Gratitude Remembers

Harvest Thanksgiving — Deuteronomy 8:7–18 | Luke 17:11–19

A psychology professor at U of T was giving an oral exam and asked one of her students, “How would you diagnose a patient who is screaming at the top of his lungs one minute, then sitting in a chair weeping uncontrollably the next?”

A young man in a hockey jersey raised his hand and said, “He’s probably a Leafs fan.”

With hockey season underway again, Leafs fans are once more being asked to exercise that peculiar combination of hope, patience, and emotional resilience that has sustained them for generations. As it turns out, hockey also gives us an interesting way into Thanksgiving this year.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes a curious pattern researchers noticed among elite Canadian hockey players. A surprisingly large number of them were born in the first few months of the year. The explanation, at least in part, was fairly simple: January 1 was traditionally the age cut-off for many Canadian youth hockey programs.

So a child born in January might be playing beside someone born almost a full year later. At eight or nine, eleven months can make quite a difference in size, strength, coordination, and confidence. Coaches naturally notice the children who seem more advanced, those children get selected for better teams, receive more coaching and ice time, play against stronger competition, and eventually become genuinely better players.

None of that means they didn’t work hard. Of course they did. You don’t become an elite athlete without enormous discipline, sacrifice, and probably a few parents willing to get out of bed at four-thirty in the morning.

But Gladwell’s point is that hard work is never the whole story. Long before some of those players had earned anything, they had received an advantage they didn’t create — something as arbitrary as the month in which they happened to be born.

Perhaps that gets rather close to what Moses is trying to tell Israel in our first reading. They are preparing to enter a land of abundance — streams and springs, wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, olives and honey. After years in the wilderness they are finally going to have enough, and apparently Moses is worried about them.

Interestingly, he isn’t worried that they’re going to starve. He’s worried about what might happen when they prosper. “When you have eaten your fill,” he says, when you have built good houses, when your flocks multiply and your silver and gold increase, be careful that you don’t begin to say, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.”

Remember. Remember where you came from. Remember the wilderness. Remember what you received along the way, and remember that even your ability to produce wealth is itself something you received. Perhaps we could put it this way: gratitude remembers what entitlement forgets. Entitlement says, “Look what I accomplished.” Gratitude is able to say, “Yes, I worked hard — but that isn’t the whole story.”

None of us got here entirely on our own. We were born into particular families, places, and moments in history. We were taught by people we did not hire, travelled on roads we did not build, benefited from discoveries we did not make, and inherited communities and institutions shaped by generations before us. Along the way, people encouraged us, opened doors, took a chance on us, or simply happened to be there at the right moment.

Even our capacity to work hard — our health, intelligence, temperament, talents, or ability to persist — is not entirely self-created. That doesn’t diminish effort; it simply puts effort into perspective. And I wonder whether remembering that might make us a little gentler with one another.

Every generation is tempted to assume that because something worked for us, the same opportunity must be available to everyone else. Some people came of age when stable employment was easier to find, housing was comparatively affordable, and an ordinary income stretched considerably further than it often does now. Others have entered adulthood in a very different landscape.

That doesn’t mean one generation worked hard and another didn’t. It does mean that gratitude should make us slower to judge someone whose journey has been different from ours. Because gratitude remembers what entitlement forgets.

And perhaps that is what happens in the Gospel. Ten people suffering from a skin disease encounter Jesus as he travels through the borderlands between Samaria and Galilee. They call to him from a distance — “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us” — and Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests. As they go, all ten are healed. But one of them notices. Luke says that when he saw that he had been healed, he turned back, praising God. I think that little word “saw” matters.

The other nine aren’t necessarily terrible people. In fact, they appear to be doing exactly what Jesus told them to do — they are going to the priests. But something happens in this one person when he recognizes what has happened to him. He notices grace, and noticing grace changes his direction.

Perhaps gratitude is more profound than good manners or remembering to say thank you. It is a way of seeing. It is noticing that something we had begun to regard as ordinary, expected, or deserved was actually gift all along.

And Luke adds another detail that would have been difficult for his first audience to miss: the person who sees most clearly is a Samaritan — the outsider, the foreigner, the one outside the religious and social boundaries of those who assumed themselves to be insiders.

Luke loves that kind of reversal. Again and again, the person at the edge sees something about God that the people in the centre have missed. Perhaps privilege can sometimes make grace harder to see. When access, belonging, security, or opportunity have always been part of our experience, they can slowly stop feeling like gifts and begin to feel like simply the way things are.

Which brings us back to remembering. Christian remembering is not nostalgia. We don’t remember merely so that we can recreate some supposedly better time in the past. Healthy remembering allows what we have received to shape what we do next.

That feels especially relevant for us at St. George’s after celebrating 170 years of ministry in this place. Last week we looked at photographs, remembered people who worshipped here before us, and gave thanks for generations who cared for this little church. None of us built this place from scratch. We inherited it — not only the stone and timber, but prayers and stories, music and traditions, sacrifices and mistakes, faith and hope.

And the appropriate response to inheritance isn’t guilt. It’s stewardship. What have we received, and what are we going to pass on? That question applies to this building, of course, but also to our faith, our resources, this land, our opportunities, our experience, and perhaps even the wisdom that has come through some of the harder parts of our lives.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the central Christian act of thanksgiving is also an act of remembering.

The word Eucharist means thanksgiving, and every time we gather around this table we hear Jesus say, “Do this in remembrance of me.” We remember bread that is taken, blessed, broken, and shared. We remember a life that is given rather than hoarded. We remember that grace came to us as gift before we had done anything to deserve it. And if Christian remembering is doing its work, it should make us generous.

Harvest Thanksgiving cannot simply be an annual opportunity to look around and say, “Aren’t we blessed?” Eventually gratitude asks harder questions. Who is missing from the table? Who is struggling while I have enough? What have I received that could become gift again? Because gratitude remembers what entitlement forgets.

And gratitude does not mean pretending everything is wonderful. Some people come to Thanksgiving carrying grief, illness, loneliness, financial anxiety, strained relationships, or uncertainty about what comes next. We do not honour those realities by painting a cheerful face over them.

Perhaps gratitude simply refuses to allow what hurts to become the only thing we can see. The Samaritan looked again, saw what had happened to him, and turned back.

Maybe that is our invitation this Thanksgiving — to look again. To remember where we came from and the people who helped us get here. To notice the graces that have become so familiar that we have stopped seeing them. To recognize the advantages we received without earning them, and perhaps become a little gentler with those whose journey has been different from ours.

And then, having remembered how much we have received, to ask what we can give. Because gratitude remembers what entitlement forgets — and perhaps the surest sign that we have remembered well is that the gifts we received do not stop with us.

Amen.