Life in the wild
Job 39.1-12, 26-30
Luke 12.22-31
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 9th September 2007

What does nature have to say to us, and what have we to say to nature? As we think on this today in the light of the light of the animal world I invite you reflect on the life of Augustine. I speak not of Augustine of Hippo, that great 4th Century father of the church, nor even of Augustine of Canterbury, the 6th century archbishop. I refer you to Augustine of Kingston, the very ordinary 21st century kelpie who lives behind the church in the red brick Manse. Augustine (or Gus, as he is more commonly known) has an ordered and rather sedentary life. He rises and goes for a morning walk with his mistress and then sleeps until 11 when he circles the backyard a bit and lies in the sun until lunch. After lunch he barks at the postman, sleeps ‘til dinner time and then finds a comfortable lap on which lie watching television until bedtime.
It is hardly an exciting life, yet it has its charms. On the days when our lives are busy or burdensome, Jane and I look upon the sleeping dog with a wistful longing for such a lifestyle. But it is a lifestyle that is very limited. I wonder if Gus ever longs for the broad open plains of Central Australia where he might roam with his cousin, the dingo, or some mountain region where he might learn the habits of the deer or the feral goat. Does he secretly yearn for the tropical north where he might spend his starlit nights with the buffalo and the wild ox?
In the passages we have heard today the Bible holds out to us the romance and mystery of life in the wild. Wild animals and birds and even the flowers of the field are said to reveal to us two aspects of God. In Job we are reminded of the deer and the mountain goat, the wild ass and ox, which lead us to wonder at God’s creative power and wisdom. Can we ever understand such mysteries, suggests the text? This brings us back in wonder and adoration to God. Then in Luke, Jesus appeals to the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, to lead us into, not wonder at God’s knowledge, but trust in God’s provision and protection. Wonder at God’s knowledge and creative power. Trust and reliance on God’s gracious provision for our need. This is nature’s word to us.
And yet, this message is being contracted, pressured, subverted in the world in which we live. Job’s majestic poetry asks “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? … Can you number the months that they fulfill?” Well, a quick Google search informed me that the young kid is usually born in May or June of the northern summer after six months gestation. This information took 11/100ths of a second to find. The advance of scientific knowledge has rather undercut the authority of Job’s poetic vision of God’s inscrutable knowing. Life in the wild no longer reminds us of the limitations of our knowledge, not since Sir David Attenborough bought his first video camera. We do not realise how quickly we have become acclimatized to this familiarity with nature and how little we think about the ethics of it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a letter from prison in 1943, wrote approvingly of a woman who ‘told me with genuine horror about a film that showed the growth of a plant speeded up; she said that she and her husband could not stand it, as they felt it to be an impermissible prying into the mystery of life” (Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison,  SCM, London, 1971, p158).
Similarly, the pressure of our economic activity on the ecology of the planet has severely influenced the metaphor of divine abundance as something that is evident in the wild. Anyone who has followed the saga of the kangaroos on the Majura defence force lands knows that the provision of food for natural populations of native fauna is no longer assured. Game reserves and sanctuaries, zoos and national parks are becoming more and more the environments in which some of earth’s most wonderful  wild animals find safety and food. And these institutions are, in the first instance at least, the work of human hands and minds. Increasingly all animals are becoming like Augustine of Kingston in that it is we humans that define their space and their possibilities for life.
Attendant upon this changing reality many of us feel a profound sense of loss. We are distressed that we must keep Tasmanian devils in permanent quarantine to save them from extinction through disease. That animal populations no longer roam the wild, in freedom and abundance, strikes us as tragedy. But what is it that is lost? What do we mourn? Is it simply a romantic longing for an earlier age? What does it matter if we become the zoo-keepers and farmers of all the earth? What is it at the heart of life in the wild that speaks to our domesticated hearts so deeply? Is God speaking to us out of the mystery of all that is wild and free?
To engage this question we need to strip away some of the romantic illusions we have about nature – that it is gentle and loving and beautiful. The mountain goat is supper for the mountain lion. Job’s description of the hawk starts with the lofty wheeling freedom of its flight but ends with the brutal reality of this airborne killing machine:
From there it spies the prey;
Its eyes see it from far away.
Its young ones suck up blood
And where the slain are, there it is. (Job 39.29-30)

Annie Dillard won the Pulitzer prize for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of the most profound reflections on the meaning of nature ever written. It is shot through with glory and with God. It is also filled with horror. She describes the amazing fecundity of the world and the appalling waste of the great bulk of the life that is born upon the earth. She describes this mechanism of abundant fertility and ubiquitous death:
The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A scientist calls it the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A poet says “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age.” This is what we know. The rest is gravy.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Perennial Classics, 1985, p. 183
Nature is marked by freedom and beauty, but it is also characterised by risk and death. The more we manage nature, the more we have to protect the ecology and serve as zoo-keepers and farmers, the more we sense the loss. The wild becomes increasingly domesticated, and the dimensions of risk and freedom, of abundance and scarcity retreat into the background. We have become managers not partakers of the wild and glorious freedom of God’s creation.
There is something in the wildness and mystery of life that is profoundly important. As life in the wild increasingly yields to farm and fauna-park it is not only animals who lose out. We try to keep the ‘wild’ in wilderness and let animals run free but the logic of protecting the world against the impacts we ourselves have on nature makes us managers and masters us with all manner of interventions and techniques to preserve some semblance of nature.
One of the great failures of the ecological movement is that it makes us the managers and saviours of a threatened environment. It rarely acknowledges that we too are wild and wonderful creatures, that we too are called to live with contingency and threat and danger. We too are subject to scarcity and to abundance.
A significant part of the appeal of the late Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, was that he maintained this relationship of wonder and risk with the realm of the wild. With his simple language and dorky shorts he would wander among strange and fierce creatures saying, “Crikey! Did you see that?” While he was a conservationist and managed well his zoo and wildlife reserves, he was also a part of nature as his death through curiosity and misadventure made clear.
When we look to the life of animals in farming and production, the logic of human stewardship has led to the feed-lot and the battery cage. Some activists are troubled about the ethics of such methods, and we may share their concerns. The great irony is that the form of social organization that leads to such efficiency of the farmed also finally structures and forms the society of the farmer. Max Weber, one of the great fathers of sociology saw the ultimate end of modern societies as a form of iron cage in which the logic of bureaucratic organization strangles the freedom and creativity of human life.
As we care for our families, pay our mortgages, further our studies and careers we become entwined in the cares of the world. We lose that freedom and childlike trust that Jesus enjoined upon his followers, the capacity to live a little on the wild side ourselves, trusting God and not locking ourselves in the iron cage of our own planning and investing and working.  Staying open to the mystery and divine call of God should draw us into a life of risk and excitement and even some danger.
Annie Dillard writes:
[Thomas Merton wrote “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life making itsy-bitsy statues.”]
There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and the creeks pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
Like the animals of the wild, we too live ultimately through God’s providence. To live through God’s providence leads us into the deepest of clashes with the logic of investing, farming, managing that characterizes of modern society.
Jesus does not call us to live safely and retire well. He calls us to the great adventure of faith, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Heb 11.1). He calls us to take up the Cross and follow on the dangerous and uncertain path of discipleship. He calls us to life in the wild.
Annie Dillard:
Sometimes I ride a bucking faith while one hand grips and the other flails the air, and like any daredevil I gouge my heels for blood, for a wilder ride, for more.
There is not a guarantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest, truest words: knock, seek, ask. But you must read the fine print: “Not as the world giveth, give I unto you.” That’s the catch. If you can catch, it will catch you up, aloft, …  and you’ll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for – dribbling and crazed. … Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. (p. 275)
Sometimes it is among the wild and wonderful things of this world that we find ourselves most fully. We need the risk and the gift of such a life. Sometimes the beauty of nature and its abundance leads us into the presence of God.
Many years ago I worked with a deacon who was the leading layperson in the church. He was suddenly and unexpectedly diagnosed with a stage 4 melanoma and secondary cancers. Faith seemed empty and prayers were just prattle. Life was dark and grim and nothing his pastor could say or offer was of any help. In this condition of dark despair he went for a drive with his wife in the country. They found a huge field of wildflowers, a carpet of rich purple that came up to their knees. They waded out into the centre of it and clung to each other for dear life. And from somewhere deep in his soul rose up the words of Julian of Norwich “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”. And this became his deep conviction. The sheer beauty and profligacy of this abundance of flowers brought God to him, gave life to his spirit and hope to his heart!
We are all called to live in the wild and embrace the great risk and joy of living. We weren’t given life just to play it safe, bury our talents in the ground, refuse the invitation to the great adventure of faith and discipleship. In a world where things change, where risks are encountered, and where wonder waits at every turn to surprise and delight us, will we walk with Jesus, strive for the kingdom and discover all those things that come from the providence and care of a loving God?