Considering the birds

I think that our congregation has left the Revised Common Lectionary behind this summer. Our lead pastor is on sabbatical and our interim pastor isn’t a lectionary preacher. We’ve had several changes of scripture, sometimes in the week before a service. Because I have lived my professional life within the lectionary for so many years, it throws me a bit, but change is good for one my age, even if it is a challenge. I’m trying to go with the flow. I just wait until the bulletin is completed and check out the focus text for the service before planning the time with children. That seems to work.

Even though this is year C of the lectionary - a time when we focus on the Gospel of Luke, today in our church we will be hearing a familiar text from the Gospel of Matthew: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”

Even though I think in terms of the texts of the lectionary, and I might have considered the story of Mary and Martha in this week’s reading of Luke, I actually did spend some time this week considering the birds of the air.

We have been enjoying the bounty of the cherry trees in our back yard. We have picked cherries for eating and have given gallons of them to our son’s family for snacking. We have frozen cherries. We have dried cherries. And I have made cherry pie. On Thursday, both Susan and I picked a bucket of cherries and I baked a cherry pie to take to friends. On Friday, it seemed as if most of the birds in the region discovered the cherry tree. They descended in mass. There were times when I’m sure there were more than a hundred birds on a single tree and in the grass below the tree, feasting on cherries. I was entertained by birds chasing rolling cherries that had been dropped on the neighbor’s roofs, and by birds in the rain gutters, retrieving dropped cherries. A crow would fly to the tree and send a cloud of smaller birds into the air until it left. Robins seemed to come one by one, but the smaller birds came in mass, squawking and tussling over the cherries. I sat in my chair on the deck for quite a while just watching the birds. Then I put my chair away so the birds wouldn’t make a mess on the chair.

There was a bit of mess. They weren’t careful with the pits from their cherries. Many of them, along with numerous bird droppings, ended up on our deck, which I had to scrub. Simply hosing it off was insufficient to remove the mess. Somehow the mess seemed worth the entertainment.

The bounty of nature is such that we had plenty of cherries to share. We had had several days of being able to allow our grandchildren to pick and eat cherries from the tree. We have pints of cherries in our freezer. We have dried cherries. And there still is a large bowl of cherries in the refrigerator available for snacking. We had so many that picking them was beginning to be a chore. I don’t mind sharing a few with the birds.

However, I don’t think that it would have occurred to me to use the birds in our back yard, gorging themselves on cherries, while competing with all of the other birds, as an example of not worrying. Actually, they seemed to be pretty stressed. Their wings were flapping, they called out to each other when they didn’t have a cherry in their mouths. They flitted from here to there. And at least the small birds were very flighty and easily frightened. The shadow of a crow was enough to send hundreds of birds swirling into the air and off toward the woods. I don’t think they relaxed while they were gone, either, because they would soon be back, flapping and fluttering as they tried to keep balance on a loaded cherry branch with a dozen other birds pecking at the cherries.

The text from Matthew ends with this advice: “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” I suppose that the birds weren’t worried about tomorrow, because by the next day there were a lot fewer cherries and a lot fewer birds. It seems that Friday was cherry day for the birds and by Saturday they had to look for other sources of food.

The text also uses flowers and grass as examples of reasons not to worry. “If God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?” Lilies are beautiful flowers and the hayfields around here are very beautiful in the springtime. It seems to me, however, that the passage is also a reminder of our mortality and the shortness of life. “Tomorrow is thrown into the oven,” isn’t exactly a description of long life. I’m probably a bit morbid in my mood because I heard yesterday of the death of a friend who is several years younger than I. I knew that he had been sick, but his death caught me a bit off guard. He was a person with whom I had several conversations about life and death. I know he wasn’t afraid of dying, but his life did not end the way he imagined it would. None of us gets to choose the manner of our departure from this life. We all have to surrender control.

Indeed we are more like the grass and the birds than we might think. There are more productive ways to invest our time than worrying about the future. Seeking and recognizing Gods’ gifts in the time that we have, and living lives of justice and righteousness, are enough for our time and our lives.

Still, I will take a few moments, from time to time, to consider the birds as I watch the gift of the wild diversity of creation right in my own back yard.

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