Genesis 8: 6 -12
April 26, 2009
Psalm 84: 1-4
Luke 13: 31-35
Matthew 6: 25-26
THE BIRDS OF THE BIBLE:
IN HONOR OF ROGER TORY PETERSON
Back in 1988, in our church's very first visit to South Africa, I remember going into a book store, and there, up on one of the shelves was a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to Birds, and I proudly boasted to the shop owner that he was a prominent member of our community here in Old Lyme.
I consider myself very fortunate to have known Roger and I cherish the memories of the conversations I enjoyed with him in his home up on Rt. 156, and for those of you not familiar with his work, I've brought in two of his beautiful works of art – the Snowy Owl and the Blue Bird. As much as Roger Tory Peterson was a widely acclaimed ornithologist, he was also a wonderful artist with an eye for exquisite detail, as these paintings illustrate.
I first got to know Roger when he and his wife Ginny asked me to officiate for their wedding, and over the years, I watched the passion and the precision with which he worked, documenting the sounds and the colors and the shapes of all manner of birds. Jesus, in one of his sermons said, "Consider the birds of the air…" and that's what Roger did. That was his vocation. That was his passion.
A few years ago, upon his death, I was asked to help in the scattering of his ashes in a variety of places on and around Great Island, off of Smith Neck Road, a beautiful island that has now been appropriately renamed, "Roger Tory Peterson Island." Having kayaked around that island and seen the osprey and the egrets, the ducks and the swans that inhabit that place, I really cannot think of a more appropriate place for him to be remembered, surrounded as he is now by all of his feathered friends.
Today being a part of our Earth Day celebrations, and with this being a Sunday in which our music is in honor of Roger Tory Peterson, I thought I would honor him myself with this little collection, a collection that to my knowledge, Roger never got around to documenting -- "The Birds of the Bible." Roger knew birds from every climate and every continent; with his keen, bird-like eye, he could differentiate between species in a way that would baffle the rest of us. Indeed, I confess, many times I've gotten out his Field Guild to try to identify a bird, but with my limited skills of observation I've never been able to tell the difference, for example, between a Common Flicker and a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker. So, I'll leave the work of the ornithologist to Roger and to those who have followed in his footsteps, but this morning, I would like to honor his wonderful spirit in listing some of the birds found in the pages of the bible. Did you know that there are over 300 references to birds in the bible? And so, by necessity, I'll have to be rather selective.
First of all, let's "consider" the Sparrow. I confess, being human, I would much prefer to have my beautiful painting of the Blue Bird hanging on the wall of our home, but I think a good case could be made that we all should also have a painting of a Sparrow as well.
In Psalm 84 we meet both the Sparrow and the Swallow – the Sparrow being one of the most common and also the least attractive of birds. Compared to the Baltimore Oriole, the Bluebird, the Indigo Bunting, the Sparrow must surely have an inferiority complex. Many of us build Bluebird houses in our backyard, but name me even one who has ever built a home for Sparrows.
And yet, if truth be known, most of us can more readily identify with the Sparrow than the Bluebird. We, more than anyone else, see our own imperfections, our failures, our foibles, our unworthiness, and even though the rest of the world might think of us as "Bluebirds", we think of ourselves as a sparrows. And so, as much as I love my painting of the Blue Bird, I'm glad that it is the Sparrow that has the honor of our scripture lesson for today:
How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts! My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young at thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.
I loved the story that was in the evening news this last week about the Scottish woman, Susan Boyle, who appeared on what I suppose was the British equivalent of American Idol. When she came out on stage, when all the beautiful people – all the Baltimore Orioles and Indigo Buntings, the Peacocks and the Roosters saw this homely Sparrow of a woman, they "distinguished" themselves by their inhumanity, their superficiality, scoffing and rolling their eyes at this woman, but then when she opened her mouth and sang, "I Dreamed A Dreamed"… well, there was never a Meadowlark that sang so well, and this crowd of so called "beautiful people" was rightfully humbled, if not chastened.
