“Thanksgiving and Richness Toward God” Mount Olive Lutheran Church Thanksgiving Sunday Season of Pentecost Sunday Sermon October 13, 2024 – Luke 12:13–21

Mount Olive Lutheran Church / Pr. Ted A. Giese / Sunday October 13th 2024: Thanksgiving Sunday, Season of Pentecost / Luke 12:13–21 “Thanksgiving and Richness Toward God” 

Someone in the crowd said to [Jesus], “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” But [Jesus] said to him, “Man, who made Me a judge or arbitrator over you?” And [Jesus] said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” And [Jesus] told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God.”

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord. Amen.

Grace peace and mercy to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Good Christian Friends we don’t know many of the details of the case, and as soon as we hear about this dispute there is a temptation to want to know more; we wonder ‘did the brother withhold part of the inheritance;’ ‘was this man asking for more than what was lawfully his to have;’ ‘did the matter already come before a judge and the ruling wasn’t to the man’s liking so he comes pleading his case before Jesus the Righteous Judge;’ ‘does this man even believe that Jesus is the true Righteous Judge or is he just attempting to use Jesus as leverage against his brother?’ These are all things we are not given to know and knowing more is not the point: you are not appointed the judge of the situation. Yet, what we do know is that Jesus quickly makes this question from the man into an opportunity to teach about coveting and contentment. The Commandment that best addresses this situation is the Ninth Commandment:

The Ninth Commandment: You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not scheme to get our neighbour’s inheritance or house, or get it in a way which only appears right, but help and be of service to him in keeping it.[1]  

Your brother(s) and sister(s), your family and those closest to you are your neighbour as much as the family that live next door to you or down the lane is your neighbour. So keeping this commandment in mind you could reframe the man’s question as “Teacher, tell my neighbour to divide the inheritance with me.” Looking at the man’s question through the lens of the Ninth Commandment expands the question to cover the whole topic of contentment, or being restfully at ease in whatever circumstance or situation we find ourselves in. So much of our contentment in life hinges on having a right knowledge of what has been entrusted to us and who has entrusted it to us. And while you can be thankful for the success of others, thanksgiving — in the truest sense of the term — is about being thankful for what you have been given and not worrying about comparing that to what other people have been given. It is a form of ingratitude to sidestep being thankful for what has been given to you to rather dwell and stew obsessively over what someone else has, that you do not have. When this becomes plotting and scheming in your heart you have broken the Ninth Commandment. It doesn’t require actually stealing the thing you covet for it to be a sin, it is enough that your heart has grown dark with avarice and greed and so Jesus warns this man and each of us, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”     

Of course this is the common way of things; everyone is wise regarding money and inheritances so there is never any conflict in families over these things. I’m sure your family has never squabbled over such things. Or perhaps you know this painful dance to well. The heart of Jesus’ parable about the surplus of the rich man and his plan to expand his barns and live in luxury is that life is shorter than you think and when you die what is yours will go to another, at the very least it will no longer be yours. What you have that will remain is your soul and as Jesus teaches in this parable your soul will come before the Judge when your current life comes to its end. King Solomon in Ecclesiastes provides this bit of wisdom that lines up with what Jesus is teaching in our Gospel, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.”[2] It is a particular kind of vanity to think that the things you’ve been give are yours by your own effort or by your own will when even your strength and ability to work, and your very reason in this life, are all gifts from the Lord; and it’s another kind of vanity to think that those things first given to others should somehow now be yours and not theirs. The root underlying cause of breaking the Ninth Commandment is a breaking of the First Commandment:

The First Commandment: You shall have no other gods. What does this mean? We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.[3]  

When you think you know better who should have what in this life, you make yourself out to be God over and above God Himself trusting on your own estimation of what you see before you instead of trusting the true giver of the gift. Saint James touches on this when he teaches in his epistle writing, “Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change,”[4] which means the things you have been blessed with in life are not of your own making, they are a gift. Every material blessing you’ve come by honestly in life is simply what has been gifted to you from the LORD, and when you understand this and hold this to be true, this then goes a long way toward you being able to be thankful to the Giver of the gift. And once this is clear it becomes obvious that we are but stewards of the gifts entrusted to us, managers of the riches that God has placed in our life and not the owners or originators of these things in the true sense. This helps us have a certain amount of perspective over what has been entrusted to us.  

