Hens and Foxes

"How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. . . ." Luke 13:34

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Lent 2C -- February 20, 2016

A few years ago, my wife and I had the great privilege to travel to the Holy Land for the first time. It was such a memorable trip, not least because the biblical story really came alive for us in unexpected ways by actually experiencing these places.  We visited Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity; we traveled along the River Jordan where Jesus was baptized.  We walked along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, visiting Capernaum, where Jesus preached his first sermon, where Simon Peter lived, and where Jesus called his first disciples.  We hiked up the mountain to the chapel that now marks the place where Jesus may well have preached the Sermon on the Mount.  And we spent several days in the Old City of Jerusalem, walking the Via Dolorosa, following Jesus’ last steps toward the Cross.

We also visited a spot just outside of the old city, on the western slopes of the Mount of Olives, where the Franciscans have built a little chapel, named Dominus Flevit, which is where historians believe today’s gospel story may have taken place.  The chapel enjoys a stunning, panoramic view of the Old City.

One can well imagine Jesus standing there, looking down upon this city fraught with so much history, so much promise, so much tragedy, even then. I envision Jesus gazing down upon the houses and the streets of the city, where the men, women and children of Jerusalem, went about their lives, unaware of the world-changing events that were about to happen.

As today’s gospel lesson opens, the Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him that Herod is out for blood.  There is reason to believe the Pharisees, of course, because Herod has already imprisoned and murdered Jesus’ friend, John the Baptist.  But Jesus will have none of it.  In an unusually snarky retort, Jesus responds:  Go and tell that fox Herod that I will not be so easily distracted from the ministry of healing that is my call.  And then, turning toward the city, Jesus cries out:

“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!”

The first thing to notice about this text is that it is a classic cry of lament.  Jesus is grieving. He is grieving over the reality that God’s chosen people, symbolized by the holy city of Jerusalem, continue to ignore God’s words to them. They capitulate to the powers that be, they stand idly by in the face of injustice, they chase idols, they pursue destructive paths of living.  In short, they do all the things that people do, that we do. And this grieves Jesus because he loves God’s people, and just like when a parent watches a child hurt himself or herself by wandering down some dark alley, it breaks Jesus’ heart to see God’s people so lost.

There is a deep sense of foreboding in this lament too.  Beyond reflecting upon Jerusalem’s past and present, Jesus no doubt also knows what lies ahead: that his own fate is inextricably bound up with this city that kills its prophets.  He knows that the Cross awaits him. And Jesus senses that the same hardheartedness that historically led God’s people to turn a deaf ear to the prophetic warnings of the past will inevitably lead them to reject God’s own Son.

Just as lament is an element of Jesus’ consciousness as he contemplates his journey to the Cross, so too must lament be an important dimension of the season of Lent for us.  During this season we lament all the ways in which our lives are not quite what God intends.  And such lament has both a personal and a social dimension.  On the one hand, we lament our individual shortcomings.

But, just as importantly, we lament all the social sins that keep us as God’s people from living in community as we should: we lament a seemingly intractable gap between rich and poor; we lament an educational system that fails to reach many of our most vulnerable children; we lament a market-obsessed culture prone to commodify every aspect of human experience; we lament institutionalized forms of racism and sexism and other structural biases in social arrangements that are designed to preserve power in the hands of some and take it away from others; and we lament an environmental policy built around values of dominion and exploitation rather than careful stewardship of the natural order.

We lament, with Jesus, all of these social dysfunctions precisely because they push us apart as human beings, alienating us from ourselves, from our natural world, and from God.

To lament in these ways, I hasten to add, is not the same thing as beating ourselves up with guilt.  Guilt tends to be its own sin; a helpless form of self-pity that is not constructive.  To lament, on the other hand, is to feel the grief and the sorrow of our shortcomings, but then to allow these feelings to propel us forward in a spirit of change and transformation.  True lament invites God into its sorrow in the hope that a new creation will arise from the brokenness.

