Deuteronomy 12:1-14, Psalm 121 "The First Thanks" Scott Hoezee

Family and friends who have visited the Holy Land have frequently told me that being in Israel had a positive impact on their spirituality. Once you've stood on the Mount of Olives, the next time you read a Bible passage situated on that mountaintop, the passage comes alive in new ways. You can visualize it so much better. But no one who has visited Israel ever said to me, "I went to Jerusalem because I believe that is the only place where I can worship God." As New Testament people, we believe that each of us is a mini-temple of God's Spirit. Our worship is not tied to one specific place. Even though we put a special value on coming to our own church, even so we don't believe that 700 Ethel SE is the only place we can worship. If your grandchild gets baptized at West Leonard CRC some Sunday morning, you will worship God in that church sanctuary as readily as in this one.

But it was not always so for our forebears in the faith. As Deuteronomy 12 makes clear, in ancient Israel God restricted acts of worshipful thanksgiving to the Temple in Jerusalem. Both of this morning's passages talk about this. Probably when you walked in here this morning, most of you were already fairly familiar with the 121^st Psalm. But I'd wager that you were less familiar with Deuteronomy 12. Yet as we will see, these two passages go together well. What's more, even though both spring from a very different historical era, there is something here to take seriously on this Thanksgiving Day 2004.

We'll begin with Deuteronomy 12. The gist of these fourteen verses is pretty simple. This is part of Moses' very, very long farewell sermon to the people of Israel. Earlier this year in our evening services we studied portions of this book, and so you may recall that the Greek phrase from which this book gets its name is deuteros nomos, which means "the second law" or better said, this is the law a second time. The original generation of the exodus from Egypt has now died. So Moses holds a giant review session for the next generation, diligently going back over all the laws God gave at Mount Sinai four decades earlier. Since these would be the people who would at long last settle into the Promised Land, they would be the ones to live out the full implications of God's commands.

Practically speaking, at least some of what God laid out in his blueprint for Israelite society could not be put into effect so long as the people lived in the desert. For instance, the people didn't have a permanent temple yet, but one day they would. Once that temple became the dwelling place of God, then that place, and that place only, would be proper locale at which to offer up thanksgiving in the form of tithes, sacrifices, and other offerings.

But it wasn't quite that simple. The land of Canaan that the people would soon enter was not a religious blank slate. The Canaanites had their own religion and they had all kinds of sacred sites where they practiced that faith. The Canaanites, like many ancient peoples, believed that certain locations were more divine than others. Mountaintops and certain forms of trees were thought to be places of intersection between gods and humans. And so up on many high places in Canaan, as well as in various sacred groves, the Canaanites had built altars at which they worshiped Baal, Asherah, Molech, and other deities.

So on their way to building their own unique temple, the Israelites would first have to dismantle these other shrines. Not only would this be a sign that they were repudiating the pagan faith of the Canaanites, it would also remove the temptation for the Israelites to worship in these places themselves. Unhappily, however, this was never completely accomplished. In future years, the Israelites left a lot of the high places intact. Even more upsetting, however, some Israelites later used those places for worship. Why go all the way to Jerusalem when the Canaanites had left behind lots of perfectly good altars? Couldn't they worship Yahweh in these places, too? But when you worship in a shrine built to Baal, even if you intend to worship the God of Israel, that worship gets infected--the god you honor ends up 50% Yahweh, 50% Baal, and therefore 100% idolatrous.

This is where Psalm 121 enters the picture. Psalm 121 has often been called the traveler's psalm, and I would guess that at least a few of you can recall having your father or mother read this at the dinner table the evening before your family was going to set out on some long trip. All this psalm's talk about God's watching over us and tending to our various comings and goings fits travel very well. Curiously, even originally this was a traveler's psalm, but the travel in question was quite different from a family vacation.

Psalm 121 is labeled as "A song of ascents," and there are many such poems in the Book of Psalms. The "ascent" in question is going up or ascending toward God's Temple in Jerusalem. This is a pilgrimage song. Seeing as in Deuteronomy 12 God had commanded that the Temple was the only place where the people could make their thank-offerings, at least once a year devout people made the trek from wherever it was they called home to the Holy City in order to worship Yahweh in his Temple.

