Sermon Title: "Like a Mother Hen "
Date: February 28, 2010
Minister:  Rev. Susan Bjork

Lesson:  Luke 13:31-35

 

In his influential book, The Prophetic Imagination, biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann writes: “If we are to understand prophetic criticism, we must see that its characteristic idiom is anguish and not anger.”  He continues, “The point of [this expression] is to permit the community to engage in its own anguish, which it prefers to deny.”

One characteristic of prophetic speech is that prophets simultaneously speak to the future as well as to the present circumstances surrounding them.  Sometimes I think we confuse prophecy with merely predicting the future and we miss the importance of the prophets’ speech to those surrounding them.  What they have to say to us is important too, of course, but we need to also pay attention to the historical context of prophetic speech.

Today’s scripture lesson from Luke’s gospel gives us a glimpse of Jesus engaging in this kind of prophetic criticism as he looks toward Jerusalem and the culmination of his earthly work.  And when we listen to his words, we can hear the anguish Brueggemann speaks of: the grief, the passion, and even longing in this expression of lamentation.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Now certainly this is an expression of critique and challenge, but it is not simply an angry statement of judgment.  It is also an expression of passionate lament over those whom Jesus loves deeply.  We can hear the love and we can also hear the sorrow over the rejection of that love.

This whole scripture lesson, including Jesus’ lament, invites us to look toward Jerusalem:  to look towards the culmination of Jesus’ ministry, his passion, the cross, his death.  On a literary level, it drives the gospel narrative forward by foreshadowing the culminating critical events of Jesus’ earthly life.

And clearly, this text is laden with symbolism.  Jesus speaks of “today, tomorrow, and the third day” on which he will finish his work (a symbolic foreshadowing of his crucifixion, death, and resurrection). 

“See, your house is left to you,” Jesus says after his lament, pointing to the critical event of Jerusalem’s devastation and the destruction of the temple in 70 C.E., (an event which the earliest readers of this gospel would have been acutely aware of).

“And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord,’” Jesus states, pointing to the culmination of God’s reign on earth yet to be.  And we’ll hear this same phrase again later in the gospel in Luke’s account of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem as another reminder of Jesus’ identity.

And finally, of course, we have the metaphors of both the fox and the hen.

How is Herod like a fox?  Well we know that in the gospel Herod himself is seen as one who has succumbed to power that corrupts and oppresses.  He is one who is in cahoots with the Roman Empire which puts him in his position of power and has an investment in the status quo.  To compare Herod to a fox is to also paint him as sly and cunning, predatory and risky to toy with, even voraciously destructive. 

Now, clearly Luke’s gospel is not very fair and balanced when it comes to its treatment of foxes by comparing Herod to a fox.  I kind of feel bad for the real foxes of the world!  But the metaphor of the fox speaks to the predatory “powers that be” who threaten God’s vision of loving, just relationship with and among humanity.

And then there is the contrasting image of the hen…a mother hen who instinctively gathers her chicks under her wings and nestles them against her body when danger threatens.  She fluffs up and sits on them to keep them warm and dry against the elements.  She’ll even invite lone orphans and other creatures (like puppies and kittens, as in the pictures I showed the children) into her brood and care for them too. 

Christ as mother hen: what an image of nurture, of tenderness, of loving invitation!  I don’t know about you, but I love the image of God inviting us to nestle into a place of warm, feathery, soft, nurturing, motherly love.  It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

But we should travel a step further because this image is not only warm and fuzzy; it is an image of

deeper love still.

After all, Jesus evokes this metaphor of the hen in the context of his lament over Jerusalem’s unwillingness to receive God’s prophets, messengers, and invitations.  You see, chicks have a tendency to wander off sometimes and they reject their mother’s attempts to gather them in. 

But mother hens are also persistent, so much so that they have gotten the reputation of being overbearing and fussy.  Sometimes the hen will follow her chicks and wait for them and when chicks wander off she always welcomes them back extravagantly.

And when faced with the threat of the fox, Christ as mother hen responds not with fear, retaliation, or violence, but with an honest lament and a faithful sojourn to Jerusalem and all that he would find there.

In her book, Bread of Angels, author, Episcopal priest, and one of my absolute favorite preachers, Barbara Brown Taylor, describes the scene this way: 

Jesus meant to protect the chicks from the foxes but he would not become a fox himself in order to do it.  He refused to fight fire with fire.  When Herod and his bullies came after Jesus and his brood, he just put himself between them and the chicks all fluffed up and hunkered down like a mother hen.

It may have looked like a minor skirmish to those who were there, but that contest between the chicken and the fox turned out to be the cosmic battle of all time, in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother’s love for her chicks.  And God bet the farm on the hen.

Depending on whom you believe, she won.  It did not look that way at first, with feathers all over the place and chicks running for cover.  But as time went on, it became clear what she had done.  She had refused to run from the foxes, and she had refused to become one of them.  Having loved her own who were in the world, she loved them to the end.  She died a mother hen, and afterwards she came back to them with teeth marks on her body to make sure they got the point: that the power of foxes could not kill her love for them, nor could it steal them away from her.  They might have to go through what she went through in order to get past the foxes, but she would be waiting for them on the other side, with love stronger than death.

What a loving mother hen we have.  Having loved so deeply; it makes sense to me that Jesus lamented over Jerusalem.  I wonder if any in his own time heard his lament.  Do we?

You see, I wonder if sometimes we try to resist God’s attempts to gather us under wing. 

Clearly, just as a mother hen cannot keep her chicks safe from all harm and away from the threat of all foxes, God cannot protect us from all suffering.  Chicks grow up, they learn to live on their own, they wander from the roost, and so do we.

But when we encounter the foxes once more, God like a mother hen invites us in once more to be held and cared for and nurtured under wings of warm compassion and gentle respite.

The question is how do we recognize and accept the invitation? 

Do we recognize that sometimes God’s sheltering wing takes shape through the people we meet on our path?  Do we truly believe that though we cannot avoid all pain and difficulty in this life, we can choose to be in community with one another and that sharing the burden lessens the load?

I suspect for some of us (myself included) it is sometimes easier to imitate a mother hen, offering care to others than to be in the vulnerable position of the care receiver and loosen our grasp of control.  We chicks like to be in control.

Now there is certainly nothing wrong with offering care to others.  That’s part of what we are called to do in this life.  But I think that there is also an art to receiving care.  And for some of us, at some times in our lives, it’s harder to be on the receiving end.

But if we brush off all expressions of care could we be like the children of Jerusalem Jesus laments, brushing off the very invitation to healing, wholeness, and unconditional love offered to us under God’s waiting wing?

I pray that we continue to learn from Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem, that we continue to learn to give holy space for our own expressions of lamentation in our individual lives and our liturgical life together, learning to give and receive care to each other in reflection of the deep love of Christ for us.

And I pray that we continue to take shelter under the wings of our loving God together once more, knowing deeply that though foxes may intimidate and the weather may threaten, we have a warm loving home close to the heart of God.  Amen.