Fr. Don's Sermon Lent 2
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Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
Lent 2 – Year C
February 24, 2013
Phil 3:17 – 4:1; Luke 13:31-35
How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you . . .
Last week’s Gospel passage from Luke found Jesus wandering in the wilderness after his baptism for 40 days, led there by the Holy Spirit. Pastor George preached movingly about what it means to be in the wilderness – bodily, spiritually, mentally -- how frightening that can be – going from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the comfortable to the uncomfortable, from having a stable foundation under us to having no foundation under us or at least not knowing where it is. And what we saw was that Jesus was able to emerge stronger from that wilderness experience and all of the temptations that were set before him because he knew that God was with him through the power of the Holy Spirit; George shared his own experiences of that strengthening. And Jesus’ responses to the devil weren’t just Scripture memory verses that Jesus was picking at random – they were passages that spoke to Jesus about the very nature of God and, beyond that, the nature of God in the world, and how we mediate that relationship with God and creation. Jesus allowed himself to trust that God was present in the situation, and that trust got him through it.
This week we skip ahead a number of chapters to Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem, and this time he is speaking with a group of Pharisees, who – ironically, because they are usually out to get him – who are warning Jesus that Herod is looking to kill him. And as Jesus tries to explain his mission to them, he uses a really curious image to describe it: He uses the image of a hen protecting her young.
This tells us a lot about how Jesus understood his own mission among us, and how Jesus was trying to convey God’s mission in the world. Jesus is telling them how often he has wanted to intervene in their divisiveness, in their injustice, in their self-centeredness, but they would not listen. The same city that killed the prophets of old would not listen to Jesus, either. Instead, they kept on doing what they were doing, with the result that Jesus was now going to leave without completing his mission of bringing all of God’s children together. Because they were not willing to let Jesus in, God’s
mission was going to have to wait for another day long down the road.
Jesus image of himself in the role of a mother hen is an important one. You know, it is known among farmers that when sensing a predator, a mother hen can so position herself on her nest that she can completely cover the eggs underneath. The predator may in fact kill her, but the eggs will be safe. There is a story of firefighters who, after putting out a forest fire, returned to the scene to find the burned carcass of a hen on the ground. When they picked it up, lo and behold, they discovered several chicks very much alive under the protection of their dead mother.
Jesus is telling us in this passage that’s the kind of love that God has for us. Our God is a God of endless love for us. That is the kind of God that our God is, and we can trust that. Furthermore, the nature of this love is to bring all of God’s children – all of them – together as one.
In my studies at Hartford Seminary (which, God willing, will finally conclude this fall), and from my vantage point as your pastor over these past nine years, I have become acutely aware that while we all led here by God, we bring to our community of faith a wonderful diversity over our understanding of who God is and how God operates in creation. The diversity of backgrounds which so richly defines who we are is also reflected in a variety of ways of knowing God. In the kick-off to our Wednesday Evening Lenten series this past week, Sr. Joan Chittister highlighted the different ways that Christians often look at God. There are many reasons why this is so:
1) Our cultural understandings and traditions have a great deal of impact on how we approach Scripture and, therefore, how we understand God.
- In many cultural traditions, there is a strong focus on the cross and Jesus’ passion and death; while in other traditions, there is a focus on Jesus resurrection and new life. It is NOT an either/or situation – either it is THIS, OR it is THAT. No – it is in the best Anglican tradition a BOTH / AND – it is just a matter of emphasis. The understandings with which we are raised have a strong influence in developing the whole context in which we understand God.
2) Our life experiences also have an impact: Positive – or negative – experiences during our childhood can have a huge impact on whether we are even open to believing in God, never mindloving God or trusting God.
- Whether we are raised rich or poor, have a good education or don’t complete our education, can make a difference in how we understand God and our relationship with God.
- If you have plenty of money, the prosperity Gospel sounds really good – God will surely increase your coffers if you do the right thing. If we are financially needy, the abundance of God means something else to us.
- If profound misfortune or tragedy has not struck us and we haven’t personally struggled on the margins of society, that reality can give us a certain perception of God being on our side. The corollary, of course, is that God is NOT on the side of those who do not share our good fortune. If our life has been marked by violence, tragedy, and loss, we may still have a strong faith in God but our understanding of God will be of one who all-too-often offers us a bitter pill to swallow as part of our relationship. It is easy to think, in these circumstances, that it is God’s will that we be miserable.
Chittister points out that each one of us has our own perception of God, and it is that perception that serves as the foundation – often subtly, often without our even being aware of it – for the way in which we understand and engage the world.
1) Do we believe God to be male or female? How do we envision God? How do we understand the passage in Genesis that teaches that human beings were “made in God’s image – male and female?”
2) Do we believe in a God who is primarily a law-giver, with rules to be obeyed and harsh penalties for breaking them?
3) Do we believe in a God whose primary characteristic is to love?
4) Do we believe in a God who is actively engaged in the operation of the world? If we do, what are the parameters of God’s engagement? If my child is killed in a car accident, do we believe that God caused that? If I contract cancer, do I believe that is God’s active will? Or could it be that it is just the nature of this mortal life, and we understand that God will carry us through it somehow and in some way.
5) Looking at this same question another way, if I’m the quarterback in the super bowl and throw a key touchdown that wins the game, do I believe that happened because God willed it? If I do believe that, am I also to believe that God was rooting against the other team? What if the other quarterback was praying also? Did he not pray hard enough? Was God tune him out?
6) If we believe that events like the devastation of Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy are somehow reflections of God’s judgment for a sinful society, or that the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school were God’s judgment against a society that has “taken God out of the schools” – if we believe this, are we to believe that God is less concerned with gun violence in our cities when innocent people are killed, or less concerned with racism, poverty, economic injustice, or corporate corruption on Wall Street than with activities that have something to do with sex?
There are some who would give easy answers to these questions, but my purpose this morning is not to give easy answers; it is to articulate some of the questions and to plant them in your heart. Did you ever notice in the New Testament Jesus as often as not answers questions put to him NOT with answers but with different or re-framed questions. That’s how we grow in our faith, by engaging the questions. And as we continue to grow into our Christian faith as a community of brothers and sisters who look to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we need to first be aware that each of us has a slightly different understanding of God and how we relate to God. There are some congregations where such an acknowledgement would be considered heresy and cause for defensiveness and alarm, perhaps resulting in people fleeing to a more theologically pure community. But I believe that it is the nature of our charisms in this particular community of faith that we see this acknowledgement not as a threat to theological purity, but as an opportunity to learn from one another and to grow with one another as together we engage the difficult questions. Indeed, before we can faithfully engage in discerning where God is leading us as a congregation, we have to first know how to recognize God and the places in our church and in our community where God is actively engaged.
And Jesus in this morning’s Gospel gives us a great starting point. The primary sign that we are to look for is places where God is gathering us together – like a hen gathers her brood under her wings. Each and every day, that is Jesus’ primary desire for us – that we gather together in his name, with Christ at the center of our lives. Jesus assures us this morning that we will always know his presence when we approach life in the name of the Lord. AMEN.