There are still plenty of maps on offer that tell us who is good and who is bad, how we can be successful and educated and righteous. There are many maps that make us feel safe with defined borders and well lit streets. But just as in Mark’s day, none of these will guide us to the landscape of God’s reign. The terrain of God’s kingdom is a place of paradox. It is not safe, at least to the constructed egos of our self-regard, but in it we can live free of fear. It is a wild and open country, unbounded, and yet it is illumined by the light of God’s good blessing. This kingdom is a place where wholeness comes without price and all debts are forgiven. It is a landscape where the respected and the ashamed, the somebodies and the nobodies, lose all the identities that defined them and are satisfied only as beloved children of God.

Somewhere East of Santa Fe and before Amarillo, the car fell into a quiet lull — the girls in the back occupied with reading and coloring books, the on again off again DVD player; Emily beside me writing in her journal. I drove, watching the roadside, noting the birds among the sagebrush. My mind wandered, rambling across the landscape so strange and beautiful and sparse to my Mid-South imagination.

In these quiet moments on the road I can become philosophical. And since I’d been thinking about the Trinity, trying to write a sermon for this strange Sunday, my mind turned there.

We speak a great deal of love these days. But the sort of love that endures, the kind of love that enables the care the world needs, or the salvation through sacrifice that Jesus accomplished, is one that dwells in the particular. As Willie James Jennings writes in The Christian imagination, the problem lies in how we’ve viewed the the world; the kinds of words and images we’ve used to understand and describe it. Jennings writes that “A Christian doctrine of creation is first a doctrine of place and people, of divine love and divine touch, of human presence and embrace, and of divine and human interaction.” He goes on to say that “Christianity is in need of a place to be fully Christian,” and that our “segregated mentality” is bound to “the loss of a world where people were bound to the land.”

Jesus came to throw a counter weight against the erratic spin of our off balance world, offering a liberation that returns us to the truly human form—limited, dependent, living fully only in the restful reality of God’s enough. To accomplish this return he came to make a sacrifice, an offering of himself, that would become a pattern for all those seeking the way toward freedom.

Our art is to be human, to cultivate fully human lives against all of the death dealing alternatives that make us both more and less than creatures. Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury once wrote that, “being a creature is in danger of becoming a lost art.” It is not lost for trees, or flowers, nor is it lost for the soil microbes teaming beneath the ground or the birds now migrating their ancient paths. It is lost for us, it is humanity that has forgotten the art of being creatures before God. And it is only in obedience that we can recover that art and live again into our fullness.

This week, my writing shed far too cold and the roads a snowy challenge, I spent most of my working day at my daughter’s desk watching birds out the window. I did work, of course. I had meetings on Zoom, I prepared for classes, answered emails, edited webpages, and wrote this sermon. But all the while, I watched the White-throated Sparrows, Orange-crowned Warblers, Red-winged Blackbirds, Northern Cardinals, Carolina Chickadees and the myriad of other feathered creatures at our feeders, hungrily gathered around seed and suet as the snow fell. And as I watched, I thought about the time that God was a bird and Jesus was with the wild animals.