Most of what goes on in what we routinely call the world of nature is unknown to us. Thunderstorms and floods get our attention, for sure, as do the mosquitoes that carry the West Nile virus; and also the beauties of the fall leaves or a sunset now and then. But we humans are often oblivious to the nearly infinite complexities and the profound ambiguities and the astounding beauties of what some of us still call God’s good creation. Natural scientists, of course, know a lot; but they generally are the ones who say that they know very little.
Remarkably, the God attested by biblical faith knows the whole world of nature with amazing grace. This God even knows when a sparrow falls. What could that possibly mean? I have long believed that that biblical conviction is best read literally – or, more technically, phenomenologically – rather than just poetically, even though it is profoundly poetical.
This longstanding thought of mine overcame me, yet again, when, one late morning this summer, I happened to look out our kitchen window and there contemplated a hummingbird at the feeder, three feet away, for a few elegant moments. God, I believe, in God’s own way, loves that hummingbird.
The theology I encountered once upon a time in graduate school typically taught me otherwise. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, for example, each maintained that – get this – God creates and cares for the whole world of nature as a kind of stage. Brunner said it in so many words: God wanted to have a loving history with us humans, so God therefore decided to create a platform where that history could unfold – the natural world. In effect, for Brunner, God doesn’t love nature in itself, but only for what it ultimately does for us humans.
I guess that Brunner never really contemplated a hummingbird. Nor apparently did he ponder deeply enough the biblical confession that God sent the Son to save not just humans, but the whole universe, the cosmos (see John 3:16). One scholarly biblical commentator once observed, in reflecting about the seven-day story in Genesis 1, that if God was so exclusively interested in us humans, it took God a long, long, long time, when creating the world, to get around to that main point. Does the God attested by the Bible really notice, then, when a single sparrow falls? I imagine so. Because God cares for the whole creation.
St. Francis, of course, got it right. In what I prefer to think of as his conversations with the birds – aren’t good sermons always conversations, a give-and-take? – Francis gave his own powerful testimony to the biblical vision of God. For Francis, it’s a wonderful fact of faith that God notices even when a single sparrow falls.
So I would like to think that my own commonplace experience with the hummingbird at the feeder outside my window puts me in touch with profound biblical and Franciscan intuitions. That, at least, is the sermon I sometimes imagine myself hearing when I look out and see that miraculous little creature hovering there, with invisible wings that sometimes can move two-hundred times a second.