Ah…the dreaded Sunday after Easter!
Every minister’s nightmare!
Sometimes called “letdown Sunday…”
Not here…not today…all around us,
permeating our lives,
breathing into us like the Risen Christ,
is LIFE!
How fitting that this Sunday after Easter
is also Earth Day…
How fortunate we are to be part of a congregation
that values Earth enough to offer this amazing garden of new life…
this sacred place, where, like Moses,
we can stand and sit on holy ground!
Even as we gaze at the colors,
and breathe in the fragrances,
we know that life doesn’t always
come packaged so beautifully.
Many days,
the sacred is cleverly disguised
within the profane,
the extraordinary is made almost invisible
by the mundane.
In the story we just heard,
and just when they were carefully locked
behind the doors of fear,
Jesus came and stood among them…
A few days later,
with doors shut tight to the chaos outside,
Jesus stood among them
and breathed peace into their doubts.
I daresay this Jesus
who could move through walls and locked doors
brought to his first friends
the sacred in the midst of their mundane fears;
he breathed into their profane doubts,
the extraordinary.
This is a story, no doubt about it,
that reminds us
the sacred and the ordinary
live side by side…
one revealed in the other…
I noticed the same
when I was on sabbatical in Ireland last year…
every ancient temple of stones we visited…
every holy well out of which I drank…
every sacred burial mound we circumnavigated…
all required that we first walk through the pasture, picking our way among sheep droppings
and cow pies.
The sacred among the profane…
the extraordinary in the middle of the mundane…
there was new life catching us,
once again, by surprise!
You may know that one of our church neighbors
is a family of birds—a pair of hawks
who live in one of the eucalyptus trees.
I see one or the other of them regularly,
yet their grandeur still takes my breath away!
And, right on cue, yesterday
while sitting in my car in the church parking lot,
talking on the phone,
door open, enjoying the breeze,
one of those amazing hawks flew so close
to my open door that I could have reached outand touched its wingtip.
Talk about the sacred swooping into
the ordinariness of a phone call!
But that wasn’t all…
The hawk flew over the parking lot,
and perched on top of one of the light poles.
In a flash, within inches of the hawk’s steady gaze,
a hummingbird flew over and stopped.
The hawk turned its head…
the hummingbird flitted over into the hawk’s view.
Head turned again…more flitting…
It was as if the two
were having some kind of sacred conversation…
and I was privileged to observe from a distance.
When I arrived home, of course,
I had to mine the experience for meaning.
So, like any good researcher,
I went online (!).
This is what I discovered:
Hawks symbolize, in a variety of traditions,
attention
vision
power
energy
leadership
intensity
intuition
discernment
As birds of flight,
they are messengers,
and the hawk is THE messenger bird,
teaching us to be more observant,
especially more observant
of our actions and reactions,
and aware of ourselves
and of the world around us.
What a fitting partner for Earth Day!
In various Native American traditions,
hummingbirds symbolize
healing
endurance
the ability to go into small spaces
joy
happiness
symbols of the nectar of life, of life’s sweetness
accomplishing things said to be impossible
As the smallest of all birds,
hummingbirds are thought to bring
“special” messages of malleability,
of the importance of rolling with the punches,
and adapting to what life hands us.
Hummingbirds are the only birds
that can fly backwards
and the only bird that can stop completely
while traveling at full speed;
they can hover, move quickly in any direction, and thus carry their special message
of moving and flexing in life’s wake.
A hummingbird’s long tongue
allows it to bypass
the tough and bitter outer layer
to find the hidden treasures underneath.
Another welcome partner for this Earth Day!
I hope you can hear the sacred message
in the midst of this ordinary video clip
of two birds talking in our church parking lot.
It seems to me to be one more example
of new life, new directions, new opportunities,
making themselves apparent
in the everyday world
literally right here in our own backyard.
Weeks ago,
when I first saw that this could be Earth Day,
I had imagined a meditation calling us to account
reminding us of the vital necessity
of taking care of our earth home.
I imagined readings and prayers,
poetry and song that would inspire us
here in this inspiring garden.
But then life happened.
The ordinary crept in.
Behind the locked doors of my imagination,
the Risen Christ begged to be seen and heard,
once again, in the everyday rituals of life.
First, in a baptism and a baby’s sweet smile.
Then, in music,
left over, unsung on Resurrection Sunday,
and sung today from the heart.
Then, in handbells and trumpet,
with so much music to play that it
overflowed the empty tomb.
Finally, I realized, that once again,
God had the first laugh and the last joke.
Once again,
in the ordinary stuff of our life together,
the sacred message of new life
asked to be repeated.
And I got it!
We are to be caretakers of the earth,
precisely because it is in the earth,
in the stuff of our earth home,
within the ordinariness of life lived here on earth,
that the sacred is made real and tangible.
God does not live in some far off temple.
God lives here,
in this temple, this earth temple.
And through this temple,
concrete enough to see and touch
and stand upon with confidence,
God’s real-life concrete love is made apparent.
Take care of this earth home,
so that the hawks and the hummingbirds
babies and trumpeters,
soloists and entire congregations,
can continue to talk to one another…
in places where we may listen in…
and hear that God loves us…still…
