Look!
Birding for the Holy | First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C
Psh Psh Psh
Whiiinnnie
Chip
That sequence on most mornings in the forest will usher in a chattering mix of warblers, chickadees, and kinglets—small birds rushing to drive an invading screech owl from their woods. For me, a birder, it gives the chance to have a good look at creatures that normally spend their time in treetops.
I spent a good deal of my youth learning tricks like these. In High School while other boys looked longingly at car magazines, I flipped through the pages of binocular catalogues. When Junior prom rolled around, even though I had a date, I skipped for a chance to see spring migration on the Texas coast.
In my education as a birder I soon learned that there was a difference between seeing and vision. Most birders see. They scan a big flock of gulls and can tell you there are two hundred Ring-billed Gulls sitting on a sandbar.
There are other birders, though, who have vision. They look at that flock of two hundred common gulls and wonder if there is a Short-billed Gull in their midst, a rare bird in my part of the country, that looks nearly identical to a Ring-billed for all but a few feathers.
One of the first birders with vision I came to know was Jeff Wilson, a building contractor in Memphis, Tennessee. Jeff wore glasses and couldn’t hear all that well from years running saws. He came to birding with all of the same capacities, and maybe even a few more impairments as anyone else. But it seemed that everywhere he went rare birds would appear.
Of course that wasn’t quite the case. Jeff went birding as much as he could and most days he saw nothing out of the ordinary. But everyday Jeff was in the field he went with the expectation that something rare was out there. When a flock of the expected Eastern Meadowlarks flew up from a field, Jeff would look carefully to see if one of them might be an uncommon Western Meadowlark. If there were three hundred Pectoral Sandpipers then Jeff would sit for hours looking at each one to see if a Sharp-tailed Sandpiper had wondered over from Russia and found its way to Memphis. And sometime Jeff would find one. Sometimes he’d find a bird so rare people from five states away would come to see it. From Jeff I learned that you see rare birds when you look for them.
The other thing I learned from Jeff, and other birders like him, is that sometimes the best birds show up in the most unexpected places. Jeff’s favorite birding spot, the place he found most of his rare birds, were the Memphis Sewer ponds. For some reason gulls and shorebirds seemed to like the stinking muddy flats of treated sewage and Jeff Wilson would be there when they arrived. On days when the sewage ponds weren’t yielding any results he’d check garbage dumps or wander along desolate country roads. He would go to unexpected places and more often than most, he’d find unexpected birds.
I spent time birding with Jeff at the Memphis Sewer ponds, and beyond the colorful vocabulary of a construction site, Jeff’s favorite word was “Look!” He said it both as an exclamation and a command: Look! It is a common word of visionaries.
Look! There in with the Least Sandpipers is a Stint.
Look! There with those Red-tailed Hawks is a Ferruginous Hawk.
Look! A Holy Spirit Dove descending on a seemingly ordinary man in the muddy waters of the Jordan.
John the Baptist was a good birder. He didn’t simply see the expected. He was a visionary looking for the rare realities of God showing up in the common, everyday crowd.
There were plenty of people hoping that the messiah would come. They felt the need for the messiah everyday their precious crops were loaded on carts bound for Rome to pay the heavy taxes of the Empire. They felt the need for the messiah as they watched too many of their religious leaders sell out their integrity in exchange for power.
They all wanted to see that rare reality that would be God’s kingdom coming near. But most days they saw only the mundane; nothing changing, nothing new. And most days that is what John the Baptist saw. He didn’t see the heavens open often. This seems to be the first Holy Spirit Dove he’d ever spotted, the first Messiah to come out of the crowd. But he knew that he could see such things. He went to the desert, fasting and praying, so that he could clear his vision to see the rare realities of God’s kingdom breaking through.
His expectation, trained in scripture, was not to see the world as it is, as it had always seemingly been, but to see God’s kingdom here by the Jordan river; a glimmer of light that might appear only for a moment.
As we read in our Gospel for this Sunday, one day John finally sees what he’d been looking for. He sees the Lamb of God who has come to set God’s people free, to take away their sins and usher in a new reality. And like a good birder he doesn’t leave it to himself. He says—Look! And suddenly his disciples see what they didn’t see before. The rare coming of God’s kingdom now seems so obvious. With that command to “Look!” they can see it too, right there among the common stuff of another day by the Jordan.
With this call to Look! we must ask: How do we learn to see like the birder John? How do we spot those rare Holy Doves descending into the world?
First, like John we must expect to see them. We must expect to see God’s kingdom anytime, anywhere. We must go searching for it and we must recognize that it will probably show up in the places no one else wants to go. The places where the poor, the weak, and the powerless are, will be the unexpected places where we can see the unexpected realities of God’s kingdom. The Scriptures, our field guide to the divine, say as much.
We must also, like John, spend a lot of time in the wilderness. We need to pray and be in solitude. We need, on occasion, to live in the world in a different way. Not with hairshirts and dinners of locust, necessarily, but with time for Sabbath and scripture reading and a no to the distracted rush of life all around us.
Finally, we need to spend time with great visionaries and apprentice ourselves to them. We need to read the stories of scripture, to immerse ourselves in the Biblical way of seeing so that we can recognize the realities of God when they appear in the world, sometimes looking very much like the everyday until we learn to recognize the difference.
Look!
The rare reality of God’s kingdom is there to be seen by those who go searching for it.
Will you see it when it comes?
This is really beautiful, Ragan.