‘Holy Creatures: Loving our Wild Neighbours’
Once upon a time there were two house guests.
The first arrived without invitation. He just kind of moved in. A neighbour from somewhere. He seemed to like the place and made himself comfortable. He claimed a room, one of the bigger ones on the second floor. You didn’t notice him much at first, although he was kind of loud and played his music without headphones. He liked to eat and order in junk food and fast food from all over. Lots of UberEats. When the garbage can was full, he started to leave the wrappers and cans on the floor and under the bed, the bed he never made. In fact, he was a bit of a slob. Soon he had moved across the hall and into the other rooms. He took long hot showers and often left the tap dripping. He was not much one for conservation. After a few months his stuff started to spread throughout the house. You could find little items scattered everywhere, and often tripped on everything from dirty clothes to shoes to leftover Amazon packages. You could find him most often lounging on the comfy couch in the main room, hogging control of Netflix and burping. He accidently broke a few pieces of furniture, simply by not being careful. He started playing his loud music at all hours of the night. After awhile he moved his smoking inside, and made rude comments to anyone who happened to drop by. The whole mood of the house had changed and soured and become tense, the place felt trashed, and by the time he was asked to leave, he flatly refused before finally finally leaving, reluctantly, the damage done. He had overstayed his welcome.
The other guest arrived soon after. You didn’t notice him much either. He was quiet, polite, respectful, but he had this knack of smiling at everyone else and seeing the best in them. He just felt neighbourly. He took up a small little corner in the basement. He hadn’t brought much with him and didn’t seem to need too much. He liked to read, even knit on occasion. He had this knack for cleaning things up. You didn’t really see it happen, but all of a sudden you noticed that the furniture had been straightened up, the bathrooms were spotless and the living room didn’t have any clutter. He also liked to fix things – the leaking tap, the crack beside the window that let the cold in, the broken furniture, the door to the attic. Then there were the little touches – fresh flowers left on the kitchen table purely for their beauty, encouraging notes left for those who were feeling down, and some bright posters and artwork that started to appear on different walls. One day he brought in the cutest little kitten that soon endeared herself to all around. You could feel the whole house start to calm down and slowly return to some equilibrium. It was like a breath of fresh air. There was a spirit of hope in the house and people began to think about the future and what was possible. Then one day he was gone, leaving not a trace, but his kind and warm presence lingered for a long time.
In Luke 10, a lawyer is in conversation with Jesus to test him about religious law, about how to live out the faith. They go through the commandments to love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and to love your neighbour as yourself. But then Jesus is pushed, ‘And who is your neighbour?’ Jesus tells the familiar story of the Good Samaritan, which we did not read this morning, but is about the man robbed and left half dead on the side of the road – a person to be considered a neighbour and to be helped – but ignored by the priest and the Levite until the unlikely Samaritan has mercy and goes the extra mile to take care of him. Jesus asks back to the lawyer, which of these three was the neighbour to the man?… go and do likewise. The question has been turned around – not only does the story look at who might be our neighbour – who is in need of care, and to be expansive in that definition, but also what kind of neighbour are you? You are not just the host, looking to who your neighbours might be, but you are also the guest, the neighbour yourself. What kind of neighbour are you, what kind of house guest would you be? There is this nuanced conversation about the meaning of neighbours – about who might all be our neighbour and how we might be good neighbours or guests ourselves.
Our Season of Creation theme this morning – ‘Loving our Wild Neighbours’ pushes these definitions and nuances some more. What might it mean if we truly thought about the animals, and birds and plants and wildlife around us as our true neighbours, as worthy of utmost respect and care and a deep hospitality? And can we turn that question around and ask ourselves as a human species, what kind of neighbour have we been to the natural world? More often than not, we have been like that first house guest – a rather unwelcome guest who has slowly destroyed the very home and earth we have been privileged to live in, leaving it in a mess. What might it mean to be house guests that leave the home around us in better shape than when we arrived?
