Tag Archives: blessing of the animals

Let the little children and the animals come to me: A sermon for Proper22B, 2024

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Proper 22B

October 6, 2024

Today is our annual Blessing of the Animals. We usually do it on the first Sunday in October, the closest Sunday to October 4, the Feast of St. Francis. It’s an appropriate time to do it as St. Francis was known in his own day as someone who loved animals—he is said to have preached to the birds and tamed the wolf of Gubbio. He had a deep love of the created world and is regarded as a patron saint of environmentalism—worth remembering in these days of drastic climate change and the forces unleashed on the world by our exploitation and abuse of the natural world. 

It may seem a bit odd that we have these scripture readings before us on this day when we have pets in our midst, distracting us from the texts. But I like to worship with our pets on this day, because for those of us who share our lives with animals, our relationships with them are deep and meaningful and they are often avenues through which we experience and share God’s love.

In fact, I think the readings do point us toward the created world. It’s not just the section of the reading from Genesis which on the surface connects to Jesus’ sayings in the gospel reading concerning marriage and divorce. It’s all of it. We might be distracted as we read or listen this version of the creation story, questions might arise in our minds about its historical veracity or patriarchal assumptions, or whether non-traditional forms of marriage are sanctioned But think about the humor in it—God seems to be rather bumbling, doesn’t he, and it’s a he in this text. God wants to make a partner for the man because it is not good for him to be alone, but he can’t figure out what sort of partner would be appropriate—so he makes all of the animals, each time falling short of his goal. 

But think about that for a moment. One of the text’s assumptions is that we are to be in relationship with animals, not just a relationship of dominion and exploitation but of mutuality.

And when it comes to Jesus’ sayings on divorce, which may hit us hard if we or those we love have been affected by divorce. For we know that sometimes, divorce is necessary; that it’s the only answer, even that it is the only way for one spouse to survive. But still to hear a saying of Jesus like this may fill us with guilt. But think about it another way. What Jesus is contrasting is the reality of human life with what God intended for us in creation, to be with someone in a relationship of mutuality and love—of course human sin and brokenness makes such relationships difficult, as it makes all of human life difficult. We experience the vast chasm between the reality of our lives, and the vision of creation offered in scripture.

In a sense, Torah, the law was an attempt to make allowances for all the ways in which human beings fall short of the created order as established by God. That’s certainly the case with the instructions concerning divorce. There’s one important thing to note here, however. In Jesus’ rewording of the instructions concerning divorce, he gives women agency: “If a man divorces his wife and marries another, he commits adultery; and if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” There is no such provision for women in the Mosaic law—only men can divorce their wives. 

In other words, while continuing to make room for divorce in the fallen world, Jesus is calling his disciples to a different vision of justice, a world in which human beings are invited to enter into relationships with each other and with God that are grounded in equality and mutuality.

We see something of that same vision in the following verses. As Jesus welcomes a child into his arms, rebuking his disciples for seeking to erect a barrier to this new community, he is challenging all of us to embrace a vision of community that is fully inclusive and welcoming of all human beings, and perhaps, all creation.

But Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God is calling us back to that vision of creation. And it’s not just about marriage and divorce—in creation, there was no property, no exploitation, no hierarchy. So too, in the reign of God. 

We often catch fleeting glimpses of that vision in our lives and world today. In the coming together after natural disasters as strangers help each other; in the radical welcome at God’s table, in the selfless love of a pet for their person. I caught a glimpse of that vision yesterday at our diocesan convention. The fact of reunification itself is a sign of God’s reign—the putting aside of petty differences, the comforts of the past, to embark on something new, building relationships with strangers, discerning together the future of the Episcopal Church in our state. And in the midst of a service that installed Bishop Gunter as the Bishop of a reunited Diocese of Wisconsin, he laid his hands on a bible published in 1820, given by Bishop Onderdonk of New York to the Oneida Episcopalians who were being forced from their homes in New York and traveled across the country to Wisconsin, where they became the first Episcopalians in what would become our state and our diocese. With that history of oppression and violence, loss of homes and culture, those Episcopalians preserved that bible down to the present day, a symbol of their faith, and their hope that they would be embraced fully as Americans and as Christians, and later in that service, as the Te Deum was sung in the Oneida language we embraced that painful history, acknowledging our sins and giving thanks to God for a new beginning and a new opportunity to create a more just church. 

