Seeking Hope in the Garden of Gethsemane

by Alyssa Moore

John 18:1-3. Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to where there was a garden, into which he and his disciples entered. Judas his betrayer also knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas got a band of soldiers and guards from the chief priests and the Pharisees and went there with lanterns, torches, and weapons.

Mark 14:32-36: Then they came to a place named Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took with him Peter, James, and John, and began to be troubled and distressed. Then he said to them, “My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch.” He advanced a little and fell to the ground and prayed that if it were possible the hour might pass by him; he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.”

My fellow worshippers, the word of our savior, Jesus Christ.

Good morning. My name is Alyssa Moore, a CreatureKind Fellow, and I will be sharing a few words for us today.

Beloved of God, we have journeyed through yet another Lenten season. We have gone into the wilderness with Jesus. Through our prayer, through fasting, through mourning, through works of justice and mercy, we have walked into the desert. And so perhaps it’s fitting that now, in Holy Week, we begin and end in a garden.

In the Gospel of John we read that, “Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to where there was a garden, into which he and his disciples entered.” We read that Jesus has often been there with his disciples. We know that in Jesus’ ministry up to this point he speaks repeatedly of the beauty of creation, its belovedness and worthiness of care in the eyes of God. And right before what he knows to be a night of anguish, Jesus seeks refreshment and peace and companionship in the garden. Jesus seeks communion with God and answers to prayer in the garden. We can picture what it looked like, what kind of trees and grasses, what kind of flowers and creatures might be there with Christ. We can picture our own gardens, our own communities and ecosystems.

And today we can hear Christ asking us to keep watch and be present with him in that garden, just as he asked for the company of Peter, James, and John. Just as he asks that the cup might be taken away from him, we may be frightened of what Jesus is asking us: of what he might call us to see, to experience, to do. Because as we have experienced, all too often, the quiet garden soon becomes the scene of injustice, violence, and persecution.  

White supremacy, colonialism, greed, and speciesism have uprooted the “gardens” we live in, and just as Jesus is taken from the garden to the place of judgment, we know that we have dispossessed peoples of their lands and animals of their homes. The violence and injustice of our political systems is not a phenomenon unique to Jesus’ day.

White supremacy has cried out “crucify them” to BIPOC communities—to Black and Asian Americans, to the indigenous peoples whose stolen lands we colonize, to the people and countries our food systems exploit. Religious and political institutions have cried out “crucify them” to our queer and trans family. Capitalism and imperialism cry out “crucify them” to the disabled, the poor and working-class. And speciesism cries out “crucify them” to the community of creation, perpetuating a never-ending Good Friday for both animal and human bodies, in order to put meat, fish, and dairy products on the table.

We began in a garden and we end in a garden. We read that, “In the garden there was a new tomb,” where Jesus was laid after he is crucified, and has surrendered his spirit to God. In the world these days it seems that there is always a new tomb, a new crisis, a new tragedy; the world has already ended and ended so many times, for so many people, and animals, and continues to end every day: through mass shootings, through pandemics, through harmful legislation, through climate change, pollution, industrial animal agriculture. We may feel like the men who offer their help in claiming the body of Jesus, or the women who bring the burial spices and ointments to the tomb: maybe helpless, maybe frightened, showing up in the dark and just trying to do the best with what we have.

But it is at that tomb, in that garden, where the women will receive the news that Jesus is risen—and with him, the entire community of creation.

Imbued with the promise of that Easter strength, knowing and believing that death will not have the last word, that we are an Easter people, and Alleluia is our song—what stones can we roll away? What stones will we roll away?

In one of our Lenten readings, Isaiah 58, the prophet said:

This, rather, is the fasting that I wish:
   releasing those bound unjustly,
   untying the thongs of the yoke;
Setting free the oppressed,
   breaking every yoke;
Sharing your bread with the hungry,
   sheltering the oppressed and the homeless;
Clothing the naked when you see them,
   and not turning your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
   and your wound shall quickly be healed;
Your vindication shall go before you,
   and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,
   you shall cry for help, and [God] will say: Here I am!

Beloved of God, we are called to a project of resurrection and liberation in which we are not alone. The prophet changes the paradigm from an individual experience of mourning and penance to a communal project of change, healing, and solidarity. Jesus changes the paradigm from death to life and rebirth. As in a garden, life arises from what can seem like a continual state of death. And we are called, during these last few days of Lent, and in the Easter season that follows, to breathe life into works of justice: not to deny or ignore our neighbors, human and nonhuman—“not to turn our back on our own.” God will be with us in this work.

Guided by the Spirit, we are called to a prophetic vision that may seem as impossible as resurrection in the midst of what seems like an endless Good Friday or Holy Saturday. A vision in which we all share together in table fellowship, working in peace and fierce love and tenderness to heal and nurture and sustain the whole community of creation.

Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron Valley to where there was a garden.

He is waiting for us: waiting to pray with us, to watch with us, to share our pain, our hope, and our struggle, waiting to turn the world upside down…and begin a new life with us.

Today, let us seek and find him there.  

Alyssa Moore (she/her/hers or they/them/theirs). Since a young age, Alyssa’s love of animals and her vibrant experience of parish life have been her greatest joys, as well as tremendous sources of mission and motivation. She is a Catholic from Berkeley, CA, currently studying for a Master of Divinity degree at Santa Clara University’s Jesuit School of Theology (JST), and her CreatureKind fellowship will fulfill her degree’s field education requirements for this year. Alyssa has helped organize discussions with her JST theological community about the sentience and sacredness of farmed animals, and about how care for God’s nonhuman creation can intersect with other local and global issues. She is eager to continue to grow in discipleship as part of CreatureKind’s thoughtful, prayerful, and essential work for all of God’s creation.

"For what must the church repent and how?"

A Lent Sermon for Ash Wednesday, 2021
by Rev. Aline Silva

“God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.’” (Gen 9.12-13, NRSV)

Leader: The Word of the Lord for all CreatureKind. 

All: Thanks be to God

And we are told that God so loved that earth, this earth, that God took on human flesh, with all its joys, sorrows, exhilarations, and pains. 

I invite you to breathe in with me. And in breathing out, name the pains and sins we have witnessed this year. 

• Racially-motivated, state-sanctioned violence against our Black, brown, and Indigenous kin. 

• An attempted coup, following years of voter suppression and dismantling of basic democratic protections. 

• Acts of hate perpetrated against our Asian siblings, blamed wholesale for a virus caused by capital demand. 

• Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples who contracted and died from COVID at high rates, and yet receive vaccinations at low ones. 

Touch your hearts and breathe in with me.

And in breathing out—in this season of reminding ourselves why God so loved this very earth—in that breathing out, name the mourning and the loss of lives caused by our industrialized, colonized food systems. 

