Let the Crows Preach Easter--May 12, 2020

Let the Crows Preach Easter--May 12, 2020

"Jesus said to his disciples, 'Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!" [Luke 12:22-24]

Every day, across the whole world, birds are a day away from starvation and death.

And every day, over this whole beautiful globe, God provides food for the birds and rescues them from the grave.

If you think about it, every day is a little resurrection for the birds, whether it's the cardinals and orioles folks have been spotting at their feeders around here these days, or the crows and ravens Jesus mentions here, or the proverbial "sparrow" that God's eye is on, too.  Every day God provides enough, and every day without their earning it or buying it, God's economy of grace pulls hungry little birds back to life.  You've got to figure that is part of why Jesus chose birds for his object lesson--if you're a flying bird (like not an ostrich or a penguin), you can't afford to store a lot of energy in fat on your body, because you can't get too heavy to lift off the ground with your wings.  And while you might have a nest (and while some members of the crow and raven family are known for hiding treasures they find, from sparkly rocks to bits of food), you can't really take those things with you wherever you are flying.  In other words, unlike, say, a big ol' grizzly bear eating extra in the fall to be able to hibernate through the winter, or a colony of ants who are constantly working to store food for later, birds are constantly on the brink of going hungry... and Jesus says that God is constantly feeding them and bringing them back to life.

Funny--Jesus doesn't think the birds are lazy.  Funny--Jesus doesn't chastise or scold them for not having a good enough work ethic.  Jesus doesn't say that their habit of depending on food to be provided is morally dubious.  In fact, just the opposite--Jesus says that the birds are an example for us of sincere faith!  (As a side note, there is a story about Martin Luther from the Table Talk that he saw dogs as an example of authentic faith, because his own dog, Tolpel, so persistently focused on his master to give him food and trusted that it would be given. Same lesson, different species, it seems.)  All of this is to say that all of our lives are lived constantly in utter dependence on God to raise us up to life again from the brink of death.  Every day, then, is both a gift of grace and an miracle of resurrection from the dead.  Every day of life is a dress rehearsal for the grand resurrection we are promised, too, when at last we let go of our lives and find that God has not dropped us even for a moment, not even then.

Seeing things this way does something to us, I think.  For one, I think it changes the way we understand that promise of life beyond death.  If Jesus is right (and I think it is safe to say he is), then resurrection from the dead has to be understood as a gift of grace, not as a reward for good behavior.  After all, every day, God grants us--and the birds, too, mind you--a rescue from death with food provided when our hands are empty, and that is not a matter of earning, but of receiving a gift.  Every day our continuing existence is made possible because God is generous, not because we have worked for it... and that means, too, that life beyond death is only possible because of God's grace as well.  That should put to rest all of our Respectable Religious nonsense about who we think is, or is not, worthy to be in heaven--it ain't about "worthiness," and it never was.  And if the heart of our faith is about a God who gives life to those at the brink of death, well, then that means our whole faith is inescapably about grace, too.  Taking Jesus seriously will mean we give up the old religious tendency to see the afterlife as a great settling of accounts where prizes are doled out for looking respectable and demerits are meted out for the naughty, because the whole of life--from birth to death to resurrection--has always been powered by the unearned, unmerited goodness of God to stinkers, just like God feeds a world full of freeloading birds.

And if all of that is true, it will do one more thing for our view of this new day: we will see each day, even the ones that feel "blah" or routine or tedious or difficult, as miracles of resurrection.  After all, this day wasn't earned, but it was given.  This day could have been the day all the birds died of starvation, or you and I finally had these old bodies wear out on us.  But we have been given this day, like we are awakened out of the tomb every morning, and to treat it as anything less than an awesome wonder is to miss the glory of God right under our noses.

I know it can be frustrating to keep on going sometimes.  I know, especially in these days, when it feels in so many ways like we are being asked to keep running without any chance to rest, no finish line in sight, and no change of scenery, either, it can seem like the sheer drudgery is too much to bear any longer.  But at the same time, each day is a gift you and I did not earn and could not buy.  Each breath reminds us that these bodies of ours are uncannily fragile and rely precariously on a puff of air coming in and out of our lungs  Each moment we get, even the ones that feel rotten to live through at times, is handed to us like seed for birds.

So today, before the grumping that may be bubbling up from somewhere in your or my soul, let us pause to consider the glorious, grace-filled miracle of the beating hearts and the gift it is that God rescued us again from the grip of death once again.  That might make this day feel like something of adventure, if we dare to let the crows preach Easter to us today.

Lord Jesus, turn our eyes to see your way of bringing us--and the whole world--back to life again.  And let us respond to you in this day with thanks for your grace.