Sermons for the Month
Why Christians Need Birdbrains
DATE: July 25, 1999
SERVICE: Pentecost IX
TEXT: 1 Kings 3:5-12"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN Solomon was a birdbrain. Now I want to assure you is that this is neither disrespectful of Solomon nor of birds. Here's why. Forget the idea of birds as nothing more than "archetypal featherheads" bobbing about for worms; chirping beaked babblers whose brains are little more than a tiny mass of dizzy neurons. New research on the corvids (members of the crow family) shows powers of abstraction, memory, creativity and insight that put them on a par with many mammals, including primates. A new book by Candice Savage, Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays (Sierra Club Books, 1997), presents these "bright, brassy and colorful birds in a new light, as possibly the most highly evolved of all avian species." Scientific research now reveals that birds have episodic memory, something previously believed to be unique to humans. According to Nature magazine, a team of British and American behavioral scientists recently discovered that scrub jays remember not only where, but also when, they hid worms and other food. This type of memory involves mental images of past events. For example, we've probably all found lost keys by mentally retracing our steps the last time we had the keys. That is episodic memory. With episodic memory, we remember something in its context with other events. Apparently birds have this kind of memory -- an enormously important finding that sheds new light on the fundamental mechanisms of information storage in the brain. Researchers at Rockefeller University have also hypothesized that birds grow new brain cells and shed old ones all the time. Fernando Nottebohm and Anat Barnea have discovered that black-capped chickadees grow brain cells to store information about where they find their food. When that information is no longer needed, those brain cells are discarded. Boy would that not be a nice convenience for humans! According to Nottebohm, "It's constant rejuvenation. These birds are updating their brains" (National Geographic, June 1995). So when God tells Solomon in today's reading that he can have whatever his heart desires, Solomon gets a birdbrain instead of a brain drain. He says, "I'd like some wisdom, please, thank you very much." How would we respond to a chance like this? Suppose God says to us that we can have anything we want, or always wanted. I am sure that all of us would be eager to say to God: "Uh, I'd like wisdom." Yuh! Right! When I first heard this story I thought Solomon was some kind of birdbrain asking for what he did. Most would probably respond like we've hit the lottery and ask for things like money, prestige, power or some other form of instant gratification. But not Solomon. Solomon's answer was no birdbrain idea. Why? Because birds are smart. And so is young King Solomon. First, he places this encounter with the Lord in context with others. He has an episodic flashback and remembers what the Lord has done for his father, David, for the people of Israel, and for Solomon himself. In asking for wisdom, he shows himself to be wise: wise enough to remember what the Lord has done, wise enough to know that he lacks experience, wise enough to ask the Lord for an understanding mind. Solomon's birdbrain -- his remembering in context -- is the beginning of wisdom. Solomon is not asking to be radically transformed into something other than what he already is. He is not like the student who fails to crack open a book until the night before an exam, and then prays for an "A" through divine intervention. On the contrary, young Solomon has done his homework. He is already wise. For him to ask for an understanding heart is to ask God to bring to fulfillment what has already clearly begun in Solomon. Here is an example of what theologians sometimes call "grace perfecting nature." In other words, in granting his request, God builds on Solomon's episodic memory birdbrain. Today we have knowledge beyond Solomon's wildest dreams. Humanity has never had so much knowledge, so many facts, so many experts. We surf the Net, mining info-nuggets in databases that grow and multiply exponentially. Yet our knowledge so often seems to lack context. We are drunk with knowledge, and yet we're starving for wisdom. We know what makes for life but we are still give in to what only reaps limited rewards. We know what will build up but we get caught up too often in what tears down. We're like the scientists in the fictional Jurassic Park movies. They have an abundance of knowledge: they can create dinosaurs from broken strands of DNA. But they lack wisdom. They fail to understand that just because they want to make dinosaurs and know how to make dinosaurs doesn't mean that they should actually make dinosaurs. Capacity plus desire does not make something good or wise. The Jurassic Park movies make this lack of wisdom viscerally clear. They warn us not to tamper with nature just because we have the desire and the knowledge to do so, for what we create might eat us. It’s a fact the genetic engineers of the first cloned sheep are learning. They have discovered that the world's first cloned sheep is aging rapidly beyond its years. With wisdom, knowledge is a blessing -- a blessing that can draw us closer to God as we unlock the secrets of the world he created. Without wisdom, knowledge can be a curse, as the Jurassic Park movies suggest. And it is on the topic of life and its beginnings -- not dinosaur life, but human life -- that our knowledge today seems to be hurtling down the path of curse with some of our brightest minds leading the way. Solomon had it easy. Two prostitutes claiming custody of an infant son was all he had to face. Today we could solve that one easily with a simple DNA test. But it will take the wisdom of Solomon and the grace of God to sort out things like: * Surrogate mothers battling biological mothers over their children. * Husbands and wives fighting over frozen embryos in divorce settlements. * Genetic engineers poised not only to clone and re-engineer human beings, but to cross human beings with other animals. Christians are too often all too willing to allow such debates to continue within a purely scientific or secular framework, and many scientists and lawmakers are all too willing to oblige. It is chilling to recall that last winter at our second Fairlawn Faith Forum, only a handful of people from two churches came out to hear about the impending dangers of the current revolution in genetics. But these are moral issues crying out for wisdom. Christians can never accept the idea that the creation of a human person is simply a matter of the manipulation of genes and gametes and zygotes. God is the author of life. God entrusts us with the gift of life, which at every stage has a spiritual dimension. Any birdbrain knows that. Unfortunately, too often we forget to remember who God is and what God has done for us. Even Solomon, who had a brain hard-wired to remember the wisdom of God, forgot all about it. In his later life, his birdbrain-like episodic memory failing him, he built shrines and altars to strange gods that would later be torn down by reformers whose spiritual brain cells were still functioning. Thus, a word of warning: Wisdom is not immunity or a free pass. We can still do dumb things. Wisdom must be rejuvenated like the brain cells of the chickadee. To be a Christian is to be a birdbrain. We are a people with episodic memory. We may not have all the answers to the questions posed by our brave, new, genetically engineered, techno-procreated world. Indeed, to be truly wise is to admit that we don't have all the answers. On the other hand, to be truly wise we've got to have at least some of the answers. At the very least, we birdbrains remember: * That God created a good world and gave us the gift of life. * That God has a plan for his creation. * That we are all sinners who have rejected some portion of God's plan and so stand in need of forgiveness. * That forgiveness and the restoration of God's plan are offered to us through Jesus Christ. * That wisdom is not so much to pray for miracles but like Solomon, to do our homework and ask for God's help. * That this help is nowhere more present than when we encounter Christ through his Church gathered in his name. * That though we may not always like the answers, if we ask for his help and honestly and openly seek his plan, Jesus Christ will help us. So what will it be? Jurassic Park-style amnesiacs hurtling toward a brave, new world where the fruit of our brilliance may well be self-destruction? Or Solomon-style birdbrains, entrusted with a gift of life which always has a spiritual dimension? Birdbrains? Or brain drain? It's our decision and yours! AMEN