Extinct Woodpeckers, Divorce, Broken Hearts: Yeah. I Went There.

Mark 10:2-16

 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.

What is...Wolf?

Mark 9:30-37

  When Dan and I were first married - before there were smart phones and instant on demand video distractions and we had to wait through the high squeal of dial up just to check our email, we would play Scrabble. And Dan would smoke me. Every. Time. He not only had, and still has, a superior vocabulary, but he also had this knack for maximizing on the triple letter scores with the Ps and Js and Ks. One night, I’d had enough. I was getting so frustrated that Dan always beat me, and was currently trouncing me by over one hundred points. I was annoyed that I couldn’t seem to master this game like Dan had. I was discouraged at the threatening thought that Dan might be smarter, cleverer, better, than I. I was clearly spiraling. I could feel the discomfort climbing up from my stomach. My head was getting hot. My vision began to blur with irritation and resentment. And I watched him as he gently played the tiles on the board: W. O. L. F. “That’s 78 points,” he said with a triumph. And I looked at him, and I looked at the board, and looked at him and looked at the board and I kid you not, with something very near tears in my eyes I asked him, with all the seriousness and confusion and a truly, authentic, lack of comprehension, but also with this sort of triumph, as if I’d finally called him out on making this word up, I asked, “What is ‘wolf’?”

And I don’t remember exactly what Dan said or how he responded. I have a vague memory of a kind of bemused incredulity. “Uh, Jenn? W.O.L.F. Wolf. You don’t know what a wolf is?” And I swear, for some really long seconds, I honestly had no idea what what a wolf was. I was so frustrated and so angry and so wrapped up in my desire to, for once, beat Dan at Scrabble, that I pretty much completely lost my mind. I lost a certain grasp of reality. I couldn’t recognize familiar things. Words had lost their meaning. I was so swallowed up in what I wanted, what I needed to be true, that suddenly “wolf” was no longer a word in my lexicon. 

We joke about it now. Whenever one of us misunderstands something, or we miss the obvious, or we have a hard time comprehending what, to the other one of us, seems like a fairly simple concept, we’ll say, “What is wolf?" And then laugh at the situation.

John Calvin once lamented: “So great is the influence of preconceived opinion, that it brings darkness over the mind in the midst of the clearest light.” In other words, our preconceptions, our biases, our assumptions, and our versions of reality carry so much weight for us that when we are presented with opposing facts, these preconceptions, biases, and versions of reality cloud up and hide the truth. 

This was the Copernican Revolution, right? Copernicus essentially proved that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system revolved around the sun, and disproved that these planets and this sun revolved around the Earth, and this idea rocked the entire world. This concept, this idea that perhaps we humans weren’t the center and the focus around which all of creation revolved, was completely unfathomable to the Christian Church. Their preconceptions clouded their acceptance of the truth. They looked at the facts and they saw the evidence and its implications and they basically said, “what is wolf?” 

Eratothenes pretty much proved that the earth was round way back before Jesus was even born, and still, today, after geometry and explorers and photographic pictures from outer space, we have flat-earthers who cannot handle the truth of it.

We have climate change deniers who focus on the now debunked studies of a few scientists who question the negative impact that humans are having on this world, despite the hurricanes and floods and droughts and fires and pandemics and the rising tides and temperatures and the melting ice caps and the scientific consensus of 99% of climate experts that all say that human-made climate change is real, and is a serious threat to our health and the future of the human race.

A few people saw some behavior changes in their children after their first MMR vaccinations, and that inspired a quack so-called scientist to run a faulty, now debunked experiment that supposedly proved that vaccines cause autism, and now we have an entire antivaxer movement, and so now we have rising incidents of whooping cough and measles and a resurgence of polio, which was once so close to being completely eradicated.

    In all these situations, people have held on so tightly to their preconceived opinions, that they couldn't see otherwise, even when presented with facts.

What is…wolf?

This is a human condition. We all do it. It’s called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the uncomfortable thing that happens when we are confronted by a truth that contradicts what we previously thought. It’s when we encounter evidence that fails to meet our expectations, and we kind of flip out. And over and over again, we choose the option that meets our preconceived notions, rather than revise and adjust our worldview. 

And more information doesn’t help. In fact, it can make this cognitive dissonance worse. Studies have shown that people more easily believe the resources and the articles and the studies that already support their perspective. And we more quickly disregard any evidence that might contradict our idea of what is true. “We learn and remember agreeable information more easily. We seek it out, and we ignore, avoid, and devalue information that does not fit our view or our expectations.” We “selectively expose” ourselves to new information - that is, we tend to pick and choose the “new” information that will confirm what we already believe to be true. We surround ourselves entirely with others who agree with us. We manipulate the facts in order to fit them into our narrative. This is the “alternative fact” society, where, as an article in The Atlantic states, “There are facts and there are beliefs and there are things you want so badly to believe that they become as facts to you.”

When we’re confronted with conflicting ideas, it’s just our human nature to brush them off, forget them, devalue them, or ignore them altogether. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. It forces us out of our own little worldview and into the perspective of another, and this does not feel good. What feels good, is being right. And we will pursue that feeling of being right all the way to the end of the world. Instead of opening ourselves up to other possibilities, we double down on our previous beliefs. We do this kind of “motivated reasoning” where we do theological or sociological or even so-called "scientific" backflips in order for us to remain convinced of what we already believe. 