The second thing to notice about today’s gospel passage is, of course, the beautifully arresting image of Jesus as a mother hen, longing to gather her brood under the protective embrace of her loving wings.  Jesus claims this image of a mother hen for himself and squarely pits it against the competing image of Herod the fox.  Hens and foxes.

With these two striking metaphors, Jesus invites us to consider two very different ways of being human in the world.  The fox is cunning, deceptive, a predator, a creature who lives by violence, lying in wait, ready to pounce on the vulnerable at the first sign of weakness.  The fox is out for himself.

The mother hen, on the other hand, is compassionate, caring, a nurturer, always looking out for the other.  Her deepest longing is not for her own welfare but for those she loves.  She longs to protect, to help those in her charge to flourish, to grow, to live into their full promise.  But don’t underestimate the mother hen.  For she is so fiercely loyal to her beloved that she will, if need be, lay down her own life for them.

“There are foxes, and there are hens,” Jesus seems to be saying. “I’ve staked my claim. Where are you?”

So, at the same time that Jesus is inviting us into a posture of lament during this season of Lent, he is also, with this captivating image of a mother hen, holding out hope for its redemption in utterly unexpected ways.  For God chooses the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, just as God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. As the Herods of the world will soon enough discover, living the predatory life has its own self-destructive logic; and standing compassionately alongside the vulnerable turns out to have its own remarkably sustaining grace.

One final, obvious, but nevertheless very important point about this text.  Jesus is here claiming a feminine symbol for God.  A mother hen.  So many of our traditional images for God are masculine: Kings, Lords, Shepherds, Princes of Peace, and so on.  Our tradition has overwhelmed us with patriarchal symbols.  How we imagine God matters, and it is refreshing for us to notice that Jesus himself is here identifying with the feminine, with the maternal.

Too often we think of God as some cranky, old man in the heavens, eager to condemn us for what we’ve done wrong.  What if a more accurate image of God is this compassionate mother hen, longing to love us, to protect us, to gather us under her wings?  What if God’s essential nature is not so much to dispassionately judge us, as it is to passionately love us?  That is the glimpse of the divine that Jesus offers us today; an image of God well worth our prayers this Lent; and, one for which we can be deeply grateful.  Amen.

On Lent and Love: Temptation in the Wilderness

Olivia Hamilton
Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard

February 14, 2016 – Lent 1C

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone! It seems strange that Valentine’s Day should fall within the season of Lent this year, and let alone on a Sunday, but alas the fact that we have an early Easter, coupled with the one in seven odds that Valentine’s Day should ever fall on a Sunday, happen to have played out as such.  

Now if you’re wondering if I’m about to give a homily about the life of Saint Valentine or present a theology of romantic love, don’t worry, I’m not. We all probably agree and appreciate that to some extent, Valentine’s Day has become ensnared in consumerism, entangled with feelings of obligation, over-priced, over-sugared, and under-appreciative of the small, selfless and often mundane acts of care and affection that sustain our relationships with those we love, romantically or otherwise, over the course of time.

So, notwithstanding all of the skepticism we rightly hold toward the rituals associated with Valentine’s Day, I want to take advantage of the opportunity that presents itself today to suggest that this holy season of Lent which we’ve just entered is, in fact, all about love. And when I say love, I mean precisely the kind of love that is selfless, sustaining, unable to be packaged, bought, sold or sentimentalized.

The season of Lent opens with Ash Wednesday – a day when we are invited to embrace our human frailty rather than to run from it. A day when we are reminded that we belong to, and are beloved by God, not despite our flaws, but in fact, because of them. God, who sent Christ to walk among us as love incarnate, meets us where we are, in the midst of our brokenness. God transforms us through our sin, loving us as we try and fail and try again to do what is right, so that in turn we can love others even when they disappoint us.

Ash Wednesday is about humility – a word which comes from the Latin ‘humus’ meaning the earth or ground below us. During our Ash Wednesday liturgies then, it makes sense that we bow and kneel and together place and press our bodies against the ground. Doing so is not a posture of unworthiness or self-loathing…it is a posture that recognizes that we are of the earth and will return to the earth, and that God has given us lives which, from ashes to dust, are imbued with the potential for grace and love. We belong to and are beloved by God, and the ashes placed upon our foreheads remind us of that in a world where it’s all to easy to forget.

