Emmanuel United Methodist Church

By Rev. Stephanie Vader
Preached on Sunday, October 16^th, 2011

The way the dog trots out the front door
Every morning
Without a hat or an umbrella,
Without any money
Or even the keys to her doghouse
Never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
With milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
Of a life without encumbrance-
Thoreau in his curtain less hut
With a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff, and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
With nothing but her brown coat
And her modest blue collar,

Following only her wet nose,
The twin portals of her steady breathing,
Followed only by the plume of her tail.
-Excerpts from poem Dharma by Billy Collins 

The poet Billy Collins lifts up in his poem that dogs can be our teachers.  Here are a few things lessons we can learn from dogs.

Dogs are masters of focusing on the here and now.  Jesus speaks about focusing on the here and now in the section of the Sermon on the Mount that we heard read this morning.  He says “Therefore, stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” Dogs do not worry about what’s happened in the past or what might happen in the future.  This is a state of mind that Christians strive for – a state that with effort, we might experience occasionally.  But dogs do not have to work at this: they are always effortlessly in the moment.  And pretty much every moment represents a clean slate, a fresh start.  Forgot to feed your dog yesterday?  Didn’t have time yesterday to give your dog much attention?  Been gone for a week and left your dog in the care of another person?  Well, today is a brand new day.  All is forgotten and forgiven.  This is possible because nothing inside a dog’s head lasts long enough for a dog “to hold onto.”  How much easier our practice of Christianity would be if we humans didn’t have this cursed capacity to hold onto what happened a minute ago or a day ago or fifty years ago!  I think we would wag our tails a lot more.

Another thing our canine teachers can train us in is how to cultivate a non-judgmental nature.  Dogs do not spend their days constantly evaluating themselves and others.  This is the secret behind their unconditional love.  If our minds weren’t constantly evaluating ourselves and others, we’d have a much easier time loving ourselves and others.  Dogs are not attached to things happening in a certain way.  They don’t expect or need life today or tomorrow to go a certain way (besides getting some food and maybe a scratch behind the ears).  They also don’t generally cling to things.  Sure, they might have a favorite bed or ball, but they seem to move on more gracefully than we humans when beloved objects are lost or discarded.

Dogs are blessed with patience, one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit that Paul speaks about.  Imagine what it would be like to stay home all day long, waiting for the people you love to come home from school and work.  Most dogs handle this long, daily waiting with great patience: they sleep, they look around, they sleep, they bark every now and then when they hear something, they sleep, they stretch out, they sleep.  Next time you are feeling impatient perhaps we should copy our dog teachers and stretch out and take a snooze.

And finally, unless dogs have been tragically let down by humans, they generally have a Christ like trust about them-trust in the present moment, trust in life, trust in others.  This, like all of the Christ like qualities I have mentioned, is an effortless state of being for dogs.  They don’t try to be like this; they just are.

Off she goes into the material world
With nothing but her brown coat
And her modest blue collar,
Following only her wet nose,
The twin portals of her steady breathing,
Followed only by the plume of her tail.

Thanks be to God!