Co-Lead Minister
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My hope as we move through this series on birds of the Bible is that once you start noticing the birds, you will experience the mystical and mysterious ways in which they touch our lives. The way in which they are winged windows into the presence of God amongst us and how they can serve as mirrors reflecting the many different qualities of God. People have often told me about ways in which they have been comforted or awed by an unexpected encounter with a bird. Sometimes, we don’t make the connection between those encounters and the presence or nature of God but both Debbie Blue and I believe that indeed, that comfort or awe or even perhaps frisson of fear that we feel in our encounters with birds, are moments of God’s self-revelation.
Even as I was working on this sermon yesterday my eye was caught by a large black bird playing on the wind outside my window. We live in Squamish, on the edge of an escarpment and high enough that sometimes it feels like we are at eye level with the birds. This one had a broad wingspan and as much as I wanted to believe it was an eagle, I think it was a vulture – they’re common around the Sea to Sky and in Squamish. My point is though that its graceful movement gliding along the wave of wind first caught my eye and then distracted me enough that I stopped typing and just watched out the window, letting go of my preoccupation with finding the right words to say to you this morning and to just be. To just breathe. To just listen for what God might want me to say, which is often different from what I had planned. I was transported, only for a moment, but for long enough that I knew I was in that thin space where it feels like one is very close to the holy. And then, I got back to work. But I wasn’t the same person as I was five minutes before that encounter.
I want to be clear that this sermon series is based heavily on the book by Debbie Blue. I quote liberally from her book, although I do also make my own connections and contributions. I don’t name her in every quote because that would just be tedious for all of us, but I want you to know that Debbie is the source of much of my reflections during the series.
Today we turn our attention to the pigeon. And where are there pigeons in the Bible? They’re everywhere, Debbie writes. Pigeons are implied in the very first chapter of the Bible, and they are present throughout the New Testament. Because, she argues, pigeons are doves by another name. Both pigeons and doves belong to the Columbidae family of birds. Scientifically there isn’t a clear-cut difference. Although doves are often smaller than the bird we call pigeons, the names are interchangeable. The names ‘dove’ and ‘pigeon’ are used based on convention and vary by region and species, but they’re pretty much the same bird.
At the beginning of the Bible we read that “The Spirit hovered over the deep in Genesis and made it pregnant so that the deep birthed creation; [in the opening of Luke the Spirit] hovers over Mary and makes her pregnant. Christian art through the centuries has depicted this hovering presence, … as a dove. …Once we get to the baptism of Jesus, the text is explicit. Here the Spirit of God shows up, and this time each of the Gospel writers is clear: LIKE A DOVE. The heavens open and the spirit of God comes down, like a dove, alighting on Jesus’ shoulder, and a voice from heaven says, ‘This is my Son…with whom I am well pleased.” (Debbie Blue, Consider the Birds, p. 2)
But Debbie does not see the dove as a source of great inspiration. In these stories she says, “The dove is merely a conveyor of information, nothing more. And the message is flat – like black-and-white letters on a piece of paper. Something you could roll up and put into a small tube and attach to the bird’s leg: ‘This is the messiah period believe in him period.” (Blue, 3)
Today I am wearing a necklace with a dove hovering over the cross. My dad bought it for me when we were in Cornwall many years ago. But as lovely and as cherished as is this necklace and the multiple images we see of doves in art and jewelry, Debbie argues: “The dove has come to seem banal and bland and cutesy as far as Christian symbols go. It has come to represent something polite and petite and pure. Maybe this has worked to deprive us a more robust view of the Holy Spirit.
Isn’t it sort of limiting she wonders, to imagine the spirit of God as something dainty and white? We are made of dirt, according to the creation account in Genesis. We are made of dirt that God scooped up from the ground and blew into. And dirt, as you will tell any toddler who, like God is scooping it up from the ground and bringing it to their mouth, dirt is full of bacteria. We each carry two to five pounds of bacteria in our bodies – two to five POUNDS. We could kill a dove with one or two blows from the back of our hand. We need a sprit, Debbie says, that can handle us.” (Blue, 6)
It’s so much more compelling to imagine the Holy Spirit, not as a rather innocuous demure dove but as a pigeon – dirty and ubiquitous and in our faces whether we want it or not, showing no regard for statues of mighty warriors and explorers and insisting on our noticing them in all public places. Now that’s an active Holy Spirit – that’s a God persisting on being with us. The common rock pigeon is often referred to as ‘feral pigeon’. (Blue, p.10) How fabulous is that – the holy Trinity in a feral form stalking us through our daily living.
