Today’s author is Prince of Peace’s Intentional Interim Pastor, Steve Sylvester.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Over more than 30 years, my friend Bill and I have spent many nights camping together on canoe, bike and winter ski trips. When we get to a campsite after finishing a day of travel, we always do the same things. We first set up our tents, because you never know when it might rain, and we put our sleeping gear and extra clothing in them. If we are going to cook with wood, we head out into the forest and gather enough to get us through breakfast before we change out of our wet boots, cycling shoes or ski boots. At some point toward the end of all those preparations for cooking and sleeping, one of us will turn to the other and ask, “Have you found the nail yet?” Because without fail, someone who has visited that spot before us—no matter how remote—has felt compelled to drive a nail into a tree.
A few weeks ago in worship, we read about the details surrounding the dedication of Solomon’s Temple, among them that “so many sheep and oxen [were sacrificed] that they could not be counted or numbered.” Last week’s Scripture made no mention of animal sacrifice, but yesterday we read the passage above from the prophet Amos, a passage that includes not only the sacrifice of animals, but also the offering of grain.
The people of Solomon’s and Amos’s time lived much more closely to the non-human creation than we do, and likely respected it in ways that we do not, so I hesitate to critique their relationship with the earth and its flora and fauna. But uff da. It is so very difficult to read—and think!—about the Temple being a veritable slaughterhouse. There seemed to be great intentionality behind all that worshipful slaughter, so I don’t know whether they were in the habit of nonchalantly driving nails into trees, but again, uff da.
Nails casually hammered into trees, the worshipful slaughter of animals, the greedy extraction of “raw materials,” the careless poisoning of entire watersheds, etc. These are things that sadden me greatly. I don’t know how we can love and respect God without loving and respecting what God brings into being. Perhaps we just need to keep reminding ourselves that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Psalm 24). So, I leave you today with these reminders from the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism, which is subordinate only to the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible: “Even a bird does not perish without Heaven’s decree,” and, “Every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’”