Red Bird, Winter Branch
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, December 20, 2009


Message: Red Bird, Winter Branch

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2009.

Fly, bird of hope, and shine, light of love.
Winds be still.
When it’s really cold,
winds be still – that’s a refrain on a lot of our minds, huh?
Storm clouds pass –
yes please.

Winter can be hard,
but when those winds are still,
when the storm is past
and the snow is shoveled,
and you look outside,
well, that can be lovely.

There is a beauty in winter –
the snow on branches,
the quiet of the world.

We live just a few doors down from the Auburn St. bridge,
and, although the noise isn’t terrible by any means,
you certainly hear the traffic.
But when it is snowing –
when the stuff is coming down thick and heavy,
it’s like the mute button is on.

Quiet – partly less cars, I’m sure.
But mostly,
the muffling effect of the snowstorm.

It’s not just that –
the whole world seems quieter in the winter,
especially when the snow falls.

Winter is an invitation to quiet.

And it is darker, too.
Not all the time, of course –
when the sun is out,
and reflecting off the snow,
it is bright.

But the sun goes down so early.
Tomorrow, the 21st of December,
is the shortest day of the year.
Tomorrow there will be 9 hours, 7 minutes, and 54 seconds
between sunrise and sunset
which is two seconds less than today.
Tuesday will have two seconds more daylight
than Monday.
It isn’t a huge difference, I know,
but for thousands of years,
people have noted this day,
the winter solstice,
have observed it as a time of prayer, celebration,
a time of renewal and introspection.

The Dark of Winter,
a time for holly and evergreen,
for candles to light the night,
a time for feasting and fellowship.
A time when the wheel of the year turns,
the Yule.
Gentle Darkness, soft and still, bring your quiet to me.

And we bundle up.
Sweaters indoors,
gloves and hats and scarves outside.
It is wise to protect ourselves from the cold.

Perhaps because we have less access to these three senses:
hearing, seeing, and touch,
we accentuate taste and smell.
Rich, luscious meals,
with sauces and spices.
Evergreen in our living rooms,
scented candles on windowsills.

These are the marks of this season:
the marks of Yule, of the dark of winter.

It is an invitation,
winter.
Rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities.

An invitation to turn down the volume,
to dim the lights,
and notice what is too often obscured.

Like the cardinal on the branch.

There is something, magical, isn’t there?
about the trees, which are tracing themselves
delicately against dawns and sunsets,
the branches which seem so lifeless,
and the background of white snow on the ground –
a landscape stark and crisp,
brown and white,
and there hops a little red bird.
He sits on the branch, looks around.
What is he looking for?
Isn’t he cold?
Apparently not.
It’s the male who is bright red,
the female is more subtle with shades of brown
and more of a rusty color on the wings and tail,
although they both have the bright red beak.
They stay where they are,
not migrating like the geese and the rest;
they tough it out
instead of departing for warmer climes.

They eat seeds and insects and fruits,
and are, apparently, particularly fond of sunflower seeds.

They like to get up high enough in the branches
to sing, and be noticed singing.

And they don’t molt,
which is why they are so distinctive in the winter,
still in their finery.

When others retreat, or hide,
the cardinal shines.

And the poet is grateful for such gifts –
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,
or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens –
She is grateful
that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do.

Winter is an invitation.

The volume is turned down,
and the lights are dimmed,
and we are invited to attend,
to be present,
to turn inward and make an account of ourselves.

It is, as Mark Belletini notes,
a time to focus carefully on things
that the spotlight has missed.
Eyes closed and breath steady.
Less light is an invitation,
the quiet and the dark an offering.

We are seasonal creatures –
even though, like the cardinal,
we, by and large, do not migrate nor molt.
We are seasonal creatures.

The ancients knew this of course,
and it is why they celebrated the turnings of the year:
tomorrow, the shortest day, Yule,
and the longest day, midsummer, in June,
and the days of balance, when light and night are equal,
at the ends of March and September,
and the quarter turnings too:
Imbolc – we call it groundhog’s day;
Beltaine, May Day,
Lughnasadh, at the start of August,
and Samhain, -- we call it Halloween.

This calendar is embedded into the deep recesses
of our cultural consciousness.

It’s not a coincidence that Christmas is so close to Yule,
nor that the word Easter sounds so much like Ostara,
the pagan word for the Spring Equinox.
Yule has always been celebrated with evergreen and feasting,
and Ostara with eggs and rabbits – symbols of fertility,
and Samhain with costumes, ghost stories, and candies.

We are seasonal creatures,
and we can’t escape that reality.

Hold us in your steady mercy, Lady of the turning year.
The seasons are not just about the turning of the year, though:
they are also about the changes in our own lives:
Hold us in your steady mercy, Mother of the generations.
Or, as other ancient wisdom puts it,
wisdom far older than the creeds and doctrines of any religion,
for everything there is a season,
for everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

For everything there is a season,
and we are seasonal creatures.
We do great mischief, even harm,
to our souls when we deny our seasonal nature.
When we keep everything the same.
When we ignore how our lives and bodies change,
through the turning year and the turning day,
and the generations which come and go.

The ancient Greek Philospher Heraclitus put it this way:
“you cannot step twice into the same river.”
Which is to say, everything changes.
Everything is in motion, in flux.
For everything, there is a season.

Of course, the impulse of so much of western thought,
Heraclitus and a few others excepted,
is to deny the seasonal nature of existence.
The ancients knew that everything was change,
but, as society became firmer,
and people sought to secure their identities
against the tides of time,
we sought to move away from our seasonability.

