God's Splendor, or Lew's Birds

Job 38
20th Sunday after Pentecost

(I preached this sermon on our contemporary Fourth Sunday service, and had a file of photos looping on the screen throughout the scripture reading and sermon. All the photos were taken by folks connected to our church and were of the theme, "God's Splendor."

(One other note: I asked Lew's family permission to use his story.)

I've been thinking of Lew. A few months after I came to Hope he came into my office to talk to me about his funeral plans. He was on his second or third round of cancer by that point, and he wanted to have some plans in place. So I got my notepad and pen and got ready to take notes. But instead of discussing Bible readings and hymns he wanted to talk about his birds. "I've got pictures of birds. I'd like to have them projected during my funeral."

See, on a trip to Texas years before, he fell in love with the Sandhill Cranes. He had always loved fishing and camping, but on that trip he fell in love with the Sandhill Cranes migrating across the street from his camper.

Around this time he retired and his wife's alzheimers progressed so she couldn't live at home anymore. Cancer started coming for Lew, and things might have seemed bleak. But he bought a digital camera and took pictures of birds, Sandhill Cranes, Green Jays, and lots and lots of hawks. He had thousands of digital pictures of birds.

Last fall we started talking about the birds again. He hadn't put together a folder of his best pictures yet, and we talked about getting together to get it ready. But the cancer progressed and we didn't get it done. I promised him I would take care of it, and project the birds during his service.

He died the first day of this year. It was a dreary week, no sun at all. I sat in my office for hours with the lights off looking at his bird photos: birds I knew, birds I had heard of, birds I didn't know existed. I began to understand about Lew's birds.

Job also was a guy who had a hard time. He'd lost everything except some insensitive friends and a crabby wife. He kept asking God why this happened to him. God finally showed up and responded with a several chapter-long tirade, a tour through creation.

When we have tough times we can respond in many ways. We can work to shore up ourselves -- therapy, healing work, surrounding ourselves with better friends than Job did. We can put a post-it note on the mirror that says, "You're okay."

Or we can reach out to others: work at the foodshelf, visit someone in the hospital or nursing home. It makes us feel better, not just because of the "they've got it worse than me" thing but because it pulls us out of ourselves.

But we can also just go outside. If we've had a bad night we can look at the stars and things feel different. We can go sit by the lake*, that gorgeous, icy cold, dangerous lake that could kill us as easy as anything, and we feel better. We can try to climb a mountain. We can carry our canoe into the silence of the Boundary Waters. And we feel better, not because we realize how important we are, but because we realize how small we are. We realize how insignificant we really are. And it comforts us.

I think Lew was comforted by his birds because he got lost in their beauty. We can only dream of flying like the hawk. No fashion house in France can compete with the beauty of a simple bird.

Job found comfort too, as he saw the grandeur of creation. It changed things for him.

This is what is so horrifying about nuclear war and global warming. We have our place in creation and we have moved into a situation where we can destroy creation and our idea of our place in it. The grandeur, the distance, the immensity comforts us, but we are messing with all that.

But I have some hope. I think our comfort in creation isn't just about ourselves. It's about how we encounter God there.

I think for Lew he encountered God in the birds. He said they gave him hope, but I think they connected him to God as well. If I had any doubt about that, a bald eagle perched in a tree near his window the day he died. Lew came to God through the birds, and God came to Lew through the birds.

Job found God in his tour of creation too. He said, afterwards, "I had heard of you, but now my eye sees you."

And after that, there just isn't anything to say at all.
Amen.

*Lake Superior