• Slaughterhouse, food-plant, farm, and food-service workers around the world were forced to work in unsafe conditions during a global pandemic and sentenced to die because of it. 

• Indigenous peoples murdered, the land they steward stolen to make way for the production of animal flesh to be exported and consumed by the wealthy in other countries. 

• Long lines at food banks. Empty bellies for some while a select and privileged few reap unfathomable financial rewards. Money earned on the backs of the sick, suffering, and often times disabled. 

• Animals—fellow worshippers of the enfleshed God—pushed to extinction by human activity or bred, confined, raped and mutilated on factory farms. 

• Small farmers taking their lives in record numbers after being pushed out of a system dominated by a few powerful corporations. 

Beloved, we seem to have broken that Genesis covenant with our Creator, a covenant to care for one another, the earth, and non-human creatures. And so we must ask, where and with whom does God’s covenant need to be restored this Lent? This is work that we must do individually and collectively, to examine our personal and our communal complicity with broken systems and ways of being that cause so many in God’s beloved community to suffer rather than flourish. 

We seem to have allowed ourselves as humans to take an unrightful place in the cosmos, considering ourselves a little less than angels. Conquering and Colonizing the world, extracting and maximizing its “resources” to the great disservice of all creation. What must we change to ensure God’s covenant, salvation, and liberation is accessible to the whole world, the chickens and the stars?

Beloveds, breathe in with me. Breathe in the covenant, salvation, and liberation that the God who loves the world has for us all. 

Now breathe out fear and shame. For the enfleshed God is also our protector, liberator, and co-Creator of this beloved world. 

“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” (Mark 1:12-13, NRSV)

How might we follow God—Liberator, Protector, Creator—into the wilderness? Can we humble ourselves enough to learn not only from the earth but the animals themselves, like Adam in the garden or Jesus in the wilderness? 

For too many of us, entering the wilderness, encountering, and learning from animals is a physical impossibility. Centuries of Colonization and conquering has caused deforestation, displacement of First Peoples, and the desecration of this earth. The EuroAmerican appetite for cheap food and cheap meat, produced in huge quantities at very little cost has created a crisis of climate refugees, food apartheid, and health disparities around the globe. 

So, to follow God into the wilderness, we must repent from industrial farming and its death-dealing ways. 

Together, we confess:

• We have perpetuated 500 years of food apartheid.

• We have forced enslaved peoples to displace natives to grow food for the wealthy few. 

• We have caused global pandemics and untold death, beginning with the first pandemic of a colonial diet and the model of consumerism and capitalist demand. 

• We have subsidized multi-billion dollar agribusinesses while small, ethical farmers suffer. We have contributed to their depression and suicide. 

• We have systematically denied access to land for BIPOC farmers. 

• We have failed to protect or walk with animals. We breed and slaughter them by the billions, forgetting that each life is precious to God. 

• We put factory farms and slaughterhouses in BIPOC communities, polluting their air and water, and creating generations of health crises. 

• Our industrial fishing practices have stripped the ocean of life. 

We confess, and we repent with our actions. 

We repent by joining Jesus in the wilderness of the unknown, and letting the wilderness herself guide us and we commit to listening and learning from First Peoples, whose relationship with the earth and non-humans has been instrumental in preserving their integrity and diversity. 

We repent by being willing and open to learning from other-than-human animals. We commit to remembering that humans are not the pinnacle of creation and that our interconnectedness is the key to our very existence, survival, and flourishing. 

We repent by being careful consumers of the earth’s abundance. We commit to getting to know our food growers and handlers; to choosing to eat plants instead of animals as often as we can; to remembering that every created being is beloved by God, and to treating those beings accordingly; to advocating for policies and practices that foster flourishing, equity, and liberation for all. 

Fam, this Lent, might we return to the dirt, this very earth, and join Jesus in considering this covenant and life abundant? 

May it be so. 

---

Rev. Aline (Ah-lee-nee) Silva (she/her/hers) serves as the co-Director of CreatureKind, an international non-profit leading Christians in new ways of thinking about the Christian Faith and Farmed Animal Welfare.  Prior to coming to CreatureKind, Aline served for over a decade as a local parish pastor of rural and farming populations in Kansas, Missouri, and Colorado. Aline shares herself as a queer, Black & Indigenous immigrant of Brasil to the US. Aline chooses not to eat non-human animals, her fellow-worshippers of God. Aline is a pastor, an excellent preacher, and a life coach. You can most often find her laughing out loud, twerking, and sharing her life with her emotional support pup and main squeeze, Paçoca (pah-saw-kah). You can learn about Aline and her work by following CreatureKind on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. She writes today from the unceded lands of the Tequesta, Taino, and Seminole peoples, namedly South Florida, USA.

Homily for a CreatureKind Advent Service

This homily was written and delivered by Ashley M. Lewis for the CreatureKind Advent Service in December 2020.

Scriptures from the Fourth Week of Advent

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16 (NRSV)

7:1 Now when the king (David) was settled in his house, and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him, 2 the king said to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent." 3 Nathan said to the king, "Go, do all that you have in mind; for the LORD is with you."

4 But that same night the word of the LORD came to Nathan: 5 Go and tell my servant David: Thus says the LORD: Are you the one to build me a house to live in? 6 I have not lived in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle. 7 Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

8 Now therefore thus you shall say to my servant David: Thus says the LORD of hosts: I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep to be prince over my people Israel; 9 and I have been with you wherever you went, and have cut off all your enemies from before you; and I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth.

10 And I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more, as formerly, 11 from the time that I appointed judges over my people Israel; and I will give you rest from all your enemies. Moreover the LORD declares to you that the LORD will make you a house… 16 Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.

Luke 1:26-38 (NRSV)

1:26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, 27 to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary.

28 And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you."

29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.

30 The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

34 Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?"

35 The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.

36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God."

38 Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

This is the Word of God, for the community of God. Thanks be to God. 

_________________________________

Homily for a CreatureKind Advent Service

By Ashley Lewis

An angel shows up at the house of a young woman and says she will be given a son, who will be called “Son of the Most High.” This son will be given the throne of David and will reign over the house of Jacob with an everlasting kingdom.

What a terrifying, puzzling, mysterious, wonderful, beautiful promise? 

A throne. A kingdom. An everlasting reign. For nothing will be impossible with God.

Hearing these words from God’s messenger, Mary must have considered the lineage into which she was now birthing her son. The very lineage that we read about in 2 Samuel. David, the favored son of God, who was brought up out of the pasture to a palace, to become king of Israel. Whose son built the temple, the house of God. The promise God made to David, and to Jacob before him, would be fulfilled in Jesus the son of Mary.

