Today is my friend John’s birthday. He was 83 when he died on September 7, the same day as Andy’s dad.  John was the most unassuming person you would ever meet, though he had advanced degrees in many different subject areas–including agriculture, biology, sociology, divinity, and a few others I can’t even remember. He just loved to learn. Towering 6 feet 5, with a shock of white hair and a wide joyful smile, he was a professor, an ordained Presbyterian minister, and quite late in life decided to go to nursing school. Then he taught nursing, worked for Hospice, as a college nurse, caring for students, and finally, as a faith community nurse, going about through the mountains to visit the members of his church.  And there, just beyond the dahlias and the grape vines, John kept bees.  I had already moved here when he died and so I did not see this myself, but up in the mountains there is the old custom of “telling the bees.” When the beekeeper dies, someone close to her or him has this important if unenviable task. According to the old timers, the bees must be told gently, with quiet words, some shreds of black cloth shrouds to hang on the corners of the boxes, and maybe with a whispered, comforting little song. I hope the aching news of John’s death was shared with his bees kindly for I know my friend and I know that hive, and their being was all wrapped together.

I begin this sermon with the disclaimer that I, unlike John or Malcolm, know very little about bees and even less about beekeeping. What I know about is that the beekeepers I’ve encountered are gentle and courageous folk. I say courageous because, frankly, I’m kind of afraid of bees and pain. I can see that bees are gifts to this world, that keeping them is like “directing sunbeams” as Thoreau put it, and that in all the various spiritual lessons we might learn by observing creation, bees are unique in their community life, their food production, their amazing evolution and the determined and fragile way that they help to keep the planet alive. So, with this new worship theme, BE, I invite you to ponder bees and being for just this hour at least…think about how amazing they are and what gifts they bring to us and about the love with which they have been created and are being recreated all the time, life into life. Look for ways to save them, for their own sake and because their lives are inextricably connected to ours and to that of our world.

Every day is Mother’s Day for the Queen Bee, for it is estimated that a queen honey bee can live for more than 5 years and every single day of that time she may lay up to 1500 eggs. Meanwhile she is being constantly fed and groomed by attentive worker bees. This is not the life of most mothers I know. In the bee hive sometimes it happens that the Queen can be thrown over for a younger version of herself, and unfortunately, and in that way, humans and bees are similar. Bees can fly at 15 miles per hour with wing strokes 11,400 times a minutes which we hear as buzzing. They make wax from glands on the underside of their abdomen from which they make their colonies as we use it to make candles, soap, lotions, and medicinal products of all kinds. Bees must consume 8 pounds of honey to biochemically produce each one pound of beeswax. They are responsible for pollinating approximately 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops, not to mention untold millions of flowers and other plants.   Bees have five eyes and can see ultraviolet light and plane polarized light which human eyes cannot. Sometimes I wish I had five eyes, but then I wonder if I use well the ones I have with a grateful heart, and I wonder what can be seen without eyes and just felt with the heart–the beauty that because of my distractions, I’ve ignored, or missed.

Forager bees dance while working. Their three dances—round, tremble, and the waggle dance communicate to the others the locations and qualities of the flower patches they have discovered. Every bee back at the hive is fed because of the good news reported in these dances. Each one who goes and eats returns to share the good news of the source. John said he read once that to make one pound of honey, bees would visit about 2 million flowers, fly over 55,000 miles and that one pound of honey will be the result of the lifetime work of approximately 768 bees. He told me that a typical hive can make up to 400 pounds of honey a year, but a single bee will only produce approximately 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. I guess no bee is an island. Hive life wouldn’t be bee-life alone. Few insects live in community in nature. And the ones who do are able to make miracles.

I thought of how everyone in the hive has a vocation…an important work to do. Some guard, some fly around—shopping or traveling for work.  Some are domestic workers. Some are nurse bees, looking after the young. Some bees are adventurers—they are the scouts. Some bees act as guards for everyone else and will die in the work of protection for the hive. Some bees are robbers and in a breaking and entering, many will be killed. Many beekeepers believe they have a moral responsibility to protect the weak bees who are being invaded by reducing the entrances to the hives where this violence can happen. It makes sense in a community to reduce the openings for violence, doesn’t it?

There are many adventures in the community life of the bees. And then, for them, like for all be-ings, the ravages of old age will finally claim them. But they only get six weeks—these scout bees. Like most of us, they will work hard all their lives, making sure their community is safe and fed and that the young ones are cared for and raised up.  Eventually, their muscles deteriorate, their body hairs fall out, their wing edges fray, and one day, they go out on a flight, but they do not come back to their home. Each bee lives out its purpose for being. I hope I can say I did that, too, one sweet day, don’t you?

The honey they make is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water. It has been used for millennia as a topical dressing for wounds since microbes cannot live in it and because it produces hydrogen peroxide and can clean. It has been used to embalm bodies. Legend says honey was used to embalm the body of Alexander the Great. Fermented it makes mead, probably the most ancient fermented beverage. Before there was First Magnitude, there was first mead! The term “honeymoon” comes from the old Norse practice of consuming large quantities of mead during the first month of marriage.

The Bible mentions bees only a few times, but honey is described often as a gift given to royalty, a symbol for having plenty and more than enough, and as the ultimate in sweet deliciousness. As is often the case, the Bible also has some good advice to share, and says this about honey, in Proverbs 25: “If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, or else, having too much, you will vomit.” So true, and not just about honey.

I’ve thought a lot about the human challenge of learning how to be. How to be present, how to be kind, how to be me. It is the work and play of a lifetime, this discernment to BE. Learning to be me is often challenging, since I’d rather distract myself by trying to be someone else I really envy or admire, all the while judging myself for not BE-ing that ideal other.  Many of us spend soul energy avoiding and sliding away from pain or anger or challenge or differences or as though running in fear from a swarm. Maybe in your being, fear and/or anger soak up your energy.  I asked John once about my fear of the swarm and he told me, “A lot of people are afraid of bees and think they are aggressive, but actually it is their ultimate self-defense to sting you. You know if they do, it quite literally is a last resort.” I thought of all the times when my first resort was to jump at someone and sting them. Maybe when we hurt others we don’t die like bees do after they sting, but maybe a little part of us does, and a little bit of the other dies too. Maybe that’s why Jesus taught that when we are alienated from each other we must throw down everything else we are doing and run to make reparation of the wrongs that are between us. Maybe he is trying to say that, as with bees, so with us, being in anger and fear stings, and has the potential to hurt and to kill.

Our spiritual practice is to live out our vocation, like bee hive life is the vocation for bees. Discerning our purpose for being. What is your purpose for being? Maybe you are a builder of things or a seeker of nourishment and care for others. Maybe you protect. Maybe you are a worker bee. Maybe you’re the Queen. There is our part–mine and yours. The part that helps the whole to survive and to be better, sweeter. The question is are we being our highest selves, the one we were created to be?

Remember this simple quotation from the novel by Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, in which a main character speaks important truth when she says, “I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called, bee yard etiquette. She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. And above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”

And so may it be that our being is about being Love. Let it be. Amen.