Cicadapocalypse 2013!

(Insert menacing music here.)

Also known by “Swarmagaddon.”

Not an apocalypse or even a plague for that matter, it is the maturing and mating cycle for the 17-year cicadas, large insects of the family Cicadidae and the genus Magicicada. Across vast swaths of the Eastern seaboard from North Carolina north to upstate New York and Connecticut, Brood II cicadas (there are fifteen regional broods in all) are emerging from the ground to complete their 17-year life cycle, to mate, lay eggs, and then pass on to the nearer presence of the Lord. This life cycle makes them one of the longer-lived insect species around. But of even more interests to scientist and many nature enthusiasts as well is the unique 17-year cycle and how it evolved.

Brood II cicadas hatched upon twigs in tree canopies back in 1996. Then as nymphs they fell to the soil and burrowed into the ground where they have been living and molting and growing for 16 years, surviving off of nutrients they have sucked out of tree roots. In the Spring of their 17^th year once the ground temperature has reached 64 degrees Fahrenheit, they emerge for about five weeks to find that special partner cicada to mate with and die and the cycle begins again.

Around where I live their emergence has left visible evidence as the ground underneath trees is pockmarked by many dime-sized holes where they have come up from below. With blood red eyes, dark bodies, and of considerable size, they may look kind of ominous, but offer no harm to us humans for they neither bite nor sting. Their intentions are to begin the musical dance of love. The males have rigid plates on their abdomens that they snap producing alluring “come hither” songs that can reach 100 decibels and should the females like, they respond by clicking the wings. It’s a short courtship as their remaining days are short. By the time late July comes, many of the Brood II cicadas will be completing their lifecycles.

The bonanza of this year’s Brood—and it is indeed a bonanza as it supplies a boom of nutrients for various birds and small mammals that prey upon the cicadas—is one of 15 regional Broods of periodic cidadas. Of the 15 Broods, twelve have a 17-year lifecycle and three have a 13-year lifecycle. Last year, Brood I emerged in the Virginia/West Virginia/Tennessee region. Next year, Brood III emerge in the Midwest, so worry not Midwesterners, as you too will be able to experience the 17-year cicadas!

So why talk about cidadas?

This coming Pentecost Sunday’s Psalter lesson is Psalm 104, probably one of my favourite psalms. Firstly, for verse 15 speaking to and of God that the Lord makes “wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart.” I join the psalmist in giving thanks for wine.

But lest we become overly utilitarian, there are verses 24-26: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great. There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.” God creates the sea monster to be. Simply to sport and frolic in the sea! Things great and small! I would add, even the cicada.

But there’s another element that the cicada helps me with, the rhythm of season and cycles. In the always on, twenty-four seven constant-ness of our work and society, there is another beat to which we move, or ought to move, or can move.

This is Prince.

This is the Prince of Peace, or rather a painting of him as the Good Shepherd.

This is a contemporary shepherd in the Palestinian West Bank.

These are sheep.

Another shepherd and more sheep.

And a few more sheep, plus a few goats.

How cute!

This is also a shepherd.

Prince is my dog. And while he looks rather regal sitting in that chair, he’s really a big lovable goof, a 72-pound goober of a lap dog, and one of the finest friends a person could have. The early years of his life were not so pleasant. I’ve been told, that he began his puppy years with a drug dealer in a crack house in Kingston, in upstate New York. Meant to be a tough watchdog, he was abused to harden up. But he never did. Fortunately, he was eventually rescued and adopted by a loving family. Unfortunately, after just a few years, they had to relocate and couldn’t bring a dog of his size with them. He was fostered for a while and eventually wound up with me. He turned twelve years old this past January, which makes him an elder for his Weimaraner breed, and has only recently begun to betray his age.

There are a few wooden steps that lead up into our church offices from the fellowship hall. Was a time when Prince would think nothing of racing up and down those steps, but now—perhaps from wisdom or caution, or maybe anxiety—he paces about the bottom of them and waits for me to walk up them beside him. He does them on his own; I don’t need to guide, carry, or cajole him, just walk beside him. After which he commences a quick smell-about the office, greets whomever may be there, and then lounges in “his” chair.

