God, animals and us

By Colin Gibson in Sermons

A sermon given at Mornington and Glenaven Methodist churches 14 March 2010.

GOD, ANIMALS AND US

A sermon on Pet Sunday

In the beginning, in the very beginning, God didn't look like us at all. God took the shape of a baboon, a cat, a hippopotamus, a bull, a bear, a hawk. God was incarnate in the creatures we now think of as being so separate from us. The animals were gods, powerful deities, stronger and grander than we ordinary human beings scuttling around between their legs.

But as human beings acquired more skills, became more numerous, began to kill or control many animals, God started to look different too. Now God took the form of an animal head on a human body, like the masked dancers of Africa or North America, or the paintings on the walls of Egyptian tombs. God was only half animal...and at least half human.

Our kind went on increasing in our ability to dominate the world of creatures; so naturally enough God eventually assumed our shape, and our personality. Now there were many gods and goddesses, like the all-too-human deities of the Greeks and Romans, capable of human anger and jealousy and sexual passion, and even organised into something like a human family. The Greeks knew exactly what these gods looked like: ourselves, but with perfect human bodies and very human minds.

Then out of the deserts of the Middle East (and elsewhere in the world) rose the idea of a single God who made everything in the world, including the animals and ourselves; a god who dealt with human beings as a superhuman being might do. This God could speak, and his first words (for God was naturally a male) were 'Let there be light' (spoken in Hebrew, for God was naturally a Hebrew); after which God became extremely talkative, and began to say things like 'Be fruitful and multiply'-said to us, of course-and 'subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.' And after that there was no stopping this talkative man-like deity, or those who worshipped him.

Now, centuries later, we're not so sure what God looks like. We no longer imagine an old white-bearded man sitting on a golden throne somewhere above us, but at least we're absolutely certain that God isn't some colossal tortoise or eagle or lion or serpent, running the universe out there in the vastness of space.

Human history traces the gradual loss of our communal fear of the immensely powerful and dangerous creatures that inhabited the natural world alongside us, and seemed to be so unlike us. Gradually the worship of the spirits of nature was displaced by the worship of whole families of human-like gods and goddesses...leading ultimately to belief in a single human-like God named Yahweh, or Allah, or Vishnu, and very human representatives of God-Jesus or Mohammed or the Buddha.

The total overthrow of the ancient animal gods is marked by countless stories, found in all cultures, in which semi-divine humans fight and kill immensely powerful animals. In Hindu mythology, Kali destroys the buffalo-demon; the Summerian hero Gilgamesh wrestles monster bulls and lions; Theseus enters the Cretan labyrinth and kills the half-human, half animal Minotaur; the labours of Hercules involve his destruction of a colossal lion, a many-headed water snake (Hydra), a huge boar, carnivorous birds and man-eating horses. In Christian legends knights and saints boldly confront dragons and serpents. Even today the idea that it's our task as human beings to subdue the creatures of our world persists, in fantasy stories of human triumphs over dinosaurs (Jurassic Park), monstrous whales (Moby Dick), fire-breathing dragons (The Hobbit), giant apes (King Kong), and a whole horde of terrifying new insect and animal species from outer space.

The records in the Bible of Hebrew and Christian thought about animals have decisively defined the way we treat animals. Especially important is what Genesis (which we now understand to be a mythic account of creation) has to say. Taken literally, as sadly generations of Christians read that ancient book, Genesis says that animals, like humans, were the deliberate and immediate creation of God. (We still talk about them-though not about ourselves-as 'creatures'.

The animals were given life, but crucially no soul. Only Adam was given that, to become 'a living soul'. Here I might digress into the fascinatingly crazy notion that women, like the animals, do not possess a soul either...because Genesis makes no mention of Eve ever being endowed with a soul. I looked up Google about this ancient debate and came across one mad theory (held in an American Baptist Creationist Church) that Eve, and therefore all women, were gifted just a tiny scrap of a soul-1/350th part of a soul to be precise, because Eve was made out of one of Adam's bones, and the human body possesses a total of (you guessed it) 350 separate bones...

Even more disastrously, Genesis says that humans-but not animals- were made in God's own image (so God looks something like a human being); and humans were explicitly given 'dominion'-that is, absolute rule-over the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and every living thing that creepeth over the earth'. So we have divine authority to catch every last fish in the sea, shoot out of the skies every bird that flies, and do what we will to any land animal that comes into our sights, from using hot plates to 'teach' bears to dance, to caging monkeys for lab experiments. In our prayers later, we will recall other consequences of this idea of human domination of the natural world.

The third chapter of Genesis personified ultimate evil as an animal: a serpent (one of the 'living thing creeping over the earth'). The fourth chapter of Genesis sanctioned animal sacrifice (Abel's offering) as an appropriate tribute to a sacrifice-hungry God.

