The Brown Birds

Matthew 10:24-39

It’s rare that I get to see a goldfinch. When I do, it’s sort of magical; they look almost unreal. Their golden heads are just so, so, golden. They’re gorgeous, and it’s such a treat when one lands on the feeder. It’s so great. They’re so…obvious. I know one when I’ve seen one. It’s like God shouting out to me, “pay attention! There is beauty here!”

I’ve got this whole setup in my front yard. I’ve got six feeders hanging from metal poles, and one suet cage, all the in the hopes that a little bit of nature might grace my urban landscape. 

Most of the time, though, I get some variation of brown bird. Some are easy to differentiate. They’re bigger - the female cardinal. Or they have a black mask on their faces - the male house swallow. But things get trickier for me when I’m trying to discover the differences between the female house swallow from the female house finch. Or the house finch from the purple finch. Or trying to figure out which one is a song sparrow, an American tree sparrow, a female white-throated sparrow, or a fox sparrow. All these sparrows. They have tiny differences that somewhere, somehow, some ornithologist has determined to be significant enough to pay attention to, significant enough to label them as an entirely different species of bird. So, in what is either a grand waste of my time, or the only acceptable way to spend my time, I sit in my sunroom and watch the birds. It’s meditative. It’s soothing. Sometimes, when some other color besides brown comes twittering along, it can even be a little bit thrilling. But I’m also trying to find the thrill in the brown. In its different shades and patterns, songs, flights, twitches of their heads. And there’s no short supply of brown to study. The sparrows are everywhere. They’re flitting and fighting, hopping and perching, rubbing their beaks and bickering everywhere.

They were everywhere in the Ancient Near East as well. In Jesus’s time, they were considered a quick snack, caught, plucked, grilled and eaten off of skewers like shish kabobs. I can picture a young boy after school with his penny in his pocket, stopping at the local market, and grabbing a pair for a quick nibble on his way home. In that time, brown birds were just brown birds; they didn’t differentiate the species like ornithologists do now. They were all sparrows. All the same. Small. Brown. Scavenging. Ubiquitous.

And this is what we are to God.

Well.

Sort of.

Like every part of our reading today, Jesus is turning this idea of sparrows on its head. He’s transforming what these birds mean. He’s transforming how we see.

They’re standing in the marketplace and Jesus is giving the disciples this terrifying lecture. “You’re going to have the same reputation as I have,” Jesus says. “They’ll think you’re too much. Too emotional. Too radical. They’ll think you’re ridiculous. A dreamer. A dismantler of society. The call to discipleship is drastic, it’s life-changing and world-altering. But don’t worry. (Ha! Yeah right…) It’ll all come to light.” Jesus is looking all around him and he sees the young boy with his shish kabob of sparrows and he says, “You are a sparrow. You’re lots of sparrows. You’re more than lots of sparrows.” 

I mean, can you picture it, the little boy is about to take a big bite of his juicy sparrow and Jesus begins using his snack as an object lesson? “Don’t worry,” Jesus says, “you’re worth more than many sparrows.” Uh, thanks, Jesus? So like, how many sparrows are we worth? 10 pennies’ worth? 50 cents worth? A thousand sparrows? That’d be what, a whole five bucks…

But Jesus wants us to look closer. To look deeper. To turn the world upside down. These sparrows on a stick, these brown birds hopping around at their feet, these scavengers and nuisances that clutter the markets and live off of French fries and hot dog buns, God knows them intimately. God loves them fiercely. God is with them completely. Look closer. Look deeper. Once you can see the differences even in the tiny sparrows, you’ll start to see the world the way God sees it.

 

You’ll start to care about all those things the world has said isn’t worth a penny. You’ll start paying attention to differences, rather than lumping things all together as nuisance or a stereotype. You’ll start to see the varied and heart-breaking stories behind each brown bird. 

But to do this, you have to watch closely. You’ll have to pay attention. You’ll have to listen to the differences and point out all the variations. You’ll have to get close. And getting close means getting messy. It means conflict and frustration and misunderstandings. The sparrows don’t always get along. Once we hear one another’s stories, things will get complicated. We’ll start to have feelings. We’ll want to make judgments. We’ll want to cast out. We’ll want to draw lines. 

