July 6, 2025 Reflection

Today and for the next few weeks worship will be centered around the theme of birds in the Bible. The series is inspired by a book by a minister, writer and someone who became a friend, a woman named Debbie Blue. In some of the sermons I quote heavily from her book. Debbie writes: “…there is something about the sort of consciousness necessary for birding that is very much like the practice of faith. It comes and it goes. It requires waiting. You must use both your body and your mind. Attention is paramount…” (Debbie Blue, Consider the Birds, p.xii)

As well as her book the other sources of inspiration that I find with this series are members of the congregation. I have offered some of these reflections at a couple of other congregations and I have invited them, and I invite you, to take part in this theme by noticing throughout the week Sunday’s subject matter – birds. In the coming weeks please be ready to tell us in worship about experiences you’ve had noticing birds and how in particular they have offered you some kind of sign or assurance or sense of the presence of God. Or maybe you’ll come across a painting, or a poem or, someone once brought me an ostrich egg. As we consider what the birds might reveal to us of the essence and presence of God and the movement of the Holy Spirit I hope you have some fun with noticing and sharing what you see.
It is a preaching cliché to say that the last few years have been heavy, but preachers often are unable to resist a cliché. The pandemic, systemic racism, drug overdoses and poisoning, weird and worrying weather, Ukraine and Gaza and growing authoritarianism around the world. It’s not my desire to minimize the weight of this time, but to perhaps lift our eyes off the daily drum beat of dire news and help us scan the horizon for some signs of God’s presence with us in the midst of it all. To notice, ‘each blade of grass, every wing that soars’ as part of the ‘circle of God’. (Each Blade of Grass, MV 37) And to wonder if we are able to trust in that presence. Sometimes, and maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I feel like God is distant, if not completely absent. Maybe, I wonder, she’s preoccupied, doing her nails or so fed up with us that their attention has turned elsewhere. In our story today, we’ll see the timeless attentiveness of God, the temptation to doubt, and the challenge to keep the faith, even when it seems the world is on a faithless precipice and God is looking away.

One day I was daydreaming, not so much looking out the window as letting my eyes rest in an unfocused way on the space outside. A robin perched on the fence right outside my window and as my eyes drew to a focus on her, it seemed like she was looking right back at me. She sat there for a while, perhaps also daydreaming, perhaps also noticing each blade of grass, perhaps wondering about the impertinence of the person peering back at her. And then, without a word, she headed off to whatever task awaited her; without a word, but not without leaving me feeling like I had made a connection, maybe met a friend, maybe even been privileged with the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Debbie writes that as we consider the birds, we are considering the creature, creation, and the Creator – the whole of existence. Somehow, the interconnectedness of the universe is highlighted through the effort of trying to focus specifically on one wee critter. In her writing the magnitude and mystery of God can be distilled into meditating on one flighty visitor. And once we start to pay attention – we might feel a connection that we have been yearning for and have missed in our distraction.
Today’s bird is the quail. These little birds with the funny cowlick and that scurry about like they’re late for an appointment, these little birds have a critical role in the story of God’s people.

In the reading from the book of Numbers, the Israelites are wandering in the desert. They have been freed from enslavement in Egypt and led by Moses are on a long journey to what we now call Israel. The journey took 40 years, Bible language for a long, long time. We come upon them wandering with no end in sight, tired, hungry, hangry, complaining and yearning for the good old days. Earlier on their trek God had supplied them with manna, a substance that could be made into a type of bread. That had sustained them for quite some time, but now they are bored with it. They begin to recall their slavery as a blessed time, a time of great security and lots of food. “We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now…there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” (Numbers 11: 4-6)

Now this memory is ridiculous, enormously romanticizing what they would have eaten when they were in Egypt. They were enslaved, and the Egyptians were concerned these foreigners were becoming too great in number, taking over the land and the culture, so they drove them ever harder, increasing their daily quotas, adding straw to the mud they used to make bricks so that they would be exhausted in their efforts. We can safely assume they were not eating well. But we can’t blame them for romanticizing the past, it’s something we often do also.

