A sermon preached at the Congregational Chuch of Middlebury (VT) on August 3, 2025

Texts: Genesis 2:15–22; 1 Corinthians 13

Friends, in my time with you all this summer, I have talked about some weighty considerations to being Christian in our particular moment. In June, I suggested that the most important witness we could offer in this divisive and dehumanizing time is to stand for the capaciousness in the Christian Gospel, the Good News that God loves all of us, that God desires relationship with all of us, and that God calls us to exercise this wide embrace in our relationships with others as an antidote to the hate all around us. Last month, I suggested that liberal Christianity ought to embrace a robust role in our political life, even engaging in partisan debates when it is clear that particular parties and politicians stand for values we consider godly and others clearly do not.

Today I want to talk with you about a dimension of the Christian life that is at least as important as these topics, one that some of you practice with righteous enthusiasm day after day, but that others of you may find a challenge to your sense of Christian responsibility. I want to talk to you today about the theological importance, the importance to a godly life, of dogs.

It is my deep conviction that dogs are an essential part of a healthy Christian life. We can learn much about God from dogs, and we can learn a lot about our responsibility in the world from these righteous creatures. Some of you have dogs, or have had relationships with dogs, and because of that you already have special insight into the complex theology I will do from this pulpit today. Others of you, though, may not know the joy of being dog lovers, and so for you I hope that I can preach a word of conviction to your heart and open up an avenue of faithfulness for you to follow, that you might confess your sins before God and improve your spiritual lives. Still others of you may be adamant that you don’t particularly like dogs. I’m not a dog person, you may say. And if that describes you, then my message for you today is this: enjoy hell! Because my thesis today is that dogs are essential reflections of God’s character and signals of God’s intentions for us. And because I am a theologian, you can assume that everything I say this morning is orthodox and biblical.

Many of us might recognize a connection between pets and the Christian life in that our pets remind us of the inherent value of the non-human natural world. We Christians must confess that our religion has traditionally been quite anthropocentric, or human-centered, and that elevation of the human has underwritten a destructive relationship with the non-human world. For decades, modern theologians and environmentalists have been urging Christians to take inspiration from the celebration of creation in the Bible to appreciate the natural world as a gift from God, something that has inherent value because God loves it, not just instrumental value because it’s useful to us.

But one challenge of a Christian environmentalism is that those biblical stories of creation are themselves focused on the human story, and they are susceptible to being used to reinforce the idea that the non-human natural world is valuable primarily as a resource for our consumption. For instance, Genesis tells us that God commanded human beings to “have dominion” over the created order. For much of Christian history, this command to “have dominion” has been cited as license for using nature for our purposes, even to the point of extinction and ruin.

More recently, Christian thinkers have urged us to see the command to “have dominion” as a call to stewardship, to respect nature as an object of God’s affection, and to care for it as an expression of gratitude for the majesty of the world we live in. Those of us who have dogs are similarly reminded of this responsibility to stewardship. Our dogs have inherent value, they are gifts to us, but they require us to care for them and love them in order for them to thrive.

Interestingly, our first reading today tells us that God gave the first man every animal of the field and bird of the air for him to name and evaluate, but none proved a suitable companion for the man. God declared that “it is not good that the man should be alone, [so] I will make him a helper as his partner.” It has always struck me as odd that God did not recognize that a suitable partner already existed among the creatures God presented to the man. This passage’s silence about man’s best friend strikes me as a reminder that the Bible is inspired but also a text written by human beings and is subject to human fallibilities.

(I shared this concern with the Genesis reading this week with Elizabeth, and after I was done, she paused and responded, “so you’re saying that if God had recognized dogs as a suitable partner for man, there would have been no reason to create women?” I immediately walked away from that conversation without making further eye contact, which is why I am here to worship with today.)

My point is simply that dogs are theologically important because they remind us to love, respect, and honor the non-human natural world. But I think their connection to the Christian life goes beyond encouraging a respect for animals. I think dogs witness to the Christian doctrine of incarnation.

Now hear me out on this, because that might have sounded a little like heresy. Incarnation is the Christian belief that in the person of Jesus, God was and is really with us, in an intimate way. God comes to us, connects with us, in human existence, to empathize with us in our weakness. In Jesus, God demonstrated the life God intends for all of us to live. The doctrine of incarnation is the assurance of God’s closeness to us. It is a commendation of the way of love, and it an endorsement of the value in this human life we are all living. Call that incarnation with a capital “I.” But I think dogs represent the same themes, as incarnations of God with a little “i.”

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer John Calvin defined a sacrament as “a visible sign of an invisible grace.” (He got that definition from St. Augustine.) And Calvin thought there were a lot of things we could describe as sacramental in this way, as visible signs of God’s invisible grace. We celebrate Baptism and Communion as Sacraments with a capital “S,” but Calvin believed that there are many things in the world that serve as visible signs of God’s invisible grace; call them sacraments with a little “s.” Calvin’s favorite natural sacrament was the rainbow.

I think similarly about incarnation. Jesus was the incarnation of God with a capital “I.” But there are other beings in our lives who make clear to us the closeness of God, the importance of love, and the value in our existence. And nothing testifies better to the closeness of a loving God than a dog sleeping on one’s lap. When my dog Opie pushes his head under my arm without prompting, I am overwhelmed by the experience of unconditional love. In the eyes of my dog, I am convinced that God exists, that God desires my happiness, and that love is the power that turns the world.