On the one hand the danger of preaching on the topic of thanksgiving is that it can quickly become a kind of cajoling to be thankful, a niggling persuasion towards being thankful, a sort of making thankfulness into a law, something that — in the Christian — is intended to be a natural response to being given a good gift. Such pressure often creates resentment. Now in the history of someone needing to calm down how well does flat out telling the person to calm down, right to their face, at the height of their distress, work? They’re just piping hot mad and you say ‘you know what you need to do is calm down,’ who well does that work? It rarely if ever does, in fact it will more than likely cause them to be even more angry: so to with thankfulness. If someone is brimming with ingratitude and someone comes up and says ‘you know what you need, you need to be thankful’ they may quickly grow to resent the one who said this to them. Have you ever had this happen to you? Now that’s on the one hand, on the other hand Saint Ambrose taught that, “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks,”[5] a sentiment that echoes what we find in our Old Testament reading today from Deuteronomy[6] where the LORD through His servant Moses lays out the necessity of first fruits giving as a form of thanksgiving. This then becomes an acknowledgment that all we have is a gift given, an inheritance handed down to us by the LORD. And so we are taught to cultivate this attitude in our life, to give thanks when prayers are answered, to give thanks when we have enjoyed the fruits of the harvest at our tables, whether the meal is modest or lavish makes no difference we are called upon to give thanks. So while it is true that the one who is needlessly angry does need to calm down, it is equally true that the person who is displaying gross ingratitude does need to be thankful, but woe to the preacher who must bring it up to them. “Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; reprove a wise man, and he will love you. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be still wiser; teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning.”[7] We are not told if the man who came asking for Jesus to tell his brother to divide the inheritance with him was a scoffer, or a wise man, or a righteous man, and we are not given the rest of his story, for this reason we don’t know how he took what Jesus taught in the parable. And we also don’t know how it went over with the rest of the crowd either; amongst that crowd there would be scoffers and wise men and righteous men along with women and children and people who would hear this; so too with a day like today.    

Dear ones with this parable, of the rich man and his surplus and his plans to build bigger and better barns to house the surplus, Jesus reminds the man asking the question of his vain thinking. Truly what he has is not his in the first place; neither he nor his brother will keep what has been entrusted to them forever and for this reason they do not need to covet or fight over the inheritance. Comparison is the thief of joy, when you spend time and attention looking into the bowl of someone else asking why they have so much more and you so little, all you actually add to your bowl is less time to be thankful for what you actually have in your own bowl. Jesus teaches the man, and everyone listening, that there are greater riches to be found in a right relationship with God, everlasting riches that outshine the luster of the things we posses in this life. Here Jesus teaches that in Him there will be a relaxation, a feast, and a merry heart that will not last for years but for an eternity. Once that lesson is learned it becomes much easier to truly consider the manifold blessings we have been entrusted with in this life.          

Do you find yourself struggling with being thankful in life for the things you do have? Here’s a radical idea, “whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”[8] The cheerful giver, who gives not reluctantly or under compulsion or from a sense of obligation, will also, be open to being thankful, to having a heart of gratefulness. One of the bounties they will reap will by joyful thanksgiving and gratitude for what they have been given. And yet you know it to be true that there are those who will never miss the water until the well runs dry.[9] For such people the dry well is also a lesson to learn from. When Job who had a full and abundant life had it all striped away from him his godly and righteous response was this, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”[10] And so likewise we find Saint Paul from his prison cell in Rome writing these words, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.”[11] That last bit is not about opening a stubborn pickle jar, or passing a difficult exam in school, or running a marathon. Paul’s imprisonment in Rome would be his last, what he faced was his death ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ Saint Paul was no fool, he had riches to spare and he gave them from the tip of his pen to you and me in the letters of encouragement that he wrote from his prison cell. 

When Jesus’ life and soul was demanded of Him upon the cross of His crucifixion on that first Good Friday He had everything stripped away from Him save for the devotion of His mother and His disciple Saint John a few other faithful followers who stood near, and the love of His heavenly Father, who in His Son Jesus Judged the World. Our sin brought forth Jesus’ death, sins of coveting, sins of ingratitude amongst all of the other sins; Jesus’ sinlessness His thankful heart among all of His other virtues brought forth His Easter Sunday resurrection promising the inheritance of eternal life to His brothers and sisters, to all who believe. You as a child of God the Father, you with Jesus as your brother in your baptism do not receive a divided inheritance, you receive the whole thing: what is His is yours. Jesus inherited our sin, we have inherited His righteousness. All other riches pale in comparison. They will rust and mold, they will fade and decay. 

While we are called to be thankful for our material blessings and a day like Thanksgiving Sunday with grain in the bin and food on the plate is a good day to do this, we as Christians are to remember that we have something more to be thankful for, the love of God made manifest in His Son Jesus towards us and our eternal inheritance in Him. This is not a gift to hoard away, something to save and keep hidden for yourself, when you find you have an abundance of it it’s not a time to tear down your barns and build bigger barns, this is a gift to share with all who will hear it, a gift that makes brother and sisters out of everyone you share it with who, by the grace of God, will receive it. Dear ones the time is short and we do not know how much time any of us have left to share this gift. Be thankful that it is yours and be thankful you have time yet to share it. Amen.    

Let us pray:

Lord have mercy on us, Christ have mercy on us, Lord have mercy on us, “take our minds and think through them, take our lips and speak through them, take our hearts and set them on fire; for the sake of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, Amen.

[1] Ninth Commandment with Explanation, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, page 15.  
[2] Ecclesiastes 12:7–8
[3] First Commandment with Explanation, Luther’s Small Catechism, Concordia Publishing House 2017, page 13.  
[4] James 1:16–17
[5] Saint Ambrose (b. 339 – d. 397 A.D) attributed, Oxford Treasury of Sayings & Quotations, Oxford University Press 2011, page 196.
[6] Deuteronomy 26:1–11
[7] Proverbs 9:8–9
[8] 2 Corinthians 9:6-7
[9] English Proverb early 17th Century, Oxford Treasury of Sayings & Quotations, Oxford University Press 2011, page 195.
[10] Job 1:21
[11] Philippians 4:11–13

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