Sermon: May 8, 2017 – “I Believe in Dog”

Rev. Matt Alspaugh

For an animal blessing service.

Introduction

Some preachers always start a sermon with a joke. I thought I’d try that out. Here is the requisite joke:

A pastor had been called to a church and on his first Sunday was dismayed to find that one of the lay leaders of the congregation had brought his dog to the service. The pastor asked the man to kindly remove the animal. The man obligingly took the dog outside and returned to his pew.

After the service, some of the church board members rebuked the pastor for insulting one of their most beloved members. The dog hadn’t caused any trouble, they pointed out, and the dog had been accompanying the man to church for years.

After the service, the pastor called to apologize. “Don’t worry about it, Pastor,” the man said. “It all worked out okay. I wouldn’t have had my dog hear that sermon for anything in the world.”

To all of you here today, please know that your dogs or other animals are welcome here. But if you suddenly need to take your leave, don’t worry — I’ll get it. That’s OK!

Embodiment

Each month we focus on a theme for our sermons and other program at UUYO. The May theme is “What does it mean to be a community of embodiment?” Today’s animal blessing service reminds us that we too, have animal bodies, and part of being fully human is to acknowledge our bodies. We have to, as Mary Oliver says, “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Our soft animal bodies love many things. They love be fed, satisfied, to be warm, to have freedom to move, and to rest. But our animal bodies also love contact with other bodies, human and animal. So we seek human companionship, and we also seek animal companionship with our pets.

Our companion animals and us

Our pets, our companion animals tend to come from a small number of all the species of animals in the world. These species, these companion animals are with us because they evolved alongside us. That is to say, of these species, the successful individuals, the survivors, the ones who got to eat and breed — became more docile, peaceful, more at ease around humans.

We evolved in the same way: those groups and tribes that learned to domesticate cows, horses, sheep, pigs, and goats tended to be more successful than those that didn’t. Those tribes would have likely included dogs and cats as well.

In this month’s Scientific American magazine, Russian researcher Lyudmila Trut tells of her six decades working on an experiment to domesticate wild foxes. Her team wanted to understand how wild wolves might have been domesticated into dogs over millennia by early humans, so the experimenters used modern techniques to selectively breed foxes for docility. Over a dozen or so generations, the foxes they bred came to become very much like dogs. These foxes wag their tails, lick your hands, lay at your feet, and even bark like dogs. More surprisingly, these animals have begun to look like dogs, with bushier, curly tails, mottled coats, and rounded snouts.

But this could be expected. Many domesticated animals have these characteristics – the tails, the coats, the snouts. Even Charles Darwin commented on appearance and demeanor in On the Origen of Species. The team is now exploring common genetic factors — the DNA evidence, if you will — that links these appearance factors and mild disposition.

Human exceptionalism

There’s a TED talk by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz[1], a cardiologist and professor, called “What veterinarians know that physicians don’t.” She found her physician’s eyes opened after she agreed to consult on animal cardiac cases at the Los Angeles Zoo. She learned that veterinarians had discovered numerous treatments for their animal patients that could be useful to treat humans, if only physicians were willing to learn from veterinarians. She quoted the old line:

“What do you call a veterinarian who can take care of only one species?

… A physician.”

But her deeper point is this: she says,

“We accept intellectually that homo sapiens is merely one species, no more unique or special than any other, but in our hearts we don’t completely believe that. [We] feel that tug of human exceptionalism, even as [we] feel the scientifically isolating cost of seeing ourselves as a superior species.”

As I looked deeper into the idea of “human exceptionalism”, I found another name was “human supremacy.[2]” It is promoted by, among others, the Discovery Institute, the group most known for trying to get intelligent design creationism taught in public schools.

Core to the idea of human supremacy is that there is some bright line, some sort of god-given quality, that separates humans from animals, and allows us to justify the abusive treatment of animals and tolerate the destruction of the biosphere. We’re human, we’re special, we can do anything we want.

