Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments…Dt

Take care that you do not forget the LORD your God, by failing to keep his commandments…Dt. 8:11

I was relieved to find out that I’m not the only one who forgets things. Everyone does at one time or another, according to Karen Bolla, A Johns Hopkins researcher. These are the things people most often forget:

1. names	83%
2. where something is	60%
3. telephone numbers	57%
4. words	53%
5. what was said	49%
6. faces	42%

And if you can’t remember whether you’ve just done something, you join 38 percent of the population.[1] How about walking into a room and forgetting why you went in there? I wonder what percentage of the population keeps forgetting where they put their keys? I have had personal experience with each of these types of forgetting.

Then again, sometimes forgetting is an excuse used for not following through with a responsibility. Forgetting homework assignments is the classic among students. Deadlines often raise anxiety among us and forgetting is a way of coping.

This morning’s reading from Deuteronomy raises another kind of forgetting that is rooted in the illusion of our self sufficiency. This forgetting is more than a lapse of memory for details. When the Israelites were in the wilderness, hungry and thirsty, uncertain of what lay ahead and stripped of all their personal resources, there last resort was to trust God, to depend on God. So, another word goes out to them. When they finally arrive in the land of milk and honey, when they finally live in their own homes and not tents or temporary shelters, when they finally have enough to eat and lack nothing, that is especially when they, and we, have to pay attention not to exalt ourselves, not to become so prideful that we believe “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.” God is telling the Israelites, God is telling us that God is not the God of the last resort, but the living God who gives us the power to work and save and build and have and share. God is God when we are desperate and when we are living easy! But, the temptation is to congratulate ourselves, to feel self satisfied, to tell the story of our hard work, and to keep ourselves so busy in managing and displaying what we have earned that we forget the One whose unseen grace helped prosper the work of our hand.

That’s the lesson, real simple, don’t forget God. Do get so busy and focused in planning Thanksgiving and counting our blessings that we forget the One to whom we raise our thanks!

Maybe that is why the other nine healed of their dreaded disease in our Gospel reading went on their way to show the priest as Jesus said and did not return to him as the tenth one did to say thank you to God. It was not that the other nine were ungrateful. I am sure they were so happy that in the joy of the moment and all the possibilities for life before them, they forgot to thank God. The nine were cured, but the tenth was made well by his faith. The verb for made well is also translated “saved.” To be made well is to be made whole, to live with the spiritual reality of your relationship with God as well as the physical reality of your own life.

It is gratitude to God that prompted an old man to visit an old broken pier on the eastern seacoast of Florida. Every Friday night, until his death in 1973, he would return, walking slowly and slightly stooped with a large bucket of shrimp. The sea gulls would flock to this old man, and he would feed them from his bucket.

Many years before, in October, 1942, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was on a mission in a B-17 to deliver an important message to General Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea. But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into the most harrowing adventure of his life. Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as giant sharks rammed their rafts. The largest raft was nine by five. The biggest shark…ten feet long. But of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone or destroyed by the salt water. It would take a miracle to sustain them. And a miracle occurred.

In Captain Eddie’s own words, “Cherry,” that was the B-17 pilot, Captain William Cherry, “read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for deliverance and a hymn of praise. There was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my eyes to keep out some of the glare, I dozed off.” Now this is still Captain Rickenbacker talking…” Something landed on my head. I knew that it was a sea gull. I don’t know how I knew, I just knew. Everyone else knew too. No one said a word, but peering out from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on their faces. They were staring at that gull. The gull meant food…if I could catch it.” And the rest, as they say, is history. Captain Eddie caught the gull. Its flesh was eaten. Its intestines were used for bait to catch fish. The survivors were sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically hundreds of miles from land, offered itself as a sacrifice. You know that Captain Eddie made it. And now you also know…that he never forgot. Because every Friday evening, about sunset…on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida seacoast…you could see an old man walking…white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. His bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls…to remember that one which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle…like manna in the wilderness. [2]

Let us remember the God from whom all manna comes; the God who in Christ gave himself for us. Let us take care not to forget the LORD our God.

[2] “The Old Man and the Gulls” from Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story by Paul Aurandt, 1977, quoted in Heaven Bound Living, Knofel