I remember when there were 600 kids in Sunday school, when our parents bought their house for $20,000, when everyone spoke English and we all celebrated Christmas and only Christmas and the stores were closed on Sundays. There were absolutely no challenges and nothing wrong in those days – we ate all the fish and melons and cucumbers we could ever want.

God says to the Israelites, ‘You want meat, I’ll give you meat. I’ll give you so much meat it’ll be coming out your nose!!” And sure enough quail dropped in piles all around their camp, so many quail it took them all day and all night and all the next day to gather them all up.
In Blue’s book she writes that the quail of the Middle East migrate. They don’t have the capacity to go long distances, and so they wait for the wind to be in their favour before they start out. But they didn’t always make it – there were stories of so many quail landing on a ship that the vessel sank. They would drop to the land and die or fall into the water and sink. And so there they are these hapless creatures, waiting for a wind, waiting for the breath of God to carry them where they need to go, and then, once up and away, sometimes falling from the sky, falling and dying and in their dying bringing life to one of God’s other creatures, equally falling and failing in the desert. The quail and the desert wanderers have a lot in common – although there is no record of the quails complaining.

The people gorged on the quail. And then we read in Numbers: “But while the meat was still between their teeth, before it was consumed, the anger of the Lord was kindled against the people, and the Lord struck the people with a very great plague.” (Numbers 11: 33) And the place where this happened was named Kibroth-hattaavah, translated, The Grave of Craving.
It turns out that the quail and manna are not just about protein and carbs. The people are hungry not just for food, but for assurance that everything is going to be OK. “Will God feed and care for them now? Was it God’s love that led them to freedom and wandering, or is it that God hates them and brought them out to the desert to die? …They demand food and water, but what they really seem to need is the confidence that God is truly with them.” (Blue, p.30)

And in their insecurity, they seek the assurance of things they used to know, things that make them feel safe, and comforted – even if those things actually held them in captivity. And, they grasped not only at the past, but in the present took and consumed more than they needed. They didn’t only crave just enough to tide them over, not just ‘daily bread’, they gathered and amassed huge volumes of manna and quail to the point where they got sick.

Very often I marvel about how current and relevant the Bible still is. Fear, insecurity, craving, and overconsumption not only still endanger our health, now they’re killing our planet.

I read somewhere that God’s best medium for working is nothing. In the beginning there was nothing and God created light and life; the wanderers in the desert had nothing, and God gave them food and water; those listening to Jesus offer his sermon on the mount had nothing and through Jesus God offered them bread and fish. Maybe, when we feel bereft and alone and nothing seems certain and there appears to be no hope, maybe then, in that nothingness, our eyes are able to see with a new clarity that God is, and God is with us. When we are at our most empty perhaps then we are able to taste with a heightened sense that God is, and God is with us. In times of aching silence maybe then we can pick up a whisper on the wind assuring us that God is, and God is with us. When our eyes are burning with tears, and through those tears we catch the movement of a bird we can know that God is, and God is with us. And that’s enough.

Maybe this time, this time of global crisis and this time of transition in the congregation, is the very best time for honing our senses, for watching and for listening and maybe even for smelling and tasting the presence of God. Maybe this time is a release from the captivity of habits and unconscious behaviours, as individuals and as church. In times of stress and change we are often freed from assumptions, from taking things for granted, from doing things in a particular way because we’ve just always done them that way. In times of feeling lost and wandering we’re freed up to ask and to be open to hearing, how do we live now as a people who trust in God’s presence? How do we really make a difference in our world? How can we learn to be satisfied with a piece of mana and a chunk of quail? And, trust that tomorrow there will be another piece, and another chunk?

Debbie writes, “It makes sense that people whose imaginations have been confined …might need a time of wandering in the wilderness to get free. Maybe the problem with the wanderers is not that they desire too much, but that they desire too little – or their desire lacks imagination….At times they revert to Egypt instead of growing into something gorgeous.” (Blue, 60-61)
Maybe in this time, we are being lured into becoming something even more gorgeous that we were before. Perhaps we are being offered a renewed trust in the truth of God’s presence with us. With something as simple as a bird catching our eye, maybe we will be reminded of God’s care for us, and the call of Christ to trust in that care.

May it be so. Amen