Birdsoul

Propers: The First Sunday of Christmas, AD 2024 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Far over in Norway’s distant realm, / That land of ice and snow,

Where the winter nights are long and drear, / And the north winds fiercely blow,

From many a low-thatched cottage roof, / On Christmas eve, ’tis said,

A sheaf of grain is hung on high, / To feed the birds o’erhead.

In years gone by, on Christmas eve, / When the day was nearly o’er,

Two desolate, starving birds flew past / A humble peasant’s door.

“Look! Look!” cried one, with joyful voice / And a piping tone of glee:

“In that sheaf there is plenteous food and cheer, / And the peasant had but three.

One he hath given to us for food, / And he hath but two for bread,

But he gave it with smiles and blessings, / ‘For the Christ-child’s sake,’ he said.”

“Come, come,” cried the shivering little mate, / “For the light is growing dim;

’Tis time, ere we rest in that cosy nest, / To sing our evening hymn.”

And this was the anthem they sweetly sang, / Over and over again:

“The Christ-child came on earth to bless / The birds as well as men.”

So begins a poem entitled “Julenek,” by A.M. Tomlinson. As the tale continues, this same penniless peasant, who showed such generosity to the birds in the midst of his own scarcity, then falls into crisis, and is saved by divine intervention through the intercession of the birds. The birds pray to God, and God hears them. God saves a man, for the sake of beasts.

On one level, this is a pleasant fable, a short story in which animals impart a moral lesson. But beyond this, Tomlinson taps into a deeper spiritual reality commonly expressed in the Psalms. Nature has agency in the Bible. She has a will of her own, and thus is wild. Beasts of the field, birds of the air, and denizens of the deep all acknowledge and praise their Creator. Sun and moon, shining stars, waters above and waters below, fruit trees, cedars, creeping things, angels and the highest of heavens all join in one united chorus.

And if we are lucky, when we are blessed, we might catch a glimpse of this underlying sacred unity—the harmony of existence, the music of the spheres—so often obscured by the fever of daily life and the horrors of a nature red in tooth and claw. Mystics call this unity Sophia, or Holy Wisdom. Sophia is Oneness: the Oneness of the God whom we know as the Three Realities of Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit; and the Oneness shared between Creator and Creation.

When we are overcome by a canyon, struck dumb by a sunset, smile at the stately procession of a crow across our yard, these are glimpses of Sophia, of the sacred unity undergirding all. For indeed, when we affirm that God created us ex nihilo, out of nothing, we mean of course that God has created us out of nothing other than Himself. Creation is the first miracle: that infinite Being and Knowing and Love would empty out a space for something separate. The One becomes none, in order to make the many.

Incarnation is the next: that God, having created all things out of love and delight, and not from any loneliness, lack, nor need within the Godhead, then freely chooses to become part of His Creation, like an author stepping into his own book. We are first made “other,” sent forth from God; then remade One, gathered again unto our Father, so that nothing and no-one is lost, yet everything is gained. He gives us a world to steward, a world to explore, then joins us in the dance that we’ve begun.

It is a vision of Creation as sacred, as holy, as in some sense the first Body of God. That’s not to say it hasn’t fallen—we very much have, and the world is not as it ought to be, not as God intended—yet nothing is beyond the love, the grace, the power of our God to save. Nothing is beyond the Resurrection. God comes to us as Jesus to redeem all humankind: to live our life and die our death and raise us up eternal. For we were meant to be the bridge betwixt things earthly and divine, spiritual and material. Adam was High Priest of all Creation.

So much corruption has come through human hands, so much cruelty and waste and needless, awful suffering. Thus it is only fitting that healing come now through those same hands, human hands: the hands of the New Adam, broken open by Crucifixion. Do you think God doesn’t care for animals? Or for plants or rocks or stars? The Bible says He does. And they have souls, you know, according to medieval Christian piety.

There are in our tradition three sorts of souls: the vegetative, the sensitive, and the rational. The vegetative soul exists in anything that grows, in whatever has life, however we define it. Sensitive souls are animals, who sense and perceive and feel; anyone who’s had a dog should know she has a soul. The rational soul is that which can discern both good and evil. We have reason, in theory, and may transcend our instincts. The rational soul possesses moral responsibility. That’s why there’s no such thing as a bad dog, only bad owners.

All of Creation has a place in the world to come. Everyone and everything shall “appear once more In a new & most beautiful Edition, Corrected and amended by the Author.” As to what exactly that might look like, I couldn’t rightly tell you. It’s hard to imagine vegetarian predators, or how a mosquito might appear if it needn’t drink our blood. Yet we are promised that the lion will lay down with the lamb, the child play with the adder.

My point is simply this: we weren’t the only ones waiting for the Christ. I do not claim that animals have languages and prophets and systems of organized faith, though indeed some might. But just by being what they are, they declare their Maker’s glory.  “God,” the Sufi poet sang, “sleeps in rocks, dreams in plants, stirs in animals, and wakes in man.” All of us are His children, for we all are one in Him.

St Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” For truly nature longs to be freed from the same fetters of mortality and decay that have enslaved all humankind. No more natural selection. No more survival of the fittest. Only life eternal in the Lord of men and beasts. Can we imagine? Or is it simply too fantastical on this side of the grave? I do not pretend to know the mechanics of resurrection, only the miracle, only the promise.

Everything comes from God in Christ; everything is sustained in every moment by God in Christ; and everything returns to God in Christ at last. There really is nowhere else to go. If we fly up to heaven, He’s there; should we fall into hell, He is there. Christ has conquered the angels and the demons, the celestial spheres of the heavens, the deepest pits of the abyss, with the same limitless love that has filled up and sundered His tomb.

And the last enemy to be destroyed is death. She shall be cast along with Hades into the burning lake of fire, the sacred refining flames of God the Holy Spirit, and there shall death be then remade: from nothing into something, from negation into creation. Death reborn shall be our transformation and rebirth. All of this has already been accomplished in eternity. It’s just down here we wait for our salvation to spool out. But we know where this is going. It’s all going back to Him, to the Babe laid in a manger, to the Man killed on the Cross.

And He will make it right: every thought, every second, every sin of every soul, made whole, made one, made alive in Him. “Behold, I make all things new!” The fusion of God and Man—Creator and Creation made one in Christ—this is the conquest God hath wrought through Mary’s womb! This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Remember the birds, and the song they sang, / When the year rolls round again:

“The Christ-child came on earth to bless / The birds as well as men.”

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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