The painting of the Good Shepherd is in the front of our sanctuary just behind the organ console. Originally it hung in our church building on Avenue B in the East Village of Manhattan. Avenue B was once considered to be New York’s “German Broadway”, the commercial heart of the German immigrant community. But by the turn of the 19^th Century into the 20^th, much of the German community was moving either uptown to Yorkville or out to Brooklyn and Ridgewood. Thus, the Avenue B Church eventually merged with St. Petri Evangelische Kirche in the east Williamsburg/Bushwick section of Brooklyn and became the Trinity Reformed Church of Brooklyn and they built a new church building in the growing German neighborhood of Ridgewood (Brooklyn and Queens). The two merging congregations brought reminders of their previous church edifices—brass bells from St. Petri’s and the Good Shepherd painting from Avenue B. The Good Shepherd looms prominently in our worship space.

Admittedly, the image of a too-white looking Jesus in a billowy clean robe doesn’t square well in my mind of what the actual Jesus looked like, or an actual shepherd for that matter. And on Good Shepherd Sunday a few weeks ago, I pointed out in the sermon how Jesus undoubtedly had a much darker complexion than many of us who have German backgrounds. Nonetheless, a white Jesus has sort of grown on me. All the many problems that entails aside—and there are many—I appreciate how God comes to us as one of us. Now Trinity Reformed is made up of folks from Asian and Latino heritage, even Middle Eastern backgrounds, as well as our German and other European-background folks, a full spectrum of skin colours. But the turn of the century congregation, these immigrants from Germany and Austria and other parts of Central Europe, that Good Shepherd image must of meant something for them. And I can appreciate that! Although, it is not the image I have of the Good Shepherd.

I think now especially, when hearing Psalm 23 my mind readily jumps to the West Bank and the Hebron Hill. I picture the Palestinian shepherds out among their sheep, leading them to fresh meadows, protecting them from harm—too often from the hands of illegal Israel settlers. I picture the men and boys who work so in sync with their sheep. The sheep really do know their voices and respond to their commands. But I don’t just picture the people who shepherd the sheep; I picture the dogs who also shepherd. These dogs are not like my lap dog Prince who is a pet and companion. No, these dogs are working dogs, they are shepherds. They work in sync with their people to keep watch over the flocks.

All this to say that words are one thing, but the images they connote can be another. NPR’s Morning Edition had report this morning about language and brain function and images. Very appropriate. I certainly grew up with an image of the Good Shepherd much like that which is in our sanctuary. While not completely accurate, I’m sure it was helpful at times. But now that image is expanded. Jesus looks different. God “looks” different.

Some years ago around Christmas time a friend and colleague shared with me about a book they were reading which focused on the shepherd to whom the angels announced the birth of Christ. I forget the book or the author. But the gist of it was an imaginative rethinking of that Lukan story where the angels sang and proclaimed the joyous news first not simply to human shepherds, but to dog shepherds. And thus the dog shepherds were some of the first to go and see this thing that has taken place and adore the newborn king. No need to alter the original story, but I like that image. I picture the men and boys and dogs—all the shepherds—who went to Bethlehem that evening.

Which brings me back to my Prince. He is now of the age where I have to shepherd him around differently, including the step into my office. But in so many ways, he also shepherds me. The unconditional love and presence of “man’s best friend” is like that of the real Good Shepherd. I mean absolutely no disrespect to the historical Jesus, but if we can picture a fair skin man in flowing robes journeying with us in green pastures and dark valleys, I think its can be fitting to imagine God with four paws and an undying affection for his beloved.

Does what we believe make a difference?

Or should what we believe make a difference?

Or rather, how do we believe what we believe?

And let me put it right out there, I mean belief especially about peace, as a Christian practice, as a way of faith, as being about Jesus. Is it? Do we believe it…or in it...or that’s it’s important?

