To my woefully untrained eye, the red knot looks like a cross between a robin and a seagull. Perhaps I just see them that way because those are two of the small handful of birds that I can identify without the use of Google. But unlike robins, these birds don’t thrive in urban areas. And unlike seagulls, they can’t survive on a diet of French fries snatched from some unsuspecting tourist’s lunch. When they’re not breeding, the red knot is pretty unremarkable. They’re grey and black and white, and they look a little dumpy with their broad chests and spindly legs, and they hang out way way down in the southern hemisphere. They spend their days along the shore poking around for mussels and clams that they swallow whole, their gizzards doing the work of breaking down the calcium and other minerals so that they can gain enough weight for the long trek ahead of them. Sometime soon, around a month from now, the red knot will begin its migration north, a 9,000 mile journey that will end somewhere in the islands of the Arctic Circle. They’ll make a few pit stops on the way, flitting up the coast of South America to rest and refill their stores with the shellfish they find. But they can’t stay long. They have a date with destiny.
I’m not really sure, as I write this, where this sermon is going. I just have gotten to the point in my faith journey were, if I get two references to these little birds by two different admired spiritual guides in the same week, I just know I have to pay attention. Red knots aren’t very big, about the weight of an avocado, with a 20 inch wingspan. They travel in groups. They fly as high as twenty thousand feet in the air. And their lives have to be impeccably timed, a perfect balance of weather, wind current, food source, flight and rest. They’ll feast on the shellfish they find as they travel the coasts north, but the increasingly acidic ocean has made shellfish harder to find, less meaty, less nourishing to the hungry birds. Still, they persist, they fly north, drawn by an instinct, a power, an innate desire that they don’t worry about analyzing or understanding or even being aware of. They feel the tug, the urge, and they go.
As they fly, their feathers will transform into a rusty red from neck to breast. For the strongest of them, for the best shellfish hunters, those with the most efficient metabolisms, they’ll reach Delaware Bay, a final rest before their final slog to the barren tundras of the Arctic. But each year, there are fewer and fewer that make it to the bay, and even for those few who get there, there still aren’t enough resources for them all to store up enough of what they’ll need to make it the rest of the journey. After almost 7,500 miles, these birds are exhausted, and starving. And they’re scouring the bay for the nutrient dense and easy protein that is left behind by the horseshoe crabs that have laid billions eggs before heading out to sea. The birds will devour these easy to digest gelatinous blobs, hoping to double their weight, before the final stretch of their yearly journey.
For us humans, horseshoe crabs have been a bit of an ugly nuisance. They’ve been no real use to us economically until local fishermen discovered that they make pretty good, cheap, and easy to gather fish bait. But now, these crabs have been overfished, and their numbers are falling. And as the warming climate has increased the severity of storms, and those storms and ever-increasing development have washed out the crabs’ beach where they lay their eggs, life has gotten much much more difficult for the red knot, so much more difficult that around 80% of the rufa red knots have been lost in the last 50 or so years, almost completely due to the disruption of their delicately timed balance of resources, their fragile, but life-giving synergy with the earth. It’s all stacked dominoes now. If they can’t get enough to eat in Delaware Bay, they won’t make it up north to lay their eggs. If they don’t lay their eggs in time, they’ll miss the hatching season for the insects that their hungry chicks will need to grow and thrive and make it back down south. If they do make it south, will there be enough shellfish to nourish them before it’s their turn for the pilgrimage north? Once exhausted and starving and landing in the Delaware Bay, will there be enough horseshoe crab eggs to prepare them for the rest of the journey to the arctic, where the lucky ones will mate, lay, and support a new generation of red knots so that the cycle may continue. Around and around it goes. For a red knot, so much depends on a horseshoe crab, laying her eggs, 7,500 miles away.
Maybe I don’t have to make some grand connection between our reading today and these birds. Maybe I don’t need to draw theological conclusions at all. They don’t have to be a metaphor. They don’t have to be an allegory or a symbol.They can be just birds, and that will be enough. They can be threatened, and we can be concerned enough to do something about it. Maybe if we held a tiny chick in our hands, felt its weight, its fragility, its tenacity, and its total dependence upon the intricate balance of life here on earth, that would be spiritual enough. If we weighed its chances of survival, calculated the likelihood of this one tiny bird to endure all its challenges, if we let our hearts be broken by its simple beauty, its pure innocence, and this rotten broken system that we have created, it’d be enough for today. Maybe for a whole lifetime. We would be changed. An imprint of that fluffy chick would be forever imprinted upon our palms. These birds mean something. They matter. Simply because.