As Luther and I were joking earlier this week, unlike Valentine’s Day, Ash Wednesday is probably the day least likely to be co-opted by Hallmark. And can you imagine what as Ash Wednesday card might say? Roses are red, violets are blue, someday I will die, and so will you? Though it has a nice ring to it, mortality is a tough sell. Ash Wednesday is about death, yes, but it’s not about meaninglessness. It’s an opportunity, as I see it, to remember that we are beloved by God, from our first moments on earth until our last, and to reorient our lives – if even for a day – in light of that love.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of our forty-day journey toward the cross. It’s a journey that invites us into self-reflection and self-examination about what it means to be loved by God. However, I would argue that although there’s a strong emphasis on the self, we need to be in relationship with others in order to experience and experiment with what it means to be beloved by God. In last week’s Gospel text, we encountered Jesus at the top of a mountain, being transformed and transfigured in response to God’s presence. Peter’s response, if you remember, was to build a house there, where Jesus and Moses and Elijah can stay on the mountaintop in the presence of God forever. And Christopher was right when he asked…who wouldn’t want to stay on the mountaintop? But Jesus doesn’t. He leaves the mountaintop, goes back down to where the people are, and immediately after he does, heals a small boy who we are told is shrieking, convulsing, and foaming at the mouth. This text invites us to consider that Jesus’ relationship to God is always inherently about his relationship to others. He could not stay on the mountaintop, where everything was dazzling and brilliant. Immediately after coming face to face with God, in a moment of bliss and certainty, he was plunging himself directly into the chaos of human need, coming face to face with the frailty of human bodies.

Christ’s ministry is always about relationship.

Our Gospel story this week recounts Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness for forty days and forty nights. Isolated again, but this time in a parched desert rather than a splendid mountaintop. This episode follows immediately after his baptism in the Jordan, when the voice of God proclaims that Jesus is his beloved son. Jesus’ forty days in the desert is likely a familiar story for most of us, and is the scriptural basis for the forty-day period in Lent wherein we are challenged to resist temptation.

One way we could interpret this story is that it shows that in an hour when Jesus is famished, alone and tempted, his knowledge that he is beloved by God sustains him. When the devil says, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread,” Jesus replies “One does not live by bread alone.” Jesus affirms this idea that his life belongs to God, and that much more than just the air he breathes or the food he eats sustains his time on earth.

Another way of seeing the story is that the devil, by tempting Jesus, is trying to keep him in isolation. No doubt we’ve all been in situations where our temptations confine us into wildernesses of our own making that can be incredibly lonely and isolating.

The devil shows Jesus all of the kingdoms that could belong to him, but Jesus is not the kind of leader that lords his power over the nations from a position of distant, detached authority. Jesus’ authority, as we know, rests precisely in his capacity to reconcile, to heal, to reject the forces of greed and power, and to make God’s love known through selfless acts. Gaining power over others would, I think, keep him walled off and in the wilderness. He is determined not to stay there. He’s determined to be in relationship.

So how are we tempted? I think, like Jesus, we are tempted to isolate ourselves. We might do this by refusing to let others know we are suffering. We might do this by believing that we can live by bread alone, by books alone, by accomplishments or accolades alone. We might be tempted to isolate ourselves from those who are different than we are, preferring to believe that we alone are made in the image of God.

As Thomas Merton wrote in his book “No Man Is An Island,”  “The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” And it seems we do this with those we love most, but also as a culture; we are determined that we know what’s best for others even though we can’t possibly know what it is like to be them, or what wilderness they may be lost within.

So I invite you to join me in thinking of Lent as an extended dress-rehearsal. Each day, through self-reflection, and each week, when we worship together, we rehearse voicing our failure to love, and God meets us there. He meets us right where we are tempted to isolate, and in sometimes small and mundane ways, assures us that love will overcome fear, that life will overcome death. And perhaps this rehearsal will help us to resist isolation and to be more vulnerable with one another throughout the rest of the year.

