Reader Writes - September 2020

In the last week of July I am already scanning the sky for reassurance; summer is still here. By the end of the first week of August it is all over; the wonderful swifts have almost all left until next spring. For just a few weeks of the summer the flickering wings of the swifts delight us as they scream and flock and do their aerobatics above us. For only the briefest early summer spell they use the crevices and eaves of our old houses to breed, two worlds briefly but tantalisingly entwined. Once the young are on the wing they won’t touch down again for up to 3 years travelling to central Africa and beyond. Thanks to gps trackers we are now learning of the extraordinary feats of migration undertaken by even the tiniest birds every year.

Migration appears rather sudden by casual observation. We see swallows flocking and martins endlessly feeding in migration-ready flocks, but in fact great escalators of birds are moving along migration routes all through the season. Birds will begin to move south as soon as their duties are done; cuckoos disgracefully early for example! I am so glad that Jesus encouraged us in the Sermon on the Mount to “Look at the birds of the air”. Luther picked up on this divine endorsement of birding, reminding us that the birds are our teachers. The theologian and evangelist John Stott appropriately called it ‘orni-theology’.

So what can the birds teach us in this season? My first choice would be repentance, which at root means ‘turning back’. The swallows will now make that extraordinary journey from northern Europe back to southern Africa. Genetic code and evolutionary ‘engineering’ allow them, compel them, to do this through highly sophisticated and complex adaptations. Summer migrants return south to avoid a northern hemisphere winter. But hand in hand with repentance there is faith. Some birds make their breath-taking journeys, artic terns for example, over thousands of miles of ocean; this requires the instinctive trust that they will arrive where their needs will be met.

The Apostle Paul makes this spiritual twinning explicit when he tells the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:21 that both Jews and Greeks must “turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus”. The best way to learn the essential truth that God is our only sure and true spiritual home is to keep returning to him. We err, we get lost, we are blown off course by the storms of life, but God is always there. He is as sure as the seasonal tilting of the earth to the sun. But what swallows do by instinct, we must do by deliberate choice. This is where faith mirrors repentance. We turn back because we know that that is our home; faith with growing experience tells us so.

Lord, thank you that we can learn so much from the birds, that they and all creation can be our teachers. Help us to know deep in our hearts that you are our only true spiritual home. Bring us back to you in repentance as surely as the swallows return to our barns each spring. Encourage and nurture our faith to know that you are there, always, and ready to receive us, no matter what. Thank you for the birds that delight us and teach us, and their endlessly beautiful rhythms. Amen.

Robert MacCurrach