Psalm 50:11 – I know every bird in the mountains. Everything that moves in the fields is mine.

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A few years ago I stopped at the dollar store on a Saturday evening and bought them out of plastic birds – garden decorations – because I needed them for the children's sermon. It was gonna be Pentecost. All the joyful spring of Easter I'd been searching for simple white birds with the idea of remembering the Holy Spirit, alighting as a dove at the baptismal Jordan River or burning as white-hot flame over the church in the Upper Room. But I didn't find doves (not even a pigeon). The closest I came was a collection of plastic red cardinals: I took them all. With the young and the young at heart, we compared and contrasted cardinals and doves: both are birds, both fly high, both sing beautifully – but while cardinals are blood red, red-blooded American birds, real doves are olive-branch-bearing biblical beacons of God's Spirit, God's life, God's peace. "True enough," I said, trying to salvage some grace, "still, red is the color of the Holy Spirit – and a blazing cardinal in the sky is kinda like a tongue of fire, isn't it?" But, they countered, plastic birds don't blaze anywhere. (Kids can sniff out a fake any day.) So cardinals are red, and we left it at that. ... After worship, I brought a fake red bird home and stuck it on a ledge outside our front door to remember the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life. It's stayed there ever since, bright red – and I still kick myself for not holding out for a dove (or at least a pigeon): to wit, I keep on thinking a plastic dove would've been a better reminder of Jordan, of Jerusalem, of Jesus' Spirit... until that Good Spirit intercedes with a sigh too deep for words, with the blink of a living bird's eye too quick for my weak wit. Why do I look for plastic to show signs of life? It's only life – breathing life – that points to life. If the Spirit abides with us, why not look to the Spirit to remember the Spirit? God knows every bird, knows exactly which will fly and sing and bring the joy of Easter to the Spirit's life in which we live and move and have our being: when that bird arrives, when those heavens rip open, when all us children hear we are claimed and beloved as God's good pleasure, then the children's sermon will be everything it has ever needed to be.

Pastor Joel S Neubauer
St Mark Lutheran Church (ELCA), Yorktown, Virginia