But how easy it is to miss it. To forget it. To choose not to care. And, for some of us, how hard it is to love this fragile world and all its brokenness without getting swept up and overwhelmed in the process. We harden for convenience. We harden out of ignorance. We harden out of our stubborn independence. We harden for survival.
Maybe you think that I’ve finally lost it as a pastor. Maybe I am just waxing philosophical over a couple of endangered birds. Maybe I’m too stubborn to accept that this ship we’re all on is sinking and paying attention to one species of bird is all we need to plug the hole, right the ship, and get back on track.
But today we get Jesus’s vision statement. And today we get Paul’s revolutionary disruption of the hierarchy of all humanity. And if all we do today is meditate on the migratory challenges of the threatened red knot, then I think we’re a lot closer to the scriptures than we might originally believe. Because this is why Jesus came and still comes. This is why the church was founded. For the red knot. And the horseshoe crab. And the polluted oceans. The warming climate. And you. And me.
It’s all connected. All of it. You can’t pull one thread without unraveling the whole thing. You can’t darn the hole without reconnecting all the threads. For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For just as all of God’s creation is one and has many members, and all the members of creation, though many, are one creation, so it is with Christ.
You cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you.” You cannot say to the eye, “I don’t need you.” You cannot say to the horseshoe crab, “We have no need of you,” and we cannot say to the red knot, “eh, your loss is of no concern for us.” Because we are all connected. We are all created by and loved by God. Without you, I cannot be fully me. Without those ugly horseshoe crab eggs, there’s no red knot. Without the tiny red knot’s yearly 9,000 mile pilgrimage, the earth is diminished. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.
I really don’t think this is some kind of hippy-tree-hugging-out-there perspective. It’s the Christian perspective. It’s what we profess to believe when we say that God became human and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. It’s what we rely on when we proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord. It’s what we know, deep to our bones, is true, when we encounter the beauty of a sunset, or the giggle of a baby, or the heartbreak of a bird that has fallen from the sky.
Jesus proclaims this mission statement in the midst of his family, in his hometown, surrounded by all the things he is intimately connected to. He takes this mission statement deep from his culture and from the past, knowing that it’s all connected — the past, the present, the future. It’s all one. These words from Isaiah are woven into the tapestry of the life and mission of Jesus, just as the good news to the poor, the release to the captives, the sight to the blind, and the freedom of the oppressed are all woven into that same life and that same mission. It’s all connected. The dominoes are all lined up. If the poor are knocked down, then so are we. If the captives are imprisoned, then so are we. If we are blind to the presence of God in all things, then the red knot, and the horseshoe crab, and the homeless man with his cardboard sign, and the trafficked teen, and the baby born to the refugees at the border, and yes, us, all of us, are lost.
Jesus comes and proclaims that it all matters. The poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the oppressed, all that God has created and we have thrown away, Jesus has come to say, “they matter,” “it matters,” “you matter.” That is why he’s here. That is why he’s come. That is why God didn’t just snap God’s fingers and fix it all, or start all over from scratch, or wipe us out of existence - because God and them and it and you and I are all connected. You knock down one domino tile and they’re all coming down.
There are many members, yet one body, and the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. When one suffers, we all suffer.
Now. You are the body of Christ and individually members of it. This world is the body of Christ, and all creation is individually members of it. Every piece of creation that God has touched has the imprint of God upon it.
Two seemingly unrelated writers bring your attention to a tiny migratory seabird, and so you pay attention. Hold that red knot hatchling in your hand, let it imprint itself upon your palm, let it break your heart. And when one is redeemed, then all are redeemed. When one is saved, then all of us are saved. Jesus Christ came to us as one of us, connected to all of us, so that when he is resurrected, we all are resurrected, and the birds and the crabs and the tiny drops that make up the ocean are too.
Christ calls us, as his body, to continue his mission: to pay attention to the little things, to bring relief where we can, to be present with them, to let them break our hearts. Imagine what it would be like to live in a world where we knew, really knew, that through Christ, all things are connected? What, then, could be saved?
Thanks be to God.
SO much thanks to authors Gayle Boss and Richard Rohr. Look 'em up. So worth it.
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