God With Us

Dogs: A Theological Palindrome

jamescalvindavis

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.

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And His Name Shall Be Called

jamescalvindavis

What’s in a name? When I was in seminary, my middle name understandably got a lot of attention. Professors and students alike at the Presbyterian school I attended got a kick out of a guy named James Calvin Davis in their midst, wondering aloud whether it was foreordained (get it?) that I would be called to ministry with a name like that. The reality is, at least on the surface, much different. I am proud to be named after both of my grandfathers, James Kermit McCullough and Calvin Davis. But the ironic part is that the man who gave me the name that tickles my fellow Presbyterians so much was, in many ways, the opposite of the sixteenth-century churchman—not so much pious and learned as a rough-around-the edges coal miner from which I get both my appreciation for blue-collar values and a legendary Davis temperament.

And yet that name of which I am proud has become more to me than just a testament to my grandfather. Without it, I am a generic placeholder; “James Davis” is one level up from “John Doe” on the scale of nondescript monikers. But with it, I am James Calvin Davis, professor and Reformed Christian theologian. James Calvin Davis has become an symbol of who I am, of what I consider myself to be.

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