So, perhaps she thought her royal treatment would begin promptly! Maybe she envisioned the kingdoms of the world crumbling at her feet as her son grew from boy to man. Maybe she thought that upon Jesus’s birth, the house of God would begin to overshadow the palaces of Rome and that she would come to live as a queen in a new dynasty. She might have imagined that under the rule of her son, fairness and equity and justice would prevail, and that despair, poverty, and idolatry would no longer have a place in the world. The corrupt empires that exploit humans, animals, and the earth would be abolished. She probably thought Jesus would deliver them from homelessness and wandering into an everlasting home with God, where all Creation would be at peace.

Is that the vision that made Mary say yes? If she knew what Jesus’s life would really be like, would she have said, “Let it be with me, according to your word?”

Because Jesus never occupied an earthly throne. His kingdom did not appear to break the hold Rome had over the world. In fact, he didn’t ever even stay in one place, much less have a palace. He wandered. He was a traveler. As a man, he had no place to lay his head and was not welcomed even in his hometown. As a baby, he was born in someone else’s house and given a feedbox for a bed.

The house where Jesus was born was most likely a distant relative of Joseph. And contrary to popular thought, Jesus and his parents were not made to stay in a stable, outside. Stables didn’t exist in first century Palestine. Instead, the common room of the house, on the first level, was where humans and animals lived together. It would have been preferable and much more appropriate for guests like Mary and Joseph to be given the guest room, upstairs, where they could have privacy. But all the guest rooms in town were occupied, so this family-member who welcomed Mary and Joseph gave them what they had:

A corner of the common room.

Warmth.

Bread.

Prayers.

A place to sleep. 

And when Jesus made his appearance into the world as a human child, even the animals gave up what they had for him. The manger, where they were used to seeing hay and feed, was now occupied by a baby.

Perhaps the sheep and the goats were perplexed by Jesus’s presence in their trough. Surely, they’d be wondering where their food was, staring at him, smelling him and the space all around him, pondering why he’s occupying the place where their dinner should be. Like our pets when we move their food bowl.

I’d like to think Jesus’s presence pacified them in their confusion. This child would later offer his body up for the sin of the world, breaking bread, pouring wine, shedding his own blood, and indoctrinating creation into a new covenant with God.

But, long before Jesus sat at the table and broke bread with his disciples, he laid among the animals—in place of their food.

Watching over Jesus on the night of his birth, Mary must have wondered when all these grand promises were supposed to start coming true, as the angel said? How would such a house be established? When would Jesus take the throne? How would God get them from here to there? What would it be like to be given a place all their own, planted in the presence of the Lord, and disturbed no more by the corrupt forces of the world? When would they be delivered from pasture into paradise?

Let it be, Lord, according to your word!

When we envision God's kingdom coming to life in this world, we often imagine it taking place in the grandest way. We suppose the so-called powers and principalities will crack and crumble, as a new, just ruler takes the throne.

But our God is prone to wander, from place to place, in a tent and a tabernacle, not afraid to seek shelter in someone else’s house or among the animals, taking up residence in the unlikeliest of places… in a crowded room, sharing bread and warmth and prayers, reclining at the table, or in the manger, where human and non-human alike can bear witness to this new sort-of kin-dom.   

The thing about Emmanuel—God with us—is that if God’s going to be with us, God’s gotta be able to go where we go.

Emmanuel—God with us—is at home in our hearts and at our tables. In our mess, and in the messes we make. God can’t be locked away in a palace, or a white house, or on a throne. God of Creation is at home in creation, with creation.

In the skies and in the oceans. In the cities and in the countryside. In the stars above our heads and in the earth beneath our feet.

In a manger. In a crowded family room. In the company of humans and non-humans. In the wild places and in our domestic comforts, whether welcomed or estranged.

God takes up residence where hope is needed the most. With the homeless. With the oppressed. With the depressed.

In the slaughterhouses and on the killing room floor. In the prisons and at the borders. In the fields, and in the factories.

What a terrifying, puzzling, mysterious, wonderful, beautiful promise. 

A manger. A savior. An everlasting reign. For nothing will be impossible with God.

Let it be with me according to your word.

Good Love

Sermon delivered by Michael Anthony Howard at Brookside Community Church, April 22, 2018. Reprinted here with permission. 

The Resurrection illustrates what good love looks like. When love is good, it has the power to transform us and offer new life to the world!

The Raging Rambo

Whether it was natural born or not, Rambo was “a killer.” As Kathy Stevens puts it, he “thought his job was to kill us. It was a job he seemed to relish.” When Rambo arrived, he was “full of testosterone and rage.” He was “so violent and volatile,” she said, “we began to compare…war stories.”[1]

Photo: Catskill Animal Sanctuary

Rambo you see, was a hateful, hostile, raging Jacob ram. If you happened to be the poor, helpless human assigned to feed the sheep for the day, Rambo was ready to draw first blood. He would rear up on his hind legs and come at you head-first, full speed ahead, with those twisted horns of his. Kathy and her team had rescued Rambo from an animal hoarder. There were seventeen animals locked in a very small, filthy stall. One was a dead cow. The other animals were adopted, but Rambo was too violent. Even a few very experienced sheepherders tried to take him in, but they gave up within a few days.

It was hard to know what to do with him. There was deep concern for the safety of farm workers and the rest of the sheep. Rambo was claustrophobic. He was too destructive to keep in a barn stall. He destroyed the fence, “smashed it to smithereens.” It is not untypical for Jacob rams to be highly emotional and extremely dangerous. But even after Kathy had Rambo neutered, nothing seemed to ease him. Alarmed that Rambo might get someone killed, Kathy was advised to “put him down immediately.” “For our own safety,” Kathy said, “I struggled with whether…it was indeed time to give up on Rambo.” In two years, Kathy had seen dozens of injured and traumatized animals be transformed. “This,” she said, “would be our first failure.”[2]

I think Kathy is an example of what Jesus called a good shepherd. She is a sheep-lover, someone who really loves her sheep. She challenges us to rethink what we mean by the word good. She helps us see what good actually looks like.

Framing Exercise: What is Good?

The relationship between Kathy and Rambo helps us better understand the teachings of Jesus we read this morning. It relates to what linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff calls framing.

In our text this morning (John 10:11-18), Jesus uses the word good. How we understand what good means depends on how it is framed. “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we [perceive and reason about things.] As a result, frames shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions.”[3]

By identifying himself as the “good shepherd,” Jesus is in the process of reframing. He takes the everyday experience of tending to sheep and makes a comparison between what is good and what is not good. In comparing the “hired hand” to the “good shepherd,” he is reframing our understanding of what constitutes as good.