Already in the early 1990’s Toronto Star Religious Columnist Tom Harper, in one of his weekly column, asked the question of whether the concept of neighbour as used by Jesus, treating others as you treat yourself, should be extended to the soil, air, streams and all living creatures. We need an 11th commandment – You shall not commit geo-cide – the killing of the planet. (as quoted by Lyle Friesen in a September 25, 2022 sermon at Rockway Mennonite Collegiate – https://soundcloud.com/caweaver/lyle-friesen-plight-of-bumblebee-2022?fbclid=IwAR1amnDqFIdPvbNcGFUnwiwQTlgltX6ctX24920xne5V2Ayj9Gz_TV2unzY) . How can we both treat the natural world as our loved neighbour, and be better neighbours ourselves?
We are more and more aware of how often us humans have been bad neighbours. We have polluted the world, poisoned and drained many of our local watersheds, and changed and altered the natural world and its ecosystems in so many ways. We have been bad house guests. This has taken a toll on our animals and plants, our wild neighbours. A few decades ago on road trips, the car windshield would be covered with dead bugs splattered all over. We thought it irritating, but what does it say that more recently, your windshield is almost left clean after a trip? Our world is facing a crisis in biodiversity – the enormous variety of life on earth. We hear more and more about invasive species taking over and altering a landscape. Habitat loss and climate change have pushed more and more species towards extinction. In Ontario alone there are over 230 native animals and plants identified at risk – endangered, threatened, or even extirpated, meaning no longer present in this geography. (https://www.wildernesscommittee.org/ONSpecies) There is a government website that lists all of these, along with their photos. (https://www.ontario.ca/page/species-risk-ontario). It is sobering – amphibians, birds, fishes, insects, lichens and mosses, molluscs, plants, reptiles and yes, mammals, all at risk. Some I recognize (Lake Sturgeon, the Monarch Butterfly, the Algonquin Wolf, the Bald Eagle – which we saw at Point Pelee last Saturday), and some I have never heard of (the Allegheny Mountain Dusky Salamander, the False-foxglove Sun Moth, the White-rimmed Shingle Lichen, The Eastern Small-footed Myotis or Bat). I remember a few years ago in worship here reading outloud the names of many of the endangered and extirpated species and offering our prayers of lament.
We need a re-orientation to how we approach our neighbours in the natural world. What difference would it make if us humans started to think of ourselves as guests, visitors, company, neighbours ourselves in this created world? I like the passage of Scripture we heard from Job. It’s in the midst of a whole back and forth dialogue between Job and his so called friends, but also stands on its own as wisdom for us. ‘Ask the animals and they will teach you, the birds of the air and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you, and the fish of the sea will declare to you.’ There is so much we can learn from the natural world – about living well in your environment, about using only what you need, about conservation. More and more as I lead canoe trips into the wilderness, or even as we gathered as junior youth and youth at Point Pelee last weekend, I ask people to look around and notice the natural world around them. See yourself as a guest in someone else’s home. What do you see? What do you learn? In a matter of a few hours on a canoe trip we saw loons, blue herons, Canada Geese, kingfishers, ducks, woodpeckers, 2 large snapping turtles and heard the call of an owl. At Point Pelee, people noticed a wild turkey, a injured monarch butterfly, a soaring Bald Eagle, tent caterpillar tents in the trees, the large varieties of trees, algae, bulrushes and water lilies, camouflaged sandpipers at our feet at the point, a pair of swans in the marsh, a large blue heron guiding our way back on the water, and some sort of large black bird on a stump that we think was a cormorant, even as it didn’t fly away from us. When you pay attention like that, you start to realize in your gut that you are just a guest on their territory, their land, and your respect and care can grow. Can we have that same approach within our cities and towns and villages, where it is so easy to feel like we are the ones in charge of the land and space around us? Can this start to give us both a compassion and an imagination for how humans can live well on this earth, how we can become good house guests?