A palindrome is a word or phrase spelled the same forward or backward. Although it’s not a literal palindrome, I am convinced that the word “dog” is a theological palindrome. Theologically, the word spells the same thing forward and backward. Consider it logically:

God is love.
Dogs are love.
Therefore, Dogs = God, or at least an image of God in our lives.

Dogs are experts at conveying unconditional love, just like God. No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, your dog loves you. Your dog does not hold your day’s challenges or failures against you. Your dog does not judge you. Your dog will not be passive-aggressive with you—unless it’s a husky, maybe. God is love. Dogs are love. Dogs are glimpses of the divine.

Dogs also are incarnations of the love we are meant to live in God’s name. No one practices Good Samaritan love, love of the stranger, better than dogs. Our dog Sadie has turned our furnace guy and at least a half-dozen Amazon and UPS drivers into her very best friends. I don’t know you, she says, but I wuv you. Dogs are the quintessential embodiment of the love St. Paul is describing in 1 Corinthians 13. One of the most famous passages in all the Bible, we often associate 1 Corinthians 13 with weddings, but this text isn’t actually about romantic love at all. It is about Christian companionship or friendship. It’s a challenge for us to live with each other in the spirit of enduring, patient, other-regarding love. Who among us lives to the apostle’s standard as well as our dogs?

Last week, Eliana shared an alternative interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer to disclose something profound about its first lines. Inspired by that part of her sermon, I thought I would make my point here about the model of love that dogs provide by reading an alternative interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13, this one from the “Doggone Good News” translation:

13 If I speak in the tongues of humans and of angels but do not know how to talk sweetly to a dog, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ² And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains but do not have a dog, I am nothing. ³ If I give away all my possessions and if I hand over my body so that I may boast but never had a dog, I gain nothing. ⁴ Dogs are patient; dogs are kind; dogs are not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵ or rude. Dogs do not insist on going their own way [unless they see a bunny]; dogs are not irritable [like cats]; dogs do not hold on to grudges; ⁶ dogs do not rejoice in being bad dogs but rejoice in being good dogs. ⁷ Dogs bear all things, believe you are all things, hope for good things, endure all things.

In their affection for us, dogs model Paul’s teachings on love better than any person I know.

Those of us who love dogs, then, know that they are an important part of the good life. And that’s another thing that dogs remind us of: life is good. Too much of the Christianity we hear preached from pulpits today, especially from televangelists, suggests that this life is not good; it’s just something for us to hunker down in and wade through until we see Jesus on the other side. But Christianity properly understood is not an escapist religion. Christianity celebrates the good in life in the world and attributes that goodness to God. It encourages us to not just tolerate life in this world as we look forward to another, but to give thanks for this life, to see in this life the grace of God, and to be instruments in this life of God’s graces to others. In that sense, the Kingdom of God is not a place to wait for but a divine presence to look for here and now.

Properly understood, Christianity encourages us to live in the here and now, to value each moment of life as a gift from God. Dogs remind us of that fact. Dogs are very focused on the present—they don’t get too stressed out over their plans for the future, and they tend to forget their past mistakes pretty quickly. They constantly exhibit a character of appreciation and enthusiasm for God’s wonderful world, especially when you take them for a walk after a rain, and they can discover all the places where bunnies ran or other dogs peed.

Dogs help us focus on the blessings of the here and now, too. When Opie sits next to me on the couch as I’m waking up over coffee, or on the porch steps as I enjoy the last moments of daylight, in that moment, for a time, the to-do lists, anxieties, questions about the future, regrets over past missteps—all of that goes away, and I am palpably aware of beauty, the beauty in love, the beauty in companionship. Looking at that little dog, who thinks his only reason for being is to make sure I am OK, reminds me that a big part of my reason for being is to make sure others are OK. So I am convinced that dogs provide us glimpses of the character of God. They are moral exemplars of the good life. They are embodied foreshadowing of the Kingdom of heaven.

I know that I have talked exclusively about dogs so far this morning, but as a former cat parent, I definitely could see including them here. My mom once had a duck that reflected the goodness of God in her life. And I watch enough YouTube videos to know that sometimes pigs, donkeys, horses, racoons, baby beavers, otters, and dolphins can serve this incarnational purpose too.

My fundamental point this morning—something that’s hard to hold on to these days—is that life is good, God is good, and our pets remind us of that. People will often ask as a philosophical exercise, “Do our pets go to heaven?” I don’t know what heaven is—e.g., a place, a state, the enduring memory and impact that we have on others when we are gone. I honestly don’t know; I’ve never been there. But to the extent that the mystery of heaven can be described as the ultimate validation of goodness over badness, life over death, and joy that’s new every morning, then I do expect that dogs are part of that equation. To the extent that pets represent all that is good about the world God created, and all that is good about unconditional love, then yes, I expect that when I reach the Kingdom of heaven, whatever that looks like, Opie and Sadie and Toby and Dugan and Taylor and Annie will be waiting there on the couch for me. Amen.