Hungry Hermit Thrushes
May 8, 2022 - Luke 24: 28-43
There has been a Hermit Thrush sighting in my backyard this year. And several Yellow Rumped Warblers have been around for a couple weeks. If you’ve never heard of a Hermit Thrush or a Yellow Rumped Warbler, you’re not alone. Until I spotted these new-to-me backyard visitors this spring, I had never heard of them either, despite my growing interest in birds and birding. I don’t know what my neighbors think I’m doing with my binoculars eagerly trained out my back window, but I hope to be able at some point to reassure them all that what has my attention so rapt are the wild, feathered visitors.
Over the past few years I’ve started to expand my backyard feeders and to work in more native plants, all in hopes of attracting increased numbers and diversity of feathered friends. And my attempts have yielded some limited success, pulling in more woodpeckers, goldfinches, and even an occasional Blue Jay. But several mornings this past month, I have been delighted to see birds out my window who I had never met before and who I needed help to identify.
It could have something to do with the cold, wet spring. That could be driving these hungry Hermit Thrushes into my vicinity. But I want to hope that it also has something to do with my humble efforts to respect and tend to the needs of my wild friends.
In the middle of today’s text Jesus appears to a whole group of disciples who believe him to be a ghost. There’s this lovely partial sentence in that part of the story that begins “While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering…” It’s not exactly the risen Christ I’m looking at out my back window. But I feel in my joy a disbelief, and a persistent wondering about how faithful people may tend to a planet in peril.
When it comes to the environmental crises we’re facing, I can feel incredibly disheartened about the inertia on the part of big governments and big corporations to face this monumental challenge. I also feel the limits of my little spoonfuls of action to move this mountain to the sea.
So, where I find the most hope and possibility these days is in places where ordinary people meet to amplify and organize around helpful action–in churches, community groups, local governments, and more. When we talk to each other and hear each other’s concerns, I think that’s when we can find a new way forward together.
In response to their joy, disbelief, and wondering if he is a ghost, the risen Christ looks at the disciples and asks, “Do you have anything to eat?” Apparently resurrection is hard work because the risen Christ is hungry.
Now, this kind of story is a rich place for our imaginations to dance around the question of bodily resurrection. If the risen Christ is hungry and has physical needs, then when we, too, rise from the dead will our bodies take a similar corporal form? And if so, ought we to preserve our bodies as well as possible even after we take our last breath?
I have current friends and relatives as well as many predecessors who certainly think and thought so. For me, I am humbled by the mystery of life after death. I choose to trust that however it works, God’s love and grace will find me and carry me on. When I imagine bodily resurrection, it’s easier for my science-interested mind to focus on the holiness of these atoms I now call me going back to the eternal process of life, death, and resurrection that are part of the DNA of all creation.
Me, I’d rather my ashes be scattered or become part of a new growing tree. But perhaps what my well-preserved ancestors and I can agree on is that stories like this one speak to the preciousness of bodies to God. I think they also speak to the preciousness of that which sustains our bodies, including food and the source of all that food: this Earth that we call home.
Last year a group called the Wild Ones of Northern Kane County and the Gail Borden Public Library District hosted a community read and various events around the Doug Tallamy book titled Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard. In the book, Tallamy suggests ordinary people have the power to create a new national park that will re-wild and sustain the natural life around us, if together we work to restore native habitats in our local parks and the very yards that surround our houses, condos, businesses, churches, municipal lots, and apartment buildings. This restoration aids both the carbon capture that we so dearly need, if we are going to evade the worst of a warming planet, and, it restores food sources and breeding grounds for native wildlife, making our neighborhoods more lively and healthy naturehoods for all of the inhabitants–including us humans.
These ideas are included in the “Gardens and Garbage” Sunday School lessons our church’s young people are discussing this month with the help of our Green Team. And more ideas are in the works for how the faithful people of this church may together tend to the body of this planet which God has given us to sustain these bodies and to call home. Who knows how the Holy Spirit may yet lead us to join in this resurrection work.
On the road to Emmaus, two disciples meet the risen Christ, but they don’t know it. They ask him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” This was the man they thought to be dead. This was the man the women told them had risen from the dead. But they had trouble believing. They did not recognize the risen Christ on the road because they were, understandably, not expecting him.
There are times when I, too, am so focused on the reality of suffering and death that I have a hard time seeing the ways new life is already on the way. I do want to be the kind of person who takes time to lament and grieve. At the same time, I know that life is not only about pain. Life is also good, beautiful, and surprising.
It’s overwhelming at times to carry a both/and approach to life—to be aware of the pain and the joy at the same time. But if we don’t, I’m afraid we might miss the depth of beauty all around us.
In her talk about climate anxiety, Stanford University’s Dr. Nicole Ardoin cites a 2021 report from the Pew Research Center that “suggests 80% of people are willing to make changes to how they live and work to reduce the effects of global climate change.” 80% of people is a lot! Imagine what 80% of people could do. Imagine what they are already doing! Imagine how the new life possibilities we need are already underway.
As we journey together, share our joy and pain together, and break bread together, may we, too, keep our eyes open for the ways the risen Christ is among us even now, showing us the way to new life and hopeful possibilities.
May it be so. Amen.
