The ivory billed woodpecker is gone. Wildlife officials working for the US government have declared it, and 22 other species, officially extinct. They’re gone. That’s it. The nation’s largest woodpecker, the one called the “Lord God! Bird” because of its sheer size and beauty is no more.
For most of us, I expect, we hear this news and we sigh and we go on with our days. After all, about 150 species go extinct in our world every day. It’s just the sad reality of our time. But, for me, if you remember my first sermon I ever preached, the ivory billed woodpecker has a special place in my heart. For me, this “Lord God Bird” was a symbol of the resurrection. They’d suspected that this bird was quickly reaching extinction in the ‘40s. But in the early 2000s, there began to be sightings. Amateur birders claimed to have seen the bird while canoeing through an Arkansas swamp. They reported the sighting on some birding chat rooms online, and this caught the attention of some scientists from Cornell and Louisiana State University, and that started the manhunt, or the woodpecker hunt, rather, for this rare and special bird. I was enthralled that maybe, just maybe, the ivory billed woodpecker had made a comeback, had experienced a kind of resurrection, no matter how small, and that these scientists who have given their whole lives to finding evidence of the existence of this bird were really people of faith, people who believed, and searched, and gathered evidence, and just went out into the swampy wilderness, day after day, with nothing but the sheer hope of resurrection as their guide.
And now, it’s gone. No more federal funds will be committed to the discovery and survival of this bird. No more resources will be used to participate in the resurrection of this bird. That’s it. Just like that. It’s done. I have a tattoo of the bird near my right shoulder, and now, everyday, I get to look in the mirror and wonder, was any of it real? What do I do now that there is no resurrection where I so needed it to be? What do I do now that this bird has etched its way into my heart and my life and my symbology and into my very flesh?
What do we do when our resurrections, don’t, well, resurrect?
For some of us, we just change the rules, right? Oh, well the bird may be gone on this earth in this life, but I’ll get to see the ivory billed woodpeckers in heaven. God must have needed another bird-angel. Or we live in denial: the bird’s not really gone; if I just wait a little longer, resurrection will come; it’s always darkest before the dawn, after all. Or if we work a little harder, invest a little more, believe a little better, the bird will come back. Or we make it metaphorical. The bird can still be a symbol of resurrection because even though it’s gone, it still lives inside our hearts. Or we rush to a replacement: the pileated woodpeckers are so similar to the ivory-billed, we can just shift our attention to them. Or we move on, distracting ourselves with all the wonderful stories of different animals who have begun to thrive after they were on the brink of extinction. We can avoid the pain by beating ourselves up for not doing enough to save the bird. Or we spiral and lose hope and give up because all living things are destined to the same fate as the ivory billed woodpecker. We can push the pain away by thinking about how selfish we are for wanting this bird, when the whole world is still full of hundreds of thousands of avian creatures. Sometimes, we just suck it up as a fact of life, sort of apathetically accepting that extinction is the way of the world and we’d just better get used to it. We throw up our hands, accept our helplessness, and say “It’s no use crying over spilled milk…or extinct woodpeckers.” Or we say, “well. It’s all in God’s plan,” as if God has willed the extinction of this bird for some greater, unknown purpose.
I hope you can see by now that this isn’t just about extinct woodpeckers. It’s about how we turn ourselves inside out in order to force a resurrection, to make something good out of something that’s just bad.
It’s about all those little and big deaths that we suffer in our lives. All those times when we hoped and prayed and sacrificed and begged for a resurrection, and then, it didn’t come. What do we do when we put all our chips down on red and the roulette wheel comes up black? What do we do when there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow, when there’s no true love’s kiss to awaken the fair maiden, there’s no spring tulips come back around and the monarch doesn’t erupt from it’s chrysalis, triumphant? What do we do when the degree never leads to the job, and the children make awful choices and the hurricane destroys the last of your carefully scrapbooked memories? What do we do when we fast forward five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from the white dress and the fancy tux and the “I do’s” and ten dollar a plate chicken dinners straight to the divorce?
We do our best to cope. And often, that means running away from the pain. Often that means finding someone or something to blame. And often that means creating rules so that it can be someone’s fault if it happens again.
Maybe that’s why I wanted to take on this landmine of a passage for today. Because when I read it, my main emotion was just deep, deep sadness. Maybe that’s because of my own almost-divorce. And maybe it’s because, so often, we turn painful experiences and difficult choices into issues of morality so that we can point fingers - at others, and at ourselves - rather than fully experience the pain of the whole gosh darn broken thing. The thing didn’t resurrect because it, or us, or someone, didn’t deserve it.
