Creationtide 4 Year A

May the God who laid the foundations of the earth, who commands the morning and gives the dawn its place, open our hearts to the wonder of creation. Amen.

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Two of the great spiritual writers on the natural world have died over the last few weeks. Last Sunday I spoke about Wendell Berry, the American poet, essayist and farmer, who died earlier this month. Berry spent a lifetime writing about our relationship with the land, about belonging and community, and about the dangers of treating the natural world simply as something we own and consume.

And just over a week ago another extraordinary American writer died, Annie Dillard, at the age of 81. Dillard is probably best known for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, published in 1974, and for which she won the Pulitzer Prize when she was 28 years old. The book emerged from a period in Dillard’s life when she spent an enormous amount of time walking beside the very ordinary Tinker Creek, near her home in Virginia, observing the natural world around her.

She watched birds and insects and fish. She watched light moving across water. She studied clouds and trees and the changing seasons. She read voraciously about biology and natural history and theology. And then she wrote about what she saw, and about the experience of that seeing. Above all, Dillard paid attention.

And what she saw was not always beautiful. One of the most famous scenes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek describes a frog sitting beside the water. As Dillard watches, the frog suddenly collapses, its insides being dissolved and sucked out by a giant water bug. It is grotesque. The natural world Dillard describes is beautiful and astonishing and extravagant, but also violent, bewildering, wasteful, strange. She never sentimentalises creation. But she keeps looking. Again and again, she asks us to look more closely at the world which is already around us, and which most of the time we barely see.

And I found myself thinking about Annie Dillard as I read one small sentence in our gospel reading this morning. Jesus is travelling towards Jerusalem, through the border country between Galilee and Samaria, when ten desperate people suffering from leprosy call out to him from a distance: “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!”

Jesus tells them to go and show themselves to the priests – the people who have authority to declare them clean and allow them to return to their communities. And they go. Luke tells us simply, “as they went, they were made clean.” No great drama, no laying on of hands, no spectacular miracle. They go on their way, and somewhere along the road, something changes.

And then Luke says: “One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice.”

‘When he saw.…’ All ten have been healed. All ten have received the gift. And we shouldn’t be too hard on the other nine. After all, they’re doing exactly what Jesus told them to do. They are going to show themselves to the priests. Perhaps they are desperate to get home, to return to families and communities from which their illness has separated them.

But something happens to the tenth. He sees. He recognises what has happened to him, and that recognition interrupts his journey. He stops, turns around, goes back to Jesus, praising God with a loud voice, and throws himself at Jesus’ feet in thanksgiving. He sees; he turns back; he gives thanks.

I wonder if thanksgiving begins before we ever say thank you. Perhaps thanksgiving begins by learning to notice. That was Annie Dillard’s great spiritual practice: attention. Not looking at the world because everything in it is reassuring, or because every part of life can somehow be called good. Dillard knew better than that, and so do we.

Faith doesn’t require us to call suffering a blessing. Thanksgiving doesn’t require us to pretend that grief or illness or cruelty or destruction are somehow good things sent to us by God. But faith does invite us to remain awake to gift, to notice, to see what is actually around us. The tenth leper’s thanksgiving is not a technique for making himself happier. He has received something; something has happened to him, and he sees it.

Jesus looks around and asks, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they?” And then Luke adds another detail. The man who turned back is a Samaritan. Once again in Luke’s gospel, it is the outsider who sees. The unexpected person recognises what God is doing.

And Jesus says to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” All ten were cleansed, all ten received healing, but something more has happened here. This man has recognised the gift, and in recognising the gift he has turned back towards the Giver.

Perhaps that tells us something important about thanksgiving: gratitude changes our relationship with what we have. What I receive and recognise as gift cannot be possessed in quite the same way as something I imagine belongs absolutely to me.

And that takes us back to the strange and extraordinary vision we heard in our first reading this morning from Leviticus: the year of Jubilee. Every fifty years, for the Hebrew people, the trumpets sounded throughout the land. Liberty was proclaimed. People returned to their families and ancestral property. Land which had been sold was ultimately to be returned. The ordinary processes by which some people accumulate more and more, while others lose what they have, were disrupted. “You shall not cheat one another,” Leviticus says.

It is a remarkable vision, and beneath it lies a theological claim about possession. The land is gift. Human life is gift. The community itself is gift. And therefore none of these things can simply be possessed without limit. If the land belongs ultimately to God, then that changes how we inhabit it. If the abundance of creation is gift, that changes how we share it. If the people around us are also creatures of God, that changes how we treat them. Thanksgiving is not simply a feeling of appreciation; it changes the way we see and inhabit the world.

Over these weeks of Creationtide we have been learning different ways of seeing. We began with Job, confronted by a creation unimaginably vast and wild, a creation which does not revolve around us.

Then Hildegard of Bingen gave us viriditas – the greening vitality of God, the divine life shimmering through creation.

Last Sunday Wendell Berry reminded us that creation is gift rather than commodity, that we belong within it and depend upon it. And perhaps Annie Dillard offers us something even more basic: look. Pay attention. See what is there.

Notice the extraordinary living world into which we have been born: the spring growth appearing around us, the birds and insects and trees and rain, the food before us, the person sitting beside us, our own breath coming and going without our instruction. None of this is to deny what is frightening or broken in our world; Dillard certainly did not.

But one of the dangers of living in a time of such overwhelming information, such enormous challenges, such constant anxiety about what is happening to our planet and our communities, is that we can stop seeing altogether.

Creation becomes an abstraction: “the environment”, “the climate”, “the planet”. But creation is also this tree, this bird, this patch of earth, this body, this neighbour, this piece of bread. Perhaps the practice of attention restores us to relationship – to connection. And I wonder if that is one of the things thanksgiving does.

The tenth leper sees. He turns back, and he gives thanks. And in a few moments, we will do much the same thing. At the centre of our worship is the Eucharist – eucharistia – thanksgiving. We take ordinary things from creation – bread and wine, grain and grapes, fruit of the earth and the work of human hands – and we bring them to this table, and we give thanks.

We do not make the gift; we receive it. We recognise it, and in recognising and receiving, we turn again towards the Giver. Perhaps that is one of the deepest things our worship teaches us about how to live in this world: to pay attention, to receive what is given, to recognise the gift, to give thanks, and then to allow that thanksgiving to change how we live – how we share, how we consume, how we care for one another, how we inhabit this beautiful and bewildering creation to which we belong.

The tenth leper does not remain at Jesus’ feet. “Get up,” Jesus says, “and go on your way.” He sees, he turns back, he gives thanks, and then he is sent out again into the world, changed.

May our thanksgiving do the same to us.

Amen.