From dust to dust, we belong to and are loved by God, and so is everyone else. God doesn’t need to twist us or project anything onto us; he knew us as we were formed in our mother’s wombs and will be with us in our final hours. And even as we try and fail and try again to love others, God’s love for us is steadfast.

So in light of the fact that we begin and end this season of self-examination bowed down before God not alone but together; in light of Jesus coming down off of the mountain, plunging himself into the chaos and suffering of humanity; in light of our temptation to twist others to our own image and call it love; in light of the wildernesses of isolation we find ourselves in; in light of a holy and mysterious season that resists tidy answers and can’t be summed up in a greeting card; my prayer for each of us is this:

That whatever these forty days might bring, whatever we learn about ourselves, others and God, it has everything to do with love.

Amen.

The Walls Come Tumbling Down

“And Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.’" Luke 4:24

The Reverend Luther Zeigler
Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard
January 31, 2016 – Epiphany 4C

Last week we were with Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth listening to him give his first sermon before the hometown crowd. You remember the sermon, the one in which Jesus quotes from Isaiah, saying the spirit has landed upon him, and that he now understands his task in life: Jesus is to bring good news to the poor, to liberate the captives, to restore sight to the blind and to offer freedom and wholeness to all. Luke tells us that the crowd was amazed, at least at first, but then things turn a little ugly.

The crowd is delighted to hear Jesus’ message of redemption, and that he has apparently already done miraculous works elsewhere, in places like Capernaum.  But they want proof, you see.  It is one thing to hear a good sermon about God’s saving grace, but the proof is in the pudding, and the crowd demands that they receive a sign of God’s blessing. “Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum,” they say to him.  They want evidence of Jesus’ claims; in particular, they want the hometown boy to bless his hometown friends and family first before he goes off to save the world.

And here is where Jesus’ message challenges, and ultimately, enrages them.  “God does not work that way,” Jesus in effect says. Grace is not to be manipulated by those who believe they deserve its favor. God’s saving grace is unbidden. Unbidden. It comes unexpectedly and freely, and it falls upon those who, in purely human terms, often seem the least deserving of its benefits.

And to illustrate his point, Jesus reminds the crowd of two well-known stories from the Hebrew Scriptures: the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, and the story of Elisha healing the Syrian warrior Naaman. These stories deserve our attention, because understanding them both explains why the crowd gets upset and gives us an important insight into the nature of Jesus’ mission.

In the first story, you will remember that in the midst of a great famine Elijah is commanded by God to visit a Gentile woman in Sidon, and not just any woman, but a poor widow, on the brink of starvation. And, even though the widow and her young son are literally down to their last meal, God commands her to feed Elijah. Bewildered and confused by the command, the widow nevertheless trusts. And then, somehow, in the midst of their desperation, in the midst of utter scarcity, God provides enough food for Elijah, the woman and her son to eat; and not only that, but when the widow’s son then suddenly falls ill and appears to succumb to death, God works through Elijah to breath new life into the boy.

The great prophet, Elijah, begins his public ministry not by breaking bread with his kin, with the chosen people of Israel, but instead is directed by God to reach out first to the stranger. Elijah is sent by God not to rescue the elite, or the elect, or the devout; but first he is sent to a foreign nation, to a forsaken widow and her starving little boy, to the least of the least.

The second story Jesus mentions – the story of Elisha’s healing of Naaman – develops this same theme but pushes it even further. Naaman is the commander-in-chief of the Arameans, a powerful enemy of Israel’s in what is now southern Syria. Naaman’s problem is that, notwithstanding his power, he has contracted leprosy. Elisha reaches out to Naaman, through a messenger, and tells Naaman that bathing seven times in the River Jordan can heal him. Naaman at first is furious, thinking that there is nothing special about the River Jordan and that many of the rivers back home in Syria are every bit as impressive as the Jordan. But Naaman’s servants prevail on him to listen to Elisha, and so, Naaman goes down to the Jordan and does what he is told. And sure enough, Naaman’s leprosy vanishes. He is healed.