Love Without Domination

The deep truths in passages like ours today can elude us because of the way we frame them. I grew up on a farm, and we had all kinds of animals. I’m not sure I would say I loved all of our animals, but like many farmers, I think my folks would say they did. Many farmers will say they love their animals, but what they mean is that they have an attachment to them. They feel a kind of warmth, an affection, a fondness for them. Caring for animals is certainly hard work. While they may call it love, I think most of those human-animal relationships are examples of domination. Rarely do they mean the kind of good love Jesus described in our passage for today.

Let’s begin with a first question: Why would someone get in the business of taking care of sheep? There are many who are widely considered shepherds, but they are not good in Jesus’ sense of the word. The frame here is one of domination. Rather than shepherds, these farmers would more properly called wool harvesters. They see the sheep as a possession. Their relationship is one defined by ownership, based on maximizing their benefit. Their relationship is one of domination. When the sheep are no longer profitable, the relationship ends—and most of the time, that means death for the sheep.

The good shepherd, on the other hand, is a sheep lover. They see the sheep, not as possessions but as partners. The frame here is one of nurture and mutual care. The sheep and the caretaker both exist with equal value and dignity. One does not exist for the sake of the other. The benefits that come from this kind of relationship are more spiritual than material. As Richard Rohr puts it,  “Material gifts decrease when you give them away. Spiritual gifts, by contrast, increase the more you use them. Yes! You get more love by letting it flow through you… If you love, you will become more loving. If you practice patience, you will become more patient.”[4]

The Teachings of Jesus

Throughout Easter, I have asked us to consider the Resurrection as our divine initiation into life free from the powers of Death (with a capital D), the Domination System that governs our relationships, our institutions, and the way we look at the world. By using the term good shepherd in contrast hired hand, Jesus is offering to free us from the domination system by reframing our understanding of what is good.

In the context of the gospel story, we can assume that the hired hands represent the political and religious leaders of Jesus’ day. They see their relationship to the world under the frame of domination. When danger comes, they run. Protecting their authority, maintaining the status quo, or upholding their religious doctrines are more important than keeping their followers—the “sheep”—from danger. As participants in the Domination System, the sheep exist for the hired hand’s benefit. Everything they do is carried out for their own self-interest.

Jesus, on the other hand, represents the good shepherd. His relationship to the world operates under the frame of nurture and mutual care. Jesus identifies himself not as someone above the people, but as one of them. The shepherd identifies with the sheep as if the shepherd and the sheep share a common nature. For those that maintain a classical trinitarian theology—the Father, the Son and the Spirit are co-equally God—what Jesus says should blow your mind. Jesus says, “Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father,” this is the same as the relationship between the sheep and the good shepherd. When danger comes, Jesus offers his own life for the sake of those he loves. Because for the good shepherd, when the sheep suffer, the shepherd suffers.

Jesus is an illustration of what the good shepherd looks like. He is good because he loves the sheep as he loves his own life. He is good because he is willing to lay his life down for the sheep. He is good because his love is a good love. The shepherd sees the sheep on their own terms, as fellow creatures with their own needs to meet and hardships to bear. For the good shepherd, the sheep are here with us, not just for us. That is the only what that love can be good, when it is a love between two equals.

Kathy Stevens and Kaden Maguire

Kathy Stevens is an example of a good shepherd. She is a sheep-lover, someone who really loves her sheep. Like Jesus, watching her work challenges others to rethink what we mean by the word “good.” She helps me see what “good” actually looks like.

Starting out with nothing, Kathy created the Catskill Animal Sanctuary, a 148-acre refuge in New York's Hudson Valley for eleven species of farmed animals rescued from cruelty, neglect, and abandonment. They have rescued over 4,000 animals since 2001.

Kaden Maguire is an example of one of the Catskill staff, but he is anything but a mere hired hand. He knows every one of the sheep by name. He can tell you about Cleo and his son Ferguson, two sheep that suffer from a disease called Lintivirus. Cloe came to the farm as one member of a whole herd that were rescued from an animal cruelty case in 2016. They had been neglected. They were knee deep in waste, emaciated, and infested with parasites and disease. In the framework of domination, these sheep offer no material benefit whatsoever. They cost time, money, and resources to keep alive. And yet Kaden is out there, every day, watching sheep like Cloe, Lavern, Bertha, and Leena as they care for their children and teach the world how smart, kind, and beautiful they are. By spending time with Kaden, I got a glimpse of what Jesus must have meant by the good shepherd. Kaden loves his sheep, but it is a love that seeks to be free of domination. Kaden is a good shepherd because he teaches the world what good love looks like.

The Rest of Rambo’s Story

My wife Zion and I took our daughter Joey to stay at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary just a few weeks ago. I had just preached a sermon—you might remember it—where I talked about “Rambo Jesus.” Well, wouldn’t you know, we stayed in the Rambo room! One of the first stories that our guide, Drew, wanted to tell us was Rambo’s story.

After having him neutered, Rambo calmed down a little. But they were still afraid. They didn’t listen to the advice of those who said Rambo needed to be put down. Instead, they decided he just needed a little more time. They let him roam freely, and after a while his eyes began to change and he seemed to show signs that he trusted that he was never again going to be confined. He began to let go of his anger and feel at home at the Sanctuary.

On one cold bitter night, after turning out the lights and saying good night to everyone, Rambo came up to Kathy and began to bleat as if something was wrong. He led Kathy into a stall where she found two of the turkeys missing, Chuck and Cliff. Rambo then walked out with Kathy into the rain to find them outside their pen. Chuck was drenched with his head tucked in trying to stay warm. Poor Cliff was motionless in the driveway in a cold, shallow puddle.

Once everyone was back, dry and safe, Kathy began to reflect, “What just happened?” It was the first time Rambo had really used his voice, and he had figured out how to tell a human that something was wrong. Even more than that, he had just shown concern for two animals of a different species. Kathy says that that moment changed her life. As she writes in her book, “Nothing I [had read or studied in my many years of graduate education and experience] told me that my core beliefs were based on a false set of assumptions, on naïveté or ignorance. But in a darkened barn on a bitter early winter night, a sheep who finally believed he belonged with us did exactly that.”[5]

That’s what reframing looks like!

Not everything we call love is good love. Often it is little more than a sentimental form of domination. Good love, however, is based on relationships of nurturing and mutual care. Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd [because] I lay my life down for the sheep.” That is what the Resurrection teaches us, that God doesn’t give up on us when things get tough. God loves us with an infinitely patient, an unending, deeply nurturing love—the way Kaden loves Cloe, the way Kathy loved Rambo. This is the kind of love Jesus calls us to have for each other and the world around us.

As 1 John 3:16 tells us, “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”

The Resurrection illustrates what good love looks like. What the world needs are people who give their lives to learn how to love well, who know what good love looks like. Because when love is good, it has the power to transform us and offer new life to the world!