And I suppose I’m coming at this from a few different angles. Firstly from a Heidelberg 1, “what is your only comfort” direction relating comfort not only to assurance but peace, probably the peace that passes understanding kind of peace. If we have this comfort—if we have this peace—is it also something that we are suppose to embody, to practice, to permeate? Another angle relates to last Sundays conversion narratives of Saul/Paul and I would include Peter. Saul goes from persecuting the early church to becoming one of them. He goes from practicing violence against them to participating in bearing the good news including practicing peace. Peter too. Although he knew Jesus before and he would then take up the sword to defend him, still he denied him three times. But in last Sunday’s gospel with the cookout breakfast on the seashore we have Peter experiencing a kind of conversion experience of letting go of his guilt and living into a new reality of feeding Jesus’ lambs and tending his sheep. Peter goes from taking up the sword to taking up lambs, from participating in violence to sharing in nurturing. This seems like a movement of discipleship in practicing peace.

I am also coming at this from the angle of whom I understand Christ to be and what the Holy Spirit enables. That he is the Prince of peace and that the Holy Spirit brings about peace.

So I’m trying to understand if this is so, do we believe in the way of peace?

I am fully aware that the Reformed tradition is not part of the historical “peace churches.” I am fully cognizant that there is both a history they espouse that we don’t directly share and a theology of just war that we lean upon. But all that still, aren’t we to be about peace? Not pie-in-the-sky-peace, or hippie-peace (no offense to hippies), but honest to goodness God commanded loving thy neighbor, Christ following, Spirit empowered peace?

I’m pondering this as North Korea is bellicose with intimidation and accusation and bombs have gone off in Boston and we as a nation are pandering to the gun lobby while we are droning and bombing enemies and communities on the other side of the world. And too, I’m irritable having not had my morning coffee. And I’m irritated at the state of the world. And I’m irritated at the response and presence of the Church. And I’m irritated with myself, because I don’t particularly see the way of peace in my own attitude quite often. I don’t find in myself—attitude and perspective, let alone practices—much peace being done.

So I ask, does what I/we believe about peace make a difference? Or should it? And how?

I lead to believe it does or should.

But I’m not really feelin’ it. So now what?

And you?

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD-- and their descendants as well. Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.                                                                                                                                                                         –Isaiah 65:17-25

I’ve been observing over the last several weeks a pair of mourning doves, Zenaida macroura, as they assemble their nest upon one of the window ledges of an upstairs guestroom. The industrious couple has been gathering vegetative detritus and debris from the churchyard and reapportioning it to hold their eventual brood. What I first took notice of was how incredibly useful old dry Hosta leaves and stems were to them. Passing daily past a couple of old gnarly yew trees in the courtyard surrounded by a generally verdant blanket of green Vinca, the brown leftovers of last summer’s Hosta plants stood out. “You need to clean that up” I’d tell myself, but never seemed to get to it. So I was happily surprised to see them being taken up with such gusto by my windowsill neighbors, pleasantly hearing the whistling sound of the dove’s takeoff each time they gathered their building supplies. It gave me a kind of The Lion King/Hakuna Matata/Circle of Life feeling to see how last year’s yard wastes would become this year’s bird nest.

The Mourning Dove is a beautiful songbird and its commonality should not take away from that grandeur. So common, it is spread throughout much of North America and with full-season habitation in all of the lower 48 states, the dove is one of the most widespread species of songbirds. It shares its haunting call of cooOOoo-woo-woo-woooo and cooOOoo that it is one of the most recognized birds by sound, a sound that contributes to its name of mourning, which I personally don’t find a mournful sound, but rather, very comforting. So abundant, the dove is also a common game bird. Which is sad to me. Hunting for food and wildlife management makes sense. But mourning dove populations don’t really require management by hunting—they are an abundant species which have an already high mortality rate. Although they can be eaten, it is generally just the breast that is consumed—which seems a rather wasteful kill for just a couple puny pieces of meat. More often than not, the birds serve as live targets and many are wounded.

So about that high mortality rate…

Early last week—Monday morning of Holy Week actually—I was greeted in the church courtyard by the striking presence of a hawk having just made a kill and enjoying her breakfast. At first I was like, “Cool!” It’s a pretty cool thing to experience wildlife in New York City, beyond say rats or cockroaches. With a pretty constant din of traffic, various sirens, and the rumble of the elevated train along with concrete and bricks consuming most of the view in any general direction, the connection to nature and wildlife is grounding and sustaining. It is beautiful. It is also harsh. As I approached the hawk more closely awareness dawned on me and recognition of what and who her meal was: a mourning dove.

