Second Sunday of Easter 2008
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter
March 29, 30 2008

Thomas has been called “a doubter,” and it is a disparaging comment when someone is called “a doubting Thomas.”  Yet the heart of today’s Gospel

 is Thomas’ confession of faith, “My Lord and My God.”  It’s not that he was a doubter; it’s that he saw and believed.  The story underlines the fact that seeing is believing and that the real blessing is for those who have not seen, have not had the resurrection appearances that we have read about all week, but still believe on the testimony of those who have gone before.   That’s all of us. 

But I must tell you that what really came to me as I thought about Thomas’s confession, “My Lord and my God” is a connection with a bird.  There is a woodpecker, native to the Southern United States, called the Lord God Woodpecker.  It’s called that because when people saw it for the first time, it was so imposing and impressive, large and conspicuous with its three inch ivory bill, that supposedly they said, “Lord God, what is that!”  Supposedly this magnificent bird is extinct.  Robert Cording wrote a poem entitled “Lord God Bird,” that starts out, “Extinct, though often sighted and pursued as if you were still of this world.”  E. O. Wilson, world-renowned Harvard biologist calls it “Lazarus,”for although it was thought to have gone extinct in 1944, it was pursued like the Holy Grail. Then came electrifying news in 2005 that a male Lord God Woodpecker had been sighted in eastern Arkansas and eight additional sightings have been verified by experts who took pictures and videos.  So, hopefully there are a few breeding pairs left in the small remaining old growth forest needed to sustain them.  Hopefully it is not just the one last bird showing up again and again.

Well, sightings, resurrections, these are all part of our story right now.  We have had a week of readings of sightings of Jesus.  We are in the midst of the springing forth of green from the tomb of winter.  How wonderful that Easter’s new life and spring’s new life coincide! 

We are so removed from the cycles of nature that we have to remind ourselves about the seasons almost as much as we have to remind ourselves of the Resurrection of Christ.

Richard Louv has written a book entitled “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder.”  That about says it all.  Our children grow up in a world that isolates them from nature, from its wildness, from its wonder.  They are far more interested, usually, in the mastery of video games than in the mystery of the world about them.  Not surprising since they spend so little of their time outside compared to the time they spend in front of television or game boys. 

But how will our children want to protect what they do not love and how will they love what they do not know?  This is a plea to get your kids and grandkids outside in the spring, summer, fall and even winters of our world to delight and wonder about nature.

Studies show that people who care deeply about the environment almost always had transcendent experiences of nature when they were children.  Probably many of us who are over a certain age can remember times when we could roam in fields and woods, safely, creating our own relationship to the world.  Children who do not have direct connection to the world experience a sensory loss, a lack that cannot be filled in other ways.

Children need mud, water, trees, unstructured play.  There is no substitute for it.

It is not like Jesus telling Thomas that blessed are those who do not see and still believe in him.  If we do not know ourselves as part of nature, we will probably not understand how important it is to preserve it, to live in harmony with it.

We Christians have not always been good stewards of the earth.  But we are repenting, I believe, and trying to do better.  It is not too late, although it is very important that we don’t wait any longer.

We Christians should be very fond of winged things, after all.  The Holy Spirit is often portrayed like a dove, and the angels of God are winged messengers.  The Feast of the Annunciation, moved from March 25 because of Easter week to April 1, is the story of the winged angel Gabriel who came to a young girl named Mary and started all of this incarnation and resurrection business.  I get a certain amount of fun out of thinking that this year we are celebrating it on April Fool’s Day.  That won’t happen again in our life time!

Birds are everywhere in our world.  Even in the cities, there are birds.  Right now they are a noisy chorus outside our windows, here in church and in home.  They are praying right along side us.  Perhaps they are praying for us to wake up, to open our eyes, to take care of this beautiful world. 

Even non-believers like Jonathan Rosen who has written “The Life of the Skies,” and  lives in Manhattan, writes “I do feel that birding, a great and fulfilling pastime, and by the way, a lot of fun, is more than merely that…Bird-watching is intimately connected to the journey we all make to find a place for ourselves in a post-Darwinian world.”

As Episcopalians we can live comfortably with God and Darwin.  Our national church’s publication “A Catechism of Creation,” helps us find plenty of room for being nature lovers, God lovers, stewards of creation and studiers of the Bible.  And putting them together is exciting.  I mean, how much better can it get than to learn about the Lord God Woodpecker in a sermon the Sunday after Easter?

