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"Look at the Birds" Sermon preached by John C. Hall on
December 17, 2006 One thing that Jesus said was “Look at the birds.” That sounds kind of simple, almost too easy. But Jesus talked about birds a lot. There must be a reason for that. Listen to these passages that all mention birds. These verses from Matthew make up our scripture lesson for today. Look at the birds of the air;
they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly
Father feeds them.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Two sparrows are sold for a penny. But not even one sparrow falls to the ground apart from God. “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” What’s the deal with birds? Why should we look at them? Jesus talked about birds in three ways. He talked about what they eat. He talked about where they nest. And he talked about how they fall. First, what they eat. Back in 1996, when I preached another sermon with this same title, looking at the birds carefully was new to me at that point. The birds I looked at closely were the birds in our backyard, the birds that come to the feeder. I don’t take any credit for the birdfeeders in our yard. That’s all from Robin’s initiative. But when it’s cold out, and the feeder is empty, sometimes I’m the one who gets to fill it when I return home from one of my winter walks. I look at the birds in the trees and see them with their feathers fluffed up, hanging onto the branches. They appear to have very hungry looks on their little faces. And then I wonder, how do those tiny, bodies even stay alive on cold winter days, when it’s freezing? Birds have a very large surface area of their body in proportion to their body weight. That means they need a huge amount of food to keep their body temperature normal. In the winter, I don’t see a lot of food out there for birds. I don’t see any insects, for example, but somehow they make it. God feeds them. Over the past eight years, my bird watching has expanded beyond the backyard, to other parts of Middletown, and down to the lower part of the Connecticut River, the shore, to Rhode Island, Cape Cod, and Maine. Down around Essex, I often see osprey diving for fish. This is quite a sight, and you shouldn’t miss it. An osprey dives straight down from an altitude of a hundred feet, or two hundred feet. If you watch carefully, you can see that this large bird, speeding straight down head first, and just before it hits the water it turns and enters feet first. A few seconds later, it flies out of the water and most of the time it has a fish in its large claws, which it then carries back to a tree for lunch or back to its nest to feed the babies. Once I was in my kayak in a quiet estuary where egrets hang out. I saw a Great Egret, which is a large, white, long necked bird, standing on a rock with a small fish in its mouth, and the fish was still flopping and wiggling in the egret’s mouth. I guess it was waiting for the fish to “calm down” before eating it, which I can easily understand. Eating a still-flopping fish wouldn’t be my idea of a pleasant experience. I sat and watched with my binoculars. After a few minutes, the fish wasn’t moving anymore. The egret tossed the fish up in the air a short distance, caught it again in its mouth, and I could actually see the bulge in the egret’s throat move down its neck. Crows have an undeserved, unfortunate reputation for some reason – maybe because they’re very common and maybe in part because they eat carrion. We need crows, because without them, we’d have a lot of carrion lying around, especially in the form of road kill. Actually, crows are one of the smartest birds. They’re related to Mina birds, one of the best talking birds. But they don’t eat just carrion. Once I saw a crow flying by with a huge apple in its mouth. I was amazed it could get off the ground with that thing. Jesus also talked about birds nesting. Birds make their nests out of sticks, or mud, or grass, or string, or a combination of materials they pick up. In the spring, you can see a mother robin with a huge bundle of grass in her mouth, so large she can’t even see around it. One type of bird might nest under the eaves of your house. Another in the fork of a tree. Shore birds might nest in a pile of rocks or in sand dunes. Some birds nest in hollowed out tree trunks. And some birds choose the bird houses we hang in our yards. If you want to witness a great spectacle, get out your binoculars and watch a nest of young house sparrows taking their first flight out of a birdhouse in the spring. It’s better than the Discovery Channel. If you go for a walk in Wadsworth State Park, or around Long Hill Estate, don’t just look at the path where you’re walking. Also look up, and occasionally you’ll see an owl high up on a branch. This is more likely if you’re walking alone, or at least not talking. If you take a canoe or a kayak out to the boggy meadows between Middletown and Cromwell, you’ll see many different kinds of birds: families of mallard ducks and lot of tree swallows and red-winged blackbirds that love the grass that grows up out of the water. I’ve also seen a black backed night-heron, a Baltimore Oriole, an Eastern wood pee-wee, an Eastern king bird, and many other species. I’m not bird expert, by any means. I take pictures, email them to my friend Dan in Pennsylvania, and he does the I.D. work. I think if I sent Dan a single feather, he could tell me what kind of bird it came from. If you go to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket or Cape Cod, you’ll see areas of beach roped off as protected nesting areas for Piping Plovers and other shore birds whose habitat has disappeared as more and more houses get built along the beaches. Finally, Jesus talked about birds falling. Considering how many birds there are, and considering their short lifespan, it’s amazing how seldom you actually see a bird that has “fallen” — a bird that’s died. Sometime, a bird may fly into your window and you’ll find it on the ground just below the window. Sometimes you’ll see a pile of feathers on the ground, where a small bird has been eaten by a bigger one, probably a hawk. When I’m out on my bike, I sometimes see a bird by the road that got hit by a car. At the beach, you’ll sometimes see a dead seagull. But for the most part, birds die very discreetly, don’t they? They seem to die out of sight. It’s amazing to me that God made such beautiful, exquisitely engineered creatures. They’re able to fly. They survive the bitter cold. They migrate thousands of miles. They have brilliant colors and beautiful songs. In ancient times, birds were thought to be messengers from God, or mediators between heaven and earth. This is why the Holy Spirit comes as a dove. This is why angels have wings. And yet, these creatures have such a short lifespan. A few years, at most. What are we supposed to learn from all this? Why did Jesus say, “Look at the birds”? Maybe he said that because birds’ beauty, their songs, and their struggles, resemble our beauty as creatures, our songs, and our struggles. Look at the birds, Jesus said. Look at the birds just because Jesus told us to do it. It doesn’t need any more justification. Look at the birds. Get a pair of binoculars and so you can look at the birds close up. I find it very exciting to see any bird at really close range. Look at the birds and think about all the things Jesus said about them. Look at the birds, at their beauty and vulnerability. It might make you feel different about all life, including your life. Look at the birds. Just that. So simple. Look at the birds.
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