Wednesday, March 03, 2021

MLUC Chapel - Lent 3 - Our Non-human Neighbours

 MLUC Chapel - Lent 3/UN Wildlife Day - Wednesday, March 3, 2021


Exodus 20:1-17; John 2:13-22


“Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” Ah… Jesus and the Temple.. One of the very few stories shared between the Gospel of John and in the Synoptic Gospels, it clearly left as much of an impression on the first generations of Christians as it does on us. Then and now, we bristle when holy spaces are contaminated by the marketplace, by commodification. 


Back then, in Jesus’ time, people understood the Temple in Jerusalem to be the holiest of spaces — the dwelling place of the Shekinah––the dwelling place of God’s Spirit among God’s people. Of course it was important not to turn it into a marketplace, not to commodify it. Access to the presence of God’s Spirit was never something to be marketed, to be made transactional. Jesus was not the first, and certainly not the last, to resist the place of God’s dwelling being reduced to a transactional space. The Temple was the place where God dwelled in the midst of the people for the well-being and holiness of the people. It was a place of shelter - a house where people could find comfort in God’s presence. Marketplaces - places of transaction, where the have-nots had to bargain with the haves - they might have had their role to play, but not within the walls of this holy house, not where God’s Shekinah dwelled, not within the Temple.


Of course, what happened through the course of history was that the Temple was actually destroyed. And Jews, and then Christians, struggled to understand what that meant for the Spirit of God dwelling among us. Jews came to understand that the Spirit of God did not leave, but came to be with them in the study of Torah and in the continuation of the people of Israel, while Gentile Christians came to understand that the Spirit came to dwell amongst the Christian family as we gather in the name of the resurrected Christ. Both Christians and Jews came to understand that God’s Spirit moved from the Temple to dwell amongst the people, to dwell in the world.





Today, which is UN Wildlife Day, I want to invite us to understand God’s Spirit dwelling among us in an even deeper way, which is to see God’s Spirit dwelling amongst all of creation, not just among humans. This way of seeing is not new, of course. Christian mystics and theologians have understood the world, and even the cosmos, to be the dwelling place of God’s Spirit for centuries, from Francis of Assisi to Teilhard de Chardin to Sallie McFague. 


My own sense of beginning to see the entire world and its web of plants, animals, trees, rocks, bacteria, even viruses, comes from indigenous people introducing me to the indigenous perspective of greeting these things as our “non-human relations.” And so today I invite you to envision God’s Spirit dwelling in the Temple of nature, to find God’s Shekinah dwelling amongst our non-human relations.


So what might we notice if we take on this understanding?


Well, we might again return to Jesus’ words from the Gospel of John, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” Because we are noticing that more and more, our world is being commodified. Land, of course, was the first to be sold and bought, without regard for who else might need it, including especially our non-human relations. The deep parts of our earth have suffered from unrestricted mining, impacting not just the earth but also the waterways vital for fish and animals. Trees are commodified, the waters of the Great Lakes are bought and sold, entire industries are built on animals and even plants. You cannot step outside your door without being impacted by the way our entire relationship with the earth has been made transactional. Everywhere you step, you are on somebody’s land now. There is, at least in Canada, no such thing as unowned land. There is nowhere that God’s Spirit might dwell that is entirely transaction free.


But we know this. And I know that we lament this. Even in the midst of all else that we lament––COVID consequences, personal loss, even just this period of Lent––I know that we also lament that we have allowed this planetary non-human Temple, our Creator’s Dwelling Place, to be made into a marketplace and I know that we yearn to do better. We yearn to find a way to decenter ourselves from this web of God’s Creation, to turn away from anthropocentrism–– our species-wide version of curvatus in se.





It is yet one more sign of God’s graciousness in giving and nurturing us in life that God has given us the framework for doing this. This time, I invite you to take our new perspective of our non-human relations as we look at our reading from Exodus––the Ten Commandments.


We have, after all, been entirely anthropocentric in understanding these commandments, particularly the ones concerning our relationships with other humans. Honour your mother and father, do not kill, do not steal, do not covet––I, at least, have only ever considered these commandments in my relationships with other humans. I have tried to honour my human parents, I have never killed another human, I have never consciously stolen something that belongs to another human. I’m continually working on the coveting part.


But as I’ve worked on adhering to Luther’s “but instead” of the Commandments, I confess that I have also been anthropocentric in that. Do not kill, which Luther expands to say, “neither endanger nor harm the lives of our neighbours, but instead help and support them in all of life’s needs,” has been something that I have worked on. For my human neighbours. Do not steal, which becomes “neither take our neighbours property nor acquire it by crooked deals, but instead help them to improve and protect their property,” is another thing I have worked on. For my human neighbours. Do not covet, “so that we do not try to trick our neighbours out of their inheritance or property or try to get it for ourselves by claiming to have a legal right to it and the lie, but instead be of help and service to them in keeping what is theirs.” Again, working on that, for my human neighbours.


But might we not consider these commandments as also applying to nurturing our relationships with our non-human neighbours? Might we not consider these commandments as ways in which we can resist and overturn the commodification of God’s Temple, that we might stop making our Creator’s house a marketplace? Perhaps we might find ways to help and support our non-human neighbours in all of their life’s needs, to help our non-human neighbours to improve and protect their “property,” as it were, to help and be of service to our non-human neighbours in keeping, or at least living on and accessing, what is theirs. 


Perhaps we might be as zealous in protecting natural habitats and watersheds as we are in defending property lines. Perhaps we might invest as much in our park rangers as we do in our police forces. Perhaps we might advocate that our governments enact legislation that establishes the rights of wildlife as equal to the rights of humans. We would not be the first to think and act on behalf of our non-human neighbours - I thank Tim Hegedus for directing me to an article that described how indigenous peoples around the world have been fighting to establish legal personhood status for various bodies of water, and you may perhaps remember the news from several years ago of a group of 21 children suing the United States government on behalf of the climate. Perhaps it is time for us Christians to see this work as part of the work of following the Ten Commandments.


For as we consider that these commandments apply to our relationships with our non-human neighbours, might we not also understand the blessings to apply as well? Because we know how these Ten Commandments are positioned––with curses to the third and fourth generations who break these commandments, yes, but also with blessings to the thousandth generation of those who live by them, because it is the living by them that is the blessing. Honouring the earth which supports us and the waters which nourish us and the air which sustains us, protecting the spaces and places of our non-human neighbours from commodification, protecting the lives of our non-human neighbours not just so that they might survive but so they might thrive, this blesses them and us and all of this earthly Creation for generations to come.


Through honouring these Commandments, we are ushered into the presence of the Spirit of God, the Shekinah who dwells in this planetary Temple, so that we all, humans and non-humans alike, might experience the blessing of life that God has intended since Creation. We pray that God might empower our efforts, and we so say, thanks be to God, Amen.


https://www.nationalobserver.com/2021/02/24/news/quebecs-magpie-river-first-in-canada-granted-legal-personhood