Free as a bird

Rev. Dr. Rod Sykes’ sermon for May 25, 2008

Read: Matthew 6:24-34

In these words Matthew’s Jesus speaks a deep wisdom about our relationship to God. It is a wisdom that addresses our problem with trusting in God, turning our life over to the purposes of God because we are so anxious about the risks that would bring.

I am an anxious person, by temperament, by childhood pattern, perhaps even by genetic inheritance. Some folks find it second nature to trust, find it easy to let go and live in the present and not fret about the future. But for people like me, faith in that sense of not fretting about the future is an achievement, not an instinct.

And so, being a person constitutionally given to sweaty palms and the wrinkled brow, I regard the high ropes course to be a vivid demonstration of the challenge to me of faith. I first encountered the high ropes course four summers ago at a United Church nationwide learning event for church leaders. Since it was held at the Banff Centre one part of our program offered folks an opportunity to spend a couple of hours in the Centre’s aerial playground. Participants were safety-harnessed into rigging that is strung among some of the trees at the Centre. Safety lines were run down to people on the ground who held on in case the subject up in the air were to slip. Nonetheless many of the participants found it almost impossible to let themselves go and leap from platform to pole. Our human instincts for self-preservation kick in. Some deep part of us knows that we don’t belong 20 feet off the ground! It takes an intense amount of effort to summon up sufficient courage and trust to perform these monkey-style acrobatics. Talk about a leap of faith!

And yet – don’t we all harbour in our breast a yearning to be able to fly? Many people report that they sometimes have flying dreams in which they are liberated from their earthly shackles and glide through the air like a bird. The dream is as old as the classical myth of Icarus, who fashioned himself wings of feathers and wax but flew so close to the sun’s heat that his wings disintegrated and he plunged to his death.

Think with me for a moment about what this yearning in us to fly might mean. Does this not signal to us that we are limited creatures who yet chafe within our limitations? Great volumes of vertical space beckon to us but also terrify us. Lean out a bit over the balcony railing of a tall apartment building. Our travel up through the central multistoried atrium of one of our tall skyscrapers in one of those glass sided elevators. You will probably experience a sense of awe or a tingling of fear, perhaps a touch of vertigo and disorientation. That is a signal to you that you have left your comfort zone. And yet when you have looked up at the piles of whipped-cream clouds on a fine summer’s evening have you not fantasized about leaping up and magically soaring through those immense volumes of space? What a joy it would be to swoop in the darting dash of the swallow, to soar in the glide of the hawk or eagle who rides the thermals to great heights over the foothills west of Calgary, to learn in our body to ride the wind. Yes indeed, although we are psychologically uncomfortable with vertical space there is yet a part of us that wants to be able to conquer it, to move through it, to fly through it as easily as we walk across our two-dimensional floors.

We play on the edge of that disjunction. We are earthbound, yet we are destined for sky. And the movement from one to the other always carries such risk. Did you not love to climb trees as a child? Perhaps you and your friends built a tree house. In doing so, however, you took the risk of a dangerous fall and in so doing you had to place your trust in your ladder, your ropes, and the branches of the tree. People who perform tightrope walking step out over a literal abyss. In doing so they have to trust the balancing pole and the soles of their shoes. The Wright Brothers took to the air over Kitty Hawk, which required them to trust their engine and their flimsy looking airfoils. Sky-divers have to trust their parachute. Indeed each of us places our trust in a lot of things every time we walk on an airplane!

Here’s a startling visual example of the enormous risk of going vertical and the kind of courage and trust you need to do so – from last week’s news , the Swiss Rocket Man:

[Play video]

That is Yves Rossy. He's a 48-year-old Swiss airline pilot, who invented and built himself a fold-up carbon fibre wing powered by four tiny jet engines that allowed him to soar through the skies over Switzerland last week at 300 km an hour. Yves Rossy realizes every child’s fantasies of birdlike flight. Yet also what a great risk it would represent and therefore what a huge amount of trust it would demand from us!

When Jesus uses that simple little image of the freedom of birds as an invitation to us to trust in God he taps into an ages-old theme in the human imagination. According to the worldview of all the premodern cultures when we rise through the air we move closer to God. We recognize that the bird has no care about what keeps it aloft, no anxiety whether it can remain in flight. Likewise to live with one’s life fundamentally turned over to God is too proceed in just that way.

Perhaps you are so blessed that your spirit beats its wings with no thought. But for me and for most of us, I think, this is one of the great challenges that lies within Jesus’ invitation to us to walk upon his Way. If we are to turn ourselves entirely over to God after the fashion Jesus shows us, we need to develop and practice a discipline of letting go, a practice of attending to the moment, a habit of being mindful of the presence of God in the moment.

That is an individual challenge. It is a challenge also to our congregation as in this jubilee year we not only celebrate our history but look to our future. The challenge is that we might do this without fretting, but instead pursue what God intends to do from this time on with utter and confident trust in the Holy One.

As a reflection and commentary on this deep spiritual wisdom contained in that short saying of Jesus, Marcus Borg recommends to us a short poem by the American writer Denise Levertov. “The Avowal”

As swimmers dare

to lie face to the sky

and water bears them,

as hawks rest upon air

and air sustains them;

so would I learn to attain

free fall and float

into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,

knowing no effort earns

that all-surrounding grace.

May it be so.