This brown bird, with the white above its eyes, they should live here. This brown bird, with the pattern on its wings, they don’t belong there. That brown bird with the yellow beak, they’re the selfish ones. And on and on it goes.

But Jesus doesn’t say, “back up.” He doesn’t say, “we’re all just birds, why can’t we get along?” Jesus says, “get even closer.” Cozy up to them. Get near.

This will cause conflict. We’ll have stuff we have to work out. We will have conflicting stories that we will have to tell and retell and come to understand. A son is going to have a different story than his father. A daughter will have a different perspective from her mother. A daughter-in-law will have conflict with her mother-in-law. You’ll start to see the terrifying and beautiful differences between each other, and you won’t know what to do with them. You’ll want to reject the differences. You’ll want to step away. You’ll want to avoid going near because there will be conflict and confusion and difference.

But be like God. Watch the brown birds. See their differences. Find their uniqueness. Lean in to the conflict. 

It will be hard. It will hurt. You’ll think you’ll never be able to find common ground again. There will be frenzied flitting and angry squawking and things we’re going to have to work out.

Don’t stray from the conflict. Step in to it. Watch and wait and pay attention. Don’t plow through will your supposed “rightness,” but listen. If you rush forward with all your one-sided answers, you’ll scare them from the feeders. Instead, lean in to the conflict with a gentle curiosity. What makes this one tick? What makes that one thrive? Which seed do they prefer? And then wonder why all this is. 

This will bring out all kinds of judgments in us. They take all the food. They make a mess. They’re inefficient. They waste. But if you hold on to these judgments tighter than you hold on to the beauty of the differences, you’re going to miss it. You’re not going to see the world the way God’s sees it. You’ll deny Jesus, who saw everything the way God sees it. You’ll lose your life. 

But if you hold on to the beauty of the differences, you’ll start to see the world the way Jesus sees it - not as a mass of generic brown birds, but as a mosaic of difference, creativity, life. But we have to step in to the difference, we have to brave the rupture, we have to be curious through the conflict, or we’ll never get to the repair. The resurrection isn’t about making things easy. It’s about living through the conflict to greater life and beauty on the other side. 

When we start to look at the world with a concern for all the brown birds, one day, we’ll start to see all the beauty. We’ll start to see that the chipping sparrows wear a rusty orange crown. We’ll notice that the female house finch has an elegant thin neck. The song sparrow has a dark spot on its chest, right where its heart should be. The American tree sparrow has this curious bill - it’s black on top and yellow below. And the house sparrow is small and feisty, the first ones to the feeder in the morning. God knows and loves them all. Not because they’re all the same. Not because they get along.  But because they are God’s. They belong to God in all their beautiful difference. Pay attention. Even when it’s hard. Step in. There is beauty here. 

Thanks be to God. 

In Medias Res -- To Save the World Entire

 

Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

Goodness. If this isn’t a…”Squirrel!” Passage, I don’t know what is. There’s so much going on here. One thing after another. We barely catch our breath from the first miracle and we’ve already moved on to the next. So much is happening here that it’s hard to get our bearings. 

There’s this literary device I learned about in my English classes. It’s Latin, of course because it has to sound fancy: “in medias res”. Which really just literally means, “in the middle of things.” It’s when you begin a story in the middle of something else that’s already going on. You start the story in the middle of the action. This happens all the time in storytelling. The king has already died, and Hamlet must take revenge. Achilles is filled with rage right at the beginning and we have no idea why. Odysseus is imprisoned while everyone else is going home after the war. Before the opening credits, Walter White is racing through the New Mexico desert in his RV. The Montagues and the Capulets have been fighting for years before Romeo meets Juliet. It’s great for storytelling. It draws us into the action. It gives us questions that we can’t wait to have answered. We stick with the details because we want to find out more, not just to find out what’s happening right now, but to discover what’s got us into this mess in the first place, and maybe even find some clues as to what will happen next. History tends to repeat itself, after all. Sometimes telling the story, not from the beginning, but from “in medias res,” is the best way to grab folks’ attention and then keep it. It’s sort of a storyteller’s fancy way of multitasking.

