Today’s Gospel story, unique to Luke, tells of the healing of ten people with leprosy, of whom only one returns to thank Jesus (click here to read Luke 17). Therefore, the lesson is: do not be like the nine ungrateful people; remember to say thank you. Right?

Well, that would make a rather short sermon and get us to our Thanksgiving lunches sooner, but I am not sure that is what the story says. We know nothing about whether the other nine were ungrateful. We know only what they did, which was just what Jesus told them to do: “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” Note that Jesus does not invent anything special here or contrary to the Law, under which the priest would examine someone who had been healed and allow that person to return to religious and communal life. And who is to say that this return to the religious community would not itself involve thanksgiving to God? The rites described in Leviticus do include sacrifice and worship. So we do not have to imagine nine people who receive such a gift and feel nothing. The difference between them and the tenth may not be whether they have gratitude, but what they do with it.

Luke gives us one crucial piece of information about the person who returns: “He was a Samaritan.” So when Jesus asks, “The other nine, where are they?” he, in fact, knows exactly where they are. Having been excluded from society, and suddenly gaining the possibility of returning to it, they are doing what they need to do. They have a religious system into which they can be restored, obligations to fulfil, and a community waiting for them. But the Samaritan does not have the same relationship to the Temple and its priests. He will never be part of the Judean world in the same way. Even his healing does not erase that reality, so he does what is available to him: return, praise God, and thank the person through whom God worked. What I am suggesting, then, is that the Samaritan is not necessarily more grateful than the others. But his specific expression of gratitude, paired with other readings we have heard recently, gives us four strategies to consider.

I will call these strategies the Four Rs: Return, Reframe, Rest, and Remember.

First, to return to the source of our gift, we might first have to determine where that source lies. As our classic Thanksgiving reading from Deuteronomy 8 warns, when we eat our fill, and prosperity becomes ordinary, do not say, “My power and the might of my own hand have gained me this.” (Click here to read the full chapter.) We really do work, study, practise, persist, take risks, and make sacrifices. But even our ability to do those things exists within an enormous network of gifts, in which our achievements can genuinely be ours without being ours alone. We did not create our minds or bodies. We did not arrange every opportunity that happened to coincide with our abilities. And alongside the transcendent source of all of this are the ordinary people who taught, encouraged, employed, challenged, or opened doors for us.

Just as the Samaritan does not seem to decide whether it was God or Jesus who healed him and instead thanks both, neither do we have to choose. As Christians, we can grow accustomed to thanking God rather than the human beings through whom God works. So when we thank God for medical recovery, for example, let us also thank the physicians and nurses, the friends who drove us to appointments and brought us food, the person who covered our work. Not only thank God for them, but actually thank them, recognizing that thanking the person can still be a way of thanking God.

In that sense, we are still in the vineyard we heard about a few weeks ago (click here to read the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard), which metaphorically speaking, God has created, gave us capacities to till, filled it with coworkers and mentors, and minted the coin with which to pay us our wages. The vineyard workers’ parable also illustrates my second strategy: reframe, which is a tool used in cognitive behavioural therapy.

Reframing involves recognizing that the automatic interpretation we place upon a situation is not necessarily the only truthful way to think about it. The vineyard workers’ agreed wage had seemed adequate until they saw what others received and began to interpret their own wage as unfair. The vineyard owner effectively invites them to reframe: “I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Are you envious because I am generous?”

As we know, envy is a thief of joy, but interestingly, negative comparison can even disguise itself as thanksgiving. In the chapter of Luke’s Gospel that follows the healing of the ten lepers, the Pharisee prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people.” (Luke 18:11) We have our own versions. “Others have it much worse than I do.” Or, “They have lots of money, but I am sure they have terrible problems of their own.” Perhaps they do. Perhaps they do not. But why would their misery make my life better? Or we hear that people in poor countries have little and yet are so happy. How do we know? Millions of people live there, each with their own sorrows and joys. Poverty does not exist to teach comparatively affluent people a lesson in contentment, and none of this frees us from envy anyway, since our attention is still fixed upon somebody else’s life as we try to feel better about our own.

Just as we do as individuals, churches have a tendency to turn gifts into numbers to evaluate as soon as they flourish, or even before we allow them to do so. Our ESL ministry is a good example. It is smaller now that government regulations have changed and there are fewer visitors with long-term visas. We can say, “Attendance is down. Do I even need to come if the volunteers may outnumber the students?” But what the students themselves say is that they enjoy the small scale because they feel comfortable and receive individual attention. They want to be outnumbered by native speakers because this means more voices to hear, more relationships, and more people communicating by their presence that these students matter to our community. The numbers themselves do not change; what changes is what we notice about them.

The way our Soward Fund is both a blessing and a source of anxiety is another good example. We can say, “Look how much we are spending; at this rate we are going to run out!” Yes, prudence matters, but another truthful view is also available: “Look how much we are spending; what a range of ministries this gift enables us to support, at least for now!” The financial situation is the same; only what we notice in it differs.

