Aug 16: “The Ostrich: More Than Meets The Eye” (Birds of the Bible,Week 2)
Reflection by Rev. Sandra Nixon
Scripture: Job 39: 13-18
This is our second week of the sermon series in which we are “considering the birds”. It may seem like an odd focus for a sermon series, but as I said last week, there is much about bird watching - or preaching about birds - that is similar to a spiritual practice. It requires attention; it calls for our eyes to be open to the smallest movement.
It calls for lots of waiting, and the engagement of our whole bodies. And it draws us away from a constant focus on ourselves.
In her book, Consider the Birds, A Provocative Guide to Birds of the Bible, Debbie Blue writes that focusing on birds can move us away from our ‘incessant narcissism’ - that is, our tendency to focus all our attention if not ourselves as individuals, then certainly on the human race.
Considering the birds expands our understanding of what matters. It invites us to value another creature for its own sake - to appreciate its intrinsic worth, including when we encounter it in scripture.
And with that expanded curiosity our minds and hearts may also begin to wonder differently about God.
Graeme Gibson compiled essays and poetry into a beautiful collection called The Bedside Book of Birds, and in it he writes, “One of the rewards of bird watching is the brief escape it affords from our ancient and compelling need to make nature useful.” (The Bedside Book of Birds, p. 4)
As we home in on one animal for a few weeks, we might begin to appreciate each bird as one of the multitude of splendid creatures in God’s creation: precious, irreplaceable and priceless simply because it exists.
That appreciation might help loosen the grip of a utilitarian worldview that everything can be commodified and assigned a value - or, conversely, in which nothing has value unless it is directly useful to us.
Today our eyes fall on the ostrich. The poor, much maligned ostrich.
She does not come off especially well in Scripture, at least not at first glance.
In the book of Job, Job cries out in his misery: “I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches.” (Job 30:29)
The image evokes desolation. Jackals and ostriches were associated with the wilderness and ruined places and isolation (head in the sand). Job feels himself pushed to the margins, no longer at home in the community where he was once respected.
Because Job had been a person of considerable standing, much beloved by God. You might even say that God sounds almost proud when speaking about Job to the Accuser—the figure called Satan in many translations: “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth; a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” (Job 1:8)
The Accuser suggests that Job is faithful only because his life has gone so well. If things were to go sideways, perhaps Job would turn on God.
God accepts the challenge, and the story becomes deeply troubling. All kinds of calamities befall Job – he loses his family and his livelihood when his home and crops are destroyed. His body starts falling apart, his skin breaks out in horrible boils. He finds himself sitting outside the city gates where all the street people and homeless dogs hang out. It’s there, from that place of grief and isolation, that he cries out: “I am a brother of jackals and a companion of ostriches.”
Job calls on God for an answer. As far as Job is concerned, he has kept the deal. He has lived according to the moral order he was taught: faithfulness should lead to blessing, while wrongdoing should bring suffering. As far as Job is concerned, he has upheld his side of the bargain. Yet his life has fallen apart.
Essentially, Job takes God to court for breach of contract.
Our passage from Scripture this morning, in some ways, id God’s statement of defence. It is a glorious hymn to creation, beyond a doubt, but it’s also a rather defensive rant.
In it, God does not explain why Job has suffered. Instead, God inventories the wildness and wonder of creation, much of which exists beyond human control, human comprehension and human usefulness.
It is as though God says, “Creation is larger and more mysterious than the system you have built to explain it—and so am I.”
Convenient, perhaps. But also profoundly unsettling.
Among the creatures God describes is the ostrich. The poem portrays her as a careless mother: she lays her eggs on the ground, leaves them exposed in the dust and seems to forget that they might be crushed or taken by wild animals.
And yet, in the same breath, God points to something magnificent about her. Despite what appear to be useless wings and a careless way of tending her eggs—despite God having “made her forget wisdom, and given her no share in understanding”—God says, “When she spreads her plumes aloft, she laughs at the horse and its rider.” (Job 39:17–18)
To make sense of this, it is worthwhile to note that the ostrich is the fastest-running bird on earth Her large size and powerful legs enable her to run over 40 miles per hour for extended periods of time. When she lifts herself up, when she rises to her full potential, she is faster than the horse and taller than horse and rider combined.
In one biblical commentary, the ostrich is described as “… a design of paradox and mystery, of beauty and fear, full of life, yet not without suffering. … The author concludes that “God’s design makes room for all of this diversity” in one creature. (David C. Hester, Interpretation, p. 86)
Indeed, when we look more closely at ostrich behaviour, we discover that this bird has been badly misunderstood.
Let’s start with nesting.