And our reading today is a whole lot of Jesus multitasking. He’s being interrupted in every moment. We are shoved into the middle of his action, and it seems like the poor guy doesn’t get to focus on a single thing, His attention is constantly drawn to something new. Over and over again this happens. First, while Jesus is just walking along, he sees a random tax collector, and calls to follow him. Then, while Jesus is sitting at dinner with a whole bunch of sinners, the Pharisees interrupt to criticize him. While Jesus overhears them talking to the disciples, he sets them straight. But even before he’s done saying these things, a leader of the synagogue interrupts his dinner to tell him about his dead daughter. Then, on his way to see this girl, he’s interrupted by a woman who’s been hemorrhaging for twelve years. Jesus sets his mind to do one thing, and then the “tyranny of the present” interrupts him and he must divert his attention. 

This, psychologists say, is terrible for our mental health. And, in addition, multitasking is ineffective. You can do one thing at a time much more quickly and efficiently than if you tried to do all the things all at the same time. But doesn’t it feel like our whole lives are happening “in medias res” - in the middle of the action? The world never stops. Joy insists on invading when we’re grieving. Sorrow floods in when we’re celebrating. Work still needs to be done even as we’re resting. Two kids fall in love while their families are feuding. Flowers bloom while cannons are blasting.  The world keeps spinning, and Jesus, in our reading today, gets a full blown serving of it. Everybody wants a piece of Jesus. And somehow, in medias res, he gives it to them.

So what’s our gospel writer trying to tell us about who Jesus is in the midst of all this middle of things? Is Jesus like The Flash or Sonic the Hedgehog, he’s so fast that time literally slows down, objects move in slow motion, and he can attend to everything, seemingly all at once? Or is he like the perfect soccer mom, who can tie shoes, drive the carpool, serve the snacks, and order the triple latte all at the same time? Is this passage meant to separate us from our likeness to Jesus? Remind us how very far we are from being the Son of God? Maybe. Maybe Jesus is the superhero that we can never live up to, the ideal we’ll never reach, the God who is far away from anything we can ever be.

I know that when I get overwhelmed with all the things going on in the world, in my life, I just want to shut down. Go back under the covers. Close my eyes until the world rights itself again. When I’m in the middle of the mess and I can’t juggle one more thing, I want to drop it all, let it go, burn it down, give it up. Maybe if I hide from the dishes long enough, they’ll do themselves. Or maybe if I ignore the injustices in my own country and others, they’ll eventually resolve themselves, right? Right? And since there’s no possible way that I can feed all the millions of hungry people in the world, there’s no point in sharing my lunch, right? Right?

Since there’s so much going on in the world, all I can do is keep my head down and focus on myself and my needs, right? Right? Since I can’t solve the war, or fix the crisis, or heal the sick, all I can do is just tuck my head between my knees or under my shell and not enter the story at all?

Sometimes, that is definitely, exactly, what I want to do. Don’t put me in the middle of the action. Let me out. Help me escape. My work doesn’t make a dent in anything anyway. The war goes on. The families keep feuding. What difference does one person, one love story, one adventure, one discovery, one person’s narrative in the midst of it all, make anyway? 

Our poets, our storytellers, our heroes, and our Jesus, say it makes all the difference in the world. The Talmud has a saying, “Man was created alone to teach you that whoever kills one life, kills the world entire, and whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. That’s why we’re in the middle of the action. Not so that we can fix it all, but so that we can help one, and in that way, fix the world entire. 

This is how Jesus works.

Don’t you think, if Jesus wanted to, if God wanted to, he could snap his fingers and just like that, fix it all? Couldn’t Jesus have reclined at the table, used some Jedi mind trick and called Matthew, taught the Pharisees, healed the hemorrhaging woman, and raised the girl from the dead while knit an afghan, updated his Facebook status, and ate lunch? Couldn’t God simply solve the hunger and end the wars and heal the earth in one fell swoop, leaning back in “his” lazyboy, dozing off while the infomercials come on? Couldn’t God fix this all, so so easily? 

If God can, why does God choose not to? 

Maybe God’s a jerk? 

Or maybe God can’t? 

Or maybe God knows and understands something that we don’t. But for whatever reason, God doesn’t work this way. Jesus steps into our worlds, in the middle of all the action, and he shows up for one, one alone, and then another, and another, and another. 