It was one thing to feel all The Lion King/Hakuna Matata/Circle of Life about the Hosta plant, quite another about the mourning dove that I’d been watching build a nest these last few weeks. Sure enough, the nest construction has stopped. The dove who became the hawk’s breakfast had a partner although I’ve not seen him or her around lately. (Doves are usually monogamous.)

During those early weeks of nest construction I was thinking a lot about how I like things neat and tidy: a neat and tidy house, a neat and tidy yard, a neat and tidy life. Even my theology often, likes to be neat and tidy. We could insert a joke about how we Reformed-types especially like things to be done decently and in order—neat and tidy, but that’s not just our tradition or personality, that’s a very human reaction I believe. And neat and tidy has its place, to be sure. But in the construction of the nest I was reminded of how “our” version of neat and tidy may not serve in the bigger picture sort of way. Had I cleaned up that yard waste, my birds would have not so readily had nesting materials available to them.

These thoughts were not consuming me, merely background conversation in my head.

But then the hawk came.

With my biological training I have great appreciation for both the dove and the hawk. As I said above, it was really cool when I first saw the hawk. But then the loss of the dove set in. Sure, there is a neat and tidy ecological explanation—or probably, more dynamic than tidy. Again, these have not been a consuming thoughts, rather, background conversation in my head.

But for the timing, at the beginning of Holy Week. This backyard drama of life and rebirth, death and loss has played out just beyond my office window. And I can’t help but see it connected, somehow, to God’s Easter vision in Isaiah…

Would be too trite to say keep building nests? Would it be too bromidic to long for a time when the hawk and the dove feed together?

So four days after Easter does the vision still stand even if its not so neat and tidy?

I am especially thinking today of those who have kept the vision in a world not so neat and tidy. I think of Rev. Dr. King’s words in Memphis on April 3, 1968:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I'm happy, tonight.

I'm not worried about anything.

I'm not fearing any man.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

It is with that mindset, with thoughts of home permeating my heart that I wish to use this space to commend to you a new short film of only 26 minutes called My Neighbourhood. For a limitted time, you can watch the entire film online at the Guardian. My Neighbourhood concentrates on a child as he is becoming a teen, eleven years old Mohammed El Kurd, a Palestinian who lives in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem. He and his family and many neighbors are forced to give up their homes as Israeli settlers move into them. In a very short amount of time, the viewer is able to see how resentment and hate develops, fosters, and grows. Animosity and enmity is not where this story ends, however. We also meet Zvi and Sara Benninga, Jewish Israelis residing in West Jerusalem who develop a relationship with Mohammed and join in regular protest to save the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Three years ago a group of about twelve delegates from the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church in America joined a Christian Peacemaker Team group for two weeks in the West Bank of Palestine. We went to Sheikh Jarrah, participated in the protest, and actually met some of Mohammed’s family who were camped out in front of their home that has been taken over by settlers. It was a profound and personalizing experience of an issue far too ignored or generalized in the US media.

This week as President Obama is visiting Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank and much of the media’s coverage will be given over to rhetoric and ruhmors of wars with Iran, I urge you to remember Mohammed and Zvi and Sara and the countless others—Israeli, Palestinian, and international—who are working towards a just peace in Palestine and Israel, who are reminding and showing the world what is happening, who are peacefully but courageously protesting the injustice of horrors of the occupation. Please join me in prayer that all might find a true home with peace and security.

The Guardian currently is showing the film, My Neighbourhood online, but this is for a limited time. To find out more about the film, go to http://www.justvision.org/myneighbourhood.

You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,

    and plants for people to use,

to bring forth food from the earth,

    and wine to gladden the human heart,

to make the face shine,

    and bread to strengthen the human heart.

The trees of the LORD are watered abundantly,

    the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.

In them the birds build their nests;

    the stork has its home in the fir trees.

The high mountains are for the wild goats;

    the rocks are a refuge for the coneys.

You have made the moon to mark the seasons;

    the sun knows its time for setting.

You make darkness, and it is night,

    when all the animals of the forest come creeping out.

The young lions roar for their prey,

    seeking their food from God.