A hundred years after Heraclitus, Plato comes along
and says Heraclitus must be wrong.
Things are eternal,
and we access those things through our reason.

And the history of western thought,
by and large,
is dominated by Plato’s commitment to un-changeability.

We long for the assurance implied by stability,
we fear the new and the different,
even if we are unhappy with the present and the familiar.
We turn up the heat, and turn on the bright lights,
winter – what winter?
slow down? who, me?

But, of course, it turns out that Heraclitus was right
and Plato was wrong.
Everything is flux and change.
Quantum mechanics makes that conclusion unavoidable.

You never can step into the same river twice,
every particle of every atom is in motion,
all the time,
the universe, life, and everything – it is perpetual, unceasing, change.

In other words, we are seasonal creatures
living in a seasonal universe.

In the last century, as the physics and biology of evolution and change
have finally dethroned the idolatry of stasis,
theology has been slow to catch up.
But many theological liberals have embraced a new vision of divinity
to match the new cosmology:
a vision of relationship, a power in process with creation,
a Lady of the turning age,
whose virtues are constant –
hold us in your steady mercy –
but who changes because what is ultimate is in relationship
with everything,
and everything changes.

The divine has seasons too,
times of flourishing, times of cascading plentitude,
and times of restraint –
times of brown branches against white snow,
times of dark and quiet,
times when the cardinal fires up the landscape,
and that is enough.
Just a little red bird,
but that is enough to color the whole world,
if we have eyes to see.
that is enough to sing the whole world,
if we have ears to hear.

We are seasonal creatures
living in a seasonal universe;
we can flee from that fact,
or we can accept it.

I think it’s better to accept it.

In this season,
which is a season to itself,
and not simply a way to spring,
in this season,
we are invited:
invited to live in harmony with the way of things.

The sun sets:
earlier in this season than any other,
as Paul Dunbar, the poet whose words
were set to music in the choral anthem,
put it:
in the lately radiant west
the gold is fading into gray
while in the south the first faint star
lifts to the night its silver face
and twinkles to the moon afar.

A star twinkles in the night . . .
we lift up our eyes to see,
what cannot be seen so well
in other times of the year.

And we are invited:
invited to follow that star,
to see where it goes,
to journey in the direction suggested by mystery.

No one knows, of course,
when Joshua Bar Joseph,
Jesus of Nazareth,
was born,
or where,
but a legend grew up, as it usually does:
and whether or not the legend is factual
is beside the point,
the legend speaks to our longing,
it sings to our hearts.

In the winter time,
in the midst of oppression,
in some back-water-corner of the world,
some place that used to be important,
once upon a time, but isn’t anymore,
and in that unimportant place,
not even in the inn,
but in the stable, for god’s sake,
with the sheep and the cows,
in that place,
the divine makes itself known.

When things are dark and quiet,
when it looks like there is nothing but leafless branches
and week-old snow,
there is a dash of bright red,
a beak, a tail, a wing.

If you take Heraclitus and Quantum Mechanics seriously,
if you respect the wisdom of the ancient pagans,
and the ancient Jews,
that for everything there is a season,
if you open your heart to the Tao,
the sacred way,
which flows through all things,
then of course the divine was present
on a winter night
so long ago.

Just like the divine is present on this winter day,
and will be present on this night,
and will make it self known
in the birth of children,
near and far,
in hospitals and homes and inns and everywhere else.
Will make itself known
in singing red birds,
and when the winds blow
and when they are still.

We are seasonal creatures
living in a seasonal universe.
Mother of the generations,
hold us in your steady mercy.
Our lives are change:
our bodies are change
our families and relations and vocations are change.
The holy, the universe itself, whatever you call what is ultimate,
it is change, too.
What season are you in, in your life?
Is it a season of striving?
Of hunting and pecking for sunflower seeds in winter snow?

It is a season of celebration?
A season of getting up on the high branch
so everyone can see you,
firing up the landscape, singing out in joy?

Is it a season of sorrow?
When what has been lost to the tides of time
weighs heavy on the heart?

Is it a season of work?
When the cold and the fragility of life
inspires and calls you to the concerns of justice and mercy?

Is it a season of planning?
When you are getting ready for the spring,
which is not here yet but will come in time?

Is it a season of love?
When, in the quiet and the dark,
we reach out with tender care to another? Or to ourselves?

We are seasonal creatures,
and the good news, and the hard news,
it is the same news:
this too shall pass.
Day to night to Day again.
Winter to spring, summer to fall,
year to year,
generation to generation
This shall pass,
and what comes next shall pass,
and that, too, in turn, shall pass.

You cannot step into the same river twice,
you cannot cling forever to what was once,
but neither are we asked to rush ahead,
for it cannot be spring when it is still winter.

We are seasonal,
and so embrace the season you are in.
Be present to it,
be present where you are and when you are.

The red bird neither molts
nor migrates,
and they are around all the year.

I’ve seen them in the spring and summer and fall,
and heard their song.
But it is in this season,
where we are now,
that the red bird makes us so grateful,
grateful that it fires up the landscape.
The heart narrows just as easily
as it opens,
so let us be grateful for sweet mercies,
for flashes of color when light is less,
for acts of kindness and care in a oft-cold world,
let us be grateful for winter,
for quiet and dark,
for luscious meals rich with sauce and spice,
for evergreens,
for starlight,
for the invitation to be alive,
alive in this time and place
and no other.

Let us be grateful for this season,
this season of wind and weather,
this season,
which in the starkness of the outside,
invites us to joyful community,
to sing with pride and splendor,
as the red bird, on winter branch, sings with
the singing beauty of the earth.