God shows up for us in medias res. While the wars are raging, while the families are fighting, while the crisis has been going on and on for centuries. Jesus enters people’s lives while he’s walking along the road, while he’s sitting for dinner, while he’s listening to the conflict, while he’s teaching the lesson, and while he’s walking to raise the dead. Jesus comes in the middle of all this messy, juggling, confusing, frightening world, in the middle of it all, and he calls one. He eats with one. He teaches one. He heals one. And then another. And in that way, the whole world. 

We don’t have to start from the beginning. And we don’t have to fix it all. We just have to enter in to what is already happening, and keep going. Keep showing up. Let the story grab our attention, and then keep it. As we’re walking. As we’re eating. As we’re listening and teaching and walking some more. We get to start, right here, right now, in the middle of all this action, in the middle of our mess and our imperfections and our failures.  We don’t have to be fixed or our “best” or finished in order to save the world. We just get to enter in to the stories that are already happening, enter in, show up, and say, “I’m here. What do you need?” This is how God works. This is how the best stories begin. This is how we save the world.

Thanks be to God. 

Over. With. In. A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

 

                                               A Trinity of Trillium: Photo Credit - Rich Hanlon

Read me! Matthew 28:16-20

In honor of my son asking the age old question over his algebra homework, “When are we ever going to use this stuff in the real world,” I would like us all to return to our fifth grade English class. Remember? Mrs. Dowling. She had short red hair and glasses, and sometimes, when the kids would throw the erasers and break up the chalk into tiny little pieces, her stutter would start up as she struggled to get the words out. And you are small for your age, curiously small, and you don’t want to give up believing in Santa Claus, even though all the kids have told you how dumb you are. Your mom sends you to school every morning with bows in your hair, which you immediately yank from your braids as soon as you cross the street. Anyway, you’re sitting next to Jason, who picks his nose and eats the boogers, and Patrick, who has the strangest, most wrinkly hands that make you cringe when you have to hold them to say the Our Father. And Mrs. Dowling comes to the front of the class, where there is a big table set up for science experiments or art projects, group work or geography lessons, but today, it’s empty. There’s nothing there. No paints. No protractors. No giant atlas or shared microscopes. It’s just a table. Nothing else.

“Today we are going to learn about prepositions,” Mrs. Dowling announces. “Get out your grammar books.” And we all sigh. Nothing is more boring than grammar. Nothing can be more tedious than learning about these linking words that are neither noun nor verb, adjective nor adverb. They’re just the glue that holds the more important words together. They’re the lost words, the words you’re not allowed to end a sentence with. 

“A preposition,” Mrs. Dowling continues above the sighs and the groans, “is a word that shows relationship. It is a word that expresses relation to another word or element in the clause. Now. Repeat that back to me class, please.” And so you all drone together, “A preposition is a word that expresses relation to another word or element in the clause.” “Very good, class,” says Mrs. Dowling. “Now to make this a little bit clearer, we will use this table to illustrate. A preposition is any word that can show relationship to the table. For instance, if I go under the table, under is a preposition. If I stand by the table, by is a preposition. I can be on the table, beside the table, beyond the table, in the table, through the table, and even from the table. On, beside, beyond, in, through and from are all prepositions. These are words that don’t really have meaning on their own unless you attach them to something else. Above, across, against, along, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, by, down, from, in, into, near, of, off, on, to, toward, under, upon, with and within, these are all prepositions. You will need to memorize these for a quiz tomorrow. Now. Let me show you how to diagram these prepositions.” And you all sigh again.

The Gospel of John is known for all of Jesus’s “I am” statements. They’re meant to remind us of that moment with Moses and the burning bush, when he asks God who God is, and God simply responds with “I am.” That’s it, that’s all Moses gets. “I am.” So Jesus comes along and gives us a little bit more to hold on to. “I am the bread of life,” he tells us. “I am the light of the world. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life,” and on and on he goes. But my favorite “I am” statement, which scholars would probably say doesn’t even count, comes from our reading today from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is surrounded by what’s left of his followers after a brutal death and a mysterious resurrection, and they’ve climbed a mountain in Gentile Galilee, far away from their Jewish comfort zones. And Jesus has some last words. Jesus gives them a homework assignment, and then he says this, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” And there it is. My favorite I Am statement. I am with you. I am with.