Orange Shirt Day reminds us that we as Settlers are guests on Indigenous land, and we need to take seriously the wisdom that comes from Indigenous Elders and writers and truth-tellers. I am reading the book, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ (Milkweed editions, 2013, pages 39-47), by First Nations author and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. She shares about her experience walking into her first freshman intake interview and being asked by her white professor why she wanted to major in botany. She already knew so much about the created world around her, and eagerly told him that she chose botany because she wanted to learn about why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. She was sharply told that that is not science or the sort of thing with which botanists concern themselves … if you want to study beauty, go to Art school.’ Science is about looking at everything objectively. It was not until after becoming a Biology faculty member herself and listening to and claiming her own Indigenous wisdom that she learned and noticed more about the colour wheel and light spectrum and the specialized receptor cells, rods and cones, in the retina of humans, but also of bees. Purple and yellow are reciprocal colours that delight the human eye, but also the bees, and the goldenrod and asters become the most attractive target in the whole meadow, and receive more visits than if they grew alone – and our world gets pollinated. It’s a testable hypotheses; a question of science, art and beauty. Nature teaches us. I thought of her example when Janet brought our walking group to a large beautiful and peaceful meadow full of asters and goldenrod at Schneider’s Woods last Sunday afternoon and you could hear the life around you, or when I thought about the goldenrod that has spontaneously sprung up in our backyard flower beds this summer that we named as weeds and were planning to pull out. Hmmm…
Kimmerer also shared about a General Ecology class she taught where all the students could easily point to and name the negative interactions between humans and the environment and confidently say that humans and nature are a bad mix, but not one of them could point to any positive interactions between people and the land. She writes ‘As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision… I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? (p.6) This is what her whole book is about. So what does a beneficial relationship with our Wild Neighbours look like? What can the animals and birds and plants teach us as it says in Job? Where can we open up our imaginations and move in a positive path to being good house guests? I want to share 2 examples, 2 stories that excited me over these last couple of weeks.
The first story came over CBC radio 1 about 2 weeks ago as I randomly tuned in – from The Current on September 14 (https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/beavers-climate-change-drought-wildfires-1.6582915). It was about California, Wildfires and Beavers. As we know, California has been struggling with drought and with the resulting wildfires burning acres and acres of trees and land, devastating the natural environment. There are lots of bigger reasons for this and issues to address in terms of cash cropping, over-consumption and use of water and so on. A few researchers have also been studying and experimenting with the role the common beaver might have to help alleviate this environmental crisis. Previously there were anywhere from 100-400 million beavers on the North American continent and now only 10-30 million. The result has been much loss of wetlands and the retaining of water in the land. So they have re-introduced beavers into parts of California. Beavers are highly skilled environmental engineers – they move into almost any landscape and transform it, making it an oasis that soaks in the water like a sponge, and makes the land much more resilient to the wildfires. These become climate resistant patches that survive the fires and offer protection and refugee for critters escaping the threat elsewhere. A catastrophic fire goes through and these green patches remain almost untouched where the beavers live. The beaver ponds even act as a filter for the ash and sediment that would have washed into the rivers and streams afterwards, protecting water and fish downstream. Researcher Glynnis Hood calls the industrious beavers Climate Heroes who get the work done early, under budget and don’t take weekend off. What would happen if we re-introduced populations on a larger scale? She argues that there are ways to co-exist and also limit the damage beavers cause – protecting certain trees with wiring, pipes that allow some water through dams and so on, while still benefiting from the ecosystem services they offer. She is a Beaver Believer. There is much to learn from beavers in tackling climate change.
The second story comes from Lyle Friesen, local bird biologist and naturalist and member of Rockway Mennonite Church in Kitchener who shared a sermon at his church last Sunday entitled ‘The Plight of the Bumblebee and What we can do about it.’ (https://soundcloud.com/caweaver/lyle-friesen-plight-of-bumblebee-2022?fbclid=IwAR1amnDqFIdPvbNcGFUnwiwQTlgltX6ctX24920xne5V2Ayj9Gz_TV2unzY) I listened to the audio link on his wife Carole Ann Weaver’s Facebook feed. He began by lamenting the decline over the last decades of the population of bees, monarch butterflies and all manner of insects and connecting that to much of the plant and tree life we have made dominant in our cities and towns. Invasive species like periwinkle, English Ivy and Norway Maples might look good and keep things clean, but host zero caterpillars and few insects. He calls them worse than plastic plants, whereas native plants are huge pollinators. Goldenrods and Asters by contrast are insect powerhouses, hosting over 100 different kinds of caterpillars and are bee and butterfly magnets. (again I thought about the supposed ‘weeds’ in our backyard). We are starving the insect world by the plant choices we make. These native pollinators are key to the food chain, supporting insects, the little engines that drive the world.