The male prepares the nest by scraping a shallow depression in the ground. Several females may lay eggs in this communal nest, which can contain 30 or 40 eggs. The dominant female can recognize her own eggs and generally keeps them near the centre. Because an adult can incubate only about 20 eggs effectively, surplus eggs may be pushed out of the nest.
This does not make her uncaring but rather clever enough to be able to discern which eggs are hers, and which ones are from weaker birds and therefore less likely to survive.
The male and female also take turns incubating the eggs. The female usually sits during the day, when her brownish-grey colouring blends into the landscape. The male, with his darker plumage, takes the night shift.
So, although the female has been accused of abandoning her eggs, she is actually offering her care at the time of day when her camouflage is most effective, while the male offers his care when his colouring is most effective.
And her wings, while unable to lift her into flight, are far from useless. They help her balance and steer while running, regulate heat, and shelter her chicks from sun and rain.
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As I considered the ostrich, I began to think about congregations.
Think for a moment about how beautiful and also, how clumsy we can be as gathered Christians. We are motivated by a desire to serve God in the best way we know how, and then sometimes we stumble over each other when we don’t agree on what that service should look like.
We may decide that another person or group is not doing things the right way, just as observers once assumed that the ostrich was not caring properly for her eggs.
What they failed to see was that the female and the male were taking turns nurturing their treasure, each offering what their particular gifts made possible—each doing what their plumage best equipped them to do by day or by night.
Sometimes, when we don’t see the fullness of our shared giftes as a group, or the wisdom that each person carries, we can get cranky with each other, impatient with what we see as shortcomings within the body.
In the context of our “congregational body” , as we move closer to the fall and continue conversations about our narthex renovation and consider other important questions about what we do and how we do it, the ostrich might remind us about the great diversity and complexity in God’s design, even within one creature.
Perhaps she can point us towards gratitude and curiosity about how different we can be, even within one body and one shared mission.
And perhaps she can also help us notice when we might be reacting from the lens of our own experiences, and be missing or misinterpreting the actions of another.
We all carry wisdom in some form. God has given each of us gifts to share – gifts that contribute to the mission of) this faith community, this gathered body of Christ.
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Now - there is one thing in particular that almost everyone thinks they know about ostriches: they stick their heads in the sand.
But that is another misperception.
Ostriches do not actually bury their heads in the sand. This behavior is a complete myth. Instead ostriches employ real survival tactics or care routines that create the illusion that it’s sticking its head in the sand.
Nesting habits: Because ostriches lay eggs in shallow dirt holes, they end up sticking their heads into the ground to turn their eggs with their beaks. This can make them looking like they are burying their heads in the ground.
Camouflage: When danger approaches and running is not possible, an ostrich may lie still with her head and neck pressed low against the earth. From a distance, her body can resemble a mound of earth, making it appear that her head has disappeared into the sand.
I was captivated by this image.
Theologian Sallie McFague wrote about the world as Gods’ body. She reflected that God is not limited to the world, but that the world exists within God and embodies God’s presence.
If we imagine the world as God’s body, we can imagine that when under duress the ostrich collapses onto God’s breast. She drops into God’s embrace and while her wings shelter her young, and all of them are held within the larger embrace of God
Isn’t that what we long for from God – an assurance that God is with us, that God will catch us, embrace us, enfold us? Even - perhaps especially - when life has flattened us on the ground?
This brings us back to Job.
At the heart of Job’s anguish is the collapse of everything he thought he understood about who God is and how God acts. He had believed in a God who rewarded faithful behaviour and punished wrongdoing. But his experience no longer fit that picture.
His is a deeply human story of spiritual evolution and growth. The book of Job refuses the easy equation that good behaviour always brings blessing and suffering is always punishment. Job does not receive a tidy explanation. Instead, he encounters a God who is mystery and who can’t be contained by the moral system he was taught and once relied upon.
Have you ever had an experience that led you, like Job, to question what you thought you knew about God?
David Ewart (for those of you who may not know him) – a retired UCC minister and part of this worshipping community - has captured beautifully what many theologians have spent a great deal of ink trying to describe.
He says: “God will only do what love can do.”
God doesn’t coerce or punish. God does not control every event or guarantee our rescue from every wound. God loves. God is Love—loving all creation and drawing life from death through love.
What if God is also like the ostrich?
Just as the ostrich drops to the ground to protect her young, maybe too, when danger draws near, God does not hover safely above our suffering. But rather, in Jesus, God comes down to the ground of our lives and spreads wings of compassion around us.
What if God sees our distress and, even now, encircles us with her wings of love, breathing peace and strength into our lives?
What if we could trust this to be true?
May it be so. Amen.