We learn about animals

But as we learn more about the animals around us, it is harder to justify human supremacy. And now that we are paying attention, we find animals that are surprisingly smart, creative, and moral.

There’s a border collie — you may have seen her on youtube — that learned the unique names for over one thousand of her toys. She actually knew the toy names better than her trainer, a retired psychology professor.

Monkeys have invented ways to wash food, and passed these ways down from generation to generation as part of the monkey troupe culture.

Even octopuses clearly do think: they solve problems, they play, they use tools, they have personalities — alien personalities, but still.

We are only now learning that animals have a sense of morality. Rats will work frantically to free a trapped cage mate. Moreover, they’ll ignore a chocolate reward while they help their trapped buddy, and then share the chocolate in the end[3].

You may have seen the famous video — it’s also on youtube — where a researcher begins to treat two macaque monkeys unfairly, first rewarding them both with cucumbers, then rewarding just one with far more desirable grapes, for performing the same task. The dissed monkey characteristically goes ape-shit, if I may use that expression, throwing the now disgusting cucumber at the researcher, shaking his cage, and screaming.

Similarly, dogs trained to offer their paws for a shake will gladly shake without reward, but will stop that if they see you reward another dog for the same activity.[4]

The closer we look, the harder it is for us to draw that bright line dividing human from non-human animals.

God got a dog

Our reading today was from a lovely little picture book “God got a dog” by Cynthia Rylant with illustrations by Marla Frazee.[5] The book came to me through a Presbyterian minister; it’s a collection of poems that explores a God that actually experiences the world — making spaghetti, working at a desk job, getting arrested — of course God gets arrested for getting in a fight in a bar, because someone said something not very nice about his son Jesus.

The final, eponymous poem in the book has God rescuing a dog. Not surprisingly, God is anthropomorphic — formed in our human image, but he/she is delightfully bigendered. I imagine if the book was written today, even more gender choices might have been offered.

Indeed, there is some useful theology in these poems. In this particular poem, God “having only set the world on it’s course” is obviously a Deist. “She couldn’t be blamed for everything.” An attractive theology, that Deism, for it gets God out of the day-to-day, out of messing with our lives, off the hook for miracles and such.

Theological Imagination and Construction

I started my seminary education at Iliff School of Theology in Denver Colorado. There they taught a multi-semester core course called Theological Imagination and Construction. The point of this course, ‘tick’, as the students called it, was that students were expected to use our own imagination to create our theological world, to in essence construct god out of thier own understanding. (I did not take this course, for I transferred to a Unitarian Universalist seminary.) For Iliff, as a Methodist school, this is quite a radical idea! We could do the work of imagination and construction ourselves, perhaps individually, perhaps in community.

Seeing god in a dog

Now, I define myself as a non-theist, meaning mostly that I pass on most traditional definitions of God. But if I’m allowed to imagine wildly, to construct liberally, I just might come up with a God that I could believe in.

The interdependent web would be core part of my God. God emerges in the interconnection of all life, and all life is therefore valuable. Creativity, that’s what is important. Not the magic show, poof, and all life forms are generated in the seven days of creation of the Christian fundamentalists, but rather the slow, plodding, effective creativity that is the evolution of life by natural selection. And relationships — relationships are central. My God would show up in our relationship with each other, human and animal.

So maybe the God I might believe in would have shown up — symbolically, metaphorically certainly — with almond eyes, with a cold moist nose, and a tail that wags in greeting. Maybe the God I might believe in appears in the most unexpected places, out by the tracks, in the cold, and I might be ready to take God in.

Returning to Mary Oliver, another of her poems[6], Little Dog’s Rhapsody in the Night:

He puts his cheek against mine
and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I’m awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws
in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.

“Tell me you love me,” he says.

“Tell me again.”

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask.
I get to tell.

—

Over and over, he gets to ask. I get to tell.

And that is how I could believe in God … as in a dog.