For all this it is my duty to thank and praise,
serve and obey Him. Those words appear
at the end of the Small Catechism’s explanation of the First
Article of the Creed. The Creed’s First Article teaches us that
our Father in heaven is our Creator. But not only did He make us,
giving us our body and soul, our eyes, ears and all our members,
our reason and all our senses. He continues to provide for us as
well. He gives us food and drink, house and home, wife and
children, land, animals and all that we have. Everything that we
have in this world comes to us as a gift from a loving, gracious
heavenly Father.
And He does all this – gives us our life and the
things we need to sustain that life – out of His fatherly, divine
goodness and mercy. We don’t deserve a shred of it. But God
gives it anyway. He gives it to Christians and non-Christians
alike. He gives it to the grateful and the ungrateful. He gives
it to Donald Trump and Bill Gates as well as the skid-row bum
who’s dependent on handouts and meals at an inner-city soup
kitchen to keep body and soul together. God gives – because He’s
good and gracious and caring.
He gave Adam and Eve everything they had. They had
a perfect life in a perfect place. No worries about scraping
together enough money to pay the bills, or where the next meal was
coming from. Paradise. Theirs was a blissful existence that we –
this side of the Fall -- can’t even begin to imagine.
And for all this it was Adam and Eve’s duty to
thank and praise God, to serve and obey Him. Receive His good
gifts with thanksgiving and praise – not a bad deal. Serve the
God who served them by giving them life and all the things they
needed to sustain that life. Again, not a bad deal. Obey their
Father in heaven by saying “no” to the one thing He’d declared
off-limits – the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil –
and partake with delight of all the good things He lavished upon
them. It wasn’t a bad deal. In fact, it was perfect. It was
heaven on earth.
It could be said that sin came into the world
through ingratitude. At some point Adam and Eve stopped being
grateful to God for all He’d done for them, all He’d freely given
them. They became dissatisfied. They wanted more. The
cornucopia of blessings God poured out on them seemed small and
insignificant compared to the one thing He’d forbidden. Their
status as God’s creatures suddenly seemed narrow and confining.
The serpent promised Adam and Eve more. He told them they could
be like God. New vistas of freedom lay before them, according to
the serpent. And all that was necessary, the serpent said, was one
act of disobedience, one bite of the forbidden fruit. Besides,
who did God think He was, commanding them to steer clear of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil? What kind of spoil-sport God
was He anyway?
For all this it is my duty to thank and praise,
serve and obey Him. Ever since Adam sinned, that doesn’t come
naturally to us anymore. In one way or another, we all follow in
Adam’s footsteps. His tooth marks on the forbidden fruit might as
well be our own. We too want to go our own way, chart our own
course, live free of restrictions and boundaries. If it feels
good do it, has been our fallen race’s motto since the first
man and woman were expelled from the Garden. In our lust for what
God has forbidden, we – like Adam and Eve – repeatedly lose sight
of God’s blessings and gifts.
It’s sin to covet what God has not given you – be
it forbidden fruit, another person’s spouse, another person’s
home, career, or whatever. God has given us what He wants us to
have, and part of the obedience we are to offer Him is to receive
His gifts with thanksgiving. To think, even sub-consciously, that
God is holding back from us something that’s rightfully ours is to
replay the Fall on a smaller scale, in our own personal garden.
To fail to be thankful is to duplicate the sin of our first
parents.
If I were to ask you which of the lepers in
tonight’s Gospel reading you can best relate to, who would it be?
The one grateful leper who even though he was a Samaritan returned
to thank and praise our Lord when he saw he’d been healed? Or the
nine lepers who received their healing as though it was their due,
and continued on their own merry way without a thought of turning
around and thanking the One who’d healed them? Which would it
be? The ungrateful nine? Or the grateful one?
I can’t answer that question for you. I can only
answer it for myself. And the honest answer is that more often
than not I identify most closely with the ungrateful nine. Like
them, I frequently take God’s good and gracious gifts for
granted. I don’t appreciate those gifts as I should, and I don’t
appreciate as I should the God who gives those gifts. God gives
and gives, and I go my own merry, complacent way. I forget that
for all that He gives and does and is, it’s my duty to thank and
praise, serve and obey Him. Too often I take His gifts for
granted. And I take the Giver of the gifts for granted too.
That’s what Adam did in the Garden of Eden. It’s
what the nine ungrateful lepers did. It’s what I do. And so Adam
and the lepers and I show that we’re brothers in our shared
ingratitude. In my saner moments I wonder why God ever puts up
with someone as self-centered and thankless as me. I don’t
deserve God’s loving-kindness. I don’t deserve His gifts and His
care. What I deserve is to be booted into hell post-haste.
