Creekside Revelations of the Gifts of Small Things

On seeing the small things that make us flourish | Proper 18, Year B

“The rich and the poor have this in common:
the Lord is the maker of them all.” —Proverbs

“Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” —The Epistle of James

“Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” —The Gospel of Mark

My sit spot along the Illinois Bayou in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.

On Monday, I sat by a creek in the Ozark Mountains reading Aristotle. My daughters were below, happily playing in the shallow pools of shale bedded water, while our dog, a brindle mutt, entertained herself with the knot of a log. My wife, Emily, meanwhile, went for a walk in the woods. Alone, reading of virtue and its achievement, I was interrupted by a fly.

It was a small fly with quick wings, holding itself aloft and then darting, side to side, forwards and back. It’s body was marked by the lined pattern of light and dark that would signal a bee or wasp, but its bulbous eyes, red and compound, gave it away as a fly. My entomology is weak, but I was fairly certain that this insect belonged to an aptly named family called hoverflies. Unlike the biting black flies and horseflies that were also present along the creek, this hoverfly offered no threat to my comfort. It was investigating my book—a strange object in its neighborhood—to see if it might be a source of nectar. Hoverflies are a major pollinator, second only to wild bees in their importance to plant procreation. Disappointed that my book offered no feast, it moved on after a few seconds and I returned to reading of the nature of true happiness.

Creation is full of small, often unseen and unnoticed creatures that go ignored or unvalued by human calculation. A look at those species made extinct by Industrial civilization will mostly prove to be a list of small creatures who fill a particular niche, doing the work of life and yet unacknowledged and often unknown until it is too late. The White Rhinos and California Condors to which so much money and attention have flowed are the exception. Most species are lost without so much as making it to a postage stamp, or the cover of the latest World Wildlife Fund appeal mailer. We have a tendency, made all the worse for our speed and ambition, to value the bright and bold, the large and flashy. In our carelessness we miss the gifts of those small realities that keep the world going. This is one of the truths to which our scriptures for this Sunday call our attention.

In the Epistle of James, and the Gospel of Mark, we find a call to recognize the gifts of those who go unnoticed. James, in his characteristic prophetic style, calls out the church for ignoring the poor while fawning over the wealthy. Anyone who has been part of a church community has likely seen this play out—a newcomer shows up, known from the newspaper’s “society” pages, their picture regularly flashed at the black tie fundraisers that serve as a party for a cause. This is somebody and they’ve chosen to worship with us! The calculating mind begins to think of how we could use their wealth, their connections, their power to extend our church’s influence (all for the glory of God, of course).

Then there is a woman who shows up, her clothes dingy, her hygiene questionable. She seems off—a person to keep our eyes on. Her presence represents a deficit—needs we will be called on to meet, problems to be solved. A few folks might offer a friendly smile, a handshake after which they go for the Purell, but no one is strategizing how we can get her on the member rolls as quickly as possible.

James calls out this perennial pattern of preference for what it is—a missed opportunity to welcome the gifts of God. As Proverbs puts it: “The rich and the poor have this in common: the Lord is the maker of them all” (22:2). God has created all of us as bearers of the divine image, all of us carry gifts necessary for the fullness of the whole. And in the divine economy just as in the ecological one, it is often the small, the hidden, the unnoticed ones that are the most essential for life. For all their flashy wonder, the extinction of rhinos will not bring ecological collapse. The loss of hoverflies just might. This is not to say that either should be lost, but simply to name that for rhinos to truly live, they are dependent upon hoverflies keeping plant succession alive, season after season. And so it is with the church. We need everyone, all are gifted, and those whose gifts are so often ignored are the most foundational for the community of faith. When the wealthy are off at their second homes for the weekend, it will be the poor who still show up to continue the prayers of the church, desperate for God on a Sunday.

The Gospel, too, offers us a story of unexpected gifts. Jesus has traveled beyond the Jewish center, into the mixed territory of the borderlands. There he meets a woman desperate for the healing of her daughter. Mark doesn’t offer us stories that don’t have a point for our discipleship, and this one in particular seems to be a kind of performance piece—a chance for Jesus to show that the salvation of Israel is meant for the healing of the nations. When the woman asks for healing for her daughter, Jesus responds with what I read as a playful use of a common epithet. Gentiles were sometimes derided as “dogs” by Jews, but Jesus softens the use, offering the diminutive form. As Sarah Ruden translates it, we could read Jesus retort as: “First let the offspring eat their fill, as it’s not right to take the offspring’s loaf and toss it to the little doggies.” As Ruden comments in her notes, “In the entire Greek Bible, only this passage and its mirror in Matthew (15:21-28) use this diminutive of the word for ‘dog,’ a rare and largely comical word. This word choice weakens the usual sense of dogs as dirty and uncivilized and excluded from the home, much less from the table that symbolized God’s providential bounty.”

When the woman responds to Jesus like a good improv actor, accepting his offer and yet adding to it, Jesus tells her that because of her response her daughter has been healed. Jesus sees in this woman, who many a rabbi would have rejected, a person who understands the truth of God’s new household. There is enough for everyone at God’s table, children and puppies both. In her understanding, she has moved into the reality of God’s reign, a reality in which her daughter is freed from the demonic disability that had held her captive. And the truth is that most of us reading this are with her, among the puppies, outsiders who have been welcomed into the family.

Our call in response to these scriptures is to learn to recognize just as the ecosystem, that great household of life, depends on hoverflies as much as humans, so the household of God requires that we recognize, celebrate, and welcome the gifts of everyone. How might we put this into practice? Since I’ve been reading Aristotle, I’ll offer some helpful advice from his Nicomachean Ethics. Noting that we all have tendencies toward one vice or another, Aristotle says that when we have a vice we should “drag ourselves away from it toward its contrary.” In light of our scriptures, then, we should recognize our tendency to welcome the wealthy, the “educated,” the connected into our community. Instead, we should go out of our way to notice, recognize, and welcome the poor and marginalized into our midst. In this act we can begin to open ourselves to learning to see alongside God, and recognize those often hidden and yet essential gifts, that will make us whole. They are gifts possessed by children and puppies and hoverflies alike.