Our gospel reading began with the news that Jesus and his disciples are now in Judea, on that journey to Jerusalem coming ever closer to the cross. The disciples have shown that they don’t know what’s going to happen, they don’t understand what Jesus is talking about when he proclaims the coming of God’s reign—that’s why they sought to exclude children from his presence. But Jesus breaks through those barriers, reaches out to us and to all, embracing us with his love, inspiring us with his vision, calling us to create this new community of love and justice that transforms us, our relationships, and the world.

Messy Lives, Messy Faith: A sermon for Proper 22C, October 2, 2022

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By the rivers of Babylon

Proper 22C

October 2 2022

Today is our annual blessing of the animals. In a few minutes, I will invite those of you have brought pets with you, or if you have photographs, or ashes of deceased beloved animals, to come forward for a blessing. We’ve done this many different ways over the years at Grace, but always on a date close to the feast of St. Francis of Assisi which is observed on October 3. Some years, we have changed our readings so that instead of the regular Sunday lectionary, we read the lessons and prayers appointed for the Feast of St. Francis. 

It’s a messy day, messy liturgically because we are doing multiple and somewhat contradictory things, messy because we have among us dogs and other animals that disrupt the decorum of the church. But I’m always reminded when dogs are among us that altar rails became a thing to prevent dogs from entering the holy space of the altar. You’ll note that we no longer have an altar rail that can do that.

One of the few pluses of the past few years of pandemic is that the messiness of our lives was on display for all to see, thanks to zoom and other technological things. I’m not sure how many times a meeting, or morning prayer was disrupted by kittens or cats running through the house and across the keyboard. Zoom, especially for those of us who never created backgrounds, provided windows into the messiness of our lives, the cracked ceilings, the bookshelves that are disorganized with papers everywhere.

That messiness, and the relationships powerfully symbolized by the pets among us, here or at home, remind us of something else profound, the ways in which our lives, even our spiritual lives don’t always present themselves publicly the way we would want them to. More deeply, we might recognize ways in which we don’t admit the messiness of our spiritual lives to ourselves—those places, those hidden things that we don’t like to be reminded of, or confess but have a way of revealing themselves to us, and often to others, at inopportune moments.

Last week’s gospel, the story of the rich man and Lazarus, confronted us with the ways in which we fail to live up to the gospel imperative to love and care for others. We have all walked past homeless people, turning our heads away, offering nothing to panhandlers. In today’s readings, we are confronted with something else entirely, but perhaps even more challenging.

The reading from Lamentations, and Psalm 137, reflect the pain and suffering of a defeated people, forced into exile. Both bear witness to the deep distress and spiritual upheaval caused by military defeat and forced removal. We know about this, if only from the images and stories from the war in Ukraine: cities, cultural and historical monuments destroyed, thousands killed, millions forced to flee.

The texts convey the pain. Lamentations, written by someone who witnessed the devastation, saw the ruined buildings, the empty streets, the destroyed temple. The psalm, written by an exile poet, expressing their deep distress, their crisis of faith:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, *
when we remembered you, O Zion.

2 As for our harps, we hung them up *
on the trees in the midst of that land.

3 For those who led us away captive asked us for a song,
and our oppressors called for mirth: *
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

4 How shall we sing the Lord’S song *
upon an alien soil.

These beautiful, tragic words echo across the millennia. They describe not only the experience of the Babylonian exiles but also the experiences of millions of others over that vast expanse of time, forced from their homes by war, famine, natural disaster, and now climate change. 