When the sun rises, they withdraw

    and lie down in their dens.

People go out to their work

    and to their labor until the evening.

Psalm 104:14-23

New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

There is a tree about two blocks away from where I live which stands about midpoint between two busy intersection. It is perhaps easily missed, goes unnoticed, possibly uninspiring to the tree enthusiast. It is average and ordinary to the eye and if anything, doesn’t call out the “essence of tree” as its canopy has been oddly hacked and roughly misshapen to allow for utility lines. But to me it is a special tree, a good tree, and a reminder of the sweetness present even in the darkest of February and March days.

"April is the cruellest month…" was powerfully spoken by T. S. Eliot, but I think it is late winter and early spring when we most long for change and growth or at least for the warmth and light the coming season brings. March has such promise and longing then clobbers us with another snowstorm. Cold gloomy days hold on long, be it from steely gray lake affect cloud cover, fierce prairie winds, or embankments of asphalt, concrete, and steel.

But that tree down the block knows better. There is life in the old girl yet! With a few days that bring a limited but increasing ration of sunshine, temperatures rise a few degrees, then plummet below freezing again at night. And movement happens! Imperceptible to our human eyes and to all the many souls who plod past her daily, but now is when the sap rises.

My special tree down the street is a sugar maple, Acer saccharum, or as my granddad would have called it, hard maple. As lumber, its hard wood makes excellent furniture and musical instruments and is ideal for flooring especially bowling alleys and basketball courts. But its most admirable quality—if one can admire such things and I do—is what even its Latin name, saccharum suggests: sugar. During the cold months the sugar maple stores nutrients as starch in its trunk and roots, but as the days warm and the nights freeze, that starch gets transformed into sugar water sap that moves in the tree’s xylem—the tree’s network of blood lines, if you will—and that sap can be tapped and collected, boiled down, and become one of the most delicious foods known to humanity, maple syrup.

And we’re not talking about that maple flavoured corn syrup substitute stuff you find in your average grocery store. No. Maple syrup is unadulterated goodness from God, a kind of fruit from heaven.

Last week’s gospel passage from Luke had Jesus telling the parable of the fig tree. I like figs. I’ve written about them here before. Even brought in a little potted patio fig tree for the children’s sermon last week. When we think about trees bearing fruit, producing something like a fig makes for a ready analogy, handy and appropriate for Jesus (and Luke) to use with his original audience. But I’ve been pondering this passage in light of these cold days of March in New York. Figs are indeed abundant but not so fruitful during this time of year. But maple trees are producing right now. Easily missed for sure, especially in the midst of the City. And the fruit of the sap is not the same as the multiple little helicopter seed pods they’ll shed later in the summer. But this “fruit” is actually abundant and tasty for those who know about it and how to go about refining it.

There is something beautiful about sap coursing through the tree to bring it back to life. In the resulting syrup we get to actually taste and see how sweet and abundant that life is. Even in the midst of the cruel month of March, life and abundance are still present. Fruit still happens.

Maybe for many people and congregations too?

My tree down the block will not be tapped for sugar. And that’s ok. She still reminds me that it is sugaring season. She reminds me there is much underneath the surface. She reminds me that even on these cold dreary days, life is still sweet, good, and abundant.

Apparently somebody knew somebody and had a connection, and there was most likely an election coming up, and the President being relatively a local boy coming from across the river in Hyde Park, he was invited to the Ladies Guild Annual Church Fair. And he shows up!

Now ironically, speaking with many of the old-timers, he was not necessarily well liked. The mid-Hudson Valley back then was a pretty reliably Republican area. And even during my time serving there during the second Bush years, I learned that the vast majority of my congregants followed a similar voting habit.

All that said, over the years of my own political development I have learned to love FDR. Thus, I am quite happy to have a picture of the house that I once lived in with the President of the United States sitting in the front yard.

The season of Lent grants one the opportunity for self-examination, and to perhaps discern how the various idols we often worship immerse themselves into the systems of our lives, politics being one of those great idols. As said above, as Presidents go, I really like FDR. And yet I am reminded that he did what I believe to be absolutely terrible things as President, immoral and certainly unconstitutional.

