Eye on the Sparrow
A sermon in The Other Six Days series
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 30, 2006
Jonah 4:1-11; Matthew 10:26-31

Jonah 4:1-11 • But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

Matthew 10:26-31 • “So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

I. BEGINNING

The Universe is about 14 billion years old. [1]

Fourteen billion.

Even if I were to live to be a hundred years, I’d have to live that span 10,000 times just to get to a million years. And even that span would have to be lived 14,000 times to approach the age of the universe. Human civilization has been around for about 5,000 years or so. That’s .000036 % of the whole of creation. Nothing. Statistically irrelevant. And our lives are barely 1.4% of that.

I recently read an anthology of stories that all take place a million years in the future. It’s a time scale almost impossible to fathom. In a number of them, we aren’t around any more. The human race is gone. Extinct. Not necessarily through war, but just in the change of the ages.

I find myself thinking about the immensity of it all. We are often so arrogant, imagining that the universe revolves around us. We imagine that our history is central to the history of the entire universe. A laughable proposition when you realize that 99.999964% of the history of the universe took place before we invented writing!

When we contemplate the mysteries of the universe, it is hard to believe that in the scheme of things, we matter at all.

Very often our first encounter with the larger issues of our mortality, of our finite nature in the face of the infinite is when we’re kids with the death of a pet. Confronted by death of something so close to us, we ponder questions of eternity and ask our parents whether our pet will go to heaven or not.

Our parents, and often our Sunday school teachers, don’t always have an answer to that question. People aren’t always sure of their own relationship to God and their own place in the context of the infinite, so how much more unsure must they be about pet gerbils or cocker spaniels? Given that we are insignificant in the scheme of things, where do the animals rank?

II. THE TEXT

It’s why I find tonight’s Old Testament lesson so compelling. It is the final chapter of the Book of Jonah. Animals play prominent roles in the Book of Jonah. First is Jonah’s name, which means “Dove”. Then of course, there is the whale or the ‘great fish’. As you may remember about this story, Jonah was called by God to go to Nineveh and proclaim repentance and instead hopped on a boat headed the other direction. When his shipmates discovered that he had been running from God and that he was likely the reason for the bad weather they tossed him overboard, whereupon he was swallowed by a great fish that transported him eventually to land, where it spat him up.

He goes to Nineveh and preaches and the city repents. And Jonah isn’t happy:

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

So Jonah goes off and builds a booth at the outskirts of the city, and sits there and sulks while he waits to see what happens to Nineveh. While he sits there God appoints a bush to come up and give Jonah shade and Jonah is glad. But at dawn the next day, the third animal shows up: a worm, whom God has appointed to attack the bush so that the bush dies. And Jonah is unhappy:

When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

…And also many animals.

God says, “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh… in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people… and also many animals.”

III. EYE ON THE SPARROW

God takes heed of the animals as a reason to be merciful to Nineveh. We should not be surprised by that. God made animals first, both Biblically and evolutionarily. God provided for the animals in the flood. And Jesus tells us that ‘Yet not one [sparrow] will fall to the ground apart from your Father.’

This makes me think that maybe we have gotten the question all backward. When we think of animals in relationship to the creation we often think of their status as somehow deriving from our status. That is, how much are animals like us such that God should pay any attention to them?

One of our Indian hosts in Cherokee spoke about the order of things. He said that the earth was the oldest and needed nothing. The plants were the next oldest, and they needed the soil. The animals were next, and they needed the plants and the soil. And then we were last and needed the animals, the plants, and the soil—but they did not need us. They would be fine without us. Perhaps we have gotten this little food chain backward—the earth, the plants, and the animals don’t matter because we say they do. We matter because they matter to God.

We do not matter because we have something that God actually notices, whether it’s our intellect or our creativity or whatever it is. We matter because even the sparrows matter to God.

When we feel that we are lost in the immensity of the universe, dealing with distances and times so vast that we can feel insignificant, Jesus reminds us that God keeps an eye on even the sparrows—those little birds sold two for a penny in the marketplace. We don’t matter because we merit this kind of attention. In the vastness of the cosmos there is no way we could. Just a bunch of overgrown, hairless monkeys on a planet around a non-descript star in the low rent section of one out of millions upon millions of galaxies. My friends, there is nothing about our situation that demands attention.

And yet God loves us

God cares for us. God’s love extends even to us, in our finite mortality. In our lives lived out in three score and ten years on this little globe, the eternal God shares her love with us. God extends to us life and then life eternal.

IV. CHRISTIAN RESPONSE

So, what do we do, loved as we are by this ineffable God? What does this love require of us in our relationships with the other creatures with whom we share this creation?

I think it requires that we share nothing less than the respect of one creature beloved by God with another. We in this community have a fairly expansive attitude toward animals. We have had on a number of occasions dogs in attendance. But of course our responsibility toward the animal kingdom does not end with pets or animals that are cute or cuddly looking.

We share this world with creatures that are no less loved than we. God cherishes all God’s creatures. We, as witnesses to this love, reflect that relationship that God has with all the living in our relationships with all the living. That means that it is not we alone who are worthy of dignity and respect. All creatures are.

Christians should be sensitive to issues of animal cruelty. We should insist on the ethical treatment of animals. We should oppose needless animal testing if no reasonable benefit can be derived from it. We should not simply consume animals without taking some responsibility for the conditions in which those animals live before they become food for us.

Doesn’t mean you have to go out and protest or engage in other similar acts. I remember when I was a kid, my mother would leave little cards on the table of a restaurant we’d eat at if that restaurant served milk-fed veal. A silent but effective witness on behalf of a creature who was not treated with the dignity that it merited as beloved of God. When American Indians killed game for food, they always thanked the animal for giving its life and they used every bit of the animal out of respect for the sacrifice. It seems to me that as Christians we should insist on a treatment of those animals we use for food in a way that respects this God-given dignity.

V. END

For we are reminded that Jesus did not simply die the death of the Messiah, or the death of the Son of God. Jesus died the death of all living. Died representing all creation, not just the deaths of those who sinned. I had a seminary professor who said, “Dinosaurs did not die because of sin, they have as much right to eternal life as you do.” [2] St. Francis understood this. He used to preach sermons to the birds and to the animals of the forest, because he believed the Gospel was for them too.

The promises of God are made to the entire creation, not simply to us. God’s love is not limited to “two legged people”--as the Native Americans would say--but is also shared with the “four legged people” as well.

There may come a time before too long when you are comforting a child who has lost a pet. That child may ask that question that burns inside of us all—given the immensity of the world, of space and time—that child may ask, “Will my pet go to heaven? Does God care about my dog?”

We, who stand on this side of Easter, in the glory of the Empty Tomb and the promise of the Resurrection can say with confidence, paraphrasing the old hymn:

God’s eye is on the sparrow
God’s eye is on the dog
God’s eye is on the human
And I know God watches me. And you.

This sermon is dedicated to the memory of Samson Braunstein, faithful friend and companion, whelped 1994-died May 1, 2006

Notes

[1] http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101age.html
[2] Professor Josiah Young, speaking about Jürgen Moltmann

« Back to Sermons page
« Back to AU UMC Home

Copyright © 2006. Mark A. Schaefer

No part of this text may be reproduced or otherwise disseminated without the express written consent of the author.