[1] Kathy Stevens, Where the Blind Horse Sings (New York : Skyhorse Pub, 2009), p.49-50.

[2] Ibid., p. 51.

[3] George Lakoff, The All-New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), p. xi-xii.

[4] Richard Rohr, “Love is Who You Are,” Thursday, August 11, 2016. https://cac.org/love-is-who-you-are-2016-08-11/ (Accessed online, April 21, 2018).

[5] Kathy Stevens, Where the Blind Horse Sings, p. 57.

Undoing Domination, a Sermon

Sermon written and delivered by Michael Anthony Howard at Stanley Congregational Church, Chatham, NJ on July 15, 2018. Reprinted with permission. Listen to the sermon audio, download sermon notes, and access the sermon worksheet here.

IMAGE CREDIT: Die gelbe Kuh (The Yellow Cow), by Franz Marc (1911) [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Franz_Marc-The_Yellow_Cow-1911.jpg]

The Logic of Domination

There are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone. It is amazing when you think about it. The Milky Way isn’t even very big. Every star has an approximate average of 1.6 planets. So, if you do the arithmetic, that’s 650 billion planets. The Earth is home to roughly 2 billion species of life. Some 70 to 90% of those species are bacteria. There might be a total of 40 million insect species. Yet, our science is just in its infancy. Some 10,000 species are discovered each year. To date, only about 1.5 million species have been described, and less than 1% of those are bacteria. Of those two billion species (or 1.5 million species we have named), almost 60 thousand are vertebrates, 5 thousand are mammals, and 350 are primates. Human beings are but one of them.

While the universe has been around for 13.772 billion years, we homo sapiens have only been around some 300,000 years. If my middle school math days serve me well, 13.772 billion minus 300,000 is still 13.772 billion — in other words, we’ve not been around long enough for our history to be within the order of significant digits.

Despite evidence to the contrary, many of us have been taught to think of our place in the world with an outrageous and unjust logic — the universe is ours and it exists for the taking.

But this logic doesn’t just stop with anthropocentrism. Let’s follow this logic down a little further. Of the 7.6 billion human beings on the planet, how many have access to clean drinking water, a healthy diet, good health care, a quality education, a living wage, etc? A little more than half of them are men. Of those 3.8 billion men, how many of us are white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, Christian, American? All of these characteristics are things that I share with most of our national leaders, almost all of our nation’s past presidents, and the richest man on the face of the earth. I find it curious and scary to believe that such a small portion of the world’s population has believed for so long that the world was made for them. But let us not be naïve, most of us humans think the same way about our relationship to the rest of Creation. Domination, see, comes in many forms.

This unjust logic of ours, our model of society, our understanding of the meaning of life, the way human beings have perceived themselves in relation to the rest of Creation — at least for the last four hundred years or so — has almost entirely shaped our way of life. It is hard to disagree with liberation theologian, Leonardo Boff, when he described the modern human. Most of us live, he said, as if the most important thing in life is

to accumulate vast amounts of the means of life — material wealth, goods, and services — in order to enjoy our short journey on this planet. In achieving this purpose we are aided by science, which comprehends how the Earth functions, and technology, which acts upon it for human benefit. And this is to be done as speedily as possible. Hence, we strive for maximum profit with minimum investment in the shortest possible period of time. In this type of cultural practice, human beings are regarded as above things, making use of them for their own enjoyment, never as alongside things, members of a larger planetary and cosmic community. The ultimate result, which is only now becoming strikingly visible, is contained in an expression attributed to Gandhi: The Earth is sufficient for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed. [1]

In other words, our basic model for relating with each other — how we know what life is all about — is domination. When we see ourselves as being above rather than alongside, we operate within a framework — a logic — of domination.

The Dominion Argument

At Brookside Church, we’ve been wrestling lately with our ability to own up to the fact the Bible has been used to justify violence. When it comes to our interpretation of the world, our relationship to Creation, the way we think about salvation, and how we understand what it means to follow Jesus, the Bible can be both helpful and problematic. Last week, I pointed out how the gospel’s portray Jesus as skipping over problematic passages when he read from the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue. That way of reading scripture, which is commonly know as “cherry picking,” I asked us to consider thinking about it as “avoiding landmines.” I argued that if we are not careful with the way we read scripture, we will find that the body of Christ may actually lose body parts.

This morning, I want to draw your attention to a specific biblical landmine. This is one of the most commonly referenced passages when it comes to Creation, justice, and the role of Christianity in the world: Genesis 1. It’s not so much an entire passage or even a verse — really, it’s just one word: dominion.

This entire chapter is a beautiful and poetic description of God’s relationship with Creation. That’s why it’s so unfortunate that when it is read with the intent of asking what our relationship to Creation should be, Christians tend to narrow in on this one word. And this is specifically true when you talk about the relationship between human beings and other non-human animals. God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion…”

Dominion? “Didn’t God set human beings over Creation? Didn’t God give people dominion over animals and doesn’t that mean we can… [kill them, eat them, wear them, cage them, experiment with them, fill in the blank]?”

First off, the word dominion is repeated twice. That must mean it was important to the scribe or scribes that used it. But that should never, ever, trump what God said about Creation at every step along the way, “It is good.” For God to declare these things to be good, especially animal life, even before human beings existed, implies that they are valuable in their own right — that God delights in them. As Jewish scholar, Roberta Kalechofsky points out, “this substantiates the view that animals were regarded as integral subjects in their own right. God’s [expressed] delight in these creations…does not reflect a god who created animal life to be in bondage.” [2]

Carol J. Adams, arguably one of the most important feminist writers today and author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, wrote, “The more the word dominion is broken away from [the context of this poem of beloved relationship in] Genesis 1, the more likely it is that what one is defending is a broken relationship between humans and other animals and the world they inhabit.” [3]

Even more, what is interesting is that while the word radah, which we translate as dominion, is mentioned twice in verse 28, in the very following verse (Genesis 1:29), God says, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.” In other words, whatever dominion humans have been granted over animals, it doesn’t involve eating them. Even more, if we’re going to be using this passage to understand our relationship with Creation, we must be constrained first and foremost by our reverence for the fact that God took delight in what God created. God said, “It is good.”

I mean, think about it.

“It is good,” so we are justified in separating a baby calf from its mother so we can have her milk. “It is good,” so it must be okay for us to cut off the beaks of chickens. “It is good,” so we can feel innocent when we pay someone to rip into their flesh in order to prepare our dinner, knowing that most of us would refuse to spill their blood if we had to do it ourselves. “It is good,” we think, because it is good for us human beings. That is the logic of domination.

If dominion doesn’t mean domination, what then does it mean?

