Shepherd of the Springs
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod

Theme: Being thankful for what you can take with you

(and God said) 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.

. . . and another parable: the rich man who was determined to take it with him.

This evening as we prepare our hearts and minds to reflect on those things for which we ought to be thankful and to offer up thanksgiving to God . . . both parables serve well to stimulate reflection on how we ought not simply to count our blessings, but rather how we ought to order them in terms of their importance. The parable of our Lord contains a piece of wisdom: we should arrange the value of our blessings in accord with their ability to provide for what we really need in life . . . recognizing, of course, that life is not simply for a few decades - life is forever.

This means, first of all to avoid the extremes that the Devil would love to impose on our thinking - extremes that would either cause us to dismiss or deny God’s temporal blessings, or in the opposite direction, to consider them central to our ultimate well-being. The first extreme loves to misuse this parable of our Lord and target those Christians who are most inclined to be as spiritual as they can be. This extreme denies any value or blessing of anything that one might store in a barn . . . or a bank for that matter. This perverted way of thinking believes that unless something promises spiritual benefit to the soul, it cannot be considered a blessing from God. The things of God relate only to benefits of the soul in eternity and all other things - things of this world - must be consigned to sinful mammon. The ascetic spirit of the ancient heresy known as Gnosticism is behind such a perspective, and it falsely thinks that whatever makes temporal life here in the body more bearable or even pleasurable, is evil and not of God. Godly things are only spiritual things that nourish the human soul. Indeed, this perspective believe that, among other things, it is the absence of temporal comfort that blesses and nourishes the soul.

This perspective therefore teaches that the guy in the parable was misguided right from the start in his thinking that his crops and barns held any value at all in the eyes of the Lord. For these misguided spiritual zealots, the whole scene of the pilgrims going to their fields and barns to prepare a sumptuous thanksgiving feast for what they regarded as bounty from the Lord . . . well, this was just a decadent misguided indulgence of worldly concern that ignored the true spiritual nature of true godliness. For them a good fast, not a good feast, would be the orders of the day for a thanksgiving celebration. Any takers for this stance in your plans for tomorrow?

While it is probably true that the extremes of monasticism are probably not endemic in the American churches today, the spirit of Gnosticism is nevertheless alive and well among those who elevate the distribution of spiritual things as more godly than those who labor to produce and distribute the kind of things that can be stored in barns or banks and sustain the body. These are those who talk of heavenly mansions of the Lord but miss the Easter promise of the resurrection of the body. We praise God from whom all blessings flow - from barn, bank, and chicken coop. All are from his good and gracious bounty to sustain and provide enjoyment for this life lived in worldly flesh and blood and they are truly good. The pilgrims were not misguided in their thanksgiving feast that we continue to observe as a nation. Moreover, the sumptuous feast is still the most predominant context in which the fullness of God’s blessings coming to us are depicted in parables and in pictures of the end times. The temporal blessings of our Lord which we may receive in this life are used as visual aids to understand the great bounty of those still to come in the fullness of salvation.

Still . . . still there is that image in the parable of our text of too many barns . . . too many barns raised up in the interest of misguided ultimate concern. The great problem of our age is not Gnosticism. Rather, ours is the problem of over indulgence in worldly concern - an almost exclusive worship of the things of this world. This is not simply misguided priorities, it is a functional atheism that refuses to acknowledge that it is the creating and redeeming God who provides all the truly good things in life. He is the author of all things good in any context of human existence. Today, however, the picture of the worshiper of worldly goods is not represented, as in the parable, by the guy who has accumulate so much that he needs multiple storage facilities to hold it all. . . . No, today’s materialist is bent not so much on accumulating as much as possible as on consuming as much as possible while being entertained to deaden the impact of the emptiness of it all. To consider matters of soul to these is simply to indicate a particular kind of music, not to speak of things eternal. Well as Jesus implied in the parable, there will come a day when they will have to face the music when their soul is required in the day of reckoning. If there is no one to thank for the bounty one has enjoyed in this life, there will be no one to thank for what one receives in the life to come.

But to Hell with these excesses and may the Devil be gone. We gather this evening to remember the riches of our Gracious God who has blessed us with every manner of blessings - temporal and eternal, material and spiritual, the lesser and the greater. And as we gather tomorrow in our homes with family and friends, let us indeed feast on the goodness of the Lord. He has come that we might have life and that we might have it abundantly. We get both in the promises and gifts of the Gospel. And the feasts that we partake of in the world and in the Church in this life are but foretastes of the Great Feast that we have been invited to partake of in eternity. And this is the greatest blessing of them all that you can taste even now. And good news, You can take it with you! It will satisfy the longings and appetites of both body and soul forever. So let us give thanks . . . .Oh, give thanks unto the Lord for He is good . . . (your part) and his mercy endures forever! A-men!