More Than a Turkey Dinner

Sermon on Matthew 8:5-13

Title:  More than a Turkey Dinner

Textual Theme: 

Goal:

Need:

Sermon Theme:  Christians enjoy holistic blessings by Believing in Christ.

Goal:  to encoureage Christians to look for those holistic blessings

Need: Christians often don’t recognize the holistic blessings for which to give thanks.

Outline:

1. Introduction
2. Blessings of the body
3. The Feast
4. Blessings of eternity.
5. Conclusion.

Congregation,

          What makes Thanksgiving the holiday it is?  I think the answer is pretty simple.  It’s the gathering of family and friends for a meal of turkey and the fixings.  If you look forward to Thanksgiving, what do you usually look forward to?  It’s grandmas turkey and gravy with that awesome fruit dip that aunt Freda makes every year.

          But of course we know Thanksgiving means so much more than just eating a meal together.  When I was growing up, we always talked about the first Thanksgiving in the US being a meal where the natives and the pilgrims feasted together because they had a successful harvest.  The pilgrims took time to thank God that he had blessed them with enough to help them through the winter months.

          I guess the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday comes from many different feasts where people gave thanks to God.  Settlers to Newfoundland, the end of the seven years war, and some of the Loyalists came with their celebrations of the pilgrims from the US.

          At the heart of it all though is one thing.  Historically in this country thanksgiving has been a celebration of the good things that God has done for us. 

          I don’t know how that shows up in your family celebrations, but my mom would stop the scarffing of the turkey.  Lots of times she would be the one who would remind our family that we as a family had a lot to be thankful for.  Then we would go around the table and say at least one thing that we specifically wanted to be thank God for as a family.

          Maybe  your family has that tradition in your family.  I would say keep it up.  And high schoolers, I can remember being a little annoyed at having to think of something and never having anything original to thank God for.  I thank God for food, clothes, house, and family.  It might seem a little corny to say it every year.  But say it anyway.  Especially if the time comes when you ever find yourself without those things, you will wish you would have been more grateful for the blessings you were given when you did have them.  That’s probably why the WWII generation encourages those of us who are younger.  They know what it is like to have virtually nothing.  They see that we are truly blessed today.  We have so much to be thankful for.

          The passage that we are looking at this morning shows us how Christ gives blessings that we can be thankful for. 

          First, we see clearly that Christ gives us blessings in our physical lives.  He gives the centurion every reason to be thankful.  He comes up to Jesus with a servant who is paralyzed and sick.  He comes up to Jesus and asks him to heal his servant.

          In very Jesus-like style, he doesn’t hesitate to help, even though he has every reason in the world not to.  This is a non-Jew.  Jews don’t associate with them, much less the military leaders of the Gentiles.  And this is a servant. No way would a regular Jew help in this situation. 

          But Jesus doesn’t hesitate.  He says in verse 7, I will go and heal him.  He heals this servant.  This is just one of many different healing miracles Christ did in his lifetime.  Even though he did all those miracles, we can sometimes forget that Christ cares for our bodies as well.  When we get food.  When we get healthy.  When feel good finally after treatments, its all the work of Christ.

          At the Thanksgiving table, we ought to be thankful for all the physical blessings that Christ gave us.

          The second thing we find in the passage is a feast.  I think we all pretty well get the idea of a feast.  For us today, a thanksgiving feast is where you pound back a bunch of turkey and stuffing, and jello salad, and everything else.  But a feast is not just about filling yourself up with food, or about the family that’s around.  The feast is all about the celebration.  You have a big dinner for no reason, you have a feast when you are celebrating.

          Christ talks about a feast in our passage.  He is walking along when this centurion tells him about his sick servant.  It says in verse 10 When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, “I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. [1]

          Out of all the places that Jesus finds a person with faith, it is in a non-Jewish centurion.  And he tells the Jewish people following him, that this non-Jew has stronger faith than all the other people in Israel who have been kind of worshipping God, but they have been doing it for decades.

          When Christ sees such incredible faith from someone that the Jews would expect to be an outsider, he tells them about this feast.

          The students who are going to Redeemer or elsewhere in religion classes, you can impress your professors by talking about the eschatological banquet.  That’s a big fancy theology name for the feast that Christ describes in the new creation.  The Eschatological banquet.  The end times feast. 

          Christ says the great endtimes feast isn’t so much about the food that we enjoy.  Its actually about the company that will be around the table.  Verse 1 I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. 12 But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” [2]

          Many from the east and west will sit at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  For the Jews that is craziness.  That’s like saying the Red Wings will invite the Maple Leafs to the celebration ceremonies for taking home the Stanley cup this year.  People from other nations weren’t supposed to be sitting at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the great fathers and heros of the Jewish faith.  That just wouldn’t be allowed.

          But Christ says that’s the way its going to be.  As you are sitting down eating your Thanksgiving feast for today, I hope it crosses your mind to be thankful that Christ is inviting you to the eschatological banquet.  He has invited us to believe in him, and then join in the wedding feast celebrating Jesus and the church finally being united once and for all.  You might think your feast is filling for thanksgiving, I bet the heavenly feast will be infinitely better.

          Those are the second kinds of blessing that Christ tells us about in the passage.  God gives physical blessings which we are so thankful.  He also gives spiritual blessings which we ought to be even more thankful for.

          Around us, we have many places were we can have our physical needs met.  We can go to the grocery.  Maybe you have a membership at a fitness club.  You go to the family doctor or the surgeon.  But where do you turn when you hear is broken with sin, when you are covered with guilt from what you have done in your life.  Where do you go when you know your soul is not in the place it should be?  You go to Christ.

          Christ gives us reason to thank him in all parts of our life.  He really is a holistic healer.  He looks at us as we really are.  As complex whole people.  As people who need special care.  Even though we might come to church and pretend like we are flat, 2 dimensional spiritual people, with no other life, Christ see our whole self.  And he works healing in all parts as well.

          We are like finely cut diamonds.  If you see a diamond from a ways away it looks like a rock that sparkles beautifully.  But as you get closer up you find that it isn’t just some sparkly stone.  It has a stone that has many different facets.  Its those facets that catch the light and adds extra sparkle to the stone.

          At first glace we seem like pretty simple people with pretty simple reasons to give thanks to God.  But when you look closely you find that we are multifaced people, with many reasons to sparkle back thanks to God.

          So today, I encourage you to see the work of Christ in your life in many different places.  You might not feel blessed physically, but God has been blessing you elsewhere.  For that you can give him thanks.  You might be in a spiritually distant time of your life.  But you can still give thanks to God as his love is shining on another facet of your life.

          Ultimately, we can give thanks that our blessings from God are beyond anything we can dream of in this world.  We will share, in the Thanksgiving feast above all others.  We will share in the banquet of the Lamb of God.  The final and everlasting thing we will give thanks for we hear in Revelation 19:9.  Let’s close with those words.  “‘Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb!’”

All Thanks be to God.  And all God’s people say.  AMEN

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[1] The Holy Bible : New International Version. Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 1996, c1984, S. Mt 8:10-11

[2] The Holy Bible : New International Version. Grand Rapids : Zondervan, 1996, c1984, S. Mt 8:11-12