But that’s not all. The pasalm ends on a very different note, one so violent that I did not include the its last verse in our service bulletin. It speaks of bloody and violent vengeance, calling down God’s wrath on the conquerors. And that too is part of the experience of victims of war and other forms of violence—the desire to get back, to punish. That’s part of the messiness of human life, too.

Still, there’s something important that neither the psalm nor the reading from Lamentations mentions. The experience of defeat and exile was not only about mourning and desire for revenge. It was also about something else. Something radical, transformational happened while the exiles were in Babylon. In the ancient world, if a people were defeated in war, it meant not only the conquerors were more powerful, it also meant that the conquerors gods were more powerful than the defeated people’s gods. Usually, always, the defeated people lost their religion and their culture, being subsumed into the larger more powerful conquering culture.

In the case of the Babylonian exiles, that didn’t happen. They reflected on their experiences and as they reflected, they came to a new understanding of their God and what it meant to be faithful to that God. And when they returned from exile, they brought that new understanding, and newly created scriptural texts back to Jerusalem with them, and in doing so forged a new faith that would carry them, and their Jewish descendants, through the millennia, down to the present.

In the gospel, the disciples ask Jesus, “Increase our faith!” It’s something we all might ask; something we can imagine those people forced from their homes millennia ago, or people forced from their homes today, might ask. Faced with the prospects of having to abandon homes, or with the prospect of rebuilding lives after hurricanes, as people across the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Florida, South Carolina are facing today, feelings of despair, doubt, may seem natural. For us, too, faced with our own struggles, the suffering in the world, we may be overwhelmed by despair, we may feel helpless, powerless. But what little faith we have, the messy faith we have, may be enough. Jesus is there, among the suffering, the victims of violence, war, and natural disaster, Jesus is here with us, in the midst of whatever struggles we are facing. Jesus’ arms pick us up when we fall down; he carries us when we are too weak, he brings us to this table where we feast with him. Thanks be to God.

“All things were made for Him”: A Sermon for the Blessing of the Animals, 2019

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Genesis 9:8-16
Colossians 1:15-20
John 1:1-5

 

Each year on the first Sunday in October, we observe the Blessing of the Animals. It’s fun, chaotic, and a way for many of us to acknowledge ritually and religiously the important role our pets play in our lives, the blessings they are to us, and our responsibility to care for them.

We choose this day because it is on or close to October 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the popular, beloved saint who was known for his affection for animals. Stories about his care for animals abound. He preached to the birds, he tamed the wild wolf of Gubbio, turning a predator who had terrorized a town into a peaceful vegetarian. Among the few texts that are attributed to him is the Canticle of the Sun, a translation or paraphrase of which we sang as our opening hymn. In the original version, Francis sings of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

It’s easy for us to over-sentimentalize both St. Francis and our love of animals, and easy for us, as in so many areas of our personal lives, to fail to see connections between the animals we love and care for, and the whole creation of which we are a part.

Today, rather than focusing on St. Francis, or on our relationships with our beloved animal companions, I want to reflect on the larger issue, and the great challenge we face as human beings on a planet in the midst of dramatic climate change. Our collect, lessons, prayers of the people and confession come from resources approved for use by General Convention 2018. These particular propers focus on the kinship of all created things in Christ and seemed especially appropriate for this day on which we also remember St. Francis, who praised Brother Fire, Sister Earth, even Sister death.

We’ve been confronted this year with imminence of climate change: the sight of fields left unplanted after the unprecedented wet spring we had, images of the Amazon rainforest burning; news of melting glaciers and ice sheets in Greenland, the Arctic and Antarctic. I realized that while many of us at Grace are concerned about the environment and probably even participate in advocacy efforts around climate change and similar issues, it’s not something we’ve talked much about over the years.

At the same time, it’s important to recognize that in a congregation our size there are limits to what we can do; and with our advocacy and work around racism and homelessness, creation care might seem to be something for others to take on—or perhaps if some among us are so inclined, they could pursue these issues as a group within Grace. The Episcopal Church has produced a wealth of resources around creation care, materials on education and advocacy that would be a good place to start.

