Pentecost 19/St Francis Day October 3, 2010

Genesis 2:4-10, 15-20a                                                     

Galatians 6:14-18                                                                

Matthew 11:25-30                                                             

 This homily was preached at the Eucharist following the blessing of animals for St. Francis Day. The lections are chosen with reference to that occasion.

So here is the title of a new book which caught my eye: Some We Love [these words superimposed on the silhouette of a cute Labrador puppy], Some We Hate [the silhouette of a rat], and (the punch line) Some We Eat [the silhouette of a pig]. The subtitle of the book, which I haven’t read but intend to, is Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals.*

Last Sunday we tried to bring some straight thinking to one of the concerns of St. Francis of Assisi, the poor and the outcast. Today we turn our attention to another of his concerns, animals and the environment. If we just blessed pets – the animals we love and on which we lavish billions of dollars in care each year – we would be sentimentalizing what St. Francis stands for. As people who try to bring moral judgment to our lives, we need to go more deeply.

The poor and animals were connected in Francis’s life by a common theme: that all life is part of God’s Creation, all life is good and interconnected, and all life should be treated with love, respect and mercy. If that was an issue in St. Francis’s day, in the thirteenth century, it is even more so in ours. I don’t have to recite for you the ways in which climate change, the destruction of the natural environment on which we all depend, and other issues of the stewardship of Creation have moved to the front of our concern.

We are all becoming aware, as well, of the moral issues around our treatment of animals: factory farming, with chickens crowded into tiny cages where they can’t even turn around; cattle and pigs loaded with drugs so they won’t sicken and die in the vast feed lots where they spend their days; slaughter houses with terrifying conditions, and the treatment of laboratory animals who can suffer terrible agonies so that we can enjoy the latest pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. There is also the issue of species extermination caused by human destruction of natural environments. We can’t turn on the television, open a newspaper, without being made aware of these issues.

But what is a Christian perspective here? We can’t pretend that the Bible supports a vegan diet, at least directly. Turn its pages and you see that animals were slaughtered right and left as sacrifices to God. Dogs are referred to with contempt, roaming the streets eating garbage. Jesus feasts on fish. One of the great turning points in the Christian story is when St. Peter had a vision of a net being let down from heaven containing all the creatures of the earth, and heard the voice of God telling him that all things were clean to eat.

In these senses, the Bible really isn’t helpful with our issues today. Environmentalism as such wasn’t an issue 2,000 years ago because humanity had not destroyed the environment the way we have since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So we can’t just approach these questions of the moral treatment of animals and stewardship of the environment by biblical proof-texting.

What theologians are doing these days is taking the inquiry to a deeper level, working especially with the doctrine of Creation. Here we are on common ground with St. Francis. The key biblical texts here are the Creation stories in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis – the most important of which we read this morning. To summarize: God made the universe and all life in it. As the crowning glory of God’s work, God made human beings. God gave us stewardship over all other parts of creation – animals, plants, the environment. Stewardship means dominance over, the ability to name and use; but it also means care and responsibility for. Human beings may be made “little lower than the angels,” but we are still creatures, animals, ourselves. We are subject to the natural laws and constraints of the Garden of Eden, and when we transgress these, all hell breaks loose – quite literally. Jesus Christ came to restore the balance lost in our primordial transgression, to show us the way of harmony and peace, lead us into the reign of God. Saints like Francis show us this way reflected in their lives.

Science reinforces this theological understanding of our interrelationship with the rest of Creation. We have learned that the genetic differences between us and that pig or that rat, not just that Labrador puppy, are tiny. Animals are our cousins, fellow beings, not “objects.” We have learned from science that when we trash the environment we hurt ourselves – cause cancer and other diseases, hunger and starvation, wars and violence, increasingly erratic weather patterns.

All this is a work in progress: the science, the theology, the moral implications of what we’re learning for the practical ways we live our daily lives. I have enormous respect, envy really, for people who have adopted vegetarian or vegan diets. Anne and I eat a lot less meat, we are beginning to seek out local food sources that avoid factory farming abuses, we have a hybrid car and pay attention to where politicians stand on environmental issues, but our carbon footprint and the suffering we cause indirectly for our fellow creatures is still huge compared with where we’d like it to be.

The sin here, I think – as it is with our stance toward the poor – is when we “dissociate” or split off ourselves from “the other,” whether the other is a poor person or a rat or a pig. We buy a nice looking steak wrapped in plastic at Market Basket and we do not see the animal it came from, how that animal was treated. We drive a gas-guzzling SUV and we do not see the pollution from oil wells in far-off places like Nigeria and Venezuela, where hundreds of thousands of square miles of land and sea have been destroyed and millions of lives impaired so that we could enjoy our lifestyle.

Morality begins with awareness, with not splitting off others but recognizing, as St. Francis did, that everything in Creation is our brother, our sister; that everything is good and has its place in the kingdom of God; that stewardship means we must treat everything with love, respect, honor and care.

As we pet our dog, then, feed our cat, clean our horse’s stall, give thanks to God for our dinner tonight, let us remember St. Francis; and may that memory begin to change the way we live our lives.

 

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By Hal Herzog (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).