All Saints, Dorval
December 24, 2020
One of the things saving my sanity in this pandemic year has been almost-daily walks along the riverbank near my house.
A couple of weeks ago, I happened to look up into the branches of one of the bare trees beside the path and noticed something that, although it was almost the same colour as the branches, didn’t quite look like part of the tree.
(It’s in the picture on the slide; see if you can find it.)
The birders among you will recognize the nest of a Baltimore oriole, an astonishing pouch-shaped creation just a few inches across, hanging in midair and woven from natural materials, that nevertheless often lasts a year or more (85% of oriole nests survive into the next spring, although the birds don’t usually reuse them).
The mind boggles at how a small songbird can craft such a structure using instinct alone. Looking at it, I thought that the birds must have a powerful adhesive in their saliva or something, but apparently not; it’s all in the weaving. According to the Audubon Society, “the weaving process requires patience and finesse. First, the bird winds long fibers around a branch to create the support strands for the rest of the structure. Then, the female makes a series of rapid thrust-and-draw movements with its beak to begin forming the pouch. She uses more flexible fibers to create an outer bowl before switching to springier fibers for the inner bowl. Downy fibers complete the nest and provide a soft lining to cushion the eggs.”
High in the tree, the nest is well-suited to keep eggs and baby birds away from predators, but nevertheless, to a human observer on the ground, it looks incredibly fragile, as though a strong gust of wind could blow it away, ruining the hopes for another generation of orioles.
And of course, because preachers’ brains are terrible places, just a minute or two after seeing it I was thinking, “Hmm, you know, that’ll preach …”
Because what is more emblematic of Christmas, really, than a nest for a tiny, fragile new life, that seems entirely inadequate to shelter and protect that new life from the world?
If Jesus were a bird, I suspect he would be much more likely to hatch in an oriole’s nest, swinging high above the ground with nothing but metres of air below it, than, for example, that of a falcon, firmly set on a rocky mountainside. This seems to accord with the priorities of a God who became human as a baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in some straw in a feedbox.
Contemporary preachers often use the word “vulnerability” when trying to describe what it means for God to come among us in such radical powerlessness. And it’s a good word, if a bit overused – but when I hear “vulnerability”, which literally means “ability to be wounded,” I can’t help thinking of, like, actual bleeding wounds, which can be a bit distracting, and that’s more of a Holy Week than a Christmas image anyway!
Thinking of the oriole’s nest and of newborn Jesus in the manger, the word that comes to mind is closely related, but not quite the same: and that is “defenselessness”. Like the baby oriole tucked inside a pouch woven from grass fibers five metres in the air, the newborn Jesus in the manger is utterly undefended against all the dangers presented by the world: undefended, that is, except by the love and ingenuity of his earthly parents. (Which is also true of the baby bird!)
And this, for some reason, is how God chooses to come to us.
There is only a week left of 2020, thanks be to God. It has been a year that has revealed to many of us, in unavoidable and sometimes brutal fashion, our own defenselessness. Disease, loss, economic suffering, and resistance against oppression have defined this year. The question of how far we should go to protect ourselves, and how much we should sacrifice to protect others, has been front and center.
Jesus’ defenselessness as a tiny baby points to God’s solidarity with the weakest among us, and how God is far more concerned that we should protect each other than that we should try to render ourselves impregnable. Surrounding ourselves with security barriers of wealth, privilege, and violence will never be the God-like thing to do. We must aim, instead, for the radical defenselessness of God, of newborn Emmanuel lying in the straw.
That is not easy to do. It requires acting in some profoundly countercultural ways, such as being thoughtful about our consumption of resources, and choosing our work for its meaningfulness rather than its earning potential, and being open to truth-telling from, and reconciliation with, those we have wounded, and learning to pray for our enemies.
And it means looking for beauty and meaning in precisely those places where we are frightened, or challenged, or off-balance.
Like the shepherds, terrified of the angel-filled sky, who nevertheless pull themselves together and go to Bethlehem, looking for the child who has been born.
Because the thing about defenselessness is that it so often goes hand in hand with beauty. The oriole’s nest takes our breath away precisely because it is so remarkable and fragile. The beauty of a mountain meadow, or a great work of art, or a newborn baby in a manger, is of the same kind – so precious because it would be so easy to spoil.
But to protect things like these with razor wire and armored cars and a show of violence – or with any form of oppression, even a subtler one – is to deface them in a different way. We cannot truly protect each other, or any beautiful, fragile thing, with force and violence, but only with love, and careful, patient effort.
The defenseless baby in the manger becomes the defenseless Messiah on the cross, and the that is enough to defeat death and remake the whole cosmos. As Paul writes, God’s power is made perfect in weakness. God’s defenseless reveals to us not only the beauty and power of this approach to the world, but also how God, even if we appear to be held in a grasp no stronger than that of an oriole’s nest swinging from a branch, will never, ever let us go.
Amen.
Leave a Reply