I want to go back to the beginning of the Gospel.  We’ve covered a lot of ground, so let me remind you.  Jesus stands in the midst of the disciples and says, “Peace be with you.”

He repeats this and breathes the Holy Spirit upon them.  He commissions them with his breath.  The Holy Spirit is a gas!

Peace is one of the primary gifts of God to people.  Peace as a goal for families, communities, nations.  Peace that starts within ourselves and moves outward.  I cannot let this passage go without reminding you that peace is your birth right as a baptized Christian.  You have received the Holy Spirit in your baptism, you have that peace, that capacity for peace within you. 

Peace is a gift that is opened by prayer.  And prayer means taking time with God.  Time to sit and look out the window at creation coming to life again, to listen to the birds, to walk outside now that we don’t have to worry about sliding on ice.  Prayer in its most profound moments is filled with peace, with emptiness, with a sense that everything is okay even if it’s not okay.  It is an absence of worry and anxiety that frees us to get up and get going with more energy to solve the real problems of our lives and world. 

Prayer is peace.  Prayer is time with God in stillness of body and mind.  Jesus gave this gift to his disciples when he stood among them.  It is our gift for the taking.

Here to end is a Celtic Prayer of Peace that combines the natural world with God’s peace, which is not a surprising combination, I trust.

Just sit and let it wash over you, like a warm spring breeze.  Let it wash over you, like a gentle wave.

Deep peace of the running wave to you,
of water flowing, rising and falling, sometimes advancing, sometimes receding…
May the stream of your life flow unimpeded!
Deep peace of the running wave to you.
 
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
which fans your face on a sultry day,
the air which you breathe deeply, rhythmically,
which imparts to you energy, consciousness, life.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you!
 
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you,
who, herself unmoving, harbors the movements
and facilitates the life of the ten thousand creatures,
while resting contented, stable, tranquil.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
 
Deep peace of the shining stars to you,
which stay invisible till darkness falls
and discloses their pure and shining presence
beaming down in compassion on our turning world.;
Deep peace of the shining stars to you!
 
Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you,
of unpretentious folk who, watching and waiting,
spend long hours out on the hillside,
expecting in simplicity some Coming of the Lord!
Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you!
 
Deep peace of the Son of peace to you,
who, swift as the wave and pervasive as the air,
quiet as the earth and shining like a star,
breathes into us His Peace and his Spirit.
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you!
 
                        Mary Rogers, adapted from the Gaelic
 
 
Here is the “Lord God Bird” poem by Robert Cording
 
Extinct, though often sighted and pursued
as if you were still of this world; willed
into being, perhaps, by the lost spaces
you inhabit, or because you are part of
a dream we go on dreaming, you recreate
yourself in the moving shadows of gold
and green forest light, and we come close
to understanding why the few you saw you last
cried out, “Lord God!  When the rich carmine
of your crest and the silken black edges
of your wings widened the corridors
between moss hung old-growth cypresses.
 
Audubon saw you and tired to still the furtive
blurs of your canopied flight in the pose—
upright against a tree—he traced for you.
He conceived you as Van Dyck, those same
radiating qualities of color—arterial red
and verdical whites, the primary yellow
of your eyes fixed against a lapidary black—
and tried to bring you wholly and life-sized,
to his blank canvas where only the three-inch
luminous ivory bill caught you exactly:
a totem which local Indians buried with them
for passage from this world into the next.

 And after the great ornithologist Wilson
had wing shot you, and after your cries—
exactly that of a young child—made him fear
for his life, he took you to an inn and asked
for a room for myself and my baby.  There,
he unwrapped you and felt the grip
of your transformation, those unblinking eyes
and that took in that definable world of walls
and a table where he tied you.  All the while
he tried to paint you, you hammered a hole
through the plaster and weather boards
of an outside wall.  And after he tried to feed
 
you and after you refused all food and went on
hammering your ivory bill into the table
and the wall for three full days and nights,
as if the fulfilling of that act were the only thing
you could do in the perfection of your birdness,
he watched your wounded, beautiful body
breathe in one very sharp deep breath, and die,
and knew, though he could not say why,
that in one exceptional moment of abandon,
you had flown into his imaginings and he could see
you, more completely now that you lay dead,
your red cockade enlivening a depth of dark trees.