Tag: cats

I preached this sermon on Sunday, January 18, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 1:29-42.

Matt and I don’t have any pets at present, and if we do expand our family someday it will likely be with a dog.

But it so happens that I grew up in a household of cats. Lots of cats. At any given time in my childhood, my mom had about six, mostly rescues and most of them Siamese. So all of my earliest memories (and chores) were cat-adjacent, and we had what I’d call a lovingly complex relationship. Meaning that we loved them and they made life complex. 

I was an only child, given to playing lots of games by myself and making up all kinds of imaginary scenarios and scenes which I would then try to stage in our living room like a sort of pageant. Which was generally fine, except on those occasions when I had the bright idea to incorporate the cats into my efforts, to make them characters in my story of the day. 

You know, I loved Shakespeare, so maybe I was recreating a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the cats could be the fairies. Or I was imagining myself as a medieval king and the cats were my court attendants, dressed up in my mom’s scarves. 

Have you ever tried to put a costume on a cat? I don’t recommend it. Lets just say this medieval king suffered an uprising among the nobility. 

The point is that, in short order, I learned that the cats were their own creatures, with their own purpose and dignity, and they were not props to be subjected to my fanciful whims. It took a few bites and scratches for me to internalize this, but I did eventually. And we settled into a more peaceful coexistence where the true order of cat-human relationships was confirmed: they were in charge, and I was just there to serve their whims. If you have ever loved a cat, you know this is how it goes. 

Animals are good teachers; I am so glad I learned all of that at an early age—a little dose of humility in a world that is always encouraging us to center our own needs and narratives. It is important though, as we grow and evolve, to remember that we are not the center of things, and that others do not exist to serve our personal agenda. 

And that is especially important when we consider the most fundamental relationship in our lives: our relationship with God. 

Like me and the cats, I think it is safe to say that, much of the time, we are tempted to cast God in the role most useful to us at the time. If we are angry at someone, we want the vengeful God. If we are frightened, we want soothing God. If we are lost, we want the God who gives us a clear sign. If we are happy and content then, Lord forgive us, often we just want the God who is quiet and stays out of our way. And so we will pray, or not, to this version of God whom we need and then hope we are accommodated by him.

But have you ever tried to put a costume on God? In my experience, it doesn’t usually work. So many times I wanted, demanded God to do one thing, and God had quite another thing in mind.

Which leads me into this morning’s Gospel passage from John, when John the Baptist has his epiphany that Jesus is, indeed, the Messiah, and when others, like Andrew and Simon Peter begin to have this same intuition. 

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John enthuses. He sounds very confident. 

But I wonder….I wonder, really, if he knows what that means, even as he says it. Clearly he senses, in some deep, Spirit-inspired way, that Jesus is the One he’s been looking for all his life. 

But then he names Jesus—he casts him, if you will—as “the Lamb of God,” a sacrificial offering that will somehow make all things right. I wonder if John really understands at this point, though, what this means. Remember that in another account, from prison, John will doubt whether Jesus is who John thought he was because things don’t seem to be going the way he planned. 

So when John calls Jesus the Lamb of God here, he is speaking from his expectations of what Jesus will do for them, not realizing that Jesus will end up expecting much, much more from John and these disciples than they ever imagined. 

Jesus, you see, is not just a medieval king who drops in to smite our enemies. He is not a magician with a wand. And to follow him is not simply to behold a Lamb who will be sacrificed for all of our failings while we stand idly by. 

No, what John does not yet understand is that following Jesus means becoming the sacrificial Lamb ourselves. To follow this Messiah is to give away our own egos, pride, safety, expectations, and fanciful whims for the sake of an unselfish love. Jesus changes the world in and through us, not just through himself. Theologians call this cooperative grace. I call it putting our money where our mouth is. 

But John and the disciples don’t know that yet. I think they’re still hoping somehow this Lamb of God will accomplish it all on his own—both the salvation and its aftereffects—and that they can content themselves with beholding him rather than becoming him.

I wonder, friends, if we get stuck in that same posture sometimes. Jesus save me, but don’t change me!

I hate to break it you (and to myself) but Christianity is a becoming, not a beholding. It is a surrender to God’s story, not the manipulation of God to fit our own stories. We will only be saved when we stop trying to put costumes on Jesus and let him do what he actually came to do: to make us like him. 

I am dismayed by the extent to which Christianity has failed in this regard. In every age and culture where the Gospel is proclaimed, people—especially powerful people—have a propensity to turn it into a cat pageant—an self-indulgent enactment of their own agenda. We dress Jesus up in crowns and flags, we make him a general in an army or a judge on the bench. Or, sometimes, we make him a sweet little kitten, curled up by the fire, disturbing no one. Our enemies are his enemies. Our priorities are his priorities. Our failings are just the sort of thing he doesn’t mind too much. How convenient. 

But what I find encouraging in all of this is that, like those cranky felines I grew up with, Jesus does not submit to any of our games. Not for long, anyway. The truth keeps coming out, generation after generation. It keeps bubbling up—in protests and in psalms, in the sacrifices of the martyrs who refuse to worship empires, in this pesky proclamation that God loves all people, and in the fact that those who twist the words of God to suit their own ends will, ultimately, come to nothing. It can take time but it is always so—the truth of love wins out.

 I find great hope in that long record of God dismissing our various ideologies and indignations and inviting us, again and again, to come and see what Jesus is actually about, where he is staying, as the Gospel passage says. And it’s always the same, familiar place: charity, gentleness, mercy, peace, service, patience, trust, joy. And maybe a few scratch marks for those who try to distort the truth. 

So yes, I know that, as they say, God is dog spelled backwards, but today when I think of God, I am thankful that he’s a bit more like the insubordinate cats I grew up with. Especially in these times of great cruelty and fear, of widespread confusion, and the creeping sense of despair felt by so many people. God is not a willing participant in any of this debased pageantry. God has his own purpose and dignity and his own way of evading our best efforts to make him what he is not. 

And what he asks of us is to be exactly like him—catlike in our dismissiveness towards whatever nonsense is being sold to us. I am so glad. I find encouragement in his utter disobedience of our schemes. That’s the God whom I am grateful to obey. 

So behold this Lamb of God who is far more than you ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will ask more of us than we ever imagined. Behold this Lamb of God who will accomplish more through us than we ever imagined. 

Just don’t try to put a costume on him.