“Even the sparrow has found a home and the swallow a nest

where she may lay her young, by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts.”

– Psalm 84:3

Beloved of God,

It was summer at Holden Village, 1991, and I was at work in the Registrar’s office when some children came in with a scrawny, featherless baby bird, which had fallen from its nest.  It was so small and vulnerable in their little hands, and irresistibly cute, of course, that immediately I started to bond with the little creature.  Our search for the bird’s nest came up empty-handed, so we decided it was up to us to do our best to care for it.  A cardboard box was acquired and grass added to make it as nest-like as possible.  But what would we feed it?  As word about the bird spread a volunteer pledged to bring fresh maggots from the woodlot each day, and so my unlikely role as surrogate parent began.  Every day as I went to work, I brought the bird with me in the box.  And every night I carried it home again.  I wasn’t at all sure what I was doing, but the daily diet of wood worms seemed to agree quite well with our young robin, and as long as this was the case, we were happy.

Soon after we began raising him, I saw him working to stretch his growing wings, and I took to calling him STRETCH. The name stuck.  About a week after Stretch became part of our Village flock; he became a fledgling and began making short flights from one corner of the registration office to the other.  This complicated things.  He was entering a new phase, and expecting him to remain quietly in his cardboard box was not going to work. On top of that, now that he was growing up, a deeper challenge presented itself. How would he learn to find food for himself?  On the one hand, he presumably had instincts to guide him in that regard, but on the other hand, it was becoming clear that instinct alone would not guarantee his survival in this wilderness setting.

Now fully fledged, Stretch was ready to make his way in the world—only he didn’t have the right kind of modeling to make that transition successfully.  Instead of hanging out in the Registration office, he’d grown accustomed to hanging out on the balcony of our chalet, and when he spied me coming up the path toward home, he’d glide down, land at my feet, and look up at me expecting a handout.  Short of getting down on my hands and knees and poking my nose at the ground looking for worms, I had no idea how Stretch was going to learn to get food on his own!  I tried a few heart-to-heart chats with him, but to no avail.  Finally, one day, he flew off and didn’t return.  I like to think that he fell in with a good peer group of robins, and learned from them the ways of being a bird.  But I’ll never know.

In 1918 Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to protect birds from wanton killing.  To celebrate the centennial, National Geographic Magazine is partnering with the National Audubon Society, BirdLife International, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in declaring 2018 the Year of the Bird.  We are joining that bandwagon and focusing our three week SEASON OF CREATION this June on OUR AVIAN KIN.  Yes, you might say our congregation is “going to the birds”! 

We have an exciting line up of guest speakers for each of the three Sundays, beginning June 10th, including our own Jim Hunt, acclaimed author and naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, and S’Klallam Native story teller Roger Fernandes.  In addition, we’ll have an Audubon “bird kit” on hand all three weeks to help us explore birds that are common to our part of the world.  I hope will be part of it all—and will bring a friend!

In 1962 Rachel Carson’s landmark book SILENT SPRING opened our eyes to the vulnerability of birds to DDT and other pesticides.  But more than that, it reawakened us to the interrelatedness of all species who call Earth “home” and kick-started a new attitude toward nature. Whether one is a being of the avian variety or a being of the human variety, getting connected to a community that can provide safety, nurture, guidance, and modeling is essential.  That’s something we each try to do in each of our own households, and it’s what we strive to do here at Peace.  The more we learn about that natural world that God declared “VERY GOOD,” the more we can clearly see its sacred nature.  “Even the sparrow,” the Psalmist reminds us, “has found a home and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young, by the side of your altars, O LORD of hosts.”

Blessings abounding,

Pastor Erik

“Christ fights with the devil in a curious way—the devil with great numbers, cleverness, and steadfastness,

and Christ with few people, with weakness, simplicity, and contempt—and yet Christ wins.”

– Martin Luther, Table Talk

Beloved of God,

Our journey this Easter season is about conforming ourselves and our lives to Christ; living our lives following his lead.  The language we’ve heard these weeks from the Jesus of John’s gospel—LISTEN TO VOICE OF THE GOOD SHEPHERD; ABIDE IN THE VINE—is Christ’s answer to the question, how do we live in this world with all its cruelty, malice, competition, and greed without being defeated and deflated?   We follow him past troubled waters; we cling to the SOURCE; we rest in, we draw our lives from, we ABIDE in, the VINE.

Simple, right?  Of course, many things that on the surface are simple to understand are hard to do.  So it is with the life to which Christ calls us.   There’s a reason we talk about “practicing” our faith—because we never achieve perfection, we never finally arrive; we’re always in the process of becoming, we’re always on the way.

On the final page of his RULE, St. Benedict calls upon monastics to, “with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners.” Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, in her commentary on The Rule of Benedict, writes:

“Benedict does not believe that the simple reading or study of spiritual literature is sufficient. He tells us to keep this Rule, its values, its concepts, its insights.  It is not what we read, he implies; it what we become that counts.”

Every major religious tradition, says Chittister, calls for a change of heart, a change of life, “rather than for simply an analysis of its literature.” The Jewish Hasidim, for instance, tell the story of the disciple who said to the teacher,

“Teacher, I have gone completely through the Torah. What must I do now?” 

               The teacher replied, “Oh, my friend, the question is not, Have you gone through the Torah?

               The question is, Has the Torah gone through you?”[1]

Habits shape us from the inside out—for good or for ill. We need a community to help us dwell in habits that shape us toward the good, that help us discover and remain connected to the voice of the Good Shepherd and to the image of God within us, especially during those times when we sheep are surrounded and vastly outnumbered by wolves.  We follow Christ, we abide in the Vine, because in spite of our weakness in the face of all that the world throws at us, Christ wins.  This is the meaning of the cross and resurrection.  Christ finds us even in our failure—in our godforsakeness—and grafts us back on himself; leads us home.  We are never beyond the reach of the Risen One!  Death has no power over us when we abide with him.  Yes, we lose our way; life prunes us.  Yet even then, the experience of being “cut back” is an invitation to dwell ever more deeply in the Vine.

We often speak about habits during the season of Lent.  But the Easter season is also a time for cultivating habits that will keep us tuned to the Shepherd’s voice; connected to the Vine.  The most foundational of these habits is coming to the Eucharistic Table, for there the fruit of the Vine is poured out, tasted, consumed—becomes part of our very being.  What more powerful witness is there to abiding in the Vine than sharing in the fruit of his life for us and with us—and finding the life we share tilted once more toward him, that is to say, toward our neighbor?

Pastor Erik

[1] Joan Chittister. The Rule of Benedict: A Spirituality for the 21st Century.  (New York: Crossroad, 2010) pages 302, 303.