Native insects and plants are the foundation of a diverse and sustainable ecosystem. I recalled one of the only sermons I remembered as a child in Edmonton, partly because it was short and not my Dads, but it was entitled ‘Why God made Mosquitoes’ by church member and biologist Paul Paetkau – who pointed to this same thing – that mosquitoes are an essential part of the food chain God created, not something to loath. Lyle Friesen quoted that ‘we need to form a new relationship with insects, treated not as adversaries to be exterminated but as allies and members of an intricate and intimate community essential to planetary health… We need to scrap the idea that humans and nature are incompatible.’ So Lyle Friesen and Rockway Mennonite are doing something about it – like the sign hung outside their church and ours and many others – Act Now! Over this last year, a group of volunteers from the church has transformed the boulevards around the church into a productive natural plant habitat by carefully planting a pollinator garden with over 200 native transplants – a colourful and welcoming space for insects and birds. As he says, nature can rehabilitate itself if given the chance. This is something we can do right in the midst of urban living. We allow the natural world to become our neighbour. These 2 stories inspired me about what it might mean to be good neighbours, to leave the world around us in a better space than when we arrived.
Our Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition is not much one for the Saints. We don’t recognize Saints or celebrate feast days. But for some niggling reason my mind wandered this week to 13th century St Francis of Assisi, known as the Patron Saint of Animals and the Environment. In his desire to imitate the life of Christ and in his concern for the well-being of the poor and need to live simply, he had a love and reverence for God’s created world, seeing nature as the mirror of God. So I did a quick email and Google search and do you know what popped up first – an article by our very own Wendy Janzen about this Catholic St Francis. I didn’t realize until reading Wendy’s article that October 4, this very Tuesday, is the Feast Day of Saint Francis – a neat and appropriate connection to our theme today. Some churches have people bring in their pets and animals for a blessing on this Sunday. If you happen to get the daily email devotions from Richard Rohr, you will have noticed that today stars his annual week of learnings from St Francis. Wendy writes ‘We are members of a community of creation and have a call to protect and enjoy nature as both stewards of God’s creation, and as creatures ourselves. Franciscan spirituality helps to provide a beautiful perspective on our place in creation, and paints creation as revelation of God’s outpouring of love not only for us, but for all creatures.’ (https://www.mennoniteusa.org/menno-snapshots/prayer-of-thanks-feast-day-of-saint-francis/?fbclid=IwAR3sjm7PH2KGaEcUnp0uNjng6KaEWgmLItdc3-AEmSdYSgqZtUXmfJPygUE) Maybe it is when we think of ourselves as fully a part of creation, as one of the Creatures among all the rest, that we can be good neighbours, good house guests.
I would like to close this sermon in prayer – with the prayer Wendy wrote and shared at the end of her Saint Francis article – a prayer for and with our wild neighbours. Let us pray:
Creator of all that lives and breathes,
we raise up a prayer of thanksgiving for
the animals in our lives
and in our world.
For the great animals —
elephants, whales, grizzly bears, wolves, wild cats…
For the endangered animals —
bees, caribou, orcas, whip-poor-will…
For pets and companion animals —
dogs, cats, horses, rabbits…
For forgotten and unpopular animals —
rats, reptiles, fish, insects…
WE GIVE OUR DEEP THANKS.
We are grateful for a world of beauty and diversity,
for the role of each animal in its ecosystem.
Stir us to action for creatures who have
no voice or ability to
save their habitat or
affect change in our world.
May we live lightly in this world
so that our more-than-human
neighbors may also live.
With gratitude for the blessings
of this earth, and for all
God’s creatures we pray.
Amen.