Transcript
What Does the Lord Require? Gratitude
First Baptist Richmond, March 9, 2025
The First Sunday in Lent
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
You shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
I’ve been missing my dad lately.
I know it’s not Father’s Day, but I’ve been hearing his voice in my head, and thinking about all the things he used to say—and sing. My dad loved to sing. Sometimes I would end up sitting beside him on a church pew, and when we stood for a hymn it would turn into a contest to see who could sing the loudest. And when we lived in that old farmhouse in West Virginia, and he went out in the morning to milk the cow, he would often go out singing. Here are a few of his favorites, and normally I would feel shy about singing in public, but I sound just like my dad, and I’m going to sing these songs the way he did, so it will be more like an impression than a performance (please feel free to sing along if you know the words):
Life is like a mountain railroad With an engineer that’s brave.
We must make the run successful
From the cradle to the grave
Watch the curves, the fills, the tunnels
Never falter, never quail.
Keep your hand upon the throttle
And your eye upon the rail.
Blessed Savior, thou wilt guide us, Till we reach the blissful shore, Where the angels wait to join us In thy praise forevermore.
And this one:
Some glad morning
When this life is o’er
I’ll fly away,
To that home on God’s celestial shore
I’ll fly away.
I’ll fly away (oh glory!)
I’ll fly away (in the morning)
When I die hallelujah by and by,
I’ll fly away.
And for some reason this one, although I don’t know where Dad got it or why he liked to sing it.
It was always so easy
To find an unhappy woman
Till I started looking for mine.
Some beer drinking devil
Is holding my angel
And I know what he’ll do
If he’s my kind.
It was always so easy
To find an unhappy woman
Till I started looking for mine.
Thank you. Thank you very much. But my dad didn’t only sing. He also told jokes and stories, preached sermons, delivered speeches, shared the family history, and
made small talk around the supper table. He was a lot like the Bible in that way, which is also full of songs, and stories, and history, and speeches. We call it the Word of God, but like my own father, the Heavenly Father communicates in lots of different ways. You have to think about what you’re listening to. Is this a song, a story, a speech, a joke? It can make the difference between laughing out loud and bursting into tears.
There was a voice my father used when he wanted me to do something, and I call it his serious voice. I remember that he once asked me to bring three hundred-pound sacks of horse feed up from the bottom of the hill because he hadn’t been able to get our Volkswagen bus up the steep, rocky driveway. But I was busy doing something so I asked, “Can I do it later?” And he said, “No. I need you to do it now.” And I did. He was using his serious voice. And there was another time—I can’t remember what I had done—but he said, “Don’t shortcut me!” I must have been trying to take the easy way out or get by with the least amount of work possible. “Don’t shortcut me!” Dad said, and I think I have been more thorough in everything I’ve done since. He was using his serious voice.
Today we start a new sermon series called, “What does the Lord require?” You may recognize the quote from Micah 6:8 where it says, “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” But in this series I’m combing through the assigned lectionary readings for the Season of Lent and looking for those places where God uses his serious voice, where his meaning is not metaphorical, but literal. I’m looking for those places where God says exactly what he means, and wants us to do exactly what he says. And this morning I’m starting with the reading from Deuteronomy 26 that you heard earlier.
These are the words of Moses, when God’s people were still camped on the far side of the Jordan River after their long journey through the wilderness. They can see the Promised Land on the other side: a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey. They’re so close they can taste it. But Moses (who will not be crossing over with them) says,
When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
This is not a suggestion; it’s a commandment. It may not come directly from God, but it comes from Moses, his mouthpiece, and Moses is using his serious voice. He’s saying, “Look, you’ve been wandering in the wilderness for forty years eating nothing but manna. When you are finally able to plow up a piece of your own land, to plant and tend and harvest your own crops, you should be grateful! You should take some of what the Lord has given you and go to the temple.” Two times in those two verses he reminds the people that God is giving them the land. Giving it to them! What, then, shall they give in return? Well, some of the first fruits. Not all of the fruits; some of them. They shall put them in a basket and take them to the temple.
