Sermon: Two Turtledoves

Today is the 38^th day of Christmas! For that 40-day season does not end until the feast of Candlemas on February 2^nd.  No wonder our decorated pine trees are looking a bit past their best.  Of course most people think of Christmas as a season of twelve days only.  And that is just as well because the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas' is annoying enough. Imagine if there were forty verses. Twelve are quite enough!  In this sermon I am only going to mention the first four. In those verses the gifts mentioned are all birds:  one partridge, two turtledoves, three French hens, four calling birds. That's ten birds in all.  Our gospel today also had birds in it:  a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.  That link makes me want to suggest to you that the question of the significance of birds is very much one for the extended Christmas season.  

Once upon a time I was a chaplain at a Cambridge college which had such a famous radio carol service that it just had to go on the telly. However, while each of the nine lessons were sacrosanct on the World Service and Radio Four, there was more scope for experimentation with BBC Two.  One year we had a passage from Dickens' A Christmas Carol read by an elderly Don. In order to underline the point that we are still entitled to some Christmas cheer I am going to read it to you now.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course; and in truth it was something very like it in that house. Mrs Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

It is a reading to send you happily to your Christmas table whether you are feasting on goose or turkey. At the time I myself was a vegetarian and so was eating something more like bird food than bird flesh. But when I returned to my desk after Christmas I was ill-prepared for a letter, highly critical of the TV carol service not because the choir sang something obscure, not because we forewent most of the traditional readings but because of the knife being plunged into the breast of the roast goose.  It was from an enraged vegetarian. This is no way to treat God's creatures!

Another year, now a long way from the limelight in parish ministry, I decided to preach on birds at Midnight Mass.  I was inspired by various goldfinches that appear in some nativity scenes foretelling the passion (the goldfinch feasts on thistle seed) and the solitary magpie (one for sorrow) on the barn roof in Pierro's nativity.  And I could not resist quoting Christopher Smart's poem Christmas Day:

Nature's decorations glisten

Far above their usual trim;

Birds on box and laurels listen

As so near the cherubs hymn.

And then if we skip a verse:

Spinks and ouzels sing sublimely,

We too have a saviour born.

Spinks and ouzles?  Chaffinches and blackbirds.  Smart, hears in birdsong the praise not only of the creator but also the redeemer.  Whether or not Smart can be taken seriously as a bird lover I am not sure. For Smart was the owner of a cat - Jeoffrey - whom he describes as ‘a servant of the living God, duly and daily serving him.'  Maybe. But it is hard to be friends with two creatures so closely connected in the food chain. And yet our own relationship with the birds is always both more complicated and significant than we think.

This weekend the RSPB is inviting us to take a good look at the birds in our gardens and count them all.  This is the thirty first year of this event and this time it coincides with the same society asking us to become far more concerned about the slaughter of European seabirds.  There is so much to see - and so much to lose; so much to delight in - and yet we not only ignore, we also squander.

When Mary went to the Temple she was going to make a sacrifice. Luke tells us that she sacrificed according to the law, ‘two turtledoves or two young pigeons' (Luke 2.24).  Luke probably had it in mind that when we read this we would appreciate first that Mary and Joseph were being obedient and devout Jews and second that we would notice that they really were poor people. Those with any cash to spare would sacrifice a lamb on this occasion; which is interesting, as when we tell the Christmas story we think of a lamb as the gift of the poor. The reality is that Mary brought Jesus into a much lower socioeconomic stream than we like to think. Luke wants us to know that Jesus was from a very poor family. Luke's gospel is good news for the poor partly because the saviour knows that condition. 

Not that Jesus seemed to mind the poverty.  He told his disciples not to worry about their life, about food, health or clothes: ‘consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them.'  But he did not seem to mind that two sparrows are sold for one penny and agreed that they were worth far less to God than any one human being. We would agree. But sparrows are only cheap when they are plentiful.

And so we help nature out by feeding the wild birds that might come to our windowsill or garden. Not only does this help them get through the cold weather. It  also brings them close to us so we can admire their unmanufactured, feathery adornment.  I understand that feeding the birds is not only a good thing to do in the winter. They need a lot more food to get through the breeding season too. So if you have been helping God and nature out this is probably not a good time to stop.

We enjoyed some Dickens earlier and now we turn to Dostoyevsky. In his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov,  he introduces us to a figure not unlike old Simeon who identified the month-old Jesus as the Messiah and proclaimed nunc dimittis. Thus we share some profound words from  Father Zossima:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side- a little happier, anyway- and children and all animals, if you were nobler than you are now. It's all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.   

I wonder whether you noticed the two turtledoves in today's gospel reading when it was first read out?  Probably not. Birds for sacrifice are the small change of our religious life; very much at the ‘taken for granted', ‘cheap as chips' end of the spectrum. ‘Spiritually negligible', we might think , compared to say the glories of a Cathedral or its music, though they sometimes come together when a cathedral organist plays Messiaen.

It is always worth paying close attention to what Jesus actually says. He never says,'don't worry about the birds'. He says, ‘be like the birds and don't worry about yourself'.  There is a world of difference between those two spiritualities.  Worrying about the birds might be a very good idea, whether it is the birds that might be scarified or eaten or needlessly slaughtered or driven to extinction by our destruction of their habitats.

People say that the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas' is a catechetical memory song with each of the verses reminding us of some Christian basics: the four calling birds being the four gospels and the two turtledoves the Old and New Testaments.  This is almost certainly not true but no one has a very good idea why this carol has all this stuff about birds, partridges and French hens and all.   I certainly don't know the answer but it occurs to me that maybe it is precisely because they are birds that they matter.

This might come across as a strange message. Surely we should be thinking about lighting candles as Candlemas approaches rather than paying attention to birds. I am not so sure.  And preaching in this cathedral tends to embolden me in my message. If you go to the Feretory or the Aidan altar you will see more than one bird. If you go the Prior's Hall you will see many. The great northern saints were probably all bird watchers, St Cuthbert foremost among them.   Seen though the religious imagination they remind us of the Spirit of God but also carry deep and disturbing truths; think of those thistle seed-eating goldfinches. 

As we worry our way into greater ecological awareness we discover, perhaps too late, the interconnectedness of all things of which Zossima spoke. We fear where the future will take us and what of both our civilisation and our environment will last.  Meditating on the birds can help us into all these things. And I wonder... I wonder this: might it be that in some day in the deep, dark future, the memory of Cuthbert is held not by this great cathedral with its stones and liturgy and life but by the humble eider duck, which people will still call a Cuddy, as its lives out its life in the seashore detritus of a western civilisation which collapsed because it fostered ways if life where consumption replaced contemplation and greed replaced grace to such an extent that, to reverse that strange story of St Francis, it was the birds who came to preach to us.