Everything that lives is holy, says the great mystical poet William Blake.

Every living thing is holy, every person, every tree, every animal, every iceberg.  Look and see how wondrous all of God’s creation is! Look and see, look into eyes human and animal, and tree bark and oceans and take care of it all. Love it all. That is our job on this earth. For so long we thought God’s command in Genesis to have dominion meant to dominate, to use everything as we will it. We thought we were the creatures closest to God. We may be, but not as high up as we often think.   And so, in our arrogance, our failure to understand dominion as caring for, we have done a very bad job of caring for all creation. 

 In Matthew, as in the other gospels, as in the Hebrew Bible,  Jesus commands us to “love God and love your neighbor as yourself.”   This is the greatest commandment.  Who is our neighbor? We often stop at people, and even exclude many of them. But all of creation, and not just people, are our neighbors. We all dwell together. The kernel of this commandment is two-fold. First, love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Second, love your neighbor as yourself. The first part invites the vertical and invisible. Look up to the heavens and love God. But then Jesus sets our eyes on the horizontal, where God also lives, where we live now, in our neighbor world, and in our selves. Love all with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul, God, neighbor, creatures, self.   

We know a lot of people don’t love their human neighbors, whether near or far. People have become abstractions, labeled as one religion or another, one political party or another, one color or another, one sexuality or another and too often humiliated for it. But if we can look at just one at a time, look into one set of eyes at a time, our neighbor becomes precious as God’s own and we begin to undo the poison around us.

But it is hard to love one another, even our partners sometimes. George Eliot’s monumental 19^th c novel, Middlemarch, shows us a lot about how hard it is sometimes to love even those nearest to us,  in this case  one’s life partner.

One of the couples at the center of Middlemarch is Dorothea and Casuabon. The young Dorothea as a woman living in England in the middle of the nineteenth century cannot go to the university. Desperate to learn, she is drawn to the elderly scholar Casuabon because she thinks he has a vast mind and can teach her. She has a project for him. He on the other hand (whose mind, it turns out, is not a vast ocean, but a “shallow basin”) has other ideas. He is drawn  to Dorothea because he thinks she can admire him and be his secretary, as he works, fruitlessly, to complete what he thinks will be the book of all books. He has a competing project for her. For her to become learned is the last thing he wants. Each enters the marriage expecting to get something from the other. 

Rather than just criticizing the self-important Casuabon though, Eliot turns the tables and criticizes the naïve Dorothea for her way of seeing him—or not seeing him. Eliot’s narrator says,

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves…Dorothea did not conceive that he had an equivalent center of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

An equivalent center of self.  (Hands—one self here, one there, equal)  Do we see each other this way, even at home, as having equivalent centers of self to our own?   The other as not there just for me, or me not there just for another.  The other as capable of suffering as much and loving as much and dreaming as big as I do? This is such a foreign way of thinking about others not only at home but in our world isn’t it?

We are anguished by the lack of respect we show to each other, not only to strangers, but to friends and family. This is only getting worse as we enter yet another painful political season in our country, when even families will be divided. Love your neighbor, says Jesus. Though you may disagree strongly, respect the other’s center of self. How hard this is in our times!

Consider Jesus. Pilate chose to send him to death. Jesus did not hate him. Peter betrayed Jesus. Jesus continued to love him, gave him another chance and Peter, in the last chapter of John, lived up to his promise. I love you Lord, he says, and I promise to obey your command to feed your sheep.

But we have more neighbors than the human ones. All of God’s creation is neighbor to us, all of it, animals, birds, seas, trees, and on and on. We show them as much disrespect as we show each other. We do not see God’s hand in them. We do not love them with our whole hearts. We have projects for them too, rather than respecting their own centers of themselves.

Animals. This afternoon we will bless all animals. Let us hold all of them in our love and respect. You will bring your cats and dogs and hamsters and on and on. But what about blessing all animals, the ones we don’t bring?  There was a time when people thought animals were things, incapable of feeling pain or thinking.  We have known for some time now about the pain animals feel, but recent research suggests that animals also have their own languages and make decisions.   Even mice! Animals mourn, play, love, develop social systems. They have consciousness. We can’t understand them yet, although another recent article suggested AI can talk to whales. Imagine! This research should revolutionize our society’s treatment of all animals!  This can’t happen too soon.

We grieve the extinction of birds and other animals. We celebrate the wild animals left. But what about chickens? Pigs? Cows? Lambs? I know you know what is going on with a lot of our farm animals. They are not living and dying well as they were on small family farms. We know about factory farms controlled by big-agra and turn away, weeping and overwhelmed at the suffering there to the dear animals. These big farms are also killing the earth, draining aquifers, and killing those who work in them and their families who bear the brunt, sometimes children work in these places. For the sake of animals and the environment, I look for the time when we can stop them and mass produce different food.   One Christian organization, Creature Kind, has developed a six-week course to help Christians explore how we can act with compassion.  I sometimes think we all love our pets so much because we want so to save even just one, that one horseshoe crab that we can turn over on the beach—you know that story, someone sees a beach full of overturned horseshoe crabs and goes to turn one over to save it. The other person says, why bother? And the one saving says, well it means a lot to that one. Having lost my beloved little dog a few months ago, I have been on an AKC discussion site. The grieving over pets is enormous, enormous, and often hidden. Let us grieve for them all. We all know how much love we really do have for animals. Love for God’s creation. We can change things for them!!! We as Christians are called to speak truth in the face of power!

Jesus loved animals too. The friendly beasts adored him at his birth. He says God sees every sparrow. He compares God to a mother hen brooding over her chicks. He chooses a donkey to ride into Jerusalem, a humble, beautiful animal, who will never be the same to us after the movie Eo. And, of course, he calls us his sheep, the sheep of his fold.   He is a lamb, God’s lamb.

And then our dear earth. We all know what is going on here too and turn away often, feeling helpless. More Love for the earth came home to me in a telephone call I had with my husband a few weeks ago. He was in Greenland, photographing icebergs with a small group. His photos are gracing this worship. One day he said to me, in a hushed voice,  I have never felt quite like this, felt both such awe at their beauty and such despair as I witnessed beads of water, signs of their too rapid melting. Right before his eyes, an epi-glacier, towering above him, the size of the highest tall building you can imagine, split open and part of it sank into the water.  This always has happened, but not as it does now, with alarming frequency.  Our sea levels will surely rise here.

We do not live simply, I don’t. Jesus did. He had no home, no possessions that he cared about. His footprint was so light on the earth yet so deep in our hearts.

Go out this day and love the holiness in every living thing, the people on the path, the trees beginning to turn, the many shapes and colors of pumpkins, the birds leaving who haven’t already left, the salt spray, the lengthening light in this most beautiful place. Look in your pets’ beloved eyes, bless them. Love God in all with all your heart.

Poem By Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”

Glory be to God for dappled things

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose moles all in a stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh firecoal chestnut falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers forth whose beauty is past change;

                                   Praise Him.