Two days ago, February 19^th, marked the anniversary of Executive Order 9066 where in 1942 President Roosevelt signed an order that gave the Secretary of War the ability to define certain areas of the United States as military zones. As such, vast portions of the US—about one third of our land—was declared a military zone and the order further enabled those persons of “Foreign Enemy Ancestry” living in those areas to be rounded up and relocated to “internment camps.” Approximately 11,000 Americans of German ancestry and 3,000 of Italian ancestry were interned. But over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry where rounded up, taken away from their communities, their homes, farms, and businesses, relocated and interned in significantly substandard and deplorable living arrangements. These camps included old horse stables in interior western states surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. The vast majority of those persons interned during the duration of World War II were American born citizens of the United States.

FDR let this happen, assisted in it’s happening.

I still greatly admire Roosevelt but abhor his involvement in this dark mark upon our nation. I agree with much of his politics, but not all his actions.

Somehow, all this has been ruminating in my mind as I’ve reacted to Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement of his “retiring.” I remember vividly sitting at the kitchen table (in the photo above, it was situated just inside that widow you see in the far right side of the house) when the white smoke came in Rome and it was announced Cardinal Ratzinger would be the new Pope. Having read some of the Cardinal’s writings, I was disappointed and saddened by the news then. Admittedly, most of my disappointments haven’t changed much over these last few years. Dismayed at the hierarchy’s abysmal response to the clergy sex abuse scandals, discouraged by its attack upon women religious, and vehemently disagreeing with its response, perspective, and attitude towards LGBT Catholics, I find his stepping down to be a good thing.

Yet…

I think the Holy Father has attempted to do what he believes to be faithful. And although I disagree with him, I understand him to be my brother in Christ. I have found in myself, even in my own attitude, a measured response sensitive to the many Roman Catholics whom we minister to and with, who even make up a part of our congregation’s church family. Here, I agree with the Pope’s action, even as I usually do not agree with his politics.

There’s no conclusion here.

Merely ruminations on politics, history, and faith during this Lenten season.

Just some thought along the journey.

One day last week while running errands, doing visits, and culminating in some long put-off grocery shopping it seemed as though the vast majority of humanity—at least, of which I was encountering—was in cahoots to foul up my life by getting in my way, going slow, and doing otherwise stupid activity with no other seeming goal than to perturb me. I was in a bad mood. And being behind the wheel during a portion of this time would not generally contribute to alleviating my sour disposition. But then while driving through Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn almost home and done with this draining day, a segment on that evening’s All Things Considered broke me out of my cranky-pants attitude. Lead by the velvety voices of NPR hosts, Melissa Block and Audie Cornish I was helped to see the light. And discover something new about dung beetles.

Dung beetles are incredible creatures that number over 5000 species whose name basically says it: they are beetles involved with dung. The unsung heroes in nature’s sanitation management, these little marvels (and sometimes not so little) consist entirely or almost entirely on the waste—excrement, feces, manure, dung—of other creature. Some of these beetles are known to actually move into the pile of poo and set up home there. Others specialize in burying their bounty in tunnels. And others, after discovering an abundant food sources, will take their prize by shaping it into neat little spheres and rolling it away. It was this kind of dung beetle that the NPR report was on.

Eric Warrant, an Australian zoology professor teaching in Sweden has been studying a species of dessert dung beetles, particularly their navigational skills. As one might surmise, certain nutritional resources can be especially scarce in the dessert environment. To a dung beetle, a fresh pile of feces is banquet feast in a hungry community, thus it becomes a highly competitive situation. Onto, or rather, into the pile, many beetles contend to get their portion of the poo first and to get home safely. Not only must they battle other beetles for their supper—and battles do indeed break out fighting to get dung—they must also watch out for the ever present lazy dung beetles who lay in wait until the best balls of dung are portioned out and who then try to steel it from the more enterprising beetle. The most effective strategy is to get to the new pile quickly, get your poo balled up, and get out of there as fast as you can.