The last person on earth we would expect the faithful God of Israel to heal is the military commander of one of Israel’s fiercest enemies. It is one thing to extend hospitality and healing to a stranger, to a vulnerable widow; quite another to save the warrior of one’s bitter enemy. And yet such is the unbidden and unexpected scope of God’s grace.

So, why does Jesus cite these two stories to the hometown crowd in Nazareth? They are, I suggest, classic border-crossing stories, showing how God’s power and love refuses to honor human boundaries and seeks to push us out of our own prejudices and fears. Try as we might to erect social boundaries that separate the clean from the unclean, or the deserving from the undeserving, try as we might to fashion political boundaries to separate the good guys from the bad guys, the white hats from the black hats, God refuses to be contained by our line-drawing. God works not within the boundaries imposed by human conceit, but across and beyond all such boundaries.

The hometown crowd was apparently expecting Jesus to focus his redemptive powers upon them first.  They may well have shared the prevailing expectation of a Messiah for the Jewish people first and foremost, a new king to reclaim Israel’s kingdom from Roman rule.  Yet, by citing these two simple Old Testament stories, Jesus is telling the good people of Nazareth that his mission knows no political boundaries, that he comes not as a new Davidic king for a restored Israel, but instead a Prince of Peace for all humanity, a Savior whose loving arms seek to embrace not only the vulnerable, but even those we regard as our fiercest enemies.

I remember as a young boy, playing with my brother in the backyard.  We would build forts out of old cardboard boxes, and we would hunker down in them for protection from unknown dangers lurking just beyond our backyard fence.  We were the good guys, and out there somewhere were the bad guys, and we were sure that so long as we stayed behind the walls of our fort we would be safe.

Such thinking is entirely natural for a child, who is first learning to differentiate himself from others, learning what it means to have agency in the world, learning to protect himself from the risks of an uncertain universe.  But then, hopefully, we grow up and learn that the world is not so black and white after all, and that hiding behind walls is almost never the path toward growth and human flourishing.  And we also learn that ‘the other’ whom we once feared is usually not so menacing after all; and the more we get to know ourselves, the more we also appreciate that we are not necessarily always on the side of virtue.

In this election cycle, it is distressing to hear so much overheated rhetoric on the airwaves from candidates and pundits alike about the need to keep America safe from the bad guys, even to build massive walls around our country, even to exclude others from traveling here based on nothing more than a person’s appearance or religious convictions.

While I will not venture into the thicket of national politics, or immigration reform, or foreign policy, it is tempting to quote St. Paul here from today’s epistle lesson:  “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”

The impulse to build walls and demonize the other is, more often than not, a childish solution to the complexities of human brokenness. To play upon people’s worst fears, to exploit their prejudices, and to engage in simplistic line-drawing, likewise seems utterly contrary to everything Jesus is saying to us this evening. To be sure, there may well be occasions when people of good will, citizens of one land or another, need to defend themselves against violent attack from those unwilling to engage in a negotiated peace. But let us hear clearly Jesus’ words to us this evening:  his message is one of redemption for everyone, and much as we would like to reserve that salvation only for ourselves, and those people we like and who look like us, we are explicitly invited by Jesus in today’s lesson to look hard at all the boundaries, borders, and other lines we draw in a misguided attempt to limit God’s grace.

Stated simply, God’s vision for humanity is neither a restored kingdom for Israel, nor a “new Jerusalem” for America. Rather, as St. Paul puts it, what God discloses to us in Jesus is something radically different: it is “a new creation” for all people and all things. Jesus invites us into an altogether new way of being human in the world:  a humanity known not by boundaries, but by hospitality to the stranger; a humanity known not by violence towards one’s enemies, but by gestures of peace and healing; a humanity that is neither Jewish, nor Gentile, neither American, nor “foreign,” but a humanity that is remade and renewed in God’s image through Christ Jesus.  Amen.