Medieval Church scholars like St Thomas Aquinas made definitive pronouncements that since neither animals nor women had souls, they were never intended to share in the redemption of Jesus Christ, and were destined for hell. Fortunately, some voices in the mediaeval Church disagreed. You will find their words printed at the end of your order of service. Hildegard of Bingen saw all living creatures as 'sparks from the radiation of God's brilliance' (an idea remarkably like the Buddhist concept of the sacredness of all life). That great German mystic, Meister Eckhart, declared that 'God loves all creatures equally and fills them with his being. Among all the creatures he does not love any more than another. And we should lovingly meet all creatures in the same way.'...a doctrine that St Francis lived out in his encounters with wolves, birds and many other animals.

In our own time, three things have happened to hugely change orthodox religious views of the creatures of the natural world.

First, now that it has become obvious that we humans have brought and are bringing thousands of species to utter extinction, Christian theology has returned to the Genesis idea that animals are God's creation just as much as we are, and so just as deserving of the respect, even the reverence, due to the Creator's work. In other words we are beginning to recognise the wisdom of a Hildegard, an Eckhart or a St Francis, though this shift in opinion comes far too late for much of the bio-diversity of this planet.

Secondly, science has now shown beyond a doubt (except in the minds of the most rabid fundamentalists) that we human beings are not a completely separate form of being; we are the heirs of millions of years of evolutionary development, from the simplest living cells to the highest animals. In other words, we are animals ourselves, enormously successful animals-even if we have developed some capacities beyond the reach of many so-called 'lower' animal orders in the evolutionary chain. This has been hard to accept: remember the horror with which pious and not so pious Victorians greeted the discovery that our nearest evolutionary ancestors were the great apes; or even the furore caused in 1994 when anthropologist Desmond Morris published his book, The Human Animal.

Thirdly, we are beginning to realise how dependent we are on the bio-diversity of the natural world for our own survival. Yes, we can exploit and manipulate animals for our own pleasures or needs. We can breed a pit bull terrier or a sheep capable of always giving birth to twins. We can introduce stoats and possums and rabbits among our own native fauna. We can wipe out a whole crayfish migration virtually in one season of frenzied fishing, we can silence the song of the huia and end the majesty of the moa, though that takes longer) but we now know that we do so at our peril, and to the impoverishment and destruction of the world we live in.

Once our religion had it all worked out for our comfort. There was God, our God, the all-powerful Creator. Beneath him existed hosts of angelic beings; and then-ourselves, made, the Bible assured us, just a little lower than the angels. And at our feet and under our absolute dominion there were the animals, creatures endowed with life, but with no soul and no immortal future. God, human beings, animals. All distinct and ranked on a ladder that stretched from the majesty of the living God to the merest rock or lifeless stone.

There may just be enough time left to change; to replace our human pride in self to greater humility and respect for the other animals that share our precarious existence on this planet.

Hear again the voices of the wise:

God loves all creatures equally and fills them with his being. Among all the creatures he does not love any more than any other. And we should lovingly meet all creatures in the same way.

The Church has only in recent times addressed the ecological crisis, our pattern of living which is killing the earth. But the concept promoted is one of stewardship, not of kinship. The steward may be responsible and caring, but remains over and apart from the estate. When we recognise our kinship, our interdependence in a loving and intimate relationship with earth and all of its creatures we will encounter the Creator Spirit present and active in the world.
Amen


SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ANIMAL CREATION

All living creatures are, so to speak, sparks from the radiation of
God's brilliance, and these sparks emerge from God like the rays
of the sun...lf God did not give off these sparks, how would the
divine flame become fully visible? No creature exists that lacks a
radiance-be it greenness or seeds, buds or beauty. Otherwise it
would not be a creature at all. All species of creature shine in
their wonderful origin, they glitter in the beauty of their fullness,
and continually reflect God's light back and forth to one another.
(Hildegard of Bingen)

All creatures are words of God. My mouth expresses and reveals
God, but the existence of a stone does the same. God enjoys
himself. With the same enjoyment in which God enjoys himself he
enjoys all creatures; not as creatures, but the creatures as God.
God loves all creatures equally and fills them with his being.
Among all the creatures he does not love any more than any other.
And we should lovingly meet all creatures in the same way.
(Maister Eckhart)

The Church has only in recent times addressed the ecological
crisis, our pattern of living which is killing the earth. But the concept
promoted is one of stewardship, not of kinship. The steward may
be responsible and caring, but remains over and apart from the
estate. When we recognise our kinship, our interdependence in a
loving and intimate relationship with earth and all of its creatures
we will encounter the Creator Spirit present and active in the
world. (A contemporary theologian)

Footnote:
According to the United Nations Wildlife Authority, the ten
most endangered larger species of animals include the panda,
the tiger, the polar bear, the walrus, the penguins of South America,
the leatherback turtle, and several species of whale.
Our assault on natural habitats and the global warming
which is taking place under our stewardship of the earth
are the principal causes of this devastation.

-- by Colin Gibson.

(some photos of attending pets can be see under Photos, Mornington Church Gallery)