Our current situation invites us to respond in the way that Jesus challenged his listeners in his preaching: Metanoia. It’s a word that has traditionally been translated as “repent” or “repentance.” And we have a great deal of that to do. But more than that the word literally means “change your mind” or rethink. We must reorient ourselves—reorient our understanding of what it means to have faith in God in Christ, reorient our understanding of scripture, and reorient our roles as human beings and as Christians in the world.

There is a longstanding assumption in Christian theology, and among ordinary Christians, that when God created the universe and human beings, God created us to have dominion over all creation. That has led to our rapacious exploitation of natural resources, or willingness to exploit everything in creation for our use and benefit, our presupposition that we as human beings are outside of, exterior to creation and have no part or role in it. All of this derives at least in part from that commandment in Genesis 1: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and have dominion over it.

There is a second creation story, in Genesis 2, and it is rather different in its focus and meaning. In that version, God plants a garden and creates a man out of the dust of the earth to take care of it. God then creates all of the animals as possible helpers or partners for the man, and finally he creates the woman from the man. In this version then, human beings are literally part of the created order—made from the dust of the earth, connected with all living things, and participating with God in the ongoing work of creation as God’s stewards of creation.

It’s that story that I think offers us helpful ways of connecting our faith, our understanding of God and the created universe, with the urgent need for human beings to re-orient ourselves, to change our minds and take action to preserve the earth for future generations. As stewards of God’s creation, we are created and called to care for the created order, to tend it, to continue God’s work of creation.

Our lessons encourage us to think about our connection, even kinship with the created order. From God’s promise to Noah and his descendants that God would not destroy the earth, through the psalm, with its trust in God’s care for all of the created order, “you feed both man and beast, O Lord.” It also uses imagery from nature to describe God’s righteousness and God’s love toward living things, including humans.

The reading from Colossians and the Gospel, those first few familiar and powerful words from the Gospel of John, introduce a uniquely Christian perspective to our understanding of the relationship between God and creation. Creation happened through the power and work of Jesus Christ, the Word. Colossians makes a bold point: all things were made in and through him, that is, Christ; indeed, all things were made “for Christ.” What would it be like to understand all of creation, all living things, from the smallest plant or microbe, to the majestic Rocky Mountains, the Amazon rainforest, as being made “for Christ.” I daresay we would think and act rather differently.

I know there are Christians who believe that if or when our planet becomes uninhabitable, Jesus will return on a rescue mission to save the faithful from destruction. It’s strange because every biblical description of future bliss is an extension or improvement of our current existence. Think of the great vision of the prophet Isaiah:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

 

One wonders what a vision of the kingdom of God, a vision of God’s reign, a vision of a created order restored and perfected when God’s righteousness and justice prevail, when Christ reigns in majesty, one wonders what such a vision would look like or would include if the earth, the planet given us by God to tend and nurture, can no longer sustain life.

We are called to metanoia—to conversion. To quote Pope Francis, who wrote in his encyclical on the environment, “Laudato si“:

This conversion calls for a number of attitudes which together foster a spirit of generous care, full of tenderness. First, it entails gratitude and gratuitousness, a recognition that the world is God’s loving gift, and that we are called quietly to imitate his generosity in self-sacrifice and good works …   It also entails a loving awareness that we are not disconnected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion.

If and when we experience creation in that way, to discover God in the world around us as well as in our soul, we will be well on our way to becoming more fully human, more faithful to our calling as Christians, and become more completely shaped in the image of the one who created us. May God give us the grace to grow into that image and calling.