My hope and my prayer is that this church might be a place for Sparrows, a place where those of us who sometimes think of ourselves as Sparrows in a Bluebird world can come to see that we also have something to give, and with the wonderful example of that this Scottish woman, may we also have the courage to step on the stage to share our dream, whatever that dream may be.
I can see Jesus sitting on a hillside, overlooking the beautiful Sea of Galilee on a beautiful April morning and saying, "Consider the birds of the air…" and then he would tell a story or two about the sparrows that he had known and then looking up at the sky, he would point out an Eagle, in all of its magnificence. Consider the Sparrow, but consider the Eagle as well.
Contemplate just for a moment a time in which you saw an Eagle. For me, on one of our trips out to the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Bill Slivinski and I were riding in a car with one of our Native American friends to go to Mobridge to pick up a new refrigerator for the Green Grass church, and all of a sudden a huge Eagle that had been sitting on a fence post, banked its wings and took off into the blue, blue sky.
For me, that's the image that comes to mind whenever I read that wonderful passage from the prophecy of Isaiah that we used for our Call to Worship this morning:
They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, hey shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
I guess it's a universal truth that all of us are not as young as we used to be. Sooner or later, entropy catches up with us all. Our bodies don't always cooperate. Where at one time, at least in our recollection, there was never a mountain we didn't climb, and probably all of us or at least most of us can identify with those lines from Tennyson's poem, "Ulysses":
Though much is taken, much
abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, --
There is wisdom; there is a healthy acknowledgement, even resignation in these words. The gradual loss of energy is a fact of life that we all have to come to terms with, sooner or later, but what I love about the words from the prophecy of Isaiah is that there is an altogether different type of energy, a spiritual energy that defies the laws of nature. That's a renewable and sustainable source of energy that too often gets left out of our Earth Day celebrations, and for far too many of us, it's a reservoir of energy that is largely unexplored and under utilized.
In this Season of Easter when we talk about the resurrection of the body, too often we misunderstand what the scriptures have to say about this. They are not talking only or exclusively about what happens to us after we die, and neither are they talking about these brittle broken physical bodies. Rather the Greek word for body is "Soma" which might be better translated, not as "body" but rather as "personality", and so what is resurrected is not our physical bodies, but rather our unique personalities, our individual spiritual identities, the very essence of our God-given lives, and so while our physical bodies are decreasing, our spiritual identities can be going in a very different direction.
For me, I like to think of that Eagle out in South Dakota as a mirror image of our own spiritual identities, unfettered, untethered to the earth, more than able to do something far more than just sit on a fence post. In one moment we can be "out to pasture" as we say, but in the very next moment, defying the laws of gravity, we can bank our wings and be off on some new adventure.
As I said, the Good News is that resurrection is not something that begins only when we die, but rather resurrection is a way of being-in-the-world, here and now, the promise that the closer we are to God, the closer we allow ourselves to be with God, the more we allow ourselves to live in that spiritual reality that envelopes us, the more spiritual energy we will have. And that's what the prophet Isaiah was saying,
They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
I can see Jesus sitting on a hillside pointing up at the sky and saying, "Consider the Eagle overhead. There are air currents you cannot see; there is a spiritual reality that is invisible, but if you allow yourself to be a part of that reality, you will surprise yourself and you will surprise the world with your ability to go from strength to strength.
In our "Birds of the Bible" collection, probably no other bird enjoys the prominence of the dove.
In the story of Noah's ark, as you may recall, after 40 days of sailing the open waters of the flood, Noah released 2 birds, the first of which was the raven. Rather than coming back to let Noah know whether it was safe to disembark, the Raven, being rather self-centered, took off, never to be seen by Noah again and would resurface years later in Baltimore, Maryland at the home of a certain poet, Edgar Allen Poe, but please don't quote me on this!
Be that as it may, the real hero of these two birds was the dove which went out and then came back to let Noah know that it was still too dangerous to disembark, but then 7 days later the dove went out again, and this time came back with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak, an indication that the waters had sufficiently subsided from the earth.