Quoting again from Carol Adams:

It has been said that if kings and queens exercised dominion over their subjects the way human beings do over the other animals, kings and queens would have no subjects. So why is being in God’s image often interpreted in view of power, manipulation, and hegemony instead of compassion, mercy, and emptying unconditional love? We often anthropomorphize God as powerful, fierce, and angry (if not belligerent). When we are lording over others, using power — it is then that we are most likely to assert the image of God. Acts of unconditional love, suspensions of judgment, mercy for the weak, and kindness to animals get associated with a wishy-washy picture of who Jesus was, but are rarely discussed regarding God the Creator. [4]

The Impulse of Jesus

And here we come to the heart of the matter. Most of us have had our imagination of God shaped more by this logic of domination than by the teachings of Jesus. The Christian God as often taught by some Christians is a god of domination. He — and this god is always a he — could more easily be confused with the violent war gods of the Greeks or the Romans than with the teachings of Jesus. What if we approach the question christologically? What if we decided to ask what “dominion” might look like — our relationship to Creation and non-human animals — if we begin our thinking about God and humanity by learning from Jesus?

The central impulse at the heart of Jesus’ teachings was the proclamation of the Reign of God, or what Walter Wink called “God’s Domination-Free Order.” It was the creation of a new community, a new citizenship, based on a shared commitment to doing the will of God. This is what many of us have begun calling “The Beloved Community,” or the “Kin-dom.” Kin-dom, I think, helps point us to the truth that Jesus’ teachings challenge us not to see ourselves above Creation, but as alongside it as kindred earthlings. For followers of Jesus, this kin-dom teaching consisted of a twofold commitment to nonviolence and undoing that logic of domination. Walter Wink called it the Domination System: “An encompassing system characterized by unjust economic relations, oppressive political relations, patriarchal gender relations, prejudiced racial or ethnic relations, hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence to maintain them.”
 [5]

Understood in this way, Jesus’ ministry was a radical critique of the logic domination, aimed at bringing healing to Creation by calling people to repentance and helping them discover what it means to be fully human.

The central teaching of the church is based on the idea of the incarnation — that somehow, in Jesus, God was revealed not to be above Creation, but alongside Creation. The central quest for communities of faith today is to recover for ourselves what Jesus unleashed, that original impulse at the heart of his teachings aimed at undoing the old order of domination and bringing about a new order of life and freedom. Only then will the church have what is needed to bring about positive change in people and all Creation.

I pray that this becomes our quest, that hear the voice of our still speaking God and take up our call — to learn to stand alongside Creation as kindred earthlings, following Jesus to undo the logic of domination.
 — Amen

Notes:

[1] Leonardo Boff, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 2.

[2] Roberta Kalechofsky, “Hierarchy, Kinship, and Responsibility: The Jewish Relationship to the Animal World,” in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberly Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 97–98. Quoted in Carol J. Adams, “What About Dominion in Genesis?” In A Faith Embracing All Creatures: Addressing Commonly Asked Questions about Christian Care for Animals (The Peaceable Kingdom Series Book 2) (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), p. 5.

[3] Carol J. Adams, “What About Dominion in Genesis?” p. 5.]

[4] Ibid., p 2.

[5] Walter Wink, The Human Being Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), p. 270.

Finding Our Place in the World, a Sermon

Sermon delivered at Drew Theological School Chapel by David Clough, April 2018

"May my meditation be pleasing to him, for I rejoice in the LORD."

What emotions do you bring to worship this evening? Delight at glimpses of beauty and of love? Sadness at tragic loss? Anger at injustice? Resentment and bitterness about our lot?

We find all these responses in the Psalms. They are deeply honest, sometimes uncomfortably so, conveying a preparedness to put the whole of human life in the context of a relationship with God.

In the Psalm we’ve heard (Ps. 104), the mood is awe and wonder. The Psalmist is intoxicated by a vision of God’s creative and providential work. At times the vision is on a grand scale, stretching the heavens like a tent, setting the earth on its foundations. At other times the vision is particular and tender: watering the cedars of Lebanon so that the storks may make their nests in their branches, providing high mountains as a home for goats and rock badgers.

Humans are part of this scheme, enjoying wine, oil, and bread as God’s gifts — three of my favourite foods. But they are only part. In commentary on this passage Karl Barth found it embarrassing that humans are only discussed alongside other creatures, but I find it a profound perspective in which the Psalmist is able to picture themselves alongside a whole universe of God’s other creatures.

All creatures look to God for food, and the Psalmist rejoices to God that ‘when you open your hand, they are filled with good things’. The Psalmist also recognises the fundamental commonality between all of God’s creatures: ‘When you send forth your spirit, they are created’; ‘when you take away their breath they die and return to the dust.’

How does the Psalmist respond to this celebration of God’s work? With exuberant praise: ‘I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to key God while I have being’.

Not everyone shares this response: the Psalmist asks God to make an end of the wicked who do not share this response to God’s ways with the world.

The conclusion is a call to bless and praise the Lord.

As you are well aware, this call to praise of the God who is creator and sustainer of all is by no means unique to Psalm 104. Other psalms call the whole creation to praise God in response to God’s grace. Elsewhere in the the Wisdom literature, in the closing chapters of Job, in Proverbs, and in Ecclesiastes, we find similar themes. The creation narratives in Genesis 1-2 shares much of this vision. The prophets lament the plight of humans and other animals subjected to God’s judgement, and look forward to the time of the Messiah when all creatures will dwell peaceably on God’s holy mountain. In the New Testament Jesus teaches that not a single sparrow is forgotten by God and that birds and lilies are good models for Christian discipleship. Paul laments the groaning of all creatures subjected to the labour pains of the new creation, and looks forward to the time when all creatures will be released into the freedom of the children of God. And the opening of the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians express a faith in Jesus Christ that is nothing short of cosmic: making peace and gathering up all things in heaven and earth. Psalm 104 is therefore a particular instance of a vision of God’s gracious dealings with creatures that is a key theme of biblical texts.

Later Christian traditions also celebrated God’s providence and care for creaturely life. We find particularly striking examples in the stories told of the saints. We may smile at these stories, but we should not only smile: they are attempts to envision what it might look like for true holiness to be expressed in the way we live with other animals.

And how do we respond? Well in the first place, we will want to rejoice with the Psalmist in God’s astonishing creative and wondrous work: the magnificent beauty and diversity of creaturely life of which we are but one small part, the intricacy of the particular mode of life of every creature, the abundant grace of God in provision for all creatures, the vision that all this life, compromised in its flourishing in these days, will be gathered up in the fullness of time in a new creation in which every creature will attain fullness of life. Amen to that.

