The Park Road Pulpit

For these small birds, something calls. Ornithologists call it “instinct.” That instinct stirs deep within -- deep calls to deep (Psalm 42.7) – and one set of fidgety wings flits and dances impatiently, and that nervous impulse is conveyed. An energy of firing synapses, of bird-brained neurons-gone-mad ripples through the air until that instinct, now raised to a frenzied, exponential power, is made manifest in utter chaos and supreme majesty -- aloft, swallows, too many to count, follow their freedom (follow their freedom) – all the way back to Capistrano.[1]

On March the nineteenth of each year, the “Jewel of the (Californian) Missions,” founded by the Franciscan Father Juniper Serra, celebrates St. Joseph’s day by fulfilling its true calling, that is, by becoming a true sanctuary. On this day each year, the little church of San Juan Capistrano becomes a haven of rest for the thousands of cliff swallows who have made their cone-shaped nests of mud and straw here for time immemorial.

According to legend, these little birds return from the Holy Land in each annual pilgrimage, a trip made with twigs in each beak. These twigs are dropped in the ocean to provide rest for weary wings, and are then taken up again as yokes, necessary burdens in this relentless pursuit of home. It is a wonderful tale, but it is just folklore. These swallows, whose numbers before environmental pollution and urban sprawl once darkened the sky, have in recent years been followed south, to their winter home on the banks of the Parana River, in Goya, Argentina. It is a 7,500-mile trip home, made on northerly tailwinds that speed the month-long pilgrimage.

No one understands the mechanism that guides these creatures on this amazing journey, though tiny deposits of iron in their inner ears may serve as on-board compasses for flight. (Something of an organic Global Positioning System – no satellites needed!) The homing instinct and the mechanics of flight are still great puzzles to ornithologists, but the question I’m asking today is not about avian navigation. I am curious on this first Sunday after Christmas, though, of instinct, and of destination. Whether for the swallows, who neither toil nor spin (Matthew 6.26), or for their human counterparts who do fret ourselves to death in perpetual states of pre-Christmas and post-Christmas pandemonium, the question is not, “How do we get there?” But, “What (or who) is it that calls to us from the deep?” and “Where is Capistrano?”

Praise the Lord! Heavens… angels… hosts…sun, moon, and stars…sea monsters… fire and hail… snow and frost… stormy wind… mountains and all hills… fruit trees… wild animals… flying birds… Let them (that is, let all things) praise the name of the Lord, for God commanded and they were created. God established them forever and ever…

God fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed. (This phrase may also be translated, ”for God set a law that cannot pass away.”) (vss.1-10)

In a recent article in the New York Times, Dennis Overbye tickled my fancy as a scientist wanna-be. (Pardon my dabbling… but I just love (not understanding) this stuff!)

Cosmology used to be a heartless science, all about dark matter lost in mind-bending abysses and exploding stars. But whenever physicists and astronomers gather, the subject that roils lunch, coffee breaks or renegade cigarette breaks tends to be not dark matter or the fate of the universe. Rather it is about the role and meaning of life in the cosmos. [2]

According to Overbye, physicists and astronomers, who speak in a language I can hardly decipher, are heating up an old argument called the “anthropic principle.” As best I can tell, in preacher-ese, the principle suggests that at the heart of all reality is some “law,” which has tuned the universe in our favor. That is, there are zillions of reasons why our universe should not have favored life on earth, and, correspondingly, hardly any reasons, according to their calculations and their logic, why the universe should have produced life – much less human beings who live and love.[3]

So, scientists like Dr. Steven Weinberg, who is a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, hates talk of such a principle. (In a sermon last year on Deacon Ordination Sunday, which I entitled, “The Anthropic Principle and the Call of Deacons,” I was also chastised by one of our inductees for such erroneous thinking!) Overbye calls Dr. Weinberg a “hard core reductionist” – that is, he is a supreme believer in a purely naturalistic universe. Everything can be reduced to natural components – which should be discoverable by empirical science and capable of being expressed in some complex mathematical formula. The bottom of such reductionism, so these scientists hope, is one formula explaining it all.

I am speaking a bit “tongue in cheek, of course, because for reductionists, “the law that cannot pass away” is anything but God, but… according to Overbye, scientists such as Dr. Weinberg are increasingly despondent, because their purely scientific calculations of the universe are not “adding up.” The only way they can make their math work is to add in a so-called “comological constant” to the equation. Such a constant is not appealing to hard-core reductionists, so, I had to smile as I read today’s texts and thought about Dr. Weinberg, who does not want to believe. (Or maybe better, who wants desperately not to believe.) He concluded a recent talk with an ironic resignation that sounds almost as if religion actually has a place in the universe:

I'm prepared to go on hoping that [a purely scientific understanding] will be found. But after the passage of time one begins to entertain other possibilities, and the anthropic explanation is another possibility.

Do you hear what I hear? Is the very universe, itself, telling us that there is in fact a law, a principle, an energy, a force, an instinct which beckons, woos, calls … even guides?[4] I believe there is. I call that law, “God,” and we gather in Christmas joy because in Jesus Christ, we have come to believe that this God is, alone, worthy of our praise.[5]

My college roommate, Kyle Matthews, wrote a song years ago about the Swallows of Capistrano.

God has made us for freedom. It is God who calls us to flee the nest. To chart new courses. To break new ground. To question all authorities. To challenge every taboo. To press beyond the known into the divine land of the not-yet-known. But God is also our only “home.” And if we manage to find God, we will also have found ourselves. Or, if we manage to find ourselves, we will also have found God.

