The scriptures referred to are Job 39:1-18, Psalm 121, and Matthew 11:25-30.
Well, it's been quite a week. To paraphrase Mark Twain's friend Charles Dudley Warner, everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. Yes, we can now tell you approximately what the weather will be and generally where it will be, but not, as we've seen, with precision. Ultimately, however, we can't stop the weather. Maybe that's why in the Old Testament God is often described using storm metaphors. It reminds us that there are powerful forces that we humans can't control and for which we should show a healthy respect. Unfortunately, we can, by ignoring where we should build and what bits of habitat we destroy or what things we pollute, like the water or the air, make things worse. We like to play God and every time we do, we show we can't be trusted.
As I was writing this, hurricane Ian was passing the Keys and we were getting hit by bands of torrential rain and strong winds. And we were awaiting the storm surge. Which reminded me of the fact that in the Bible the sea is often a symbol of chaos. On the land we build our sandcastles, so to speak, and the sea can wash them away. Like Port Royal, the one-time capitol of Jamaica, which was submerged by a tsunami in 1692. Or Pavlopetri in Greece, considered one of the oldest submerged lost cities in the world, with an almost complete town plan with streets, buildings and tombs, which you can dive. (But please don't. Tourists are destroying it.) Small wonder the first disaster recorded in the Bible is a massive flood.
But if storms and floods and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions reveal the harder side of nature, animals can reveal other sides. For one thing, they reveal the variety and sheer number of forms life takes. Everywhere in this world there is life: in the pitch black bottom of the sea there are large colonies of mussels and tube worms that somehow live near deep sea vents that spew out boiling water no other beings could survive. On our faces are demodex, tiny mites that live in or near the hair follicles of our eyelashes, eyebrows, and noses, who eat our skin cells and oils. In each of the cells in our bodies are mitochondria, which used to be separate bacteria and have their own DNA, but which now are part of us and generate energy for our cells. In his speech to Job, who is complaining about not knowing why he is suffering, God points out all the other parts of creation Job also doesn't understand, including animals Job knows about. It gives Job perspective and he humbly accepts God's wisdom. If God had included the unseen things I just mentioned, Job's mind would have been blown.
And while animals can also reveal a harder side—you will never look at meerkats the same if you read up on what the matriarch will do to stay sole mother in her troop!—they can reveal a softer side of life. As my Facebook feed keeps reminding me, almost every baby animal is cute, no matter what they grow up to be, whether it is a hippo or a Tasmanian devil. And you see that mothers are usually gentle and caring, such as the alligator, which watches over her eggs for 9 to 10 weeks and then stays with the hatchlings for the first year of their lives. But mothers can also be ferociously protective, fighting off predators, however much larger and more lethally equipped than the mother. And sometimes, animals that have just given birth will adopt orphaned babies of other species, such as a cat adopting ducklings or a dog kittens.
Humans have adopted other animals as pets for several millennia. Archaeological evidence shows that humans domesticated dogs 30,000 years ago, more than 10,000 years before we did so with horses, cattle and sheep. Cats were domesticated 10 to 12,000 years ago. And today, it appears that there is almost no animal that someone has not kept as a pet. Except perhaps the Geographer cone snail, whose venom is fast-acting and can kill several people. It is found in Australia, of course, which some have called Satan's petting zoo.
The reason we have animals as companions is many of them are capable of showing love for us. Yes, even cats! When they bring you a dead mouse and lay it on your pillow, it is because they care about you. They think you are a terrible hunter and need to be shown how to kill your food. They are probably insulted that you don't eat what they bring you. And that's why cats look down on us.
Animals can be selfless in their love. Dogs will risk their lives to save people. Dolphins will protect humans from sharks. Seals have kept injured people in the water afloat until other people can rescue them. The question is why? Helping your own kind protects the genes of your species and makes sure they get passed on. By why should inter-species altruism exist? From a purely materialistic point of view, it makes no sense.
From the Christian perspective such altruism would be odd if it didn't exist. If God is love and created the world we should expect to see love reflected throughout his creation, refracted in various ways through a seemingly endless array of creatures.
And God cares about animals. The story of Noah and the ark shows that God doesn't just care about the survival of humans alone. In the story of Jonah, God tells the reluctant prophet why he wanted him to preach repentance to the capitol of the empire that took the tribes of Israel into captivity. “...Nineveh has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from the left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (Jonah 4:11, emphasis mine) God wanted to spare all his creatures, the animals as well as the humans.
We don't have a lot of examples of pets in the Bible but they must have existed. When creating a story that would catch King David in his great sin, Nathan the prophet tells the former shepherd about a “poor man who had nothing except one little ewe lamb he had bought. He raised it, and it grew up with him and his children. It shared his food, drank from his cup and even slept in his arms. It was like a daughter to him.” (2 Samuel 12:3) This sure sounds like the lamb was a pet.
And one of the charming features of the book of Tobit in the apocrypha is the fact that the main character, Tobias, sets out on the journey that will get him a wife, accompanied by not only an angel but a dog. It is a lovely little story.
Approximately 48 million US households own at least one dog, including 40% of Floridians. A little over 25% of American households have a cat. 2.8% have birds as pets. 1.5 million homes have bunnies. Worldwide, a third of all households own pets.
So it's appropriate that we bless our animal companions and celebrate God's creation and his creatures on the Sunday nearest to the day we remember Francis of Assisi, God's troubadour. We sing his hymns and say his poems celebrating every element of creation. And we have stories of how he preached to the birds and tamed a wolf that had been terrorizing an Italian village. Francis was that rare preacher who was not so overwhelmed by the evil found in the world of men that he could not see the good in the world God created.
And when it came to the world of men, Francis, who as a young man had dreamed of military glory, became instead a peacemaker as Jesus calls us to be. During the Fifth Crusade Francis crossed enemy lines to talk to Muhammad Al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt, and try to convert him. Not only did the sultan not execute the friar, he let him stay for several days. While he didn't convert Al-Kamil, Francis did get a commitment from him to treat Christian prisoners more humanely. Then the sultan sent the friar back safely. Francis had gone as an instrument of God's peace and was received as such.
C.S. Lewis felt you could not say anything that was either too terrible or too wonderful about this world. When God created everything he pronounced it good. But we have misused, abused and neglected just about everything in it. Still the original goodness can be glimpsed. And one place we can see it is in our pets. They can teach us about unconditional love. They can teach us about faithfulness. They can teach us about how to comfort those who mourn. And they do it without words. Often we use words when actions are called for. Animals can't make flowery speeches and so they just show their love in how they act. We need to learn to preach the gospel of the God who is love everywhere and always and in all ways. And when necessary, use words.
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