July 20, 2025 Reflection

At the heart of our New Testament reading today is one of those sayings of Jesus that sound so simple but are actually imbued with layers of meaning. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all counted. So don’t be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.” (Matt 10: 29-30)

            It’s comforting right – God’s got his eye on you; you’re so precious to God that he’s counted every hair on your head. So don’t worry, the implication is, God’s going to make sure nothing happens to you. And there is our first stumble.

            Some 20 years ago on a Sunday morning a soloist in the congregation I was serving sang what often comes to mind when we think of the little brown bird: His Eye is on the Sparrow. And at that moment I made a vow to never have it sung in church again.  On the night before that Sunday morning one of my son went to high school grad with his girlfriend, her brother and her 2 cousins. They were all beautiful young people, at the threshold of life. When I picked up our son from his girlfriend’s house early the next morning and asked how the evening went, he said with blunt simplicity: “The most tragic thing ever happened. My friend got hit by a bus and was killed.” His friend, his girlfriend’s cousin, had jumped out of a van he was riding in and tried to sprint across the road. He wasn’t as fast on the road as he was on the basketball court, and he was killed.

            In a surreal fog I took our boy home, left him with my husband, and rushed to church because I still had a service to do. And during the service the soloist sang that song, that song of God’s promise and presence. “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.” It took everything I had to not turn off the mic. If God’s eye is on the sparrow, if we are even more precious than the sparrow, how was it a young person could be hit by and bus and killed? Was God distracted? Doing her nails? Catching a short nap? Or is it all a lie?

            Now I know that in our most rational, reasoned moments we don’t believe that God operates this way. God doesn’t ‘let’ bad things happen, and God certainly doesn’t cause bad things to happen. But when we are in the midst of it, when sorrow and grief and loss are right in our faces, it’s hard to resource our best reasoned theological selves. We have to be reminded that just because we, like the sparrows, are precious in God’s eyes, it doesn’t mean that things won’t go wrong. That the measure of our worth is not that bad things don’t happen to us, but that God’s compassion for us is beyond measure and is bestowed on us regardless and whenever, in spite of what’s happening or what we’re up to.

            Some time ago I took part in a reading course with Sallie McFague about finding new ways of talking about God. Sallie was a preeminent feminist eco-theologian. She wrote a book called Models of God in which she explored ways of talking about God, metaphors for trying to describe God. One of the things she suggested is that we see the world as God’s body. God is not limited to being in the world, but the world is part of the body of God. One of the consistencies between the articles and books, and of what Sallie taught and wrote about, is that there is no distinguishing between the life of the human and the life and the existence of everything else. We are not set apart and particularly special when it comes to life and relationship with God. There is an insistence that we are all connected, that we and everything that is, that was and will be, live enmeshed and entangled, with no separation. So, in truth, to hear that we are worth so much more than the sparrow doesn’t make sense – the sparrow and we are part of all that is. We are no better, no worse, than the sparrow.

            Consider what a dark road the understanding that we are worth so much more than the sparrow has taken us. And consider the alternative,  the implications for all creation, that if we were to believe that we are all of equal value in God’s eyes. We could no longer make decisions on how one creature trumps the other by virtue of their ‘worth’ – whether it’s two pennies or billions of dollars. So far we have functioned as if we are worth so much more than the ducks that are covered in spilled crude oil. Worth more than the polar bears pacing on ever shrinking ice flows. Worth more than the Amazon rain forests and the entire eco-system that they support. More than the Guatemalan rural residents displaced by mining, more than the global refugees displaced through wars over power and oil. It’s such a tiny phrase, “you are of more value than many sparrows…” and yet that mindset has let us to climate catastrophe and the deaths of millions of people living on the margins of our world.

            And actually, it’s quite literally damning with faint praise to say we’re worth so much more than the sparrow, because throughout most of history sparrows have been considered to be worthless. Or even worse than worthless; a nuisance, a scourge, a hassle of enormous proportions. “Field guides describe them as bland, dingy, and dull, with songs that are monotonous and grating. The Egyptian hieroglyph based on the sparrow…was used in words to indicate small, narrow, or bad. In ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing, the sparrow was the symbol for ‘enemy.’…In eighteenth-century England, ‘Sparrow Clubs’ were formed with the express purpose of killing as many sparrows as possible. ..Mao Tse-tung mobilized China to eradicate the tree sparrow…[bringing] the tree sparrow to the brink of extinction in China. ([As a result] locusts and other crop-eating insects flourished without sparrows to eat them. The resulting crop loss contributed to the Great Famine, which killed more than 30 million people.” (Debbie Blue, Consider the Birds, 130-131))

            So, to recap, being much more valuable than the sparrow says little really, it is a pretty minimal assurance. But let’s look at the context in which Jesus gives voice to this rather peculiar little saying. He is preparing the disciples to go out onto the road. In what is called the ‘Missionary Discourse’, what we might consider the pregame coach talk, Jesus is warning the disciples about the response they might encounter as they carry out their mission. Speaking about the dominion of God was not always a popular undertaking; it threatened the social, economic and political stability of the land. Imagine, in an hierarchical system that depended on layers of social status, that depended upon driving the labourers into the ground and lives of servitude, the implications of a message that claimed that the next king would raise up the poor and overthrow the rich. That the next king would treasure every single hair of the most marginalized labourer. We so often domesticate Jesus but he and all he represented were the enfleshment of a disturbing word.

            “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth;” Jesu warned in the continuation of our passage today, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will, lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matt 10:34-39)

            Jesus expects that his disciples will experience pushback, alienation, resentment. It is in that context he is telling them to not be afraid – you, like the sparrows, are not great, heroic, and brilliantly charismatic. And yet every hair on your head is counted by me. Just as I know ever star in the sky, so I am part of every part of you, you plain little stubby bird/disciple with the monotonous, irritating word about the kingdom of God. Fear not that you are going to upset people because I did not come to keep everything the way it was. I came to call people to live fully into God’s way, and that’s going to upset a few apple carts.

            Jesus saw that potential. And he spoke words of encouragement to his disciples, and those words resonate still. God in Christ is saying to the tiniest little despised and maligned sparrow and to us, don’t be afraid. I am with you. I have my eye on you. Even as you search your imagination for my eye, I meet you in the air you breath, in the rain that soaks you through, in the most ubiquitous little sparrow and in the grittiness of the downtown core and on the trails of the North Shore – I meet your gaze and I have your back.

And here’s another twist to considering this passage. I am often dismayed, saddened and angered when I hear people question their worth, when I hear them doubt that they are precious in God’s eyes – usually this doubt has been instilled in them because of some, in my opinion, heretical religious abuse that teaches that we are sinners, craven creatures perpetually in need of salvation. To those of you, of us, who have moments, if not days and years of wondering about our worth – hear again Jesus’ words about God. God loved the sparrow. An uninteresting little bird that was maligned, marginalized, hunted to extinction because the world considered it of no value, indeed to be a destructive pest. God loves that bird. God is attentive to that bird – not only the flashy peacock, but it’s opposite. If, says Jesus, God sees and loves that bird, take comfort that God loves you too – no matter how unworthy you might think you are. No matter how unattractive YOU might think you are. God loves the sparrow and, God loves you.

The words of the song that I used to be repelled by ring true for me now: “Whenever I am tempted, whenever clouds arise, when songs give place to sighing, when hope within me dies, I draw the closer to God, from care God sets me free: God’s eye is on the sparrow, and I know God cares for me.”

Fear not, press on, says God, for my sake, and yours. Amen.

Amen