Attenborough’s sin summary

One swallow doesn’t make a summer, so the saying goes. But it does mean that spring is here, and when you read this you might even have seen the first swallows arriving in Britain on the end of a long journey from their wintering grounds in southern Africa.

Swallows do not appear to be very strong or direct fliers (see Proverbs 26:2 for a Biblical observation on this), so their long-distance migration is a remarkable feat of endurance.

Another extraordinary migration was only discovered a few years ago. It was thought that the red-necked phalarope, a small wading bird which nests in Shetland, spent its winters in the Arabian Sea. Impressive enough, you may think. However, thanks to tiny geolocators attached to some birds, scientists discovered it went in completely the opposite direction and made an epic 16,000-mile return trip to the Pacific off the coast of Peru. The phalarope’s story even inspired a musical ballad performed by children from London and Peru at the Royal Albert Hall.

The Biblical writers may not have known about phalaropes, but they certainly knew about migration. The Near East was and is a major flyway for birds moving between Eurasia and Africa in spring and autumn. The prophet Jeremiah contrasts this seasonal phenomenon with the wickedness of the people of Israel: ‘Even the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons, and the dove, the swift and the thrush observe the time of their migration. But my people do not know the requirements of the Lord’ (Jer 8: 7).

Life is not easy for avian migrants. If the journey itself wasn’t testing enough, hunting, habitat loss, land management changes and other pressures are taking their toll. In Britain, the population of turtle doves has crashed, swifts are in decline and that other harbinger of spring, the cuckoo, is nowhere near as common as it once was. The stork is one of the few that has bucked the trend; last year the first storks to breed in England in 600 years did so in Sussex, but only with some human help.

This reminds us that our world is not as it should be. I don’t know if you watched the recent Attenborough series, A Perfect Planet. In the trailer, Attenborough announces: ‘Planet Earth was perfect. But now a new force is sending our perfect planet off-balance. Humans.’ He doesn’t explicitly mention sin, but I thought that was a good summary of the problem. A perfect world created by God and pronounced by Him to be very good (Gen. 1) is now marred by human sin (Gen. 3). Sin which not only cuts us off from the Creator and damages relationships with each other, but spoils our relationship with the rest of creation.

How should we respond?

Let me suggest four ways in which Christians can react when we see the first swallow* of the year (*insert favourite sign of spring here).

Firstly, we should simply rejoice because spring is on its way and we can praise God for the wonders of His creation, whether it’s the amazing endurance flight of the long-distant migrant, or the hedgehog emerging from hibernation at the bottom of your garden.

Then we should also lament and repent, because human sin has messed up God’s good world. We may not individually or deliberately set out to damage it, but we are all part of the problem.

However, we can remember that, through Jesus, God is reconciling to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross (Col.1:20). God is not only reconciling people to Himself but creation too.

Finally, we can look forward to the day when a broken creation is restored and we will sing God’s praises in a perfect new heaven and new earth.