And this is what Professor Warrant has been studying: in wasting neither precious time nor loosing their haul of feces, how do dung beetles navigate the most direct path or strait line from the dung heap to their homes? It turns out, by looking towards the heavens. The dung beetles—the particular species studied lives on the edge of the Kalahari dessert and works nocturnally in the night—use the stars of the Milky Way as a kind of compass to guide them onto the most direct path. It has long been known that certain animals use the sun and moon as navigational aids, but the dung beetles work on moonless nights. So how do they do that? The scientist made little paper hats for the beetles, basically blindfolding their eyes in an upward direction. When they did that, the beetles literally rolled their poo in circles and could no longer navigate straight. Remove the hats, however, and the beetles were back to direct routes. In further studies, the scientist placed the beetles in a planetarium, altered the stars in the sky and again, the beetles could not navigate correctly. But when the Milky Way was projected, the dung beetles got their grove back.

Now, perhaps you don’t find dung beetles and their navigational skills nearly as fascinating as I do. That’s cool. But one nonetheless has to celebrate the intricacies of the universe. I think it should also give us pause as it relates to the losses we suffer as humanity that is still very much created and evolved as part of the natural world we dwell in and are a part of. And here I mean the loss of that natural world itself, or of us having our bearings in it. Because sometimes I too feel like a dung beetle whose vision of the heavens have been marred and I can’t find my way home and am running in circles instead.

We live in a world and in such a way that many of the natural parts of life from other biological creatures and ecological relationship to climate and seasons are altered, affected, or spoiled in such a way that we loose our bearings. This past weekend in the New York Times was a beautiful report on a project that the French photographer Thierry Cohen has assembled by taking various photos of cityscapes from around the world and matching them via latitudinal positioning coordinates to night skies as seen from similar rural locals. Something that is almost entirely impossible to actually experience because of the severe light pollution that our urban environments produce is made visible in his work of art. Go to the site and see what New York City or Tokyo or São Paulo or Hong Kong would look like if one could view the night sky there. It’s beautiful. And it also makes me wonder what we are missing.

I’m no Luddite. I’m simply saying that there are a variety of ways of not seeing and of missing out that which we are present to. I’m thinking of that especially as we approach this Transfiguration Sunday when Jesus takes the disciples away onto a mountain and they see something that they were missing while down in the valley.

How often does that happen?

If you’ve not seen the show then I do apologize for going on about it. Forgive me, please; but it is quite entertaining and I highly recommend.

A particular conversation from this past week’s episode (episode 3, season 3, for we audience in the US are delayed from that of the UK) involved the Crawley household reacting to the unexpected arrival of Tom Branson, his entanglement with some activist and/or possibly terrorist actions and the subsequent plot introduction of the rise of what will become the Irish Free State. For background—as I myself am still catching up—what is pertinent here is that the Crawleys are a British aristocratic family lead by Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham and that Tom Branson is from a “lower class” (from the Crawley perspective), Irish, former staff, who has married the Earl’s youngest daughter and thus is now part of the family. Involved in actions back in Ireland, Tom as well as his wife have had to escape, albeit separately, and return to Downton for a spell. Lord Grantham is irate at the position that Tom’s involvement in activities that he does not agree with and ideas he does not support has put his daughter in, while also being honour-bound and obligated to his daughter and thus, Tom, to look out for their well-being.

In an exchange, exasperated, Lord Grantham states, “What a harsh world you live in.”

To which Tom Branson immediately retorts, “We all live in a harsh world. But at least I know I do.”

Pow! Along with the romance and intrigue that drives the drama of Downton, it seems this line so captures the change and struggle that is always present undergirding issues of class and gender and power. Lord Grantham is indeed standing on a particular side of history and that history is changing. Branson gets that in a way that Crawley cannot. Or doesn’t want to.

As such, it was interesting after an evening in the Abbey, to wake the following day and watch the revel of the Presidential Inauguration. Now, President Barak Obama may not be on the same level of say a writer for Downton Abbey, but he does have a certain panache with words. In one part of his address in particular he delivered a “Pow!” kind of line that immediately rung with the same resonance as Tom Branson’s, but more explicitly,

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth. (emphasis mine)

Pow! And it was inspiring. The beauty of the alliteration aside, the President is onto something. To see the arc of justice moving from suffrage to civil rights and equality not only gave me great hope, but was also demonstrable of seeing the world and change a certain way. That just perhaps we don’t need to ignore the harsh realities but involve ourselves in changing them.