 

 

 

Creation, Relationship, Blessing: A sermon for Proper 22,Year B, 2018

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Today is our Annual Blessing of the Animals. We do this on a Sunday close to October 4, which is the Feast of St. Francis, the anniversary of his death in 1226. Francis is of course among the most beloved and popular saints in the Christian tradition, as popular today as he was in his own lifetime. He is famous for his life of poverty, his simplicity, and his desire to imitate Christ. His imitation of Christ was so complete that he received the stigmata. For the last year or so of his life, he bore on his body the wounds Christ suffered on the cross, bleeding from his hands and feet. Continue reading →

Humility, Obedience, Self-Emptying, the mind of Christ, and puppies

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Today at the 10:00 service we will be blessing animals, beloved pets, digital photos, even, I’m sure, some beloved stuffed pets. We do this every year on a Sunday near October 4, which is the Feast of St. Francis, the anniversary of his death in 1226. Some years, we turn the entire service into a focus and reflection on St. Francis. Other years, like today, we insert the blessing of the animals into our regular Sunday Eucharistic celebration, using the readings appointed for the Sunday. That’s what we’re doing today but after I made that decision and began working more closely on today’s worship, I found my reflections returning again and again to the poverello, the little poor one, St. Francis. Continue reading →

A Homily for the Feast of St. Francis, 2015

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Today is the Feast of St. Francis, marking the saint’s death 789 years ago. St. Francis is among the most beloved and most familiar of all the saints of western Christianity. He remains as popular today as he was in his lifetime. His love of animals and of God’s creation have made him an icon of the environmental movement. His joy, playfulness, and child-like faith offer an alternative to a Christianity that often seems to take itself too seriously. Continue reading →

Living with a dying pet on the Feast of St. Francis

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We celebrated Blessing of the Animals at Grace on September 29, for logistical reasons. It was especially poignant for me because for the first time, we didn’t bring any of our living cats with us. Instead, I brought the ashes of Maggie Pie, who died in 2003, and Margery Kempe, who died on New Year’s Day this year. My heart was heavy because back home Thomas Merton is sharing his last days with us. He was diagnosed with cancer two months ago.

We actually thought that Merton would probably be dead by now.  He’s lost weight; the tumor in his jaw has grown; but for the most part, he seems to be enjoying life. He’s become very affectionate and since he’s lost weight, he’s taken to lying between my legs which was a favorite spot of his predecessors.

Coincidentally, at night he has begun sleeping where both Maggie and Margery slept the last months of their lives, up at the top of the bed between our pillows. Maggie slept there because it was a place of safety away from Merton, who tended to beat up on her. Merton sleeps there because it’s where he seems to want to be.

This morning, he seemed to be in a very good mood and feeling well. He played with his ball, even carried it in his mouth, and ran around the house.

So we are facing that difficult decision so many people face. With the deep love we share for our animal companions, it is extremely difficult to watch them suffer, and as difficult to imagine life without them. But when we open our homes and our hearts to them, we also accept the responsibility of caring for them in life and in death. We accept the responsibility to release them from the pain they suffer and don’t understand.

Here he is this morning, resting after his bout of play:

photo(2)

 

 

A Homily for the Blessing of the Animals, 2013

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Today is our annual Blessing of the Animals, a day when we remember the witness of St. Francis of Assisi and remember to the goodness of God’s creation. For some, the Blessing of the Animals may be little more than a gimmick. For others of us, it is a way of acknowledging the relationships we have with our pets, the reality that these relationships can be deep, long-lasting, and fulfilling, and that through them, we can experience the love of God.
When we bless our pets, as is the case when we take the time to bless or give thanks for the fruit of the earth, the beauty and bounty of God’s creation, we remind ourselves that our relationship with God is not merely an inward, spiritual thing. It is also bound up with the material world, the creation that God made and gave us to be stewards and caretakers of. Continue reading →

Blessing Relationships: A Sermon for Proper 22, Year B (and the Blessing of the Animals)

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October 7, 2012

There are those who look forward to this Sunday each year with great excitement. We are blessing the animals today, on this closest Sunday to October 4, which is the Feast Day of St. Francis. We bless the animals in conjunction with the commemoration of St. Francis because among so many other things, Francis was known for his love of the animals—among the stories his followers and devotees told about him were his preaching to the birds, taming the wolf of Gubbio, and more. Francis’ love of the animals was part of his delight in all of creation, as we sang in our processional hymn words attributed to him in praise of creation. Continue reading →