Reframing, then, does involve a kind of comparison, but not with somebody else. It is a comparison between our habitual or current perception and other possible ways of understanding the same situation. Of course, reframing does not mean denial or forcing ourselves to call something good when it is not. The healed Samaritan will still be a Samaritan. There are places he cannot go and boundaries his healing has not erased. Contentment cannot mean believing that nothing is missing, and gratitude cannot bring within reach what remains beyond it or recover what has been lost.

But consider the other nine, who do receive the reintegration into religious and communal life that they longed for. How long will it take before it all becomes ordinary again? And so the third strategy is: rest in the moment.

Most of the time, I do not think we are deliberately ungrateful. We are grateful momentarily, and then something else simply comes next. The nine who went to the priests would be declared clean and return to their families, work, and worship. At first every ordinary thing might feel special: the first meal together, the first embrace, the first Temple visit. But we cannot experience every ordinary thing with the same intensity as when it first became ours. I think of this particularly as a parent. Childhood is a wonderful time filled with endless “firsts,” but after each milestone, another one always lies ahead. When will they sit? Walk? Talk? Read? Master calculus? You wait for it, worry about it, but once it happens, very soon it becomes ordinary and you begin watching for the next thing.

It is the same whenever we learn a language, musical instrument, artistic skill, or golf swing. As soon as something that seemed impossible becomes possible, our attention is occupied by what comes next. Or say we desperately want a job, wait for the interview, hope and pray for the offer, and celebrate when we get it. Remarkably soon we encounter its challenges and become absorbed in daily tasks. Those difficulties may be entirely real; gratitude does not require pretending otherwise. But once what we longed for has become ordinary, we do move on.

Perhaps here we can think of the Samaritan, who, for a little while, stops moving forward, returns, and rests at Jesus’ feet. There is even an echo here of what we considered last week when we blessed the animals. Blessing and thanksgiving both interrupt possession: they involve pausing long enough to remember that a thing, creature, or relationship was God’s before it became ours. But in the end, Jesus still tells him to “rise and go.” That is normal life, not moral failure.

What do we do after we “rise and go”, however? Well, we might apply the fourth strategy, which comes from the same Deuteronomy 8 passage: remember. To this end, my iPhone has inadvertently helped me develop a little opening ritual for each day. At some point I must have enabled a widget of featured photos, and now every day a random piece of my life unexpectedly appears on the home screen: people, travels, what the children were doing, some ordinary afternoon scene. I might look at it and think, “That was nice. I am glad we had that.” And at times, frankly, “Thank God we are not dealing with that anymore.” Either way, the photograph makes me stop and attend to gifts I may hardly have noticed while I was living them, or may forget to notice now.

The ancient equivalent of my iPhone practice is described in the book of Joshua 4 (click here to read). As we heard in Deuteronomy, God warned the people that when they finally settled in the Promised Land, they must not forget how God had brought them there. And when they did finally arrive, they had to cross the Jordan River to enter the land. As they were crossing, Joshua told them to take twelve stones from the riverbed and set them up on the other side, so that whenever people noticed them and asked what they meant, they would tell the story of what God had done for them. They were, in a sense, Israel’s “featured stones”: ordinary objects appearing in everyday life and prompting people to stop, remember, and give thanks.

But the risk is that instead of saying, “That was good, and I am thankful I had it,” we become nostalgic and say, “Those were the good old days, and now they are gone.” That is unproductive comparing again. And for the church especially, nostalgia is a particular temptation in our post-Christendom world. We cannot go back to the time when shops and sports were closed on Sundays, churchgoing was a social expectation, pews were full because there were fewer other places to be on Sunday mornings, and churches therefore had financial resources that did not require the same reliance upon investment income.

There were good things in that world that we genuinely miss. But we can appreciate what was good without requiring it to come back. I am honestly thankful for the church that exists today: for people who come when nothing in the surrounding culture requires them to do so, and for those who fit worship and ministry into schedules in which the church competes with many other options. I am thankful for ministries we are able to undertake now that we may not have imagined then.

We do not need the present to resemble the past before we call it a gift, nor does appreciating the gifts of today diminish the beauty of the past. We do not need to count our blessings by keeping an eye on somebody else’s, to have people thrown out of the vineyard in order for us to belong in it, or their coin to be smaller in order to value what we have. We do not need somebody to be poorer, sicker, or lonelier than we are to be grateful, nor do we need someone who appears fortunate to turn out to be secretly miserable.

Instead, as the readings suggest, we might return to the source and either thank the people through whom the gift came to us, or recognize God’s hand in our own capabilities and opportunities. We might reframe by asking whether there is another truthful way of understanding even a situation for which gratitude does not come easily. We might rest in the moment, allowing gratitude to linger before it becomes ordinary. And we might make it a practice to remember the gifts of the past without allowing nostalgia to cast a shadow over the present. None of this means abandoning our work, worries, losses, or prudence. It just means turning away from them for long enough to appreciate this life, these people, these capabilities and opportunities, this particular coin placed in our hand.

And after that, of course, “rise and go” again.