Now for most of us, this doesn’t happen in every situation. If we walk out the door and encounter rain after the forecast told us to expect sun, we grab our umbrellas and we go on with our day. If the bus is scheduled to come at 8:17 and it’s already 8:19, most of the time, we just wait a little longer. But when our beliefs are tied to our identities and our communities, there’s much more at stake, and that means it’s much, much more uncomfortable when we are confronted with something that might threaten to shift those beliefs. We need each other, and we think that we all have to think and believe the same things in order for us to stay connected to each other. And so, suddenly, wearing a mask to the grocery store isn’t just about doing our part to protect each other from a deadly virus, it becomes a symbol of who is on your side, it’s an expression of what group you belong to, it becomes a political and moral and sometimes even spiritual stance. Even if we are confronted with the proven evidence that masks and vaccinations save lives, we will resist that evidence, avoid masks, refuse the vaccination, because to accept those things might mean that we are no longer members of that group. And we so, so, so long to belong. And in order to belong, we start to focus more on the symbols, the rules, and the definitions rather than the relationships. 

    Relationships tend to destroy preconceived notions. They wreak havoc on static belief systems. Relationships cause us to rewind the tape and question everything we thought we knew.

What is…wolf?

So this isn’t just a thing that we are experiencing now in our information-overloaded, politically dissected, instant-gratification, social media world. This is a human thing. It’s our condition. It’s exactly what was going on here in our reading today. 

Jesus is walking along, telling the disciples, once again, about this hard thing. He’s going to be betrayed by humans, by people just like you and me, and they’re going to kill him and then three days later he’s going to rise again. 

Uh, say what now?

Over and over again, Jesus confronts them with an entirely new paradigm, a conflicting set of facts that upend everything they believed the Son of Man was supposed to do and mean and achieve. This is the disciples experiencing complete and total cognitive dissonance. This can not be what is true about the Messiah. This doesn’t match the king and the political power and the reunification of Israel that the Messiah is going to bring. This is not the belief system around which my community has defined itself. This doesn’t make sense, and this is not what we expected. And they don’t understand. And they experience fear. They have anxiety. They lose a certain sense of what is real. We can't criticize them for this because we do it all the time.

What is…wolf?

And then they, like us, double down on their previous narrative. They not only think that all of this is going to turn out great, but they also start arguing on the way about who is going to be the greatest. Jesus has told them about the fact of suffering, and the disciples have rejected that fact in order to hold on to their belief in triumph.

And Jesus calls them out on it. He basically says, “Your expectations are different from the real. Your beliefs don’t match up with the truth. You think it’s all about being the first and the greatest and the best, but really, the fact is, the truth is, whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And he doubles down on this. He really wants to drive this home. He takes a kid, someone who has no current value or claim on being “the greatest” and he wraps this kid in his arms and he says, “if you welcome one like this, you welcome me, and if you welcome me, you welcome the One who sent me.”

This isn’t a story about a cute kid sitting on Jesus’s lap and telling him that he wants a Red Ryder bb gun for Christmas. This isn’t just a feel good story about how we should value children. (Of course we should). This is about how Jesus calls us to enter in to those spaces where we are experiencing a cognitive dissonance, those spaces where we are so very tempted to just hear what we want to hear and expect what has always been, and be open to something new. You know, like kids. Kids aren’t just cute and silly and messy. They’re a little rebellious. They ask “why” and “who says” and “so what?” They question the status quo. Kids are malleable and moldable and flexible. They’re resilient. When given a new situation or a new set of information, they’re quick to change their minds. They aren’t threatened by new ideas or new perspectives because it’s all new to them all the time. 

When Jesus calls us to be a servant to all, to welcome the child as if we are welcoming him, he is asking us to see the world outside of our limited perspectives. You can’t serve anyone if you can’t see what they need. And you can’t see what they need until you get out of your own cognitive space and try to occupy someone else’s. And that’s gonna be a little uncomfortable. We need cognitive dissonance in order to grow and change and learn and be in relationship. Kids have this in spades, but somehow, at least for awhile, they aren’t threatened by it. They take it in stride because they know that their value isn’t in what they think or what they believe or the symbols they adhere to. They know that they belong simply because of who they are. They can change their minds, they can explore, they can get uncomfortable and try something new because their belonging isn’t tied to any of those symbols of membership or expectation or how things have always been. 

Our belonging isn’t tied to the fact that we drive on the right side of the road or that we vote a certain way or fly a certain flag or whether we wear masks in the grocery store or not. Our belonging is tied to something deeper and more flexible and more malleable and more true than any of that. Our belonging is tied to the dynamic of relationship. No matter what changes all around us, no matter what new facts come to light, we can adjust, we can adapt, we can survive and even embrace the dissonance because we are moored to the One who resisted all definitions, who avoided all simplifications, who upended all expectations, and who calls us into the dynamic, terrifying, ever-changing, paradigm shifting, revolutionizing relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Jesus Christ: Two triple letters on a double word score plus a bingo for using all your tiles: 144 points.

Thanks be to God.