6/13/21 “Safety Nets or Safety Nests?” by Nancy E. Petty
Mark 4: 30-34
Two years ago, I gave Karla a bluebird house for her birthday. For another occasion, I had given her a bee house to put in the garden. But never quite figuring out where to hang it or how to hang it, there are a lot of rules about where to put a bee house, it had sat on our back porch for months. I was determined to not let that happen with the birthday blue bird house. So, the day before her birthday I decided to install it in our backyard garden that Karla has spent hours upon hours making beautiful, so that the morning of her birthday when she went to walk her garden as she does every morning she would see it. On that particular day, July 12, 2019, it rained cats and dogs—all day long. But I was determined to not let the blue bird house sit on the back porch beside the bee house for months. So, I went to Ace Hardware, bought a copper pole and everything I thought I would need to install the beautiful little blue bird house in our garden. My plan required cutting the copper pole to the appropriate length (that took two trips back to Ace Hardware), mounting a bracket on the bottom of the bird house with a fitting that would secure it to the pole and then securing the pole in the ground. With a bit of muscle, bending things that probably shouldn’t have been bent and a fair amount of mumbling certain words under my breath, the bird house was secure on the pole. Now came securing it in the ground so that it actually stood up straight and secure. Five hours later, and drenched to the bone, the blue bird house was standing proud between the small Japanese maple and the hearty Rose of Sharon. I don’t think I have ever been as proud or excited about a gift I have given Karla as that blue bird house.
Last year, we watched with anticipation hoping that our blue bird house would provide a safe place, a safe home, for a mother blue bird to lay her eggs. For whatever reason, the season passed with no activity. That would change last month. Last month we watched as mama and daddy blue birds flew in and out of our blue bird house building their nest with all kinds of sticks and twigs and pine needles and anything they could find to make a comfortable nest to hold their future babies. We dared not disturb the process so we had no idea how many eggs were in the nest. But weeks later we could hear the baby blue birds chirping away as mom and dad relentlessly and laboriously worked day and night feeding their babies. They never stopped. They worked so hard to care for their babies. Then the day came when we saw the faces of the babies peeking out of the hole of the bird house. And finally, the day came when they left the nest and entered into the world. Day after day, Karla and I sat in amazement of the whole process. The constant work that those two birds put into building a nest and then caring for their babies gave new meaning for me to the phrase “a labor of love.”
I thought of this experience when I read, again, this very familiar parable from the gospel of Mark. The focus of the parable of the mustard seed has typically been on the mustard seed with the lesson being how God can grow small things into grand ones. More often than not we read these parables of Jesus as lessons or good moral advice, much like a fable. Think The Tortoise and the Hare (slow and steady wins the race) or The Boy Who Cried Wolf (honesty is the best policy). We forget that these parables of Jesus are not just lessons or good advice but rather they are teachings “intended to be disruptive, to interrupt what we thought we knew and not just tell us something but actually to confront us with a surprising and often unwanted truth.”[i]
The mustard seed parable was doing its job this week. It wasn’t the mustard seed and the lesson that God can grow small things into grand things that jumped out at me as I re-read this familiar parable. The mustard seed took a back seat; and it was the birds and the nest built in the shade of the shrub and how the mustard seed grows to provide a place for the birds to nest in safety that disrupted my thinking. And I began to wonder, what truth am I being confronted with when I think of the birds and providing place for nests to be built in safety? And that question lead to me wonder about the idea of safety nets or safety nests.
In the political world today, we hear a lot about the social safety net. The core idea of the social safety net, one person writes, can be understood as an analogy to a circus artist walking on a tightrope with a net hanging under it, ready to catch the artist if he or she falls. It is not helping the individual to get up on the line again, but prevents them from falling to the ground, avoiding potentially life-threatening damages. In the same way, the economic social safety net provides a certain minimum amount of welfare or safety that the society has agreed that no one should fall below.
In our polarized political environment, one side of the political spectrum argues that these social safety nets are bad and need to be done away with. The other side of the political spectrum argues that they are necessary, and present further data to show that more are needed to build a healthy society. While I strongly believe in social safety nets, my point today is not to argue that point. My interest in is where this parable disrupts my thinking and confronts me with how the church and people of faith discern our role in providing and building not just nets, but nests for the vulnerable. Are we being called as the church to be the shade where nests are built for those who are, in Jesus’ parable, the birds of the air? Could it possibly be that these “birds” that Jesus speaks of are the undesirables, the folks we tend to avoid, the ones we prefer to keep on the other side of our street and, preferably, outside our homes and neighborhoods and maybe even churches.