But the Giver whose gifts I so frequently take for
granted shows His gracious givingness in the greatest Gift of
all. For God so loved the world that He gave. . .
not the wrath the sinful world deserves. No, God gave His
only-begotten Son. God’s answer to our sinful ingratitude was to
give even more. God gave, in the likeness of our ungrateful flesh,
His own dear Son, to rescue us from the private little hell of our
ingratitude and selfishness, and from the infinitely more dreadful
hell we each deserve on account of our sin. God gave His Son to be
our Mediator – our go-between – to save us and bring us to the
knowledge of the truth of God’s love and compassion toward
sinners.
The healing of the ten lepers is an example of the
givingness of God incarnate in Jesus Christ our Lord. Jesus
didn’t ask the lepers if they were really going to appreciate
their healing before He healed them. He went ahead and healed all
of them, even the ungrateful. That’s grace in action. It’s
undeserved. It’s free. It’s for all. You don’t measure up to
grace. You’d never get it if you had to measure up. God gives it
precisely to those who don’t measure up. Grace aint grace if you
have to deserve it.
Romans 5:8
says, God shows his love for us in that while we were
still sinners, Christ died for us. While we were
eyeball-deep in selfishness, self-centeredness, and ingratitude,
God showed His love for us through a Cross and His own dear Son
who died on that Cross. God didn’t give us what we deserve. He
gave us His Son, and with the gift of His Son came the blessed
gifts of forgiveness, life and salvation.
No, God didn’t
give us what we deserve. But God didn’t give Jesus what He
deserved either. He gave Him our sin – every last, stinking scrap
of it – and with that sin came the curse of God’s condemnation and
wrath. Jesus gets what we deserve and we get what He deserves.
He takes the bad so we can get the good. That’s the Gospel, and
from beginning to end it’s pure gift.
Once that
starts to sink into our thick skulls we can begin to live
gratefully before God. Every breath we draw is a gift from God,
but so is every touch of His grace, every absolution, every
proclamation of the Gospel we hear, every taste of Jesus’ Body and
Blood in the bread and wine. And the truth is, we don’t deserve
any of it! Thanks be to God, we don’t have to attain a certain
level on the gratitude scale before God grants us His forgiveness
and salvation! There’s freedom in knowing that. Since Jesus has
done it all by His holy life, His innocent sufferings and death,
and His resurrection, we have God’s blessing now, through faith in
Christ. It’s ours, in the Gospel, because God said so. And
despite our frequent ingratitude, God looks at you and me – for
Jesus’ sake -- as if we were the most grateful, most appreciative
creatures that ever said, “Thank you.”
Now, as those
who are a new creation in Christ, our lives are a “thank you” to
our heavenly Father. On the job, at home, and here in Church, the
things we do are a thank you to God. When you hug and kiss your
spouse, that’s a thank you to the God who gave you your spouse.
When you put in a good day’s work, that’s a thank you to the God
who gave you the skills and talents to do the job. When you
strive to keep His commandments, that’s a thank you to the God who
placed His Spirit on you in Baptism so you can fear, love and
trust in Him through Jesus His Son. When you give money to support
the work of this congregation, that’s a thank you to God. You’re
thanking Him for loving you, even though you’re not as grateful as
you should be. You’re thanking Him for forgiving you, for saving
you, for making you His child, because of Jesus.
God is a
gracious, giving, loving heavenly Father. We see this in the gift
of His Son. We see it in our Baptism, which unites us eternally
to the saving givingness of Jesus our Savior. We hear it when the
Gospel of Christ crucified is preached and taught among us, and
when the pastor’s absolution is spoken over us. We eat and drink
it in the gift of Jesus’ Body and Blood in the Sacrament. God is
a giving God, a gracious God, a merciful God. True, we don’t
appreciate it as we should. But He just gives more and more and
more, because of Jesus.
And He does it
whether our attitude is that of the one grateful leper, or, as is
more frequently the case, that of the nine who were ungrateful.
But what else would you expect from a God who gave His own dear
Son to die for us while we were still sinners? A God like that
loves us despite our sin. A God like that forgives us and calls
us His own. A God like that makes us a new creation, gives us a
new heart and new holy desires. A God like that is One we want to
thank and praise, serve and obey. A God like that can be trusted
and loved. Why else would He give His Son for sinners like you
and me? He is indeed a God who gives. And thanks be to God for
that!
In Nomine Patris. . .