“Pigeons want to be close to us. They are where we are – in some of the worst places we have made (our neglected projects and abandoned buildings) and some of the best (art museums, parks, Rome’s piazza).
They won’t leave us alone. …What if the spirit of God descends like a
pigeon, somehow – always underfoot, routinely ignored, often despised?”
(Blue, 10)
“The passenger pigeon used to be so prolific in North America that …[no one saw any reason] not to shoot them. They were hunted on a massive scale in the Midwest. …Their carcasses were loaded on to boxcars and shipped to the East, where they were sold as inexpensive food for slaves and the poor. …The spirit of God – like cheap meat. Quails and pigeons, God’s sacred meal for the most downtrodden. The passenger pigeon went from being one of the most abundant species in the world in the nineteenth century to utter extinction in the early twentieth.
May be the spirit of God is so common …that we don’t recognize it or necessarily respect it. And so we snuff it out sometimes. …Maybe we don’t notice because we are looking for something pure and white, but the spirit of God is more complicated than that – fuller and richer and everywhere.” (Blue, p.11-12)
At Jesus’ baptism the dove/pigeon heralds the presence of God’s child, “But after his baptism, things get a little unnerving. Jesus violates the boundaries – violates the system that set in opposition the clean and the unclean, pure and impure, holy and unholy: they were supposed to be kept separate. Jesus touches everything. More than touches; he inhabits. He’s God in the flesh, so the Christian tradition proclaims. He breaks the rules in so many ways…” (Blue, 15) He’s like the pigeon, messy, showing up where we don’t want it, pooping on our brand new Subaru to remind us of our inappropriate attachment to shiny new things.
“Jesus is right off the bat eating with sinners, touching lepers. He takes water from the [unclean] Samaritan woman. God incarnate arrives into the world from his mother’s womb. (That’s messy, and bloody.) He’s not setting things apart – he’s mixing it up, in his very being God in the flesh seems like some sort of explosive revelation of nonseparation. …Jesus, the spirit of God, the spirit pigeon/dove, blurs, smudges, contradicts; he opens the door and lets in the unfit: the sinner and the blind and the lame and the poor and the sick and the weak and the meek. “(Blue, 16) And me. And you. Jesus knows no boundaries, kind of like the pigeon.
“Being human is beautiful, mysterious and scary. A lot of the time we seem to believe that there are many things about being human that are not okay: dying and sweating, aging and fragility, [but] the spirit of God is not apart from this… It lands, hovers, plunges, and coos; coming again and again, [calling us beloved and] leaving its droppings on our sleeves. We can hit it with a stick all day long, but it keeps racing back to us, desirous that we might open our hearts. “ (Blue, 18)
Ten years ago this November there was a horrific terrorist attack in Paris. Suicide bombers struck outside a stadium, and shot up diners outside cafés and restaurants, and carried out a mass shooting at the Bataclan theatre. One hundred and thirty-seven people were killed and 416 injured. If you don’t remember this particular incident I’m sure there are others that come to mind. Just this Thursday at least 15 Palestinians, including 8 children, were killed in an Israeli strike while they were queuing for nutritional supplements in front of a clinic in Gaza.
After the attack in Paris there was a photo that particularly caught my imagination and my heart. It was taken in an alley outside the Bataclan theatre. There, in the grit and the grime of the alley outside the concert hall, pacing in an ungainly fashion through the discarded bandages and clothing, and the blood, so much blood, there was a pigeon. A pigeon, the Spirit of God, surveying the horror and standing in solidarity in the middle of it all.
As our minds and our hearts try to comprehend the horrific ongoing violence throughout our world, I find some comfort in considering the spirit of God descending in droves outside the cafes, and the stadiums, and the bombed-out homes and apartments, and on the sidewalks of the downtown east side in Vancouver. Did you know that there is actually a place called Pigeon Park at the corner of East Hastings and Carrall St, right in the midst of perhaps the most hurting part of Vancouver? I wonder if some early city planner also imagined the Holy Spirit descending in the shape of a pigeon into this most fragile and vulnerable population of the city. I love imagining the Spirit showing up in multitudes of pigeons united in the solidarity of one purpose, to land, to be amongst, to stand alongside God’s people.
It helps me to know that pigeons have been hunted, slaughtered, sent to war and caged, and yet, and yet, they continually seek to be where we are, to do almost nothing except stand in silent witness, offering a muffled murmur of consolation, calling on us to notice their immediate presence, and to call to mind God’s constant moving and encouraging and healing, luring us towards a restored creation. It just helps me somehow to imagine the Spirit of God as a pigeon; I hope next time you see one, next time you are bothered by one, it helps you to see God too.
Amen.