But there must be a second note to our response, one that recognises that the ways in which we treat other creatures is at fundamental odds with this theological vision. I recently came across a statistic that summed this up more starkly than anything I had seen before. Over time, we have taken more and more of God’s world under our control, including the lives of other creatures. By 1900, the biomass of all domesticated animals exceeded the biomass of all wild land mammals by 3 and a half times. That means by then we had already taken habitat away from wild animals on a tremendous scale, depriving them of an environment and replacing them with domesticated animals given life only to provide us with food. But in the last 100 years we have gone much further. We increased the number of domesticated animals by four times, which was a major factor in reducing the population of wild land animals by half, and meant that by 2000 the biomass of domesticated animals exceeded that of wild land mammals by 25 times.

It’s no better in the sea: during the same period we reduced the population of fish in the oceans by 90%.

The big picture is that we have not been content to live as one among many of God’s creatures, as pictured in Psalm 104. Instead, we have attempted to take a god-like power over their lives, monopolizing the earth to provide for our greedy wants, subjecting our fellow creatures to the horrible cruelties of industrialised agriculture and aquaculture which have also resulted in a mass extinction of wild animal species.

Reading Psalm 104 in the knowledge that this has how we have responded to the magnificent diversity of God’s creaturely life is deeply uncomfortable. How can we praise God for providing a place for the storks to build their nests when we have since destroyed it? How can we praise God for opening her hand to provide food for every creature when we have so frequently acted in ways that take their food away? We worship a God who creates and provides; in response we have destroyed and deprived. It seems to me that we are in danger of reading the Psalm in bad faith, and in so doing failing to recognize that our actions place us among the wicked that the Psalmist condemns.

Now thank God, we worship a God whose nature is always to have mercy, and who through Jesus Christ offers us today and every day the chance to confess our sins, turn from our sinful ways, repent, receive forgiveness, and begin again in newness of life. Thanks be to God!

We worship the God who in Jesus Christ proclaimed that Isaiah’s prophecy was coming true: good news for the poor, liberation for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed. It is no stretch to recognize God’s other-than-human creatures as among the poor, the captives, and the oppressed in our days, especially as the jubilee year Jesus proclaims is a culmination of seven year pattern of sabbath for the land, which allowed no sowing or reaping, which Lev 25 states is to benefit domesticated and wild animals, alongside male and female slaves, hired and bound labourers.

If our repentance for the ways we have contributed to the mass destruction of the lives of other creatures is to be sincere, we must seek to find glad patterns of life in response to God’s grace that reduce our devastating impacts on our fellow creatures, and embody Jesus’s liberating call to sabbath and jubilee. First steps are not hard to find: we need to reduce our consumption of animals by eating more plant-based foods and less animal products, and look for opportunities to source any remaining animal products from environments where animals have more opportunity to flourish.

Some may think that in a context where so many human lives are imperilled by war, poverty, racism, and discrimination, we don’t have time to care about other animal creatures, but it turns out that reducing consumption of animals is good for humans and the planet, too. The places where farmed animals are killed and their bodies processed into meat are nasty and dangerous, and the work is done by a labour force that is disproportionately female, black and Latino/a, and migrant. Reducing consumption of animals would also be good for human food security. We currently devote 78% of agricultural land to raising animals and feed 1/3 of global cereal output to livestock, which philosophers and theologians from Plato onwards have recognized is appallingly wasteful compared to growing human food crops. Very often, indigenous peoples have been displaced to make way for domesticated animals providing wealth for white colonizers. Human and non-human oppression intersect here and elsewhere. Reducing consumption of animals would also be good for human water security, would reduce the risk of new strains of bird and swine flu, and the health risks that come with overconsumption of meat. Raising livestock also contributes more to global greenhouse gas emissions than transport, as well as causing local pollution that damages the lives of the disproportionately poor and black communities forced to live alongside vast lagoons of shit that industrial animal farming generates. [Are you noticing the pattern here?] We don’t have to choose between caring for humans, caring for animals, and caring for the planet, because reducing consumption of animals is a win/win/win proposal.

For some, stopping to think about the implications of Christian faith for our use of other animals will lead them to adopt a vegan diet. You can find lots of resources online for how to get started with this. Others may not be able to imagine such an abrupt change, and may instead prefer to start by finding substitutes for meat, fish, and dairy for particular meals, or going plant-based for a day a week as Christians have done in the past. The CreatureKind project Sarah and I are working on encourages an institutional response: supporting places like Drew in finding opportunities to reduce consumption and move to higher welfare sourcing. There are many ways to start or continue on this journey, and it’s much better to find a way to take the next step, rather than do nothing out of worry that you can’t yet see the final destination.

In these days of the groaning of creation, when the reign of God is already but not yet, we cannot set our relationship with other creatures fully right. We will always be faced with forced compromise, where the best we can do remains imperfect. We will never therefore be able to read Psalm 104 without regretting the ways in which our relationship with other creatures is broken alongside joining gladly in the chorus of creation’s praise of God. We cannot end the groaning of creation, but we can attend to it, and respond by doing what we can to reduce our part in worsening the lot of our fellow creatures. We cannot love and provide for other creatures as God does, but we can be inspired by God’s love and care for them to love and provide for them as we are able, and seek ways to contribute to their flourishing wherever we can.

'O LORD, how manifold are your works!

  In wisdom you have made them all;

  the earth is full of your creatures’ (v. 24)

‘Bless the LORD, O my soul. Praise the LORD!’ (v. 35)

The Reconciliation of Creation: Especially Cows

by Margaret B. Adam

This article was originally delivered as a sermon at Hertford College Evensong.

The readings: 

• Isaiah 11:1-9
• Psalm 148
• Colossians 1:15-20

In today’s psalm, all of creation is exhorted to praise God. The psalmist calls all people to praise the Lord. He also calls on angels, stars, skies, and seas to give their praise. And weather, hills, and trees. Sea monsters and wild land-animals, creepy crawly animals and birds. And also...cows. Let the cows praise the Lord! Praise God, all you cows!

What does it look like for a cow to praise God?

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

Praise is what creatures do when they are living out their creaturely particularity to the glory of God. To praise, to glorify God, is to rejoice in God, as a creature of God. Humans often praise God with words and reason. Humans also praise God silently, without reasoned thought, newly born, approaching death, in stillness and in action. Likewise, other animals and the rest of creation all praise God in their own ways.

As we sang earlier: ‘All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voices, let us sing: Alleluia, alleluia!’

Praise is a bodily function. Created bodies sing Alleluia to God in their own distinctive voices and movements. Stars shine, winds storm, mountains stand, slugs—slugs excrete mucous and slide along it to find slug food. This is their praise, their rejoicing in the Lord. Cows praise God by flourishing: by grazing outdoors, chewing their cud, nursing their calves, brushing off flies, dozing, and mooing their version of rejoicing.

