The time I trespassed to hear a song of praise

On migrant blackbirds, God's great Yes, and our call to sing with Creation | Easter 5, Year C

Acts 11:1-18

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

Psalm 148

I was recently trespassing on a gravel road belonging to the Federal Government. How could I resist? Bobolinks were involved. Bobolinks, for the uninitiated, are a species of blackbird, part of the family Icteridae that includes grackles and Red-winged, Yellow-headed, Brewers, and Rusty Blackbirds. Though they sometimes get a bad rap, blackbirds are social birds with beautiful songs and vivid colors. None more so than Bobolinks.

The males of the species have black bodies with a bold patch of yellow on the back of their head, their wings are crowned with a bright patch of white on their shoulder and another white patch on their rump. Their chattering song sounds both metalic and etherial, like something belonging to a world of fairies. And like most blackbirds, they never travel alone. To see one Bobolink is a sign that there are a dozen more hidden in the grass. Watch long enough and they’ll appear in the hundreds—a singing, swirling mass.

On this particular evening, a large flock of them had been reported on a road on the eastern side of my city, hundreds of Bobolinks feasting in a wheat field. Beside the field was an unmanned federal installation with a gravel road leading to it. I wasn’t too worried about walking the road to get a bit closer to the birds. They were an ephemeral wonder and I didn’t want to miss them for the sake of some propriety. Bobolinks pass through my state over a few short weeks each spring on their journey from their wintering grounds in Bolivia and Paraguay to the northern United States and southern Canada.

It is hard on an evening like this—the fields flashing with beauty, the air full of song, and the sky indigo above the broken clouds of a recent storm—not to feel a great Yes echoing through all creation, an affirmation of the world and all that is in it.

That Yes is the echoing note through our scriptures for this Sunday. In Acts, Peter is given a vision to dissolve the borders of yes and no, an enclosure of everything within the affirmation of God’s goodness. Healing has come not to Jews alone, isolated in a culture enclosed by the guardrails of purity codes, but for the whole world with all its cultures. Peter is invited to sit down to the feast set at any table and to share the Yes of God’s love in any household.

Then in Psalm 148 we hear one of the great creation hymns of the bible with creatures from stars to starlings called forth to sing praises to God, the Yes of God echoed in return to the creator. There is a clear agency and animacy given to the world of creation—this is not a catalog of mere matter, but a choir of creation whose proper work is the praise of God. A work in which humans of all ages and kinds are included.

And this Yes continues in the grand affirmation of Revelation 21 where we read the beautiful song:

"See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away."

It is a song to which God responds: "See, I am making all things new." This is not some heaven we fly off to by and by; this is God’s good creation made new because God has once again come to walk in its gardens. This new life comes even into the city that was once the symbol of human rebellion against God and creation—all is reconciled and redeemed.

Such a great Yes to the world should warn against any theology that turns the Earth into a temporary container to be trashed for some purely spiritual reality. It should also warn against the secular versions of the same impulse that would abandon Earth to chase some sci-fi fantasy of escape to Mars or the Moon or a Meta hosted virtual reality. God’s home is here, with those who die, the creatures that have always looked to God for breath, for food, for all good things.

It is under the light of such a Yes that Jesus came. It was in John’s Gospel that Jesus told us, early on that God has sent him because God loved the cosmos—that is, the whole of all that is created. Our response in that famed verse John 3:16 is to trust that this is so. This, in the best sense, is what it means to “believe.” For the community formed by that trust, we find in our Gospel for this Sunday the fundamental task of those who join in God’s Yes. It is a call to love, beginning not with the Cosmos which is encompassed by God’s love, but to love the “one another” who are closest and from that love to move out from there.

This may sound like a call toward insularity, a closing in. Instead, it is a call to love well in the finite possibilities of our lives. As Wendell Berry has written, “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it.” Beware anyone who claims to love everyone, but doesn’t love those nearest to them.

Love is the ultimate Yes; affection is affirmation of the best sort. And it is in this yes of love that our greatest hope lies, as well as our most painful grief. That God will come to wipe away our tears in the end is a completion of the work of love. But those tears were often born from love, and their end can only come not from the end of love, but by love finding its fullness. To love is to want the good of the beloved. It is in the end, that final time of the eschaton, that our beloved’s good will come without limit.

Standing on that road, hearing the songs of Bobolinks joined with Meadowlarks and Red-winged Blackbirds, I couldn’t help but feel that like the Psalmist said, their voices were raised in praise to God. And yet, watching them, I knew that this land is slated for development. Driving here I’d passed the construction of a new power substation, a first step in what is to come. This particular federal installation, an air traffic control beacon, is moving to make way for factories. The city plans to expand its industrial park, taking these fields, edged by woods out of agriculture and replacing them with industry. They would consider it a win if it all gets paved over for a new Amazon distribution center and a good jobs report.

This is a No to the chorus of creation, an assertion of human ambition and will against the common concert we are called to join. One cannot love Bobolinks here without feeling grief at what will come next season. The question we should ask is this: Does our work and our life join the common song of praise that continues to hum through creation? What notes of our lives are discordant with the song of God’s renewal of all things? God’s final Yes will one day cover all our Nos. Until then, our work is to follow in the Way of Love, seeking the flourishing of the particular, finite worlds in which we are enfleshed. A good way to begin is go and wonder at a Bobolink if you hear a rumor that they are singing in a field some Saturday afternoon in May.