We turn brokenness into a morality issue. We turn pain into who was right and who was wrong. We are so afraid of heartbreak that we try to find the reasons why an awful thing has happened so that we can prevent it from happening again. Or so we can blame someone for it. Or we can build walls of ethics and rules and laws in order to keep the devastation out. The good guys earn their happiness, while the bad guys get what they deserve. We take anguish and grief as “opportunities” to grow, to come back stronger, to learn our lesson, to know better so that we can do better. We try to resurrect what’s gone, rather than sit still and feel the pain of it.
Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife? Does this fit into our worldview of right and wrong? Is this acceptable behavior, or is this guy worth condemning? What’s the law? What’s the rule? How do we know if this broken relationship is our “fault” or not? Is this a crime worth punishing? How do we know if we’re doing it “right”? How can we know if we’re on the right side? Give us the rules so that we can prevent the pain, or ignore the pain, or blame someone else for the pain, or distract us from the pain. What’s the line we can’t cross? Tell us, Jesus. We don’t want to hurt anymore. If something isn’t resurrected, we need to know who or what to condemn.
The ivory billed woodpecker is gone. And it’s never coming back.
And there are lots of reasons for that. We didn’t do enough to save it. And extinctions just happen. We live in a broken world. Death is a part of life. People hurt each other. Relationships fall apart. We show up and we do our best and sometimes it’s still not enough. We are cruel. We stop communicating. We are abused. We outgrow each other. We are forced in to things that we never really wanted.
And Jesus’s response to these pharisees who are looking for rules and answers and the right letter to fill in on the multiple choice test is to take them back to the beginning, back to what God intended, so that they can maybe just get a hint of how far away we’ve strayed from God’s original plan. Maybe by going back to the beginning, we can see that it was never about rules; it was always about relationship. About connection. About intimacy and vulnerability. Two becoming one flesh.
I don’t hear Jesus responding to the pharisees with more rules. I hear him responding to them with story. I don’t hear him taking a stance on gay marriage or prescribing that the battered woman stay in the abusive relationship. He’s not telling us to keep folks from communion or kick them out of the church. I just hear the deep deep sadness that comes from what happens when God intends one thing, and we go off and do the other. And that happens inside and outside of marriage. I hear how painful it can be to take something that is so a part of you and have to separate yourself from it. I hear that so often our heartbreaking reactions to heartbreak are just to make more rules and draw more dividing lines so that we can pretend like we can protect ourselves from that heartbreak. I hear Jesus saying that it’s our nature to harden our hearts and try to run away from the pain with rules and blame and consequences and strict definitions, but what God wants is soft, mushy, messy hearts. God wants malleable and moldable hearts. Hearts that change and grow, not because of laws, but because of relationship.
And when Jesus is pressed on the matter by the disciples, I hear him saying, again, “yeah. It’s all messed up. We’re all messed up. We’re broken and we hurt each other and even when we try to start over there are still scars; there are still wounds.” Jesus isn’t saying, “sure, go ahead. Divorce is a good thing.” But he’s also not saying, “yup. Here are the rules. You’re doomed if you make these choices. So straighten up and get in line.” I hear him lifting up an issue away from morality and into the life changing and world-shattering realm of heartbreak.
You are not evil.
You’re just hurting.
And we are all doing the best that we can.
And still. And yet. We make choices out of that hurt.
And well. It hurts.
We can point our fingers and shift the blame and learn our lessons and edit the rulebooks later. Maybe there’s a place for going back to the black box and examining how all this happened. Asking “why,” even when it is unanswerable can be cathartic.
Getting justice for crimes done is our way of maintaining a civil and somewhat organized society.
But God doesn’t hang out there. God’s not as easily found in the laws or the definitions or the boxes. God is pretty clearly present in the messy work of the heart. God’s in that muddy bayou, mourning the loss of the ivory billed woodpecker. God’s in that pain that you feel when you think about all the things in life that didn’t quite work out the way you planned. God didn’t want those bad things to happen to you, either. But God is with you in it.
The beautiful and the frustrating thing about kids is that they have such messy, malleable, wild, and untamed hearts. They feel. They enter in. They test boundaries and they break the rules. We are the ones who teach them to blame. We are the ones who teach them the rules they must follow. We are the ones who rush them through heartbreak by giving them whatever they want, or by explaining away or distracting them from or invalidating their feelings. But kids, before we get our hands on them, are all messy, fleshy, in-the-moment relationship. They are vulnerable and needy. They are laughing one minute and crying the next. They mourn the squished ant and the felled tree. They let themselves be devastated by the lost balloon and the fallen scoop of ice cream. They sit in their sadness and their joy and their confusion and their testing and their boundary breaking and God meets them there.
“Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom fo God as a little child will never enter it.”
What do we do when we don’t get the resurrection?
Throw a fit.
Have a tantrum.
Mourn.
And also laugh and be silly.
Play games.
Break rules.
Live with your heart leading the way.
Be present to what is, to what is here, inside you, right now. God is there.
The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Thanks be to God.