But, many dairy cows do not flourish. Industrial farming deprives cows of joy and decreases their capacity to praise God in their created cowness.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

Of course, much of creation is not free to flourish and praise God as created. This is a world full of brokenness and suffering, fractured and unjust relationships. In that brokenness, we humans participate directly and indirectly in the use, abuse, and early death of other human and nonhuman animals, every day. Increasingly, in England, human-cow relationships reflect consumers’ desire for cheap milk, which drives smaller-scale farms out of business and supports the growth of large industrial dairy farms. Human preferences inhibit cow praise, by cutting short their lives and treating them as objects for production rather than as creatures of joy.

The children’s picture books of your childhood and mine show cows in abundant grass and sunshine, accompanied by other barnyard animals, and perhaps milked by The Farmer, or, The Farmer’s Daughter. These cows have names and personalities. They look happy and relaxed.

The life of a factory farmed cow looks nothing like the lives of cows in children’s books—or, for that matter, any on farms anywhere at anytime in history before the late 20th century.

Industrial farms keep cows in cages just barely big enough for their bodies to fit. On zero-grazing farms, the cows spend their entire lives inside. Cows are forcibly, artificially inseminated when they are 15 months old. Farm workers remove newborn calves at 2 days old, leaving the mothers bereft. Female calves are raised like their mothers. Male calves face either immediate death or a slightly delayed death if kept for veal. Cows are repeatedly impregnated so that they will be lactating continuously. In the last 40 years, the industry has doubled milk production per cow. By the time the mothers are about 5 years old, their bodies are so worn out from over-production that their milk is no longer high quality, and they are slaughtered for human food; whereas in more cow-friendly living conditions, they might live another 10 to 15 years.

Sasha, rescued from the veal and dairy industries. Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

This is a gentle and muted description of the treatment of factory-farmed cows. You can watch videos online that show just how cruelly the cows are treated and just how grim the workers’ jobs are. There is no joy there.

This is not the end, the purpose, of creation. Scripture offers ample images to help us identify broken relationships and redirect us toward the radically harmonious relationships to come in the fullness of time.

The prophet Isaiah schools the people of God in faithfulness, calling out their failures and redirecting them toward rightly ordered relationships. When the whole world is transformed by righteousness in the Lord, Isaiah proclaims, no creature will need to suffer and die in order that other creatures may thrive. Humans will lay down their swords and machines of destruction; all animals will set aside their aggression, carnivory, and fears. Note the extra attention Isaiah gives to cows. He says:

The wolves, lambs, leopards, and goats will live comfortably together. Calves and lions will hang out and eat straw together. Cows and bears will graze together, while calves and baby bears nap together. Human children, still nursing, will play where the cobra lives, and weaned children will put their hands safely into the adder’s home. No creature will hurt or destroy any other creature.

Today, Isaiah might well add: ‘Cows will nurse their calves and humans will nurse their babies. Cows and humans will all enjoy fresh air and freedom from oppression’.

Unrealistic? Isaiah is not aiming at realism here. Realism claims that some creatures must destroy other creatures. Human animals use realism to defend the need to treat nonhuman animals as products. Isaiah names the brokenness that disrupts all creaturely flourishing, not just human flourishing. And he points to the fullness of creation freed from normative abuse. Even if the peaceable kingdom seems impossible now, it’s clear that industrial farming does not reflect or anticipate that kind of flourishing.

The Christian narration of salvation traces God’s creation through humanity’s persistent rejection of both God and the goodness of creation, and through the systemic effects of cumulative human brokenness—brokenness too pervasive for humans to fix. All of creation suffers together from human sinfulness and groans together in hope of a most unrealistic salvation.

Paul, in his letter to the Colossians that we heard earlier, proclaims the salvation of creation—the salvation of humans and cows—that comes through Christ who reconciles creation. Christ, fully human and fully the divine Son of God, dies a creaturely—and very realistic—death. That death does not bind Christ to the limits of death. He lives again, beyond death. He releases all of creation with him, from sin and the deathly effects of sin, in the reconciliation of all things.

Paul explains that

...all things have been created through Christ and for Christ.

Christ himself is before all things, Christ holds all things together in him.

For in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things--all of creation-- whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

So, Christ holds together the divisions we cause. And Christ establishes a creation-wide reconciliation of all relationships, that reaches beyond the divisions of species and the separation of death.

Christ’s reconciliation addresses every thwarted opportunity for joyful flourishing, for praising God—sibling rivalries, political infighting, warfare, hunters and their prey. It includes all those involved in the industry of intensive dairy farming—from corporate leaders, to factory workers, to cows, to consumers. Christ suffered and died for humans and for cows, so that both can flourish without harming the other, along with lions, leopards, little goats, and adders.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals

But, where is this reconciliation? Where are the signs that systemic sin is undone? Why does zero-grazing seem a sensible strategy for large-scale farms? Why is it still so hard to eschew all animal products? Part of the answer is: I don’t know. As a creature—and a sinful creature at that—I have no God’s-eye view on the pace of the fulfilment of creation; but scripture, the saints, and the teachers of the church, steadfastly remind me that Christ has both already effected that reconciliation and is still effecting it.

The other part of the answer is that Christian ethics directs us to live into that for which we hope. The ethical response to systemic brokenness is to embrace that already/not yet transformation with expanded imaginations and critically-examined practices.

First, we can demonstrate, by our actions, that we don’t need to abuse other creatures for our own pleasure. It is not necessary to purchase cow milk when there are ample alternative milks on the store shelf. Colleges, restaurants, friends and family often offer a vegetarian or vegan option for dinner. If you are looking for a quick meal, check out the plant-based prepared foods in the freezer and refrigerated sections at the store. If you cook for yourself, add one easy vegan meal to your repertoire. These are all ethical decisions you can make without even going out of your way. These are relatively simple ways to show that it is not necessary to deny one animal’s flourishing for the sake of another animal’s flourishing—our own flourishing.

Second, learn about what happens on dairy farms. Do a little research on industrial farming. Visit a local small farm. Compare conditions on larger and smaller farms. Meet some cows. Trace the sources of your food, drink, and clothing. Incorporate these considerations into your daily life practices. In the US, over 90% of dairy products come from industrial farms. In the UK, the percentage is closer to 70%. It may be difficult to change the trend toward mega-farms, but consumer choices do speak loudly.

Third, make connections with other people asking similar questions. Share concerns, insights, and experiences. Eat together. Challenge each other to adopt more peaceable creaturely interactions. Hold each other accountable.

And, above all, let’s try not to keep other creatures from flourishing. Let’s work toward the end that all creation—including cows—may experience joy and glorify God in their particular creatureliness.

Praise God! All of creation, praise God.

And, especially, let the cows praise the Lord.

Photo: Jo-Anne McArthur | We Animals