I love that image of the dove, a messenger of hope, and in all of our Earth Day activities, it's important that we listen not only to all the prophets of gloom and doom, for they have a critically important message that needs to be heard, but we also need the message of the dove, saying, " the earth is a beautiful place to live; it is as Robert Frost said, "the right place for love" and if we come to our senses, we are more than capable of restoring the integrity of God's Creation. Here's an olive branch, the dove says. Park that rusty scupper, that poor excuse for a boat and follow me, and I'll show you what a beautiful earth this is."
I like to think that the great, great, great, great grandchild of that dove made an appearance, several thousand years later, at the time when a young man from Nazareth was baptized in the Jordan River.
On Easter Sunday, as many of you know, this dove, suspended over our baptismal font, had its maiden voyage. The dove is carved out a one hundred year old piece of red cedar by Jae Wolf and it's an anonymous gift to our church by a wonderful friend of our congregation. As I announced, this dove will appear whenever we have a baptism, but I asked the dove to make a special appearance for today in honor of our friend, Roger Tory Peterson.
Whenever the dove is here, I hope it will be a reminder of those blessed, beatific words that Jesus heard when he was baptized: "This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased."
In our churches historically, we've talked far too much about "original sin" and we haven't talked enough about what the theologian, Matthew Fox called, "original blessing."
Would that all of us, at a very early age, heard those beautiful words of blessing, "this is my beloved child with whom I am well pleased." But also, at the risk of putting words into the dove's mouth, as a corollary to this original blessing, I would hope that all our children and all of us older children as well heard those blessed words from the poet, William Blake:
No bird soars too high if it soars with its own wings.
Well, if there are 300 birds in the bible, and I've only mentioned 3 or 4, counting the ignominious Raven, but time is running out, and so I'll mention only one more, but first of all a quiz.
Out of all the birds included in Roger Tory Peteson's Field Guide to the Birds: East of the Rockies, which one is most often used as a description of Jesus?
Actually, it's trick question, because the bird I have in mind is one that for whatever reason Roger did not include in his book. I don't know why, and maybe there's an ornithologist in our congregation who will tell me why this bird is not really a bird at all or at least not suitable for the pages of this book.
In thinking about a bird that would best describe the nature of Jesus, probably very few of us would think of the chicken, but this is exactly what we find in the Gospel According to Luke. We're used to thinking of chickens as being… well "chicken", but this not at all what we find in this passage.
Jesus is in Jerusalem, and he is doing what he usually does – showing compassion for those who are ill, reaching out in kindness to those who are mentally or emotionally exhausted, reminding them that they are beloved children of God, that no one is beyond or outside of the circumference of God's grace. Some Pharisees come along and tell Jesus that it isn't safe for him to preach and teach this message, that he's on King Herod's "Most Wanted List" and so, they tell him, it would be better for him and probably for everyone else if he would just go back to Galilee or go on a permanent Sabbatical, but as you might have anticipated, Jesus was undeterred. He would continue doing what he felt called to do, regardless of the consequences.
And so Jesus tells the Pharisees to go tell King Herod, whom he refers to as a "fox", tell him that I will continue doing God's work as best as I am able, and in referring to King Herod as the "fox" you can see how Jesus has set the stage for referring to himself as a hen or a chicken, in my estimation one of the most maternal and I think one of the most beautiful images of God's Love.
Quoting from the scriptures he had learned as a child, Jesus said:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
killing the prophets
and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your
children together as a hen gathers her brood under wings..
What a beautiful and tender image of God's love! What a far cry this is from the angry, thunderbolt-throwing God so familiar to far too many of us! Would that more of us could think of ourselves as a part of the brood, nurtured and protected under the wings of God. There's always a fox in or somewhere near the hen house; King Herod is forever at work in the world, and as such the world is a violent and dangerous place, but the good news is that God's love is like a not so chicken chicken. There's place for us all underneath those everlasting wings, and no matter what, God will not abandon us.
Consider the birds of the air, Jesus said, consider how they love and care for their young. That is the true nature of Divinity and if you are true to the spirit that God has given you, that is the true nature of your Humanity as well. For, as we know, "birds of a feather always fly together" – Divinity and the best of our Humanity.
Amen.
David W. Good
Old Lyme, Connecticut