Let me tell you what I hear Jesus saying in this parable and where this parable is disrupting and confronting me. I hear Jesus saying that the church is the mustard seed that has the potential to grow and offer shade, to be a place, for those who are vulnerable to build their safety nest. I hear Jesus saying that it is the responsibility of his followers to be about building safety nests for one another and for others. Is that not what Jesus did? All through the gospel of Mark is Jesus not providing shade and helping build safety nests for those his world despised—lowly fisherman, despised tax collectors, prostitutes and criminals, those shunned by the religious establishment.
Until our society offers a living wage to every worker, until there is income equality in our nation, until people are valued for their worth as a human being and not by the color of their skin, until the playing field is leveled for all races and genders, until we have a moral system that distributes wealth fairly instead of the rich getting richer and the poorer getting poorer our society needs social safety nets.
AND, our society needs faith communities and people of faith like us, here at Pullen Church, to build safety nests. There are “birds,” people in our community, inside our walls and outside our walls, who need us to be that place of shade where they can build their safety nest. As Grace and I were discussing the idea of building a nest as a visual for today, she sent me a picture of what she was working on. Under the picture she wrote, “The more it is woven or interwoven together, the stronger it gets.” We need each other to build our safety nests.
The big American lie is we are each, individually, responsible for building our safety nest. The big American lie is that if you need help building your nest, then you don’t deserve it. The big American lie is if you can’t collect enough stuff to build your nest it’s your fault.
If I learned anything watching that mama and papa bluebird build their safety nest it was that they had to work together. They labored constantly, together, day and night, flying to and fro gathering, collecting what was needed to build that nest, not for themselves so much but for the lives and survival of others. And once the nest was built, the work didn’t stop. Once those babies were born and safe in the nest, they worked tirelessly to provide for their young until they got their wings and got strong enough to leave the safety of the nest.
The past fifteen months has had us hunkered down, isolated from one another. Some of us have been lucky enough to have nests to nurture us, but many have not. And even those with comfortable nests have suffered from the separation and isolation of trying to keep the nest healthy alone, or with just a few family members. And that, friends, is not the kingdom. Unlike our pair of bluebirds, we are not meant to care only for ourselves and our own. We are meant to come together, to weave together what we have and can find, to offer our sticks and our twigs and our gifts and our presence and our hearts. To create, together, a kingdom nest, that provides not just for us, but for all. This church was founded on caring for the other, and we have tried to be good stewards to that charter purpose. And this moment in our history is not different. Today, we gather for the first time in over a year, and we gather not just for us, and for our own healing, but for the healing of Raleigh, of North Carolina, for these United States, and for this world.
So I charge us today to set about building. I don’t know what nest you need, but I know that you have all you need to be a nest builder. This entire creation is formed on the interdependence of us all – from the smallest seed to the largest mammals. But we must do our part, we must not turn away from the interdependence, but into it. We must get back to being the shrub that provides shade. We must get back to building nests together and with others. This parable is disrupting us and asking: Where are your gifts, our gifts able to offer hope for another? Where is your time, our time able to ease the loneliness of a neighbor or a stranger? Where is your heart, our heart able to offer the blessing of eye contact and a smile to someone who believes no one cares?
Many of us grew up hearing about the world wars, stories of the greatest generation, and how they fought and struggled and survived unspeakable horrors. Some of Pullen’s own beloved from the greatest generation have passed on, but others are still with us. I often wondered, in my youth, what it must have been like to be called on to show such heroism, such commitment, such courage. Well, Pullen, this very time is such a moment. It is not tanks and dive bombers this time, but rather a microscopic virus that has called us to our own moment of truth. Coronavirus is not over, we must still be vigilant. But the time has come for us to move back into the world, to gather together in love and in service, and to build. Let us set our minds, our hearts, and our bodies to serving the kingdom by building nests of safety. No one is outside God’s love, and not one is outside our nest. There is no scrap too small, for it is not our individual offerings, but our collective effort that has the power to manifest the future we all long to see. So come. Come one, come all, and let us build the kingdom nest together!
[i] Lose, David. Preach the Truth Slant. Working Preacher.
