Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Simple Love
Scripture: Matthew 6:25-26 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
Jesus taught a lot of lessons about God from nature, either through elements of farming or through direct reference to familiar animals like today’s lesson about the birds of the air and its extension to the lilies of the field in the next verses.
Contrast what Jesus said with these words from medieval Dominican friar and mystic Meister Eckhart:
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God. If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—I would never have to prepare a sermon. So full of God is every creature.
Those are wonderful words! I will come back to them but they are abstract, inviting us to examine the animals as isolated examples of God at work in the world.
What Jesus said contains some jarring economic elements: “Are you not of more value than they?” and again, in chapter 10 of Matthew’s gospel where Jesus talks about God seeing the little sparrow fall, he mentions that two are sold for a penny in the market. Jesus insists on coming back to the very human frame of reference of economics.
I noticed that as a child and it bothered me although I’m not sure I could have put it into words. But it brings to mind a story my mother’s mother used to tell us about her own childhood in Denmark where she grew up in a farmhouse with a thatched roof.
Thatched roofs make great nesting places for birds and at one point the local government put a bounty on the large number of sparrows that were on every property. So, my grandmother and her sisters were given the job of hunting sparrows. They would turn in the wings for the bounty and the family would eat the very small breast meat because to do anything else would be wasteful.
I heard that story with horror as a child in the 1960s, but she would have been hunting sparrows as a child just around 1920 and I have no right to judge her for the circumstances of her life so long ago.
Things change and while our society’s relationship to animals still involves eating them sometimes, we have made it all more invisible. We have saved ourselves the bloody reality as it would have been known to farm people for thousands of years.
Owners of cats and some dogs will sometimes come face to face with the results of hunting in the back yard or the cellar; a reminder of the realities of our own ancestors’ lives not so many years ago.
As a child I wondered why those sparrows were being sold in the markets of Nazareth. I hoped they were to become pets, maybe entertainment for people with no Televisions or Radios, or even companions of a sort, or maybe they were an escape, like the Birdman of Alcatraz: a way to dream about flying above the clouds for people with really restricted earth-bound lives?
Or were they sacrifices so the poorest of the poor could take care of their religious obligations? Or were they food: a bit of luxury; tiny meat for the poorest soup-pots?
Jesus included that jarring statement about value so we could see the contrast he was making in the way God values creation. God values the birds we treat as so worthless. God values the grass of the field, here today and gone tomorrow. God sees beyond questions of legacy and reputation and even “what am I going to eat tomorrow?”, to the deeper value of each life in creation.
Some lives are shorter: but if it’s a bird, that short life gets to soar above the clouds, something the people of Jesus’ day could only do in dreams and visions. God has created value in each and every life and it is our blind adherence to an economic view of life that prevents us from taking a deeper look.
I have never starved. I didn’t experience the great depression the way my grandparents and parents did, so I can only imagine what it is like to be that uncertain about the future, about where your next meal is coming from.
But a lot of the people who listened to Jesus DID know real hunger. They might have needed to eat grasshoppers sometimes, or enjoy a sparrow for dinner. That kind of extreme situation is not something I can judge.
But Jesus made a point of startling his audience with this contrast of values, and we can do the same.
What Meister Eckhart said seven hundred years ago has been proven true in the 20th and 21st centuries as we continue to learn more and more about the wonders of the animals that live around us: the marvels of the senses they have that exceed our own in so many ways; the sense of smell the dogs have; the remarkable hearing and eyesight of cats; the fact that butterflies can see into the ultraviolet spectrum so that what looks plain to us is a beautiful and intricate pattern to them.
There is so much to see and so much to value.
And possibly one of the greatest lessons is one we have from our own pets, namely the kind of love they bring us: uncritical, forgiving, trusting, deep; it sometimes feels like a more unconditional love than we ever find in people; it gives us a taste of the love of God and the love God wants to create in us.
The Bible talks about perfect love casting out fear and we start to get an image of what perfect love looks like as we interact with our pets.
They’re not all angels and they will get demanding if their supper is very late; but in their love, they’re not afraid and they still trust us to provide for them.
Their love is simple, and we can learn from it. It is a good place for us to start as we plumb the depths of the love of God and learn what it means to share that love with others.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 