Chicken Lessons--July 13, 2022

Chicken Lessons--July 13, 2022

"For this reason I sent you Timothy, who is my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus, as I teach them everywhere in every church." [1 Corinthians 4:17]

Here's some free advice: never underestimate how much you can learn from chickens.

Not cowards [although I suppose you can learn something from a coward, too], but from actual honest-to-goodness poultry--I mean real chickens.  Especially for scientists, like the kind who want to learn about how ancient dinosaurs walked and lived.  Really, I'm not kidding.

For a long time, paleontologists--the scientists who study ancient life from the fossil record--thought that dinosaurs were all slow-moving, cold-blooded, lizard-like creatures.  All we had to go on was the evidence of fossils, which are just old bones, and you can't recreate much in the way of social behavior or movement from the way bones lay in the rock.  But at some point scientists realized that many dinosaurs--the ones called "theropods"--have a lot in common with modern birds, from big ones like emus or ostriches to small ones like, yes, chickens.  The common way their bodies are built, the shape of their hip and foot structures, and even the evidence of feathers in both dinosaurs and modern birds, suggest that raptors and T. rexes are related to hens and roosters.  And at least part of what that means is that we might be able to get a glimpse of how some dinosaurs acted, moved, and lived, from watching what chickens do.  At the very least, scientists tell us, we can learn some things from living creatures who are related to ancient ones that we cannot learn from just the record preserved in stone fossils.

I want to suggest that the Christian life works much the same: there are some things we can only learn from living disciples, by watching and listening and practicing alongside one another, that we could not learn in the same ways if all we had was a historical record in a book.  If you've ever tried to teach yourself a new skill--say, repairing a leaky faucet, assembling a piece of furniture, or some home carpentry--you likely already know that printed directions are only so much help.  What really helps you to learn, not just what to do, but how to do it, is to work with someone who has done it before, someone who can teach you with their expertise.  Sometimes a paragraph of explanation in a written instruction manual isn't clear.  Sometimes the diagrams that come with your IKEA cabinet is too vague.  Sometimes your real-life setting means you have to modify the directions that came with your tools.  But when you learn from a real person in real situations, you see how they adapt, how they bring the printed page to life, and how they translate diagrams or words into flesh-and-blood actions.  Sometimes, in other words, you have to learn from living chickens to understand what the fossils of long extinct dinosaurs cannot reveal.

Here we have the apostle Paul sending a person to the Christians in Corinth, even while he is in the midst of writing them a letter.  If Paul could have reduced everything to words or diagrams, he could have put it all down on the papyrus and trusted the Corinthians to just read the manual and get it right.  But instead, Paul knows that they need people who will embody the way of Jesus--who can show them in their actions, their attitudes, and their choices what it can look like to love like Christ.  That's why he is sending Timothy along the with the written words of his letter--Timothy can show them, in the way he leads, the way he serves, the way he listens, and the way he loves, how to bring the words of Paul's epistle to life in flesh and blood.

This is one of the gifts we have in each other: we learn how to love like Jesus from others who have been claimed and shaped by his love, too.  It's why we don't just mail Bibles to everyone in town with a sticky-note on the cover saying, "Read this and do it, and we'll see you in heaven."  We invite others to join our way of life, like others invited us into that way of life, because we know that the Jesus way of life can't be reduced to facts you can memorize or an instruction manual you can print.  We see how the love of Jesus actually moves in real situations, when written words at best can tell us what other people did in their own times and settings.  It's like discovering how much you can learn from living relatives of ancient creatures, rather than making guesses from the fossils alone.

Who are the people you can learn from today--who are the people around you that show you the love of Jesus in real ways? And who might be watching you already, seeking to learn what it means to live their faith, because they have seen the face of Christ already in you?

Today, may we be living embodiments of the Reign of God, and not merely dusty fossils trapped in stone.

Lord Jesus, help us to learn your love in the people you have raised up among us.