SEASON OF CREATION – ANIMAL SUNDAY October 5, 2014 “KINDRED SPIRITS” Genesis 2:18-25; Matthew 6:25-33 David Hamilton, Pastor Hello, my name is David… and I’m a preacher. It’s been 104 days since my last sermon… I just want to start out this morning by saying Thank You again for your gracious gift of Sabbath Time that you gave me this past summer. Thank you to the whole congregation for making this a part of our congregational life, to affirm the importance, for all of us, not only of hard work but also of deliberate rest and renewal; thank you to our Church Council members and other lay leaders for carrying on so ably in my absence; and especially thank you to Pastor Bill Embree and Pastor Julie Webb for being willing to have their own schedules upended this summer in order to make it possible for me to have this time away. I am deeply grateful to you all. It turns out that the summer had some surprises for us. I hear you all also had some new experiences over the last three months - some good and some just positively awful. I learned that if there is going to be an earthquake in Napa, it’s better to be in Romania than in Brown’s Valley! Seriously. But I hope to be able to hear from you all about your last three months, the good and the bad alike. Hopefully there was good for you this summer, too, and not just the trauma of the wild side of Creation doing its thing. I look forward to catching up with you all. Three months away from the daily demands of ministry here was a gracious gift indeed! And I hope to be able, over the course of the next few months, to share some of those experiences with you – not all at once; not all in one sermon! – but over time, as the opportunity arises. I had termed my sabbatical as a time for making connections and reconnections, and it was certainly that – visiting with far-flung family and friends; with former congregations and colleagues; delving back five hundred years into Christian history and especially into our own history as Lutherans; spending time in some beautiful places in six states and four different countries. I can’t yet count how many Catholic cathedrals, Lutheran churches, and Orthodox monasteries we were in – I’ll have to add it all up just out of curiosity. And there were birds, of course – lots of birds - which is, of course, the appropriate connecting point for this morning’s celebration of “Animal Sunday.” The Bible readings we’ve selected for today both have birds in them. In the first reading from Genesis, Chapter Two, the birds, along with the cattle and the wild animals, are created by God in order to help deal with Adam’s solitariness. God creates them; Adam gets to name them and live in their midst. And so we get “Horse.” And “Hoopoe.” And “Hippopotamus.” (“Why did you name that one ‘Hippopotamus’?” God asks Adam. “Well,” Adam replies, “It looks more like a hippopotamus than anything else we’ve seen today…”) This “naming” of the animals is a subtle, yet important, part of the story; and also a part of the story fraught with danger for us. It has sometimes been thought that the giving of names represents an authority that humankind has over the animal world. We named them, so now we own them – and now we can do whatever we want to with them. And that attitude has led to all sorts of trouble in the world. But I think that’s a poor interpretation, even in the way the story would have first been understood. Naming is a relational thing, not an ownership thing. You parents named your children not as a sign that you owned them, but as a sign that you were entering into a deep relationship with them. They would need a name, so that you could talk to them, call them, console them, love them. God calls us “by name,” and thus a relationship is established. The author Barbara Kingsolver tells the story of her experience with her five-year old daughter, Lily, and the five chickens and a rooster that they raised – Jess, Bess, Mrs. Zebra, Pixie, Kiwi, and Mr. Doodle. Her daughter had said that if she could have chickens of her own, she would be the happiest girl on earth – and what parent could resist that? And so half a dozen chickens became a part of their family. But the first time a roasted bird showed up on the dinner table, questions were asked – “Mama... is this… Mr. Doodle?” Well, it wasn’t, but then Barbara and Lily had to negotiate an agreement and come to an understanding, the same agreement that Barbara and her mother had negotiated years before when Barbara was a child: There would be meat on the table, but they would never butcher anything that had a first name. But then, Barbara wondered, what would happen when that first egg was laid? They only had to wait a couple of weeks to find out. One morning Lily went out to the chicken coop with basket in hand and returned triumphantly with one small brown egg nestled in the bottom. She planted herself in the kitchen, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Attention, everybody, I have an announcement: FREE BREAKFAST!” (from Barbara Kingsolver, “Lily’s Chickens” from Small Wonder) OK, so our relationship with animals is complicated, isn’t it? But in all our relationships with the created order – whether it be trees or rivers or the other things we’ve celebrated these last four weeks during this liturgical “Season of Creation,” or animals – it can never be said from a Biblical standpoint that we are owners of any of this. We are, at best, stewards. Caretakers. Put in a position of responsibility and called to act in our own lives, in relation to these other parts of God’s creation, with a care and concern that mirrors God’s own. I don’t think that this is meant to suggest a strictly “hands-off” policy when it comes to the human use of the land and the waters and the animals around us, but rather it points us toward living in the world as gently and as responsibly as we are able, using what we need to use, but not misusing or abusing those things which really belong to God. But there is a deeper point beyond the relatively simple one of good stewardship. It’s not, in these stories, that we as humans are created apart from everything else and set above it. Adam, and then also Eve, when she appears in the story, have come from the very same place that the cattle and the birds and the wild animals have come from. They have come from out of the earth – Adam directly, and Eve indirectly. We human beings are of the same stuff that everything else is made from. In this, the old Bible story and the new science are in agreement – everything comes from the same material: “We are stardust,” is the way that Joni Mitchell put it. But whether we are made from out of the ground, from out of atoms and molecules, or from out of stardust – however we think of it and call it - we share in the same fundamental stuff as horses and hoopoes and hippos. And so we are certainly not the owners of these creatures. We are, at best, stewards; but even more basic than that, we are kin to them. Kindred spirits. There’s a spirituality that sets aside all the non-human world, as though God would have no interest in it, and therefore we ought not to have an interest, either. A spirituality that has a hard time understanding, or even accepting, that for most of the last ten billion years God got along just fine without us humans, and for most of the last three billion years life on earth did not include the likes of us. Even in the mythological timeline of the first chapter of Genesis, five of the six days of creation had no human presence in them at all, and God still declared those first five days “Good.” God doesn’t dismiss the rest of creation as unimportant or of no interest. When we sing “He’s got the whole world in his hands,” we don’t just mean the world of human beings (even though we only sing “You and me, sister,” and “You and me, brother,” and “The tiny little baby,” and never get around to singing, “He’s got the hoopoe and the hippo in his hands – maybe we should! It might be a good reminder…) “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and all who dwell therein.” (Psalm 24:1) And not only are we kin to the critters, we are, in fact, their younger sisters and brothers. Do the math. They came first. And it’s usually the youngsters who learn from their elders. And so, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says that we could learn an important lesson by paying attention to our older siblings, just by looking at the birds of the air. I’ve spent many a day off and a fair part of my sabbatical obeying Jesus’ clear commandment here: “Look at the birds.” And in that, Jesus suggests, two things become clear. And while some may argue that this is a somewhat romanticized view of nature, there is still truth here to be heard. God takes care of the birds. Apart from any hard work of planting and harvesting on their part, God feeds them and provides for them. If you are a sparrow or a finch, there are seeds and insects all around to eat; and if you’re a hawk, there are, well, sparrows and finches all around to eat. (I told you these relationships are complicated…) But the truth that is there is this – that there is providential care at work, a web of life in which life is provided for. This is a sign of God’s love and concern for creation that goes well beyond the human part of the world, a love and concern that we humans, created in God’s image, are meant to share. There is providential care at work, and we humans can also live with a sense of confidence that God is at work even when we are not. “All that we need God’s hand has provided…” And sure, there may be times that we add our labors to God’s labors; and there may be times that we have to get our greed and our grabbing out of the way so that all the creatures can benefit from God’s gracious giving. If the walruses suffer because their sea ice has melted, or species go extinct because their habitat has been destroyed, that’s not God’s doing; and that’s not God’s intention. That’s because we haven’t been attentive to the other animals with whom we share this world; not attentive to them as God has been attentive to them. And so creation suffers out of our neglect. But the fundamental truth remains: the Holy One provides, and you can live your life trusting in that. Just ask the birds. Legend has it that St. Francis, whose Feast Day we celebrate every October 4th, used to preach to the birds. What he thought the birds needed to hear from him, I don’t know. Martin Luther, whose hometown I visited last month, used to think that the birds were preaching to him. Luther heard them telling him, by their simple, uncomplicated lives, to trust in God and to sing out each morning with faith and joy. I like to think that the birds, and the cats and the dogs and the hippos and the hoopoes, do have something to say to us about God’s rich imagination in creating this world and all that’s in it; something to say to us about God’s love and concern for all that has been made; something to say to us about our own calling as the human part of this creation to honor and respect God’s work and to share in that love and concern for all creatures, great and small. And they can remind us, as they go about their beautiful animal lives, to trust the One who brought us all to life, and who has promised to provide for you, too; the One who holds the hippo and the hoopoe and the human in loving hands. Amen.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 00:49:43 +0000
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