God has made us for freedom. No one knew this any better than Jesus. And the calling of freedom sometimes calls us into contradiction with that which is accepted, normative, established. Sometimes freedom even calls us into conflict with that which is closest to us, like our own parents. (I hope my son did not hear me say that!) In the Temple, an understandably petrified mother and father find their twelve year-old, sitting, nonchalant, unconcerned for their anxiety, and his childlike response to Mary’s reproach is mature and quizzical: Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?

The words, “my father’s house,” are not so much a reference to the grand Temple of Israel, and to its religious practice, as they are a metaphor, still relevant for us today: “Did you not know that I must be at home with God”? (Where God is to be found.) At home with the work of God. (At whatever cost.) At home in the presence of God. (Whether comforting or discomforting.) At home with my own calling and identity. (Even if I am not who mama wants me to be!)

There is a “cosmological constant,” and it is God, calling. When we have found that constant in our own lives (whatever it may look like for each individual,), when we have found it … our lives will be lived in praise!

A commitment to God that is born of the experience of God’s love and presence is expressed in grateful participation in God’s redemptive work. There are some things we have to do just because of who we are: “I must be about my Father’s business.”[7]

So, Praise the Lord!, but not by singing with raised hands or by drifting away into some state of religious ecstasy (though there may be a place for such emotional expression in worship). No, Praise the Lord! – as Jesus’ own life teaches us. For his life was lived, I believe, in praise of God. Trust. Obedience. Faithfulness. Courage. Character. Sacrifice. Conviction. These are the attributes of praise.

Jesus grew, in wisdom… The Apostle Paul said, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2.5). Christian discipleship is growth in Christ-likeness. It begins in having his thoughts, in knowing his mind.

Jesus grew, in stature… Though we can do nothing about our physical height, we can let our maturing be an expression of God.[8] There may be no better praise than graceful aging. The wisdom of life-experience, expressed in mature decision-making, and an increasing life of selfless gratitude, is praise of the God who gives that life.

Jesus grew, in human favor… There is no mark of God’s presence with us if our relationships with those around us are constantly out-of-harmony. Relationships are revealing. How much do you show love? And how lovable are you? How much do you trust? And how trustworthy are you? God dwells in our relationships, and laughter, tears, and healthy argument are all signs of praise.

Jesus grew, in divine favor… This is a remarkable statement, especially given all that traditional theology has said about Jesus’ divine nature.[9] If Jesus grew in favor with God, then surely must we. But how do we grow in favor with the God who created us so frail but free?

I believe the Swallows of Capistrano can be our Guide for Christmas Praise. I said in my opening that at the tug of instinct the swallows “follow their freedom all the way back to Capistrano.” But do you hear the inherent contradiction? Can you really follow freedom? Isn’t freedom doing our own thing? Doesn’t freedom mean following no one?

For I believe there is a constant in our universe. I call that constant God. And I share this belief with millions of un-thinking, and millions of deeply-thinking human beings around this great green globe of ours. It is an audacious statement -- that God, who cannot be seen, is a constant – a trustworthy source of hope and help and healing and wholeness in our own very natural lives. And I believe that this constant is always wooing, beckoning, calling us as if by some built-in instinct, and that human freedom is finally found only when we accept our dependency on the persistent reality of God’s presence in our world and in our hearts.

No. We are not free… Or, stated positively, we are free only to follow our instinct … all the way back to Capistrano.

[1] http://www.missionsjc.com/swallows.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/science/space/28COSM.html?ex=1068358361&ei=1&en=

58cfafa8c90017d9

[3] There is a wonderful song by David Wilcox entitled, “Big Mistake,” in which Wilcox sarcastically jabs the reductionist mindset. In his chorus, he sings, “It was a big mistake to have eyes that see, to have love like this inside of me, to have lips that smile as I swim your kiss, to have minds that will forever every part of this…” It is beyond Wilcox’s understanding that a mindless, loveless universe could have produced “a Romeo and a Juliet,” and, though I am a full supporter of evolutionary biology and quantum cosmology (as little as I can understands these disciplines), like Wilcox, I can not reduce God out of the universe either.

[4] Though I do not know much about “Process Theology,” the words I have used here (e.g. “God woos”) have been used in this school of thought, which seeks to reconcile the seeming contradictions between science and theology.

[5] I am seeking neither to defend nor to debunk the “anthropic principle.” I actually do not know enough about it to make a very well-reasoned argument either way. I found this article interesting, nevertheless, for my purposes (the religious implications) – that even those who espouse a naturalistic position (which is generally atheistic) find themselves increasingly in the uncomfortable position of having to admit at least the possibility of “God”!

[6] The copyright is by Kyle Matthews, though the song has never been published or released.

[7] Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, “Luke,” p.78.

[8] “How much better to get wisdom than gold! To get understanding is to be chosen rather than silver. . . . Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life” Proverbs 16.16, 31.

[9] Some have suggested that as God’s “divine son,” the infant, Jesus, so much as knew, literally, his fate – thirty-three years hence, and that his whole life was essentially a matter of “biding his time,” until the appointed hour of his saving death. That Luke suggests Jesus grew is a great contradiction to such foolish thinking. That he grew “in favor with God,” should call Christians to more carefully evaluate the claim of his “divinity” (though the statement does not necessarily contradict such a claim).

[10] From “The Confessions,” of St. Augustine.

A Guide for Christmas Praise

Psalm 148; Luke 2.41-52