Jesus is a preposition.

Jesus is that thing that shows relationship. That thing that connects.

"I am with,” he says. With. A preposition.

Jesus is with.

And our homework has everything to do with that with. Jesus’s last homework assignment is for us to do what he does. For us to be with.

Go be with.

Go make with.

Go baptize with.

Go teach with.

And remember, I am with.

Jesus - I. Am. With.

I used to hate thinking about the trinity. How could it be that there are three persons up there, but they’re really one God. As if there are these different entities up there that somehow merge but not really but also all the way? As if there’s a table, and a chair, and a bowl of, I don’t know, popcorn or something, somewhere “out there” or “up there” but certainly not here that is also some sort of table-chair-popcorn-bowl conglomeration. They’re all separate things, but they’re also one thing, and well, if you just don’t buy it then there’s something seriously wrong with your faith. Maybe you just need to work a little harder to better believe in the oneness and the separateness of this whole God/Jesus/Holy Spirit, Table/Chair/Popcorn bowl trinity thing. 

But what if we don’t look at God as some sort of noun - some sort of thing - out there, that if we just bent our thinking enough and believed hard enough, we’d know God?

But what if God isn’t a noun at all? Or what if God isn’t just a noun? What if God is a preposition?

Jesus says so. He says, “I am with.” 

Go back to fifth grade, because Jesus says that he’s a preposition.

So of course, if Jesus is a preposition, then so is the Father, so is the Holy Spirit. They’re all connected in this web of relationship, this web of prepositions, where the one needs the others in order to be.

God the Father is the one with authority and power over us all.

God the Spirit is the one who is the very breath in us all.

God the Son is the one who is walking with us in all this messy, confusing, brutal, beautiful humanity stuff.

Do all of this in the name of 

the Father - the one who is over all

And the Son - the one who is with all

And the Holy Spirit - the one who is in all.

In the name of the one God who is over, with, and in us all.

The trinity - Over, With, and In.

We’ve got to do our homework in the name of the Over, the With, and the In.

God is a preposition.

Guys, if we want to know God, we’ve got to go back to fifth grade English class. 

If we want to find God, we’ve got to diagram some sentences.

If we want to do what God calls us to do, we’ve got to take a look at some prepositions. 

We’ve got to look at what completes a relationship, we’ve got to go back to that table and take a look at all the ways that we can be in relationship with that table. 

But this is where it gets tricky, because we want God to be the table. That thing that is hard and sure and measurable. That thing that can be controlled and known and built and understood. But God isn’t the table. God’s the preposition. God’s the relationship to the table. The besides, the beyond, the under and the next to. God’s the in and the above and the between and the through. 

God is the with. God is with. With.

But if that’s too hard to grasp, it’s ok. We’ve got tables and chairs and Mrs. Dowlings and trees and birds and grocery carts and partners and friends and children and donuts and pizza to be with. We’ve got frustration and joy and peace and love and anger and grief to be with. We’ve got Jasons and Patricks and gentiles and jews and prisoners and the sick and the orphaned to be with. We are never not with. With is all around. So is in and through and next to and beyond and near and from. What we call the “Great Commission,” this final set of instructions before Jesus physically departs from the earth, is simply to do our fifth grade prepositions homework. Go be with. And in. And about. And over. And through. 

Go be with the hungry.

Go be with the lost.

Go be with the sinners and the prisoners and the tax collectors and the self righteous. 

Go be with the poor and the wandering.

Go be with the guy down the street who doesn’t look like you, doesn’t vote like you, doesn’t see the world like you. Go be with him.

When are we ever going to use any of this stuff? All the time. Everywhere. Study the algebra, recite the prepositions and memorize the periodic table of elements.   Wander the mall and serve at the food pantry. Sit with the lonely and the lost. Be with the kids who throw the erasers and crumble up the chalk and eat their boogers and have wrinkled hands. Be with your fifth grade self in all her insecurity. With is everywhere.

It’s all with.  Because Jesus is with. 

God is a preposition.

Now Go. Be with.

Thanks be to God.