Great Pestilence, that started around the year 1637. Martin was one of four pastors in the town, but pretty soon he was the only one left, for one of the pastors ran away to try and save himself, and the other two died. Pastor Rinkart was the pastor who conducted their funerals, and things got so bad that he was conducting about forty or fifty funeral services every day. In that year, 1637, it is estimated that he conducted more than 4000 funerals, including one for his wife.  And in the middle of all this terrible death, Martin wrote a song for his children to sing. It’s a song you know and one will sing at the end of the service today: Now Thank We All Our God.

Isn’t that amazing? In the midst of all this war, famine, disease and death, he teaches his children and the Church to sing, “Now thank we all our God, with hearts and hands and voices.” They can do this because they know where their home is, they know that Christ walks alongside them on the pilgrimage of this life no matter how bad it may become. This Jesus who takes His atoning merits of His death, His resurrection, His life, and traces it on our heads in the shape of the cross when we are baptized, and then pours it over our heads as the water splashes and the name of God becomes yours, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  That cross, that Name, that water to which God attaches His promises, delivers to you an eternal home and says to you, none of the bad things can harm you, none of the death can touch you. So if the world crumbles, if you find yourself suffering or in want, still, still, “Now thank we all our God.” Because not even death can steal your home away. Christ has trampled down death by His death. For those who are in Christ, even though you die, yet shall you live. That is what we give thanks for. And this is the comfort of “home.”

So yes, home is where the heart is – the heart of God, who loved the world and sent His Son to die for you earning you a place in this home, and sent the Holy Spirit to gather you to Himself for eternity.