Blessing of the Animals Reflection
Psalm 104:10-15,27-30
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
September 29, 2024
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xFiZLdbYE
I’ll start with a few stories. They might seem random. Bear with me.
One day last week, when I had been sitting with my laptop for too long, I took a break to go out and play fetch with my dog Memphis. I threw the ball for him and then I remembered that about 30 minutes earlier, I had heard the awful thunk of a bird flying into a window. Going to investigate, I found a bird sitting quite still in a puddle of water. She looked at me and blinked her eyes, but didn’t attempt to move away. She wasn’t bleeding that I could see. I took a stick and offered it to her as a perch. She wrapped both claws around it and seemed steady, so I gently lifted the stick. She was fine, but made no attempt to fly. I moved her out of the water and to a place under a shrub with a bit more protection from any predators. I don’t know who her predators might be in my backyard. Memphis wasn’t interested in her.
I’m not very good at bird identification, but looking at my backyard bird guide, I think she was a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. She’s the kind of bird I often see foraging in my holly bush. She was still under the shrub 15 minutes later, but an hour later she had disappeared. I choose to believe that she recovered and flew away.
Sometime in the 1800’s, a woman named Mary MacDonald wrote a Christmas carol in the only language she knew, which was Scots Gaelic. She set it to a traditional Scottish folk tune. After her death, the carol was translated into English and the tune was named after a village near where she lived. The village is called Bun-es-san, so that is the tune name. The Christmas carol associated with that tune is Child in a Manger. Another, more well known song which was later set to that same tune is Morning Has Broken.
Bunessan is a small fishing village on the isle of Mull. Bunessan means bottom of the waterfall. We rode through it on a tour bus this summer. Our real destination was somewhere else, but our tour guide was smart enough to give us fun facts every where he could. So, before we got to the village, he told us about Mary MacDonald and her Christmas carol and then we rode through this village of about 100 people, listening to Morning Has Broken over the bus speakers. It is going to be a long time before I will hear that song without picturing the stone sea wall, the white croft houses, the boats bobbing at anchor, the blue sky that I saw there.
You all know that Jim and I have attended the Wild Goose Festival several times. For almost two decades, the festival was held in a campground in Hot Springs North Carolina, always in July or August. The campground is on the French Broad River which is wide and deep. Many times, I would slip down to the river between sessions and take off my shoes and wade in, unbelievably grateful for the refreshment of the cold, flowing water on an oppressively hot and humid day. In the last few days, my Facebook feed has been full of images of the French Broad River well past its banks, flooding the campground and the town, the streets and the restaurants. You have undoubtedly seen similar videos of homes and businesses, roads and bridges completely washed away in North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The devastation is incomprehensible. Power is out. The only road off of a farm or into a town may not exist anymore. Clean drinking water is in short supply. Communication with family and loved ones including students at college is cut off. Anyone with any connection to these places is keenly feeling the urgency and the loss.
Baba Dioum is a forestry engineer from Senegal. He famously said something like this:
“You can’t save a place that you don’t love,
You can’t love a place that you don’t know
And you can’t know a place that you haven’t learned.”
Some of us call that Watershed Discipleship –knowing and loving the place where everyone and everything drinks the same water.
The Oxford Junior Dictionary is a children’s dictionary, aimed at 7-year-olds. Every so often, the publishers update it.[1] They remove some lesser used words in order to add new ones which are more relevant to current living. You can imagine new words related to technology being adding, words like cut and paste, broadband and analogue. Fifty nature words were removed in 2007 and another 20 in 2012. Words like acorn, dandelion, hamster and otter.
In their defense, Oxford University Press said that the Junior Dictionary is a very slim children’s dictionary containing less than 5,000 words in total. 400 of those words are about natural world. I am not blaming Oxford. I’m not blaming the rise of new technology which we all need words to describe.
Older versions of the dictionary had more nature words, more examples of flowers for example. That was because more children lived in semi-rural environments and saw more plants across the changing seasons. In a way, the dictionary is simply responding to the lives we are living. So again, we can recall
You can’t save a place that you don’t love,
You can’t love a place that you don’t know
And you can’t know a place that you haven’t learned
For many of us, our pets are our closest expression of relationship to the rest of creation. Our animals experience the places we live differently than we do. They can teach us about the created world that exists beyond human comprehension and how to love it better. Attending to animals for an entire Sunday worship service might seem frivolous to some, but we can understand it as one piece of watershed discipleship.
One of the Biblical accounts of creation says that God the task of naming all the animals to the first human, Adam. Naming is a way of remembering, of paying attention, of determining what has value in our lives. We can keep on naming acorns, dandelions, otters and Ruby-Crowned Kinglets even if the dictionary doesn’t. We can remember places like Bunessan and Hot Springs.
Carrie Newcomer has a fun song called A Crash of Rhinoceros. It is her playful take on the story about naming the animals in Genesis. I’m not going to sing it; but I invite you to listen to the lyrics.
When Adam when out to name the animals
He sat on a rock and he figured
A horse and a cow and a goat and a sheep
Were the best names that he could deliver
But Eve looked around at all of that glory
Said, "Hon, I think we should consider
Something a bit more unique and refined
For each and every critter"
It's a crash of rhinoceros, a pomp of pekinese
It's a gaggle of geese and a swarm of bees
A parliament of owl and gam of whale
A pandemonium of parrot and a watch of nightingale
A huddle of walrus, company of moles
Exultation of lark and a murder of crow
A simple flock of sheep and a herd of deer
It's a bask of crocodiles, sleuth of bear
Adam looked shocked and he scratched his head;
Eve stood there, happy and beaming
The animals gathered in close to their feet
With roars of delight, barks and singing
She's on a roll and just getting started
The birds and the beasts held their breath
What fine appellation would they receive
And which one of them would be the next?
It's a team of oxen and a mob of kangaroo
It's a charm of finch if there are more than two
A troubling of goldfish, cluster of cats
A bloat of hippopotami, a cloud of bats
Ostentation of peacock, a barren of mules
An army of ant, nursery of raccoon
A parcel of penguin and a dray of squirrels
A bed of oysters with or without the pearls
All of that naming lasted into the night
Until even the insects had groupings
Eve was still bright eyed and willing to finish
Though her shoulders and fig leaves were drooping
Adam said, "Darling, I'm proud and amazed
You're really one heck of a woman
So let's go to sleep and tomorrow we'll rise
And start naming rocks, plants and woodlands"
It's a tittering of magpie, company of mole
It's a pride of lions and a tribe of goats
A plague of locust and a pack of dogs
A leap of leopard, an array of hedgehog
It's a caravan of camels, a drift of swan
A sulk of foxes and the list goes on
It's a prickle of porcupine, a battery of hen
A cohort of zebra, now once again
It's a colony of rabbit and a sounder of boar
An ambush of tiger, now just a little more
It's a business of ferret, a swarm of eels
A covey of quail and a pod of seals
It's a parade of elephant, a dole of dove
A bale of turtles and all of them I love
And she kissed the horde of hamsters
On their furry little heads
Sighed with satisfaction and she went to bed.[2]
Amen.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/13/oxford-junior-dictionary-replacement-natural-words