Now, imagine that you are one of those people as you strain your ears for Moses’ next words. He says:
You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’
Which is a way of saying, “God has fulfilled his promise to me. He told me he was going to bring me into the Promised Land, and he has done it. I stand before you as a witness.” But Moses goes on:
When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…
Do you see what’s happening here? Your very presence in the Promised Land is a witness to God’s faithfulness, but now you are being called upon to share your testimony, because that’s what witnesses do: they testify. You say:
A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
What are you doing? You’re telling your story. And it starts out well. But then, like many of our own stories, it takes a turn for the worse:
When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors;
That is, things were going fine until the Egyptians forced you into slavery and made your life miserable. What did you do? You cried to the Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And then what happened? Listen:
The Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
And what do you say when someone has struck off the shackles of your
bondage, set you free from your slavery, and brought you into the place you can finally call home? These people said:
So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.
“And then,” Moses said:
You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God.
That is, you shall worship him.
And then Moses says something I didn’t see coming, something I had to go back and look at a second, and then a third, time. He says:
Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.
Did you catch that? God doesn’t only want us to feel grateful for what he has done and what he has given; he wants us to show our gratitude in visible, tangible ways. He wants us to bring something to the temple. And this is where—as someone who feels responsibility for the financial well-being of First Baptist Church—I would love to bear down and tell you that if God has been good to you (and you know that he has) you need to not only feel gratitude, you need to show gratitude, and that when you come to this temple you need to bring something to show him just how grateful you are, not first fruits, maybe, but what about large checks or big sacks full of cash?
I would love to tell you that, but this verse says that after you bring the first fruits to the temple, and after you set them down before the Lord, and after you bow down before the Lord your God, then…you should have a party. That’s right.
Deuteronomy 26:11 says:
Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.
In other words, you don’t bring the first fruits to the temple because God needs them. God doesn’t need anything. God wants you to celebrate his goodness by taking those first fruits and turning them into a feast that can be enjoyed by you, and by the Levites who don’t have any first fruits of their own, and by the resident aliens in your midst, the foreigners who may not even believe in your God. Have a party and invite all of them to celebrate with you. And at the height of that celebration raise your glass and shout, “God is good!” and listen as everyone shouts back, “All the time!” And then raise it again and shout, “All the time!” and listen as they shout back, “God is good!”
Apparently that’s what God wants you to do with the first fruits that you bring to the temple: have a party. Because the expression of gratitude is not something he needs, it’s something we need. We need to show, and not only feel, our gratitude to God.
This crazy idea of celebrating with what we bring to the temple reminds me of something I read in Luke, chapter 14, recently. Large crowds were following Jesus, and he wanted to be sure they understood the cost of discipleship. He said, “If you want to follow me you’re going to have to put me above every other person in your life. If you want to follow me you need to know that your discipleship could very well lead to death.” And then, when that didn’t stop them, he said, “I tell you the truth, none of you can become my disciple unless you give up all your possessions.”
So, he’s asked for your love, he’s asked for your life, and now he’s asking for your stuff. Only he doesn’t need your stuff. Like his Heavenly Father he doesn’t need anything. But he knows that our possessions can possess us and what he wants is disciples who are free to follow, who are not tied down by what they have. He wants us to be like those first disciples, who literally dropped everything so they could follow him.
And that reminds me of my dad, too. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been missing him lately, but I was remembering how we ended up in West Virginia in the first place. He had been serving as the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Southwest Virginia, but he got interested in what Lyndon Johnson called, “The War on Poverty.” If he could have gone down to the local recruiting office and enlisted he would have. But he heard about something the Presbyterian Church was doing in one of the poorest counties in America. They called it the “West Virginia Mountain Project.” He wrote to them and asked if they needed any help and they said, “We’d love that, but we don’t really have a way to pay you.” He said, “What if I agreed to work at the poverty level?” which, in 1966, for a family of four, was $3,335 dollars a year. They were shocked, but they said yes, and that’s how we got to West Virginia, and to that old house on the hill with no running water where my dad often went out the back door with a milk pail in the morning, singing old gospel songs.
He wasn’t possessed by his possessions, and he knew how to show his gratitude. I can’t tell you how many nights we sat around the supper table in that house, and held hands, and waited for Dad to say the blessing, or how many times he paused long enough to look at what was on the table and say, “Everything here has come from our little farm.” But then he would say (in his most serious voice),
“Let’s not forget who gave it to us,” and we would all bow our heads as he gave thanks to the One from whom all blessings flow.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