Many have already expounded upon the beauty of the Presidential Inauguration and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday coinciding. It was hard to not hear the echo of Rev. Dr. King’s words gathered once again as we were in the nation’s capital. But it wasn’t his words about a dream that I heard. It was those from a jail cell in Alabama that resonated most strongly:

"So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.

"But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust."

-Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Sometimes, it’s easy to be entertained by history. The drama and the romance and even the glamour of a different time, to wistfully look back… To cheer on Maggie Smith, or Shirley MacLaine. We certainly cheer on Dr. King, I hope. (And I’m not confused with fiction and non-fiction.) But do we see ourselves as making history? As part of it?

Our community is awash in blood.

No, I’m not writing from Newtown, CT; though we share similar tragedies.  You probably don’t know the names or the numbers, but their families shed the same kind of tears and harbor the same kind of hurt.  The city of Grand Rapids suffered from 11 murders over the course of a majority of the year (not many by comparison, I know).  But then came Dec. 14^th and Dec. 15^th and Dec. 17^th and Dec. 20^th and…6 murders in one week.  It hasn’t stopped.  Just last night another 18 year old was shot after answering a knock on his door.

The mentality is clear, “You must die so that I can live.”  More and more I’m worried that this mentality is sanctioned (sanctified?) by our own view of the cross.  Lent is still a few weeks away, but we’ll be wondering what it means to be “washed in Jesus’ blood.”  We won’t be able to ignore our community, afraid of death and awash in blood.

Here’s a reformed view of the cross:

 We believe that God-- who is perfectly merciful and also very just-- sent his Son to assume the nature in which the disobedience had been committed, in order to bear in it the punishment of sin by his most bitter passion and death.

So God made known his justice toward his Son, who was charged with our sin, and he poured out his goodness and mercy on us, who are guilty and worthy of damnation, giving to us his Son to die, by a most perfect love, and raising him to life for our justification, in order that by him we might have immortality and eternal life (Belgic Confession, Art. 20).

Q: Since then, by the righteous judgment of God, we deserve temporal and eternal punishment, is there no way by which we may escape that punishment, and be again received into favor?

A: God will have his justice satisfied:  and therefore we must make this full satisfaction, either by ourselves, or by another (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 12).

The message is clear: someone must die.  God will have his justice satisfied, but so will too many people today who feel wronged or offended and satisfied only with death.  And, aren’t they just simply living in God’s image when they do?  How can the cross be good news if it reflects the same impulse that causes so much pain in the streets outside our churches?  How can it be salvation when the Savior requires the same satisfaction as those who need to be saved?

Maybe the answer is in the doctrine of the Trinity.  Or, maybe the answer is in the blood.  “For the life of the creature is in the blood…” – Lev. 17:11.  Maybe it’s time to stop talking about sacrifice as a substitution and satisfaction and start considering it a sign and a seal.  The prophets hated the sacrifice that was viewed as a substitute for right living.  They despised those who felt satisfied offering an animal while sacrificing their neighbor. 

So, if Jesus offered a true sacrifice it couldn’t be like that.  It couldn’t be one that allowed the cycle of violence to continue because God was satisfied by the death of his Son.  So, maybe Jesus didn’t satisfy a need for death, but instead offered a life; a life of compassion, sealed by his blood, a sign of his trust in God’s power over death.  Jesus, and Jesus alone, could die because he knew that he would live.

“In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” – Hebrews 12:4.  And we haven’t resisted to that point because we are afraid of death.  We believe the only way to defend ourselves is to use it ourselves.  So, the only way for me to live is for you to die.  The only way for me to thrive is for you to be sacrificed.

Our community is awash in blood.  But it is the blood of substitution and satisfaction.  It is the blood of death.  Our community needs to be washed in His blood.  The blood of compassion, a sign and a seal of devotion.  It is the blood of life, even eternal life.   Who will go?

What about those who are washed in Jesus’ blood, who are soaked in his life of faith and hope and love in the Spirit, who have been freed from their fear of death, who resist sin and contest sin even to the point of shedding their own blood because they have come to trust in God’s power over death through the resurrection of Jesus Christ?