This pilgrimage psalm is also a song for two voices. The first two verses give us the voice of the pilgrim, of the one making the journey. Verses 3-8 is the voice of the priest who gives a benediction to the pilgrim after he has made his proper confession of faith in Yahweh as the only true God. But we need to pay some careful attention to what the pilgrim says. What is it exactly that helps this pilgrim garner such a rich benediction?

Some of you may remember that older translations, especially the King James Version, rendered verse 1 this way: "I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help." That made the hills the source of the help. You look up to the hills and spy the location from which your help in life streams down. But that is wrong, as the NIV correctly shows with its better translation, "I lift up my eyes to the hills--where does my help come from?" In other words, "I lift up my eyes to the hills but where do I find my help?" The answer is that the pilgrim's help does not come from the hills.

Why not? Because what do you suppose this psalmist sees when he lifts up his eyes to those particular hilltops? He sees the high places dedicated to Baal. He sees those places where some people think the gods live but verse 2 declares that the real God of the universe is not living up on the hills. The true God is the Maker of heaven and earth. Yahweh is the one who created the hills and everything else in the cosmos. And this is the God who has asked to be met in his Temple as the only proper place where true worship can occur.

So picture Psalm 121 this way: a pilgrim sets out from home to give thanksgiving to God. Along the way, he passes any number of alternative places to worship as well as any number of alternative ways to give thanks. As he lifts his eyes to these alternatives, he asks, "Is this the place from which I receive help? Is that how I should thank God?" And in every case this psalmist answers, "No." Remembering Deuteronomy 12, the pilgrim keeps trekking along, each step taking him closer to the right place. Once he arrives at the Temple, he tells the priest that he wasn't seduced by the alternatives along the way, and it is this spiritual focus that earns for the psalmist the priest's lovely blessing.

But by now you may be wondering what this has to do with today. Even if you find this ancient history interesting, it seems quite removed from our setting. As I said earlier, Christians are not tied to a single locale for worship. After Jesus ascended into heaven, the Book of Acts tells us that initially the disciples stayed at the Temple to worship God. The idea that the Temple was the one location from which true worship could be offered was so deeply ingrained into them that even after Jesus rose again from the dead, the disciples couldn't imagine worshiping their Lord anywhere else.

But then the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. From that moment forward, Christians stopped focusing on the geography of worship in favor of the idea that wherever two or three were gathered together in Jesus' name, the Lord was in the midst of that group. Worship became a moveable feast. That's why Paul never tells new Christians in Corinth or Ephesus that to make their faith complete, they had to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

So given all that, what can we glean from this morning's look back at the theology of a people long gone? To answer that, let's review the nub of the issue in Deuteronomy 12. The core concern there is expressed in verse 4: the people had to get rid of the Canaanite places of worship not just to get rid of Baal worship but also because the Israelites had to remember that they couldn't worship Yahweh just any old way they pleased. They couldn't let the surrounding culture shape their piety. When you give thanks at the altars society sets up, you may begin to give thanks for the things that society values whether or not those are the things God values.

Now perhaps you are beginning to see the connection we can make to our own day. After all, we are here because this is a day our society sets aside for the purpose of thanksgiving. Of course, it's not a bad thing for our nation to do: who could object? The chance for thanksgiving is a vastly better holiday than Labor Day, Columbus Day, or Presidents Day. But Christians of all people should not need anyone else to prod them into giving thanks. For us, what makes today different should be the turkey and cranberry sauce, not the act of giving thanks. If you are scrambling today to come up with a list of things you're grateful for in a way you never do otherwise, then that's a problem.

But it's not just the act of thanks-giving, it's what we give thanks for that should give us pause. Because when you think of it, in the Old and New Testaments, where does thanksgiving come up the most often? Is it in connection with the accumulation of consumer goods, the burgeoning of stock market portfolios, or even having political freedom? Not typically, and certainly not firstly. The Book of Psalms is full of thanksgiving but if you go through the 150 psalms, you discover that the Israelites thanked God the most because of God's surpassing greatness and glory. God's nature and the splendor that attends all God's works are the most typical Old Testament sources of thanks.

In the New Testament you can also find variations on the word "thanks" quite frequently. But again, the word pops up the most often in connection with the Lord's Supper. That's probably why in some Christian traditions the sacrament is referred to as the "Eucharist," from the Greek word eucharisto, which means "to give thanks." In Paul's writings, he often expresses thanks to God but just about every single time he does so the motivation for the thanksgiving is the faith of the people to whom he is writing. "I thank God every time I think of you because I have heard of your strong faith."

Now please hear me on this next point: none of this means we may not or should not give thanks for good health, for rich harvests, for the food on our tables today and every day, for children, for meaningful employment, or for anything else that might make your Top 10 List of reasons to give thanks on Thanksgiving Day. You have heard me preach often enough on past Thanksgiving Days to know that if anything, I have encouraged all of us to be as specific as we can get in our prayers because such specificity demonstrates we are being thoughtful about our lives and where God is active in our day-to-day routines.

The point for this particular message, however, is that as we made our pilgrimage to this house of worship today, we passed through a culture with its own equivalents of high places on the hills around us. There are other people who want to set our thanksgiving agenda for us, suggesting what constitutes the finest blessings we have. We live in a society that has long had a strong component of civil religion, a belief that there is something about the bedrock of culture that has always been inherently Christian somehow. But that makes it all-the-more tempting, even for Christians, to begin our acts of thanksgiving not with those truths that the Bible deems to be the most thank-worthy but with other things.

So on this Thanksgiving Day, and every day, we need to give thanks for what the guests on the Today show this morning did not mention as an item of gratitude: we need to give thanks first of all for the gift of Jesus Christ our Lord. We need to begin all our thanksgiving with songs of praise to our Father God for his tremendous grace, mercy, and compassion. If we want to give thanks for freedom, let it be first of all not political freedom but the freedom from our former bondage to sin. We begin our thanksgiving with the hope we have in Christ, with a marveling over God's act of creation, with an awestruck appreciation for the holiness of God and all the beauty that streams from God's triune community of life and love.

Even if this day we were part of the persecuted church and living under threat; even if this day we didn't have a wonderful church facility and sanctuary in which to worship; even if this day we would not be able to return home to dining tables decked out with crystal and laden with good food--in other words, even if the gospel of Jesus Christ were all that we had, we would nevertheless have an entire galaxy's worth of reasons to hold Thanksgiving Day and to pour into it all the enthusiasm we could muster.

Yes, along with you, I personally am thankful we are not living under such grim circumstances. I am thankful with you for family, friends, food, shelter, and the freedom to worship openly. If we do not give thanks for also these things, we are ungrateful indeed. But Psalm 121 and Deuteronomy 12 remind us that giving thanks to God must not happen just any old way. We cannot let the wider culture eclipse for us the things for which we should generate our most ardent gratitude today and at all times.

The psalmist knew the hills of his own day and what they represented to some people. But he knew that his final help and hope did not come from those places. America has its own kind of "hills" today, too--places from which some derive their hope and help and for which they are the quickest to give thanks. So as we travel to church today or any Sunday, we can lift up our eyes to also these hills. We lift up our eyes and see WalMart and Wall Street, Nasdaq and Hollywood, the Pentagon and the Supreme Court, our 401k funds and our investment portfolios, the shopping malls and today's glut of newspaper circulars advertising tomorrow's big shopping binge. We lift up our eyes to these hills from which some around us draw hope and help, but from where does our help come? Our help comes from the Lord, the strong and mighty One who has lately saved us through his only begotten Son, even Jesus Christ our Savior. When we begin our thanksgiving with the salvation of our God, then we hear the sweet benediction that promises us God's love, providence, and sustenance in the rest of life, too.

Then we receive the promise that by day and by night, our never-sleeping God will protect and provide. He watches over our comings and goings, our busy lives of work and our homelife with the family. He does indeed provide a whole panoply of blessings for us in all those parts of life as well. Knowing that our God has saved us in Christ Jesus becomes then the cradle in which all of our other acts of thanksgiving make sense. As God's people this day and always, let us render a rich and full thanksgiving indeed. Let us give thanks to God because we know that in Jesus, he has already given us all we will ever need. Amen.