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Sermons at Saint Mary's
The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost: We do love our pets, don’t we? There isn’t an Episcopal Church in all of America today that isn’t brimming over with creatures great and small on this, the Feast of St. Francis. After Christmas and Easter, I dare say, this is easily the most popular celebration in the church. For we love our pets, don’t we? Especially at St. Mary’s. We pray earnestly for those furry companions who live under our roofs. They show up in our pictorial directory as members of our extended family. And as far as I can tell, we are the only church around who has a full fledged animal ministry! Yes indeed, friends, we love our pets. And we do well on this day to ask God’s blessing on them and us as we seek the wisdom and strength to see to their welfare. After all, we are one of the first generations in human history to have this kind of relationship with the creatures who share this world with us. It was only a mere four centuries ago, the word pet was first used, coming from the word petty, meaning trifling, small, insignificant.. For most of time, you see, these wonderful animals in the pews next to you were considered even less than petty. And in the 2 million years our species has been on the planet, it has only been the last 15000, or 1000th of one percent of this time, when we have been on friendly terms with domesticated animals. Today, there is nothing petty about our pets. They are the world to us, and we do love them so. It is right and good, therefore, that we mark this occasion as a sacred rite in the church. For as much as we may love our fellow creatures, God loves them all the more. We are creatures, like them. We are only a little lower than the angels, our scripture says today. We are all of us, equally, children of a loving Creator God. One of the remarkable things about this profound and complex relationship we have with our pets is that they mirror our own relationship with God. Our pets come to love us, and to trust us, implicitly, unconditionally. They come to depend on us, for we are the only ones who can take care of them, who can provide for them, who can bring them warmth, and love, and satisfaction. And isn’t this just the way we relate to God? Yes, we truly love our pets. We love them so much it seems that we are prepared to devote incredible amounts of our resources and energy on them. Last year alone in this country, we spent $75 billion dollars on our pets. That’s 5 times the amount that the United States spends on non-military foreign aid. That’s more than twice as much as we spend on domestic charities. Friends, this enormous sum represents a higher amount than the GDP of 100 of the 180 countries on planet earth, our island home. We spend more on our pets than almost anything else we can name. The great irony of course is as much as we love our pets, we cannot love them all, and 4 million of our dogs and cats each year are euthanized. We love our pets, but at the same time, today a full quarter of their direct and distant cousins are threatened with extinction. As we nurture and pamper our beloved pets, we are destroying natural habitats of their wild relatives on a scale that is morally reprehensible and ultimately unsustainable for all living things, including ourselves. So on this day when we come to bless our animals, our purpose is not to go away from here with a warm, fuzzy feeling, like giving ourselves a milkbone for some cute trick we have performed. No, we are invited on this St. Francis Day to the kind of radical obedience and dedication that Francis and Clare themselves embodied in their own time and place. St. Francis, remember, called our fellow creatures his brothers and sisters, and so they are. Their source and being, like ours, is in God. Their origin and destiny, like ours, is from God. We are intimately related, and we cannot live without each other, or without each other’s mutual welfare in mind. Thus, our pets are not idols to adore. They are not things to mistreat or denigrate. They are rather icons who lead us back into relationship with all living things who share this planet with us. Two weeks ago, on my last morning on Monhegan, I took a long walk around the island. It was a sunny morning and on the far side cliffs I saw a fogbank approaching. I scaled down half way and sat on a promontory to watch, and there below me were two minke whales as near as I could throw a stone. Then in the distance a pod of bottlenose porpoises frolicked. And within minutes harbor seals rose in the surf for their morning breakfast. In an instant, what has always been appeared like it was meant to always be. And what is always meant to be in this wondrous world God creates can happen, it can only happen if you and I and all of us take to heart these words of Jesus in our Gospel today that the only way for us to receive the peaceable Kingdom of God, finally, is as a little child. One of the great images of this can be found in the famous Peaceable Kingdom paintings of the Quaker artist Edward Hicks in the early 19th Century. The paintings depict the vision of Isaiah where the lion lies down with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid, and calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The best known of Hicks paintings is his last, no doubt each of us has seen a copy of it at one time or another. In it, half the painting is luminous sky, and all the creatures, the lions and cattle and the little child are saturated in its light. It is as if, one commentator has put it, the painting is made of diamonds, where the light is not only emanating from the sky but from each of the creatures who now live at peace with each other. It is as if the world is made of one, perfect diamond. Is this not a picture of our true destiny? To be suffused with celestial light and to be at peace with the world and each other. This is our crowning glory and honor. We are given a commission beyond the angels. To live in this world. To delight in it. To care for it. And ultimately, this is the true measure of our love for our pets, that we love this world God has created, in which they and we have a common past, a common present, and a common future. top | home | site index |
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