There is a bird that lives in the forests of Africa, a common, awkward bird. Africans honor this bird because she is a bird most exquisite in teaching us about our Creator. When she nests, God is telling us a parable about life with God.

This bird, the hornbill, inhabits the forest canopy. Her world is loud with the shrieks of animals and dangerous with predators. She lives in a perilous place but she is swift on her wing, and eludes her enemies. Yes, she flies – that is her nature – except when she mothers her children. She’s called the hornbill because she’s got a beak as big as a hollow log, and on top of that beak, a horn. In every sense it’s a megaphone beak, magnifying her cries and covering her whole face.

But if we watch her, she is most loving a mother bird for the sake of her children. For when the time draws near that she should lay and love a clutch of eggs, this “ugly” bird transfigures herself by sacrifice. She soars through the forest in search of the tree that has a hollow trunk to receive her, her beak, and her eggs. When she has found it, she enters the tree and flies no more.

Immediately, with the help of her mate from outside the trunk of the tree, she sets to work to wall the doorway shut. Mud and dung make a hard cement: no predator will break in to terrorize the small chicks or to eat them. They are protected by her loving care. Out of her bowels comes the stuff of their fortress wall.

But the wall that saves her children imprisons her! There is no alternative. For the sake of her babies, she has exchanged the spacious air of the forest for a tight, dark cell and a very cramped imprisonment.

This means that a mother has sacrificed her freedom, which is to fly, and sacrificed her independence, too. She trusts her mate absolutely. If the hornbill is to survive, she has to eat. If she’s going to eat her mate must bring the food – fed to her beak to beak through a slot in the wall exactly the shape of her beak. But for the love of her children, a mother bird accepts the loss and reduction.

When the chicks are hatched and young, their mother fires her feathers through the slot – one by one - an act that makes her so desperately lovely. In the small space of her nest, the shafts of these feathers would scratch and trouble her children. Therefore, in mercy, she strips her wings of their primary feathers, and she cannot fly any more. She has sacrificed her very nature for the sake and the saving of her children. In this way the mother hornbill becomes a parable about love – about Jesus.

Jesus is just like the mother hornbill. He chose to leave heaven, willingly, compelled by love alone. He denied himself for the sake of His people. He placed himself in time and space, that he might be a refuge for the weary. He chose to be totally dependent for the salvation of a people who thought themselves so marvelously independent. He plucked himself of power, sheared himself of his most glorious might, his blinding radiance, lest it harm us when we drew near to him. He emptied himself and became an infant, swaddled in humanity, cradled in a manger, flightless, bound to die.

Jesus loves us that much!

Pastor Dennis Drews