Nobody here likes a wet dog

The following sermon was written by the Reverend Scott Walters of Christ Episcopal Church and is published here with his permission.

“Nobody here likes a wet dog.” That’s what Billy Collins says. He says,

No one wants anything to do with a dog
that is wet from being out in the rain
or retrieving a stick from a lake.
Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight
going from one person to another
hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,
something that could be given with one hand
without even wrinkling the conversation.

But everyone pushes her away,
some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.
Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet
until they go to pet her,
push her away,
then wipe their hands on their clothes.
And whenever she heads toward me,
I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

O stranger of the future!
O inconceivable being!
whatever the shape of your house,
however you scoot from place to place,
no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,
I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.
I bet everybody in your pub,
even the children, pushes her away.”

Billy Collins titled that poem “To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now”. And I’m pretty sure he gets something just right in it. Our own dog isn’t at her most lovable when she’s wet. The kids don’t cuddle much with Annie when she steps dripping from the bath. Nobody is instinctively drawn to a damp, often sour, dishrag that wanders around begging for approval. And I bet nobody ever will.

So finally, we’ve found one simple thing we can all agree upon, even across cultures and time: wet dogs are unpleasant. Maybe the unity of all humankind will follow. Because nothing unites people more naturally and more completely than agreement about who should be excluded. And nobody here likes a wet dog.

There are no wet dogs in the book of Acts. But to really appreciate a turning point we read about today in the story of the early church, it might help to get our wet dog aversion reflex going strong. And here’s why. From the distance of all these centuries, it’s easy to assume that what was being debated among the early followers of Jesus was just a collection of ideas. Was Jesus the messiah? Was he resurrected? What is a resurrection if it’s not resuscitation? What’s a Christian? Can a Gentile be one too? Strange as these questions actually are, reasonable people have debated them for a long time. 

Resurrection: The Unprepared Dream

The following sermon was written by the Reverend Scott Walters of  Christ Episcopal Church and is published here with his permission.

What’s your dream about being unprepared or ill equipped? When you were in grade school, maybe you had that dream in which your teacher is handing out a test on material you’ve never seen before. Or the one in which you’ve shown up for the same class, but for some reason, you’re not wearing pants. Either dream is pretty effective at producing a feeling of inadequacy, helplessness, unpreparedness.

Of course, Freud said that we have those embarrassing naked dreams because we’re all born exhibitionists. And it’s true that pants aren’t strictly necessary to the task of writing an essay on the Louisiana Purchase or reciting the multiples of seven. But I still say the dreams are really about the fear of being unprepared.

When I was a carpenter I dreamt of working frantically to finish a job. But when I tried to make a cut, I was suddenly holding my five year old son’s plastic Fisher-Price saw. It made a nice growling noise when you pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t much good on a 2X4.

Anxious priests have an archetypal “I can’t find my place in the prayer book and the whole congregation is looking at me” dream. An added complication in mine one time was that the chancel had become a huge set of organ pedals that I was trying nonchalantly to make my way across, honking all the while.

And that’s another curious element in these dreams: our nonchalance. We try to play it cool. We’re slightly relieved that somehow no one has noticed our predicament. And the future that we dread—be it a failed test, horrified stares at our uncovered nether parts, irate clients, or glaring congregants—the future that we dread has never quite arrived in these dreams. So we hold on to a little hope that nobody will notice how sadly ill equipped we are to face whatever it is that’s coming. Maybe the world will return to normal before they do. Maybe we’ll somehow be prepared for the future when it actually arrives.

What’